by Ben Peek
‘That’s what happened to Bueralan?’
‘Nothing happened to me.’ He thrust the shovel into the dirt, left it upright. ‘Let’s be clear on that. A dead god used me for one moment. I don’t know how, but there were no trials, no ties to fate. His mountain fell on him afterwards and it nearly fell on me. I would have died if it had.’
‘You,’ she said, her dark eyes holding his, ‘you don’t react well to change, do you?’
‘I am not your saviour.’
‘I do not need a saviour. I am the Queen’s Voice.’ She turned from him and walked over to an empty piece of grass. With a solid thrust of her shovel, Taela pierced the ground. ‘She will not abandon me.’
2.
Ce Pueral killed two horses returning to Cynama, yet still arrived a week too late.
The city was quiet when she rode through the gate, her soldiers an exhausted line behind her. The streets were empty but for soldiers and butterflies: the latter had settled onto the walls and roofs of the buildings she rode past. Pueral saw boarded doors and windows painted with symbols of dried animal blood on them. It was an old protection ritual, useless in Pueral’s opinion, but when one of their horses stepped hard on the paved road, or a sword in her pack jangled oddly, the hard, sharp sound tore through the city, and she understood the need another might have for the symbols’ comfort.
In the middle of Cynama, the presence of the First Queen’s soldiers began to increase and with it a sense of normality returned to the city. Guards started to appear regularly on the streets in pairs, their black-and-red-metalled hands on the hilts of their swords. Pueral saw citizens as well, and many worked at constructing barriers and roadblocks, further strengthening the defensible line that had been created. Yet, by the time she rode through the final two blocks to the palace itself, Pueral had become aware that it was not just her soldiers she led to the gate, but a wave of anticipation, and when she finally came to the palace, rows and rows of soldiers had turned out to await her.
She dismounted before their gaze. Her first quiet words were to her soldiers, whom she ordered to retire and see to the care of their new horses. Once that had been done, she began to walk through the lines of soldiers, and stopped only once Captain Lehana emerged from the back of the square, the palace gate a webbed mouth closing behind her.
‘My Lady.’ The lean, middle-aged woman saluted. ‘It is a pleasure to see you.’
The salute surprised Pueral, but she returned it. ‘The First Queen?’
‘She is in the palace,’ the other woman replied. ‘She has left orders for you to be brought to her as soon as you arrive.’
As she walked through the gate to the palace, Pueral was aware of every soldier’s gaze on her.
She was uncomfortable. The First Queen had three generals who oversaw the military and in Pueral’s opinion, each of them was as capable as the other. Each was as loyal to the Queen as they should be, the Eyes of the Queen knew, but Pueral was also aware of the fact that, in the last half-dozen years, she had gained a reputation among the soldiers as the spine that kept the army upright. She had overseen a pay increase. She had weeded out a small corrupt element in the higher ranks. She had changed their armour – though she felt its weight keenly as she walked along the tiled floors – and she had expanded their training to include practices both on and off the black ocean. Many of the decisions had been made with the Queen’s generals, and she had been sure to acknowledge each of their contributions over her own, but it was clear, as she mounted the stairs, just who the average soldier relied on.
Inside the Queen’s private chamber, Pueral found Zeala Fe alone. The First Queen sat in one of her heavy chairs in front of a large window, the table beside her littered with papers and letters, an ocean of activity around a single, delicate teacup that trailed steam. Yet, what concerned Pueral most was the Queen’s health: her frail skin had sunk further into her bones and, as the last of the midday’s light came into the room, it appeared to pierce the skin of her hands.
‘You have heard, no doubt,’ Zeala Fe said in a voice stronger than Pueral had heard in years. ‘He is here.’
‘I thought that I had found him in the Fifth Province.’ She picked up a chair and placed it beside the Queen. ‘Instead, he left a letter telling me he would be here.’
‘He does like to talk.’
Pueral grimaced as she sat. ‘You met him, then?’
‘He killed twenty-three men and my daughter.’ The gaze that turned to her was haunted. ‘He did not take a backward step once.’
She had heard about Yoala. A nobleman’s guard had stopped her on the highway to impart the news. He had seen her and her soldiers riding hard, and had left his charge to stand at the edge of the road to flag them down. If Pueral had not known him from his decade of service – if she had not fought beside him in those years – she might have ridden past him. ‘I have also heard that he took your Voice.’
‘Yes.’ The strength in the Queen’s voice faded with the admission. ‘My generals tell me that I should flee, that I should seek safety in another province or another country.’
Pueral did not reply.
‘But I am the First Queen. I will not run. I will not desert my land, I will not abandon my people, and I will not allow him to silence me.’ She indicated the papers at her side. ‘My Voice is kept on Yoala’s estate with Bueralan Le and Samuel Orlan. He has not touched her. He talks a little with her and Samuel Orlan, but mostly, he converses with Bueralan. He tells stories. He talks of the gods and of the future and the past. Sometimes, what he speaks of is nothing but horrors. At others, it is nought but triviality. I will have her returned when we kill him.’
