by Ben Peek
Zaifyr sensed that his sister was afraid. Everything she had done – from a treaty with Leera, to sending Fo and Bau to Mireea, and her reluctance to begin a trial – had been a manifestation of that. She had been more damaged by Asila and by the fallout in her home than he had realized. For a moment, Zaifyr thought that he could see her memories, that he could see the crumbling spirals of Maewe, the riots in the streets and her deep despair at it. But he also believed that a moment had been presented to them now. Lor Jix might not have risen on the waves during the storm, but Zaifyr could still sense him beneath the stone of Nale, a presence entwined with the sensation of the child, a chill against her sharpness on his skin. In his mind the two had combined with the cold of the dead and the whispers of the haunts, but, as he had begun to speak, to explain that to Aelyn and to the Keepers, Eidan had interrupted.
‘She is right,’ he said. ‘When the child falls, she will remain a figurehead to them. It may be that some will leave upon her death, but not all. They will cross the ruins of Ger’s mountains to reclaim her. They will not easily believe that she is dead, and perhaps rightly. Look at our world. Will she become yet another dead god? We do not know the answer to that, just as we are missing so many other answers. We do not know what defences she can call upon, what creatures will answer her. I have seen what does answer in Leera, and if it is but a fraction of what responds to her here, then the stones of Yeflam will be a new colour come the morning if we strike against her.’
Earlier, when Zaifyr had rejoined Jae’le and Eidan, he had found them on the third floor of the Enclave. The former stood alone in the hallway while the latter stood in a dark empty office before an open window.
‘The creature with him,’ Jae’le answered his unspoken question quietly. ‘He says that he has seen her.’
‘In the Enclave?’ he said.
‘Outside.’ Eidan emerged from the office alone, the darkness falling behind him while his body was reformed by the light. ‘He says that he saw her, falling through the sky. That she was held in that giant creature she summoned. When we looked out of the window, we could not see her.’
‘So he left?’ Jae’le asked.
‘He said that he wished to climb to the top of the Enclave. To look for her again.’
Zaifyr shared the surprise of his other brother who, the hilt of his sword concealed beneath his green-feathered cloak, did not hide his expression. With a sigh, Eidan continued along the hallway. ‘It would be better to kill him, yes,’ he said. ‘It is the more intelligent thing to do, I know, and in the past I would not have hesitated. Anguish would even welcome such a thing, I believe. But all of us know that death is no mercy.’
It was those final words that returned to Zaifyr as he stood before Aelyn. He still believed that this was the moment, that all of them should strike – now, before the night was over. He could visualize the violence in his mind with a startling clarity that would linger with him through the storm and in the days after. But he took warning from the vision, and allowed that it was no longer a sign that he should rush towards the idea of destroying the child, no matter the outcome.
Zaifyr’s right hand touched the bronze charm beneath his wrist, the simple, worn piece of metal his father had instructed him to tie upon himself first. ‘Perhaps,’ he said to Aelyn, ‘you are right in this.’
5.
The storm had threatened to flood a part of Faise and Zineer’s house. When it had reached its worst on the first day, the rain had poured through the broken second-storey window, and Ayae, desperate to stop the floor from being warped, had nailed a sheet of wood over the frame. She had pulled the wood from the back door where someone – Zaifyr or Jae’le, perhaps – had put it over the broken entrance after clearing away the men and women she had killed weeks before. Now the stone floor downstairs was awash from the rain that flooded in from the backyard. When the storm stopped, she organized a replacement of the window and door.
It arrived on the day that Aelyn Meah knocked on the door.
Ayae had left the Enclave shortly after Eira’s final words. Outside, the darkness stretched across Nale and had slowly embraced her as the hours wore on.
