Leviathan's Blood

by Ben Peek

  ‘Mireea was a test.’ Kaqua’s usually calm and measured voice mirrored the bitterness in Aelyn’s. ‘Lady Wagan is a capable ruler of the Spine, and Aned Heast’s reputation precedes him. We had an agreement that no force from Leera would come to Yeflam, an agreement that meant Yeflam would not contest the body of Ger once Mireea fell. But it was more than that. It was a chance for us to study. For us to learn of the child’s general, to learn of her soldiers, her priests, and her. Let us not be hypocritical here, Qian. You and your brothers and sisters conquered most of the world. I am one of the few people here who remember enough of it to know the blood that was spilt. Mireea was a small price to pay to learn what we needed.’

  ‘But you couldn’t pay it,’ Ayae said.

  ‘No, we could not,’ Aelyn said. ‘None of us knew that Qian would be there. If we had, we would not have sent Fo.’

  ‘You’ll pay a different price now,’ she said, her voice hard. ‘How does it feel?’

  Aelyn ignored her, deciding, instead, to turn, to join Kaqua and the Keepers. With them, she began to walk towards the Enclave as a united force.

  Zaifyr wanted to tell her that she was not being asked to sacrifice Yeflam. He wanted to tell her that she was being given a chance to defend her home, to defend the people in it, but he did not raise his voice. Instead, he watched them leave. If you could only see the dead, he thought. If only you could see their suffering and live with it for a thousand years. You would know that to stop the child would be the greatest thing you could do, and you would pay any price for it. But none of them could see the dead as he did. None of them could see the world that Zaifyr did.

  7.

  Ayae’s office in the Enclave was small and bare. When she pushed open the door to allow Zaifyr, Jae’le and Eidan to enter, the contents were revealed in three shadows. A table and chair sat on the right, the two pieces barely distinguishable from each other, while a quarter-filled bookshelf stood to the left. Between the two was a small window. What little pale light that was in the room came from it and the darkening night sky outside. She had a light beside the door, a copper lantern, but after she had bent to pick it up, she realized that she could not light it.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, putting it back down. ‘I never kept matches.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Zaifyr said. ‘We won’t be here long.’

  They left the door open and the light from the hall slanted in. Ayae moved to the window, afraid to take the chair or table, sure that they would crack beneath her weight, much as the stone in Yeflam had. She stood at the window because it put all three brothers in her field of vision and allowed her to retain a sense of distance. Zaifyr was the closest to her, sitting on the edge of the table. He would turn occasionally in the conversation that followed and attempt to draw her into what was being said. Jae’le had taken the chair and placed it near the door. He had thrown his cloak of green feathers over the back and its colour was a stark splash in the room. He kept glancing at her as they spoke, but half his face was shadowed and unreadable. Only Eidan, who stood beside the open door, paid her no attention – his focus was on his two brothers and the dark figure on his shoulder, much like a bird.

  It was Eidan who spoke the most of the three. His voice was deep, and each word felt as if he had chosen it carefully. ‘I am glad you heeded my advice,’ he said to Zaifyr. ‘I found Wayfair many years ago when I built Yeflam. I almost dragged its wreckage from the depths on more than one occasion, but a part of me held back. I have wondered about that, of late – wondered since a man searched for me in Ranan and told me Lor Jix’s name. He told me that he was god-touched, but I felt nothing of him.’

  ‘You do not,’ Jae’le said. ‘The god-touched are not like us.’

  ‘You have met them before?’

  ‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘when the War of the Gods raged around me. One came to me in the final years of the war because he had heard stories of my power and he thought I might be a return of his master. I was not, but what I learned about the gods, I learned from him. He and his kin were who defined the gods to mortals. It was he who told me that they were but strands of fate given form. He believed that the gods’ war was an act of rebellion against other strands. He said that in fighting it, they had destroyed any notion of truth. I gave him little thought after he left me, for he was mad, truly mad. That was what the War of the Gods had done to him. But the words he spoke to me were the same as the words of Lor Jix.’

  ‘The man I spoke with was mad as well,’ Eidan said. ‘Perhaps they were the same man? The one I met was old and scrawny and white.’