Pueral did not reach for the papers. ‘What you ask for may well be impossible.’
‘It may well be,’ she replied. ‘But would my Eyes be as foolish as my generals to ask me to turn away?’
The Eyes of the Queen would not.
Pueral remained with the First Queen until the afternoon’s sun began to set. It was then that the weight of her armour began to fall painfully onto her bones. She found herself constantly trying to rearrange the weight of the leather straps and was eventually dismissed by the Queen, who told her to return in the morning after she had bathed and eaten and slept. In her own chamber, Pueral sank into a hot bath with the words of the report in her mind, with the images of the generals – two women and one man – once again lobbying for the Queen to leave. They had appeared within the hour of Pueral’s arrival, but while she could understand their point, she knew also that the First Queen simply could not flee. It was not about the Queen’s Voice: the three generals had seen that as a point of weakness to exploit, but in doing so, they had failed to acknowledge the demands of a Queen’s power. It was her duty, her responsibility, and the cruel acknowledgement that all the First Queen had done – all the changes she had brought to Ooilan society – would be no more if she ran from the Innocent.
After her bath, Ce Pueral did not pull on the soft bedclothes that had been laid out for her, nor did she slip into the bed that had been turned down by servants she had not seen.
Instead, she dressed in her leathers and tightened the belt holding her sword on her waist. As darkness began to set around the palace, she walked across the courtyard. She returned the salutes she received and entered the barracks of the Queen’s soldiers. Inside, she walked down the long hallways until she found the witch, Tanith.
‘Tell me.’ Pueral picked up the jar that held the letter written in the Innocent’s blood. ‘How will this work?’
3.
Before the morning’s sun rose, Heast sat wrapped in his cloak beside a dead fire and stared at the Mountains of Ger. He would leave the last of the mountains today: the narrow path that he and Kye Taaira followed would lead them into the Kingdoms of Faaisha before the midday’s sun had set. From there the land ran into a vast scrubland.
The journey over the mountain had been without incident after they had discovered the body of Taair
a’s ancestor. That had been the cause of greatest concern for the pair of them and, on the night after finding the body, the tribesman had explained it to the Captain of the Ghosts. ‘I could find no trace of him,’ the tribesman said. ‘No sign of his blood or his soul.’
‘It could be that the ghosts took him.’ Heast had laid his saddle on the ground and sat against it, his steel leg stretched out before him. ‘If a ghost can do such a thing, that is.’
‘In truth, such knowledge is beyond me.’ His gloved hand dropped to the large sword beside him. ‘But I have a duty.’
‘There are still others.’
‘I must return with them all, Captain.’
Heast sipped his water. He had not liked the tone in the other man’s voice, but he made no comment about it.
‘But we have a more immediate problem.’ Taaira began to pull off his gloves to eat. ‘The name of the ancestor we found was Myone, I believe. Certain older wounds on his body were reminiscent of scarification and he had been one of four or five who had done this to their body. It was a part of culture on the Plateau during the War of the Gods, but lasted no more than two generations. The others the child raised who would have made similar changes to their own skin were not men and women who would hunt alone. Myone, however . . . shamans would tell a story of how he enjoyed torturing enemy warriors. In it, Myone released those he captured on the Plateau painted with pig’s blood. He would use enough to draw the predators of the land to the men he had captured. For two weeks the animals would hunt the soldiers, and once they fell, once the strongest in their packs devoured the enemy warrior, then Myone would hunt and devour the packs.’
‘But someone would ride after him, if he was gone for too long,’ Heast guessed. ‘That is our problem, is it not?’
‘His brother is named Nsyan. He is by far the crueller man.’
When the morning’s sun rose, there was no sign of Nsyan, and neither Taaira nor Heast saw any over the following week. In truth, they had seen little beside birds and animals and each other. Even the ghosts of Mireea could no longer be felt.
The trail the two men followed had twisted along the Mountains of Ger on paths Heast had not expected to take. It rose where he thought it should have dropped and turned south when it should turn north. He had not been worried, for the breaks in land had been the clear reason for the change in direction and, ultimately, the paths had taken them towards the border of Mireea without incident until the last day.
As they had broken camp that morning, both Heast and Taaira had heard a loud, shuddering sound a moment before a serious earthquake shook the ground beneath them. The sound of stone being torn open roared in the sky around them, joining the birds that had lifted up like a flood, but it had not lasted long. Despite the sounds, very little had changed around the two men and their horses and it was not until the afternoon’s sun had risen that they saw anything that had altered. There, the trail they had followed dropped away suddenly and Heast found himself standing before a sight unlike any he had seen before.
The earth had been torn apart, as if a pair of hands had thrust into a wound, and then pulled it back to reveal the ruins of a City of Ger.
It was not a large city. It consisted of nearly two dozen large stone buildings, the edges of each long worn away, leaving them with a rounded appearance. Lichen and moss covered the great majority of the buildings, and a myriad of green and blue and white and grey blended together to give the city a luminescent quality, an unearthly sheen that suggested the buildings had never been designed for human habitation. Yet, Heast knew as he rode his horse around the edge of the broken earth, they had. The windows still held rotting frames and curtains, while the remains of doors were blackened so very similarly to the houses that Heast had seen throughout the world. A mother or a father would push it open. A child could emerge.