She could have returned to Aelyn’s false home, to the room where she had slept heavily after she killed Faise and Zineer, but Ayae knew that she could not. To go back there meant to be drawn into Zaifyr and Jae’le’s war, into their plans to attack the child, and she did not want that. She wanted space to think and to breathe. She knew that she had lost control on Xeq, but it had been harder for her to acknowledge that she had not regained control of herself afterward, and it was why her step left faint webs of cracks along the stone. In the long walk back to Faise and Zineer’s – a walk that saw carriages pass her, carriages she was afraid to step into – Ayae admitted that there was a chance that the solidification of her body would continue, that it would start to turn her very organs to stone. There was, as Jae’le said, a very real danger that she could be consumed by grief.
It had not happened by the time Ayae opened the door to Aelyn Meah, but neither had her body returned to itself.
‘I thought it would be best for us to talk,’ the Keeper said. Ayae’s anger at the woman for her betrayal of Mireea was difficult to find, in part because Aelyn had forsaken the blue that she was commonly associated with and looked nothing more than a tired woman in her plain leather trousers and linen shirt. ‘An official statement will be given tomorrow. It is the statement of war. We will be issuing it from the Enclave.’
No one had visited the house since she had arrived, not even neighbours, and for a moment Ayae had not thought to respond to Aelyn. Finally, she said, ‘What do you plan to say?’
‘That we must do this, of course.’ The other woman offered a smile that was brief and hollow. ‘Is that not what we always say before we march our citizens off to death?’
Ayae held the door open for the Keeper to enter the house. ‘People still talk about her being in Yeflam.’ A number of papers had, in the wake of the trial, become free. They piled up outside the house. ‘People see her – a shadow of her, they say. And they see her priests.’
‘Some of it is true, in so far as the people themselves believe. Others are not so true.’ Aelyn followed her into the kitchen, still dominated by its long table. ‘We have not found her, though. Even Eidan cannot find a trace of her in the stones.’
Ayae pulled back the heavy chair she had brought from downstairs and sat down. ‘How do you explain it, then?’
‘I do not. I cannot.’ The Keeper pulled a lighter chair out to sit upon and spread her hands out. ‘However, if we move up the coast with our navy, if we take Leera at its ports and shut down her supply routes, she will appear. In all her fury, she will appear in a country that is not the one I have worked so hard to create.’
She sounded tired and defeated and Ayae did not know how to respond to what she said.
‘The rain must have come in during the storm,’ Aelyn said, looking at the damp patches that remained on the stone floor. ‘I do apologize. Faje warned me that he had been only able to do a minor repair.’
‘I did not realize it was you who came here,’ Ayae said, caught off-guard. ‘Thank you.’
‘It was Faje, mostly. My brothers can be kind in their own fashion, but they are terrible men to know in times of grief. They believe you must stare into it. That it makes you stronger when you meet it directly. There is an element of truth to such thoughts but it is what they first said when they were at war. I do not think that they ever truly left that mentality.’ Aelyn fell silent for a moment, the stillness that was around her feeling as if it trembled, just slightly. ‘No one is sure where Benan Le’ta is at the moment,’ she said, leaving the topic. ‘In the confusion of Xeq and the trial, he must have slipped out of Yeflam. At the moment, I am quite happy to believe that. It may interest you to know that the Traders’ Union is going to compensate those who lost their homes or loved ones, in order to keep the peace as we go to war with Leera.’<
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Ayae ran a heavy hand through her hair. ‘I am happy to help anyone innocent who was hurt,’ she said, finally.
‘There are no innocents.’ She might have said on Xeq, but she did not. ‘People make their choices – do not forget that.’
‘I merely meant that I will not hide from what happened.’
‘You speak as if you have a choice in the matter.’ Aelyn’s second smile was no longer empty, but rather sad and, Ayae thought, lonely. ‘Not so long ago, you were probably like so many others in this word. An event befalls them, and they blame someone in authority above them. They say that they could have done this or they could have done that. They say that if they had more money it would be different. If they had more authority, more opportunity, then it would also be different. But for people like you and me, there is no alternative outcome. There is no authority to turn towards. We are it. We are the highest power in the world and we can do nothing but take responsibility for what we do.’
