by Ben Peek
‘You are lying.’
His charge was a slow, lumbering run and it did not surprise Ren. The Innocent battered aside his thrust and cut high in response; Bueralan’s block tore at the skin on his right side and he pulled back from pressing the blow from the pain. It was all the opportunity that Ren needed, and he pushed Bueralan, whose slow blows and parries saw cuts and nicks appear on his arms, lining his tattoos. Yet, he did not step back. He knew that he had lost, but he kept pushing. He knew that the Innocent could have killed him twice. He could have thrust into his stomach or cut through the front of his throat, and the realization saw Bueralan begin to hammer his sword with both hands holding the hilt, reduced to a novice through his pain, through the futility.
He should never have left the cathedral, never left the side of his blood brother, never left his friends. He should not be here! His sword sweeps became wild and reckless and he knew that he was exposed, that Aela Ren was stepping to his left and right and beneath, his gaze holding to Bueralan as if he was seeing a truth buried beneath his flesh and bone. Finally, a wild swing forced Ren to bring his sword up in a block and, quicker than Bueralan could react to, Ren rolled his blade and trapped the saboteur’s sword arm.
Then, in a swift, hard set of movements, Aela Ren broke Bueralan’s forearm, drove the end of his elbow into his face and swept him off his feet.
A moment later, the Innocent’s sword speared into the ground next to his head.
‘Enough,’ the scarred man said, releasing it. ‘I have waited long enough, Bueralan Le. You will tell me her name.’
4.
Eira entered the room slowly, a chilled air preceding her.
She no longer dressed in the pale, elegant gowns that Ayae had seen her wear in the Enclave, but leather armour that had been dyed white and stitched together by thick dark-grey thread. On her left hip sat a white leather sheath with grey straps holding the hilt of her sword in place. The length of the blade disappeared under a dark-grey cloak lined with white fur that fell over her shoulders, and her hair had been tied back, giving Eira the appearance of a woman younger than she normally seemed. But the look she gave to everyone in the room as she walked through the open door was anything but that of an insolent youth.
‘It has felt like dozens of years to reach this moment,’ the Cold Witch said, speaking to Ayae as she approached. ‘It is grief that allows time to slow, don’t you think?’
‘No,’ she replied.
‘Perhaps you have never truly grieved, then?’
Ayae shrugged off the insult. For a brief moment, she had thought that the Keeper had been invited, but none in the room had reacted well to her presence – she saw Lady Wagan’s hand fall to Sinae’s arm to silence him before he spoke, heard Lian Alahn’s bodyguard straighten from the wall he leant against – and the tension rose with each step that Eira made towards her. In response, Ayae remained where she was, even as the brief chill sank into her skin and forced Lian Alahn to step away from her.
‘Would you believe I did not even know that Benan Le’ta would be here tonight?’ While the Keeper spoke, Ayae saw Caeli step into the empty doorway, but as she returned to the room, the guard shook her head slightly, revealing that she had seen neither the man who had led the three of them up to the room, nor another of the Keepers. ‘I was given one task, but I would be remiss to pass up this one. Our little Traders’ Union official who ran. He has been quite the asset to us – or at least he was until he fled with the money we gave him.’
‘I never – I have been accused of many things,’ the fat merchant began.
‘Oh, hush, Benan,’ Eira replied, her gaze holding Ayae’s. ‘A despicable man will do a lot for power, if it is within his reach. He will betray his ideals and he’ll sell out his friends. He will do it so quickly you will wonder if he ever had friends. But it is when he loses his spine for it, when he runs away, that I quickly lose interest in him. Though I suppose since you tore through Bnid Gaerl and his soldiers, some people might almost forgive him.’
‘But not you,’ Ayae said. ‘Right?’
‘What good is a puppet if it runs away?’ The woman smiled faintly. ‘Still, it is my own fault, really. I had pushed my hand to the top of my puppet and felt the rotten cotton. I discovered it when I convinced him that Lady Wagan was simply too dangerous to be free in Yeflam.’
Ayae felt the floorboards creak beneath her weight. ‘You probably didn’t even need Kaqua for that,’ she said.
‘I simply promised to support his interests.’ Eira turned towards Le’ta. He had pushed himself into the corner of the couch, his bruised face a mask of terror, his chained hands raised in defence before him. He began to whisper as the Keeper approached him, but Ayae could not make out his words, and soon she could not see his face. ‘You may find this hard to believe, but the Enclave has been paralysed in debate about Qian and Jae’le for nearly a hundred years. It began after a cart bearing a young child came to one of our ports. It was of no real interest to us, except for the sensation that was reported by Kaqua when he came upon her. It was he who reported the child to us, describing what it is you feel when you stand beside the child now. It was to him that the first of her delegates came to see when they arrived in Yeflam, but he was a lone voice when it came to her divinity, for the child had done nothing to compare to the Five Kingdoms. Aelyn and her brothers had done more that spoke to the rule of gods, and many of us thought it was only a matter of time until Jae’le and Qian began to assert themselves again. A lot of the Enclave thought we would fall in with them, when they did. Aelyn did not favour that. Neither did Kaqua. Aelyn said that they simply would not return to power. After a while, he began to suggest that there was another power. It was hard to support at first. The child’s delegates did not help: they were nothing more than witches and warlocks and ignorant of much in the world. Fo and Bau believed that the lack of education was the most obvious flaw in the child’s divinity. They argued very strongly about that. It was not until Qian killed them in Mireea that it began to change for me. Some of the others had already come around to it, but for me, it was their deaths. It was Fo’s in particular. It broke my heart and I saw in it something I had not seen since I was a child. I saw my mortality. Many of us did.’