It was the first time he had seen a City of Ger. When his men had dived into a flooded mineshaft in search of Leeran bandits, he had left the work to others. His leg would have made it difficult, but it was not the work of a captain anyway. Instead, he had read the reports that had been written, but none of them had captured the strangeness before him, none of them gave voice to the unsettling realization that here were the remains of a society that had, for generations, lived beneath a stone sky.
Silently, he nudged his horse off the trail and, with the tribesman behind him, rode along the broken expanse of the land, his gaze on the ruined trail of the city.
Then—
Then the ground had opened.
The wounded fissure that ran through the ground became a huge empty space. It was of such size, such magnitude that, as he first gazed into it, a sense of vertigo assailed Heast. The City of Ger ended suddenly at it, half a stone house still present on the edge of the hole, while another leant at an odd angle into it, as if it were falling, piece by slow piece, into the emptiness below it. If Heast had been riding in an earlier part of the day, the sight of the two buildings over the vast blackness of the mountain’s wound would have been all he saw; but he came to it when the afternoon’s sun was at its peak and its light reached down into the dark and left it dappled.
In the depths of it, the very, very depths, Heast could make out an outline. It was but a curve at first, a dark shadow, a sight that could easily be mistaken for a part of the mountain until the eye made out another outline. It traced from the edge of the first, further into the splotched shadows, to the centre of the great expanse. There a monstrous shape could be made out and he saw not the broken stone of a fallen building, but rather a splintered bone, a forearm, he thought by its shape, but a forearm of no creature he had known, a forearm so thick and heavy that it could only have belonged to a being that had been so large that, once standing, its head would have risen beyond the clouds.
‘Only in devastation is truth shown clearly to us,’ Kye Taaira said in a hushed voice. ‘Only here is the artifice of belief and intent stripped bare. Only here is what binds us together revealed.’
In the darkness of the camp, Heast continued to gaze at the dark shape of the mountains. If it revealed a truth to him, he did not speak it.
4.
The storm that struck the Floating Cities of Yeflam the morning after the trial lasted three days. In the morning, the darkness of the night failed to lift completely and, from within the bruised sky, an ugly, late-season storm came. The streets emptied, the bridges closed, and the ocean rose in black waves to crash against the pillars as if the angry hands of the dead had begun to beat against the stone. Zaifyr was restless at that thought – he imagined Lor Jix standing on the shattered deck of Wayfair, leading the procession – but on the fourth day, the sky was empty and the ocean flat and still.
At the end of that week, the calm had given way to restless, erratic air as Yeflam waited for the Enclave to begin the march of war.
The papers, be they run by the Enclave, the Traders’ Union or independents, made no secret of the fact that the Enclave would issue a statement declaring war soon. The presses reported that the Keepers were embarrassed and outraged, and the Traders’ Union littered its papers with images of a giant, misshapen leviathan in a variety of poses. In some, it crushed the Keepers. In others, the Floating Cities were covered in its corpse. Yet, no matter what Zaifyr saw or read, he did not disagree that Yeflam was preparing for war. He watched the slow militarization of Yeflam from the tower ledge. From there, he saw the increased presence of armoured soldiers on the streets. He saw them begin during the storm at the bridges, and he saw patrols and small corner outposts spring up beneath the rain. After the storm stopped, he saw for the first time the Yeflam navy patrolling Leviathan’s Blood. The beating of the drums in the long vessels took the place of the noise the waves had made against the stone, as if nature had given way to the demands of humanity.
On the day of the trial, he, Jae’le and Eidan had entered the meeting room in the centre of the Enclave and found the room united.
‘We will find this child of the
gods,’ said Kaqua, the Pauper. ‘We will find her and bring her to justice.’ He had folded his arms in the faded sleeves of his robe and spoke with a serenity that Aelyn, who stood beside him, did not have. Her fury spread over the Keepers behind her. ‘However, all three of you must understand that the Enclave has responsibilities to Yeflam,’ Kaqua continued. ‘It cannot abandon these responsibilities in search of revenge. If you cannot agree to that, then you will be at an impasse with us. Worse, you will be in conflict.’
‘Anguish believes that she is still here.’ Zaifyr directed his reply to his sister. ‘Millions will die if you allow her to leave Yeflam. To kill her here is to end the war in a day.’
‘Do you truly believe that?’ she asked in a hard voice.
‘Yes.’
‘Then you are a fool, brother,’ Aelyn said bluntly. ‘The Faithful will not awake the moment she is dead. They are not under a spell. They believe. They will not stop because she is dead. We do not even know how long it will take her to die. It could be another ten thousand years, in which case her Faithful will claim she is alive. They will even make up a name for her if she falls without one. They will keep marching. You cannot stop what is happening here, and over the mountain, by destroying her.’