‘But the child—’
‘—is but us, until she is not.’ Her smile faded. ‘If we are to take what was said at the trial as a truth – and bear in mind that I think it will be a long time before we can say that – little has changed. We are still striving to make the world whole again. We are still recovering from the War of the Gods. We are not still in it, as my brothers would suggest. Indeed, my great fear is that thoughts like that only begin a cycle for what will happen when others reach this point, when beings like you and me become gods. When we begin to transcend ourselves and become divine, we cannot be at war.’
Ayae had no answer, but she knew that she did not need one. The conversation was not for her alone. They were Aelyn Meah’s words to Aelyn Meah, Keeper of the Divine, ruler of Yeflam, and they were in part an attempt to ease her conscience that she and the Enclave were heading in the right direction. While she might have always thought war was inevitable, Ayae could see that the way in which it was unfolding was not the way Aelyn had wished it, and her words sounded much more like a practised speech aimed at regaining the confidence of her Keepers.
For a short time longer, the two talked in this fashion, about subjects otherwise unspoken, about a confession of fears Aelyn could not begin to make, until the Keeper finished.
At the door, the Keeper stopped. ‘Are you sure you will not consider coming to the announcement?’ she asked. ‘It is important for you as well.’
‘I am sorry,’ Ayae told her. ‘But I would not trust myself there.’
6.
In the darkness, the finished graves held a terrible promise that Bueralan could not turn from. For the last week, he had slept poorly, the exhaustion of physical labour providing only snatches of rest and, when he awoke, he would inevitably find himself drawn to the graves. In the early hours of the morning, the mounds of dirt were lit by the moon and the stars, and he would wrap his hand about the leather pouch around his neck until the cold began to burn his skin. Then, he would release it, and the familiar chill would settle against his chest.
On the third night after the graves had been finished, Bueralan realized that a part of him came out expecting to bury Zean’s soul.
Aela Ren had appeared before them on the fourth day, after the last grave had been filled. ‘It is a strange ritual we keep without the gods,’ he said, walking between the mounds of earth. ‘Originally, we buried our dead so that the Wanderer would know where our souls were. He was but one of the aspects of mortality, and when he requested that the dead were buried, he also asked for Maika, the God of Ascension, Maiza, the God of Oblivion, and for Maita, the Goddess of Rebirth. It was she who used the soil most of all, for she ensured that a soul’s return to human life was one of steps, and it began in the soil, in the worms that ate human flesh. It has often amazed me that only the butterflies in Ooila rise after falling into the ground where the traces of Maita’s power give them life again and again.’
‘Occasionally people arise,’ Samuel Orlan replied. Of the three, the old cartographer was the only one who felt comfortable entering into conversation with the Innocent. ‘They are in a terrible state, half-decayed, their mind gone, but they do arise.’
‘You have seen such?’
‘Yes,’ Orlan said sadly. ‘I have.’
‘Then why do you dig graves?’
‘I do not, usually.’
Bueralan remembered the pyres in Mireea and the intricate images that had filled all but two of them, but he made no attempt to intervene. Ren baited Orlan in each exchange the two had, and the latter would reply only in earnest, as if a strange, unspoken debate was taking place.
A light crunch of gravel sounded behind Bueralan and he smelt a mixture of soap and perfume before Taela stood next to him.
‘You’re supposed to be asleep,’ he said.
‘So are you.’
After the first day of grave digging, she had returned to speaking to him. Bueralan had tried to keep his distance, but had found himself drawn back to her, to her conversation, to her insight, and to the fact that, in the house that held four people, only Taela shared his experience of being caught in something much larger than themselves.
‘Have you decided to bury it yet?’ she asked.
He could still feel the cold in his hand from the pouch at his neck. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I see Ren stare at it each time I enter a room. He would dig it up if I buried it.’