‘All men and women must die,’ said Muriel Wagan. She, like the others in the room, had been forced to take a step back from the Keeper’s cold. ‘Surely it was not that surprising that it would happen to you as well?’
‘You know as well as I do what happens to the dead.’ Eira did not turn to address the other woman. ‘Do you truly accept it so kindly?’
‘You said you no longer believed that you could become a god,’ Lian Alahn said, his skin looking goose-bumped and pale. ‘Why the trial, then? Why the alliance with Le’ta?’
‘The first because it was offered. The second – well, Lady Wagan, perhaps you could explain it to him?’
‘Fear,’ the Lady of the Ghosts said flatly.
Eira laughed. ‘Would you believe it was about hope?’ She shushed Benan Le’ta quietly as his pleaded whispers became fainter and fainter as the cold increased. Ayae caught Caeli’s eye and glanced down at the floor. The other woman nodded, but it was the look that Sinae Al’tor shot over her shoulder and the quick shake of his head that caused Ayae a moment of panic. ‘A god recreates the world,’ the Keeper continued. ‘All that is broken, she remakes. Aelyn understood that. Kaqua did as well. Both have seen so much, and both knew that it would be the responsibility of a god to repair the world. Both had long ago accepted the responsibility themselves. That is why they made the treaty. It was not just for Yeflam: it was for all of us. It was Kaqua who said that if we were not gods, then we were part of the wreckage, part of the destruction caused by the gods. He said that we could be remade as well.’
The blonde girl on the couch remained still, appearing to betray no interest in what was taking place around her.
‘Then what point did the trial serve?’ Alahn demanded.
&
nbsp; ‘To break Aelyn Meah,’ Ayae said, a hollow sense of despair opening beneath her.
‘No,’ Eira said, rising. ‘That was Qian’s plan, but not ours. Your mistake – like his – was to believe that Aelyn leads the Enclave. That Aelyn is somehow the most important figure of it. But that is not true. The Enclave is all of us. The trial was simply the last part of our debate in what we should do with Aelyn’s two brothers.’
When the Keeper turned back to her, Ayae finally saw Benan Le’ta. The fat merchant sat at the end of the couch, his hands held before him as if he were seeking supplication. A hardness had entered his skin, but it was only after a moment that Ayae realized that the definition she saw was not a trick of the light in the room. Rather, he had been frozen. Ice had worked its way over his body, creating a tomb through which she could see his panicked eyes, and the suffocation that was taking place.
Eira smiled at her, but before the Keeper could speak – before she could continue to freeze the room behind her words – Ayae’s hand shot out and grabbed her leather vest.
Then she brought her foot down heavily on the wooden floorboards.
5.
The crew of Wayfair did not stand on the deck of the ship as normal sailors might. Zaifyr had seen that their legs rose from it, suggesting a more intimate relationship with the ship than a mortal crew, but after the order to attack was given, he was proved right in a startling fashion.
Before his gaze, the ship began to break apart. It began at the top of the masts, where the bodies of men and women started to materialize and spring into the night sky. They leapt high, and they leapt for the darkness that was breaking into the night sky, their bright bodies lighting it up to reveal the unformed nature of it as they landed against it. As more and more of Wayfair began to crumble into its crew, Yeflam grew brighter and brighter, as if the stars had begun to fall.
Zaifyr turned his gaze to the child. Some of the crew had left the emerging darkness and had landed on the ground, but the child did not retreat from them. The first of the crew to attack her were a pair of women whose features were sharp and verging on bone; but as they came within contact of the child, their bodies began to break apart, the centre of their chests dissolving, while their shoulders sagged inwards. It reminded Zaifyr of what had happened to Anguish on the Mountains of Ger and he flushed his own power through the two women. If he had not, he was sure that their bodies would have continued to break apart. Yet, as he pushed his power into their forms, he discovered that the child’s power had attacked them in the same way as he was acting to defend them, and he found himself reacting against the sensation of consumption by hardening their bodies. In the span of two heartbeats, he rebuilt their chests and drove out the child’s rot. Moments later, she responded with a thrust of power that hit him so hard that the two women disintegrated and he fell to his knees, the taste of blood from his nose in his mouth.