  ‘No, the one I knew was different,’ Jae’le said. ‘But it could be that they are all simply mad. I would not struggle to believe that.’

  Against the wall, Ayae’s hand curled into a fist, but it was Eidan who spoke again. ‘It would be easy to become mad in the shadow of a god. In the shadow of this child, many things that I had prided myself on have been betrayed.’ The dark shadow slid down his arm, and onto the back of Jae’le’s chair. ‘I had my reasons, but I have questioned them. Often.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Zaifyr said quietly, ‘fate and the gods are in collusion.’

  ‘Or conflict,’ Jae’le said.

  ‘If we believe Lor Jix, that is,’ Ayae finished. ‘No offence, Eidan.’

  ‘I have thought it myself,’ he admitted. ‘On the Mountains of Ger she ordered the land to be ripped apart and torn up, to limit travel across it. It gave me pause to think about what might befall here, for the child can see a fate. It is a single strand, but it appears to be her own, though she has no control over it yet, and cannot see the others that surround it. I have heard her talk about the fate she sees often, and I believe that it is very incomplete. She can see an event two years into the future, then another in ten. But she cannot see consistently a whole year, or a month. She is frustrated by it, but she has used it well. That sight allowed her to find me five years ago. I had been working on the southern edge of Leera, rebuilding a series of smuggler hideouts that had sunk into a bog. Beautiful buildings: they had been made with fired stones that were lined with holes for their riches. The traps still functioned, and one almost took my hand off, a fact that she related to me in our first meeting.’

  ‘Has she seen what will happen here?’ Jae’le asked.

  ‘I do not think so,’ he said. ‘She is not complete. Her lack of a name is but an easy part for us to identify, but there are others. She has relied upon mortals to do her work for her, men and women she called her beloved. Mother Estalia was one. General Waalstan is another. Both are her voices to the Faithful, and she has long told the General about his death; but the old woman’s was not one she foresaw. The child cried out when she died – it was a scream that tore through all of Ranan. When I found her in the cathedral she was a statue in the middle of the floor. She had projected herself to Mireea, in search for the soul of the woman she had named Mother. That was when you encountered her, Qian. She had not expected that – not in the realm of the dead. It frightened her and in her fear, she made Anguish.’

  ‘Her fear?’ Zaifyr turned to the creature who stood on the green feathers, rubbing his feet. ‘I did not hear that.’

  The creature’s blind face turned up to him. ‘I was a deceit from the start.’

  Ayae frowned. She began to speak, but Eidan interrupted her. ‘He does not mean it how it sounds, I assure you,’ he said. ‘He does not want to harm us.’

  ‘Unless he opens his eyes,’ Zaifyr said.

  ‘But they’re closed.’

  ‘Is she still here in Yeflam?’

  ‘In a way, I suspect.’ Anguish dropped from the cloak, slipping into the shadow of the room. ‘But you should be more concerned if she sees herself here.’

  ‘He is right,’ Eidan said bluntly. ‘On the edge of the bog where I met her, she told me that I would betray her before a century had passed. I could feel her power – the way we all feel it, I believe – and I remember that I held a long steel pipe tha
t I had pulled from the water.’ He held out his large hands to show the girth, but in the dark, Ayae could only see the edges of his knuckles, huge and blunt. ‘I have often thought back to that moment, for she was unsure how I would react. I could have thrust the pipe through that small form she wore. She was afraid of me, then, but that fear of me never returned after I followed her into Ranan.’

  ‘We will have to find her,’ Zaifyr said.

  ‘That is why the Enclave is meeting,’ Eidan answered.

  ‘They are not a unified whole,’ Jae’le said. ‘They tear at each other, now. They may not stand united against her.’

  ‘They cannot allow the child to live,’ Zaifyr said.

  Though she remained silent, Ayae agreed. Aelyn did not have much choice, as far as she could tell. She had made the agreement to sacrifice Mireea – the knowledge of which sat hard and heavy in Ayae’s stomach and had done so as she walked through the Enclave halls – but to maintain the agreement would be to seed a deep ideological threat in Yeflam that she would never fully remove. To accept the Leeran god meant that the Keepers acknowledged that they were not, and would not be, gods themselves.