‘It is a talisman to him.’
Bueralan did not disagree. Each time he spoke with the Innocent, the scarred man would begin to speak of the War of the Gods. He would describe the world that had existed at that time, quite often in language that surprised Bueralan. He would see images in his mind, similar to the image he had seen of Jae’le, the Animal Lord. Each of them had a sweetness, a perfection to them, a sureness that Bueralan found comforting, and he had come to realize that Aela Ren was trying to convince him of his position, as if, by doing so, he might draw a name from him.
‘What was she like,’ Taela asked, ‘this child god?’
‘Cruel,’ he spoke the word without pause. ‘Young and cruel.’
‘I used to pull off the wings of butterflies when I was a girl,’ she said. ‘I would catch them in a net that my father owned and I would cut off their wings, to see if they would be reborn without them.’
‘And were they?’
‘No, they were reborn with wings. But it was cruel of me – children are often cruel, I have found.’
‘I do not think she is truly a child, not in the way you and I understand it,’ Bueralan said. ‘I had not given her much thought until this week. For the most part, I was interested in making amends for my failure. I had lost my friends, and I had lost my life. To hold Zean’s soul in my hand after that . . . it was too much like when we were children. I was not given nets to catch butterflies, but a boy to wear all my punishments, and I did not want that authority. It was a burden that I could not bear.’
‘You sound very similar to the Queen,’ she said quietly. ‘Years ago she showed me the books that she had written. They were difficult to read, filled with violence, and advice, and instructions, all with the aim of building a world power out of Ooila. At the end of my reading, she told me that the words in those books were a burden she felt every day of the year. She placed a cup in front of me as she spoke. It was filled with poison, she said. I would have the option to drink it after she told me a secret. I was not very old: the Queen had purchased me from the opera that my father had sold me to the year before, and the secrets I knew to keep were awful. But it was there that she told me that none of her children were the reincarnations of the women in the books. That her children were her own. That she herself would not be reborn.’
Bueralan wondered if his mother had known. He thought that she had. He thought of Safeen Re, whom he had seen last week, and her advice, and he thought lastly of the Hundredth Prince.
‘I could laugh,’ he said. ‘Almost.’
‘Yes,’ Taela said after a moment of hesitation. ‘
I suppose you could.’
Zean would laugh. The cold in Bueralan’s hand had almost faded, and he resisted the urge to reach up again for the pouch. It was strange that he barely felt the leather against his chest. He had grown used to it, just as he had grown used to the strip around his neck, and the weight at the end. The burden that he could not at first bear was now a burden, he knew, that he had learned to bear. He had finally begun to understand that, standing before the graves he had dug.
7.
When the second knock came on the door, Ayae considered ignoring it.
Yet, it persisted, a heavy soldier’s knock. A soldier dressed as a priest – but she pushed the thought from her mind as it started. Memories of Faise and Zineer were never far from Ayae in their house. A cup she held. A door she opened. The rumpled, unmade bed she saw from the hallway. She could see the faint outlines of both, performing the acts that they had done when alive. Walking down stairs. Standing before the kitchen window. Ayae had navigated the memories from the moment she pushed open the door and found the bloodstains, but not the bodies. Still, when the knock sounded again, she resisted the idea of rising because it did remind her of that night, and a part of her wished that she had not answered it then. She would have been in the house when the window broke, would have heard Faise’s scream. Would have heard Zineer’s shout. She would have been there. She would have, had not the false priest knocked on the door.
After the fourth knock, Ayae opened the door. There, Caeli leant casually with her long back against the frame. Her gaze was on the dark street and she had been knocking with her right hand, a series of heavy raps that did not even require an upraised arm and, when the door fell back, the fist she had held spread into an open palm and gave half a wave.
‘You bring a drink?’ Ayae asked.
Wordlessly, Caeli’s left hand lifted a clear bottle.
‘Is that laq?’