  Jae’le rose from the chair, his cloak a green ribbon that he slung over his arm. ‘We should head up there,’ he said. ‘She may agree with us, but we should take care to support her.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Zaifyr said. ‘I’ll be along in a moment.’

  The other man nodded and at the door was joined by Eidan. A moment later, the small, dark figure of Anguish appeared, and in quick, strange movements, climbed up the latter’s leg and to his shoulder.

  Once the footsteps of the two had faded, Zaifyr turned to Ayae and met her gaze. ‘You’re quiet,’ he said.

  ‘I am,’ she said.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Ayae laid her heavy hand on his, but could not feel his skin. ‘I can’t feel anything,’ she said. ‘What if it doesn’t stop?’

  Gently, Zaifyr tapped the back of her hand. ‘You just have to take control of it,’ he said, and turned his hand around to hold hers. ‘It’s discipline, remember?’

  ‘I don’t – I lost that a while back, I think.’

  She wished that she could feel his hand tighten around her own, but she could only see the pull of the muscles. ‘It happens to us all,’ he said. ‘You’ll get it back.’

  ‘I don’t know that I can do this war,’ Ayae said, after a moment. ‘Not today. Not this week. I can’t fight a god this week, Zaifyr.’

  ‘Maybe in a month?’

  ‘A month is fine.’

  In the faint light, she saw him smile. ‘A month and it’ll be over.’

  Ayae did not believe that. It could not be true, though she saw in Zaifyr’s gaze a confidence that it would be, and she wanted to reach out, to warn him not to take that belief to the Enclave, but she did not know how. She still did not know after his hand left her own, after he had left the room, and any chance she had to know was ruined when a shadow fell across the open door.

  ‘Well, it is just as I thought: you are not coming to the meeting.’ Eira spoke quietly from the doorway, her voice almost a purr of pleasure. ‘A wise choice, now that everyone knows that you went to kill Fo and Bau. You should know that no dark hole will save you.’

  ‘I don’t need a dark hole.’ Her voice was rough. ‘I have nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘Listen to yourself,’ the Cold Witch said, contempt clear in her voice. ‘You sound as if your tears are all caught in your chest. As if they’re frozen down there, trying to get out. I know that they are not tears for me, but I will believe that they are. I will believe that you know what I have lost. For over two hundred years I loved Fo. He had the most beautiful mind I had ever met. To talk to him was to see connections that no one else could, or would. It will never return and I will have to live with that absence.’

  ‘I am not looking for a fight, Eira.’

  ‘I do not even remotely care what it is that you want.’

  And then she was gone and the doorway was empty, but for its faint light, and its promise of fire.

  8.

  The afternoon’s sun had begun to set, its light catching on the broken edges of trees, a burnt orange offering to the violence that Heast and Taaira were following.

  The trail that the two rode along alternated between sunlight and the heavy, broken shadows of the trees as it climbed a ridge. Heast had not expected the path, and the two had come upon it in a sudden turn to the east, away from the Kingdoms of Faaisha and towards the plains.

  ‘Once we reach the ridge at the top,’ Kye Taaira said at the start of the narrow trail, ‘you will see that a part of the mountain has broken and fallen through the ground. It has left a huge expanse where rivers run like veins in your arm. But by the morning, the trail will have turned again and we will be back in the direction we want.’

  In a year, Heast believed, the Mountains of Ger would be too dangerous to journey over. The rot in the mountain would reveal the hidden tunnels and rivers that flowed throughout the range and it would bring the Cities of Ger and the corpses of men and women to the surface with it, just as it had claimed Mireea and the towns that had been above it. It would claim people, those who came to live on the shuddering land – Heast had no doubt that there would be men and women, desperate and opportunistic, who would come onto it. Animals would do the same, and they would die beside the humans.

  On the trail, Heast’s horse baulked twice before they reached the end of the steep climb. The second time, Heast stroked the beast’s neck and listened to the eerie silence that filled the broken trees around him, but it was not until the third time that he said, ‘Your ancestor is no longer far away.’

  ‘I fear he plans to attack us after nightfall,’ Taaira said. ‘He must not consider us much of a threat.’

  ‘Is there another path we can take?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  Heast’s heels nudged his horse up the trail.

  The ancestor would not consider him much of a threat, he knew. His sword was steel and he could use it passably well, but given what Heast had been told about the creature, he did not expect to be its equal. Yet, a certain part of him anticipated the conflict, for he had never seen one of the Hollow fight before. He had heard stories, of course. Had heard about them fighting with fists and with staffs, and had heard how they fought as no other warrior did. But he had heard enough in relation to his own life over the years to know that the stories of one’s achievements were much like a bloated and distorted corpse, no matter how flattering they might appear on the surface.

  ‘Soon we will be at the Faaishan border, Captain,’ Kye Taaira had said earlier, when they had broken for lunch. ‘When we are there, we should make good time to Vaeasa.’

  ‘We won’t be heading there,’ Heast had replied. ‘At least not first.’

  ‘Where will we go?’

  ‘Maosa first.’ Heast cut two slices off the thick black bread that Essa had given him. Cheese and pork followed. ‘It was where Baeh Lok was taking you, before you were caught.’

  ‘It may not be standing,’ Taaira said. ‘Have you considered that?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘But still we will go?’ He regarded Heast intently. ‘What is there that is so important? I have been there before. It has little to recommend it.’

  ‘It is where Anemone lives.’

  The tribesman chuckled.

  Heast smiled. ‘You’ve met her, I take it.’

  ‘She is a cranky old woman,’ he replied. ‘Our shamans always visit when they are there. It is a sign of utmost respect, but you would not know it to hear how she speaks to them. Why would she treat you any differently?’

  ‘Because she is the witch of Refuge,’ he said.

  After lunch, they had continued up the trail, and now, as Heast entered a clearing, he saw a single body lying in the centre.

  The horses, which had baulked earlier, did not do so now. With
gentle nudges, Heast and Taaira split to the left and right as they rode into the clearing, but the precaution was unnecessary.

  The man – for it had once been a man – lay on his back, quite obviously dead, his body a mix of injuries and deformities. Heast lifted himself from his saddle and walked closer to examine the body. It appeared as if a second skeletal structure had been fused against the first, enlarging the cheek and chin on the left hand side of his face, the skin breaking beneath the growth to reveal hard bone. The man’s forehead had suffered similarly, with the bone above the right eye protruding, and a lidded and blind third eye in place. The distortion continued down the limbs. On the right arm, the elbow joint fused oddly, and the right hand had four fingers growing from the back, leaving nine – including the thumb – in place.

  But it was not that which had killed the man.

  He had been killed by blunt incisions, each wound tearing open his skin. No sword had made them, nor a knife. Heast suspected, as he lifted a flap of skin aside to reveal damaged organs, that it had been done by hand.

  ‘This is what the child did,’ Taaira said quietly. ‘This is one of my ancestors. But where is his blood?’

  ‘There are no tracks.’ Heast left the body, walked to the side of the clearing that broke into thick trees that still grew on the mountain. ‘Except the ones he left.’

  ‘He did not do this himself.’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Look at his legs, arms, at where the wounds are. They were to immobilize him first.’

  The tribesman rose from beside the body of his ancestor. ‘I know of nothing that could do this, Captain.’

  ‘I know,’ Heast said, turning away from the trees, away from the ruins that were defined by the broken Spine of Ger, clearly visible from where he stood. ‘It is as I said: the Ghosts of Mireea are watching us.’

  9.

  Just after midnight, the marriage was announced.

  The groom was the youngest son of Miat Dvir, a skinny boy no older than thirteen who had found the joys of masturbation, but not yet shaving. He was presented to Yoala Fe by Usa Dvir, who stood head and shoulders taller than the boy and spoke in a strong voice about the deeds of the boy’s father, who had bonded the Saan together by blood, long before his son, Hau, was born. He was true blood from the warlord, though Bueralan doubted that Miat had any real care for the boy: the old man had had close to a dozen children, but all the stories and rumours the saboteur heard claimed that he had little love for any but his eldest two sons. Regardless of how much Hau’s father had loved him, the boy was a legitimate Saan prince, and his presence here beside Usa Dvir, coupled with two dozen guards in copper bracelets, was a clear message to the First Queen of Ooila: succession and change was the bride’s price.