The child could not press her advantage, however. In the sky, the darkness was roaring, and its bellows drew her attention to it. As she turned, the crew of Wayfair rushed her. The three creatures that had attacked Eidan leapt to her defence, but the crew swarmed over them. The huge weapons that the child’s creatures carried could not hit the dead, and their attempts to hurl away the ghostly bodies that tore into their skin were futile. When the first of the crew reached the child, she was forced to retreat, and as she did, the ghosts that were near her lit up brightly like flames as they began to fall apart. Shortly after, the child’s power returned to the three dead men who protected her, and it flushed through their bodies and their weapons with such a fury that the crew of Wayfair began to fall.
Yet, there was one who did not.
Lor Jix stalked towards the child while his crew fell around him, his cold, colourless form a startling purity of anger before the child.
Zaifyr heard Jae’le call his name, but the sound was distant. It was as if it was spoken from thousands of miles away. It was not until he spoke a second time that his urgency reached Zaifyr.
‘Eidan cannot stay here,’ Jae’le said. At his feet, the torn body of his brother lay on his good side, Jae’le’s cloak of feathers laid across the other, blood soaking through it already. ‘Bones must be set, wounds must be stitched. It cannot be done here – not in this.’
Zaifyr met his brother’s gaze. In it, he saw the fury that had burned for the last weeks, but for the first time he saw that it was not an anger that responded to the child’s presence. Rather, he saw that it was a response to the threat she had issued to his family, to the duty that he had given himself over to after the Five Kingdoms.
‘If I lose control,’ Zaifyr began.
‘I will not allow it,’ Jae’le finished.
Around Zaifyr, the dead began to slowly appear. At first, the haunts began to take shape from a leg, or a shoulder, the faint outline of their incorporeal body that they had recently gained with the loss of their mortal one. They were the recent dead who had been drawn to him, who had thought to seek him in the quiet moments of the night, or the day, and ask to be released from their hunger and their cold. But soon, the older dead emerged beside them, the broken shapes of their bodies also given a solidity, a definition equal that of Wayfair’s crew. Yet, while the crew numbered no more than a hundred, the haunts that were taking shape around Zaifyr were endless. They were drawn from the generations of men and women who had been born into the world and died since the War of the Gods.
They began to overtake Lor Jix, rushing ahead of his slow stalk towards the child, allowing him to heal from the injuries the child’s power had done to him. His left arm, Zaifyr saw, was but a pale strip, the substance of it almost gone. As the swarm of the dead drew closer to the child, the charm-laced man began to invest in them the horror of the years he had spent listening to their whispered pleas. He remembered how he had listened to them asking for simple warmth, to be sated from a hunger that could not be satisfied. He felt their demand that he give more of his power to them, that he open himself entirely, that he give them the life that they had lost. They lit the sky up, not like stars, but like a bright white sun, as the dead in Asila had. But unlike then, Zaifyr tightened his control of them. He forced them towards the child. He focused their desire. He made it so that all they could see was the beautiful young woman. He had them ignore the dark shape that loomed high above them in the sky – the terrible shape that began to descend downwards, that was attacked by the crew of Wayfair, that tried desperately to push through them to the child.
He heard Lor Jix’s laugh, and it was a terrible thing, but the cold chill that ran down Zaifyr’s spine was one of anticipation as the ancient dead’s colourless hands closed around the child’s throat.
6.
The floor gave way in a splintering crack and Ayae’s weight pulled Eira down with her.
It was, therefore, Ayae who crashed through the bottles and glasses of the bar first, she who hit the benches they sat on, she who felt it give before it shattered beneath her weight. She worried that a piece of wood would dig through her legs, or plunge deep into her thighs and cut hard into her arteries; but the edges of both wood and glass that tore through her trousers could only scratch against her, could only hint at drawing blood, and surrounded by the wreckage that she had landed in, Ayae slammed Eira into the back wall. Her hard fingers dug into the white leather of the vest she wore, gouged deep for a handhold, and used it to lift her forward and back again as she slammed Eira into the broken racks of alcohol.
A sudden burst of cold sprayed across Ayae’s eyes, blinding her. Instinctively, she lifted her hand – but the heavy, hard punch that followed hit the centre of her chest, forcing her to release her hold on Eira.
A second punch slammed her over the bar, where she hit the ground in a hard, tangled mess.
Ayae’s sight came back slowly as her fingers tore away steaming ice from her face and she rose to her feet. In the dim shadows of her returning sight, she saw a shape rushing towards her, and she began to turn away from it
; but she could not move fast enough and it hit hard against her shoulder, rocking her backwards as the object that hit her exploded in a heavy odour of alcohol. A second slammed into her chest, and a third, but it was not until the fourth that she realized that what was hitting her was hard spikes of ice, flung by Eira and drawn from the bottle she held in her bloody hand.
She braced herself for a fifth, but instead the Keeper fell sideways as a pair of booted feet swung out of the hole and into her face.
Caeli followed elegantly, dropping from the hole in the ceiling to the broken remains of the bar. Ayae’s heart lurched at the sight of her and she began to call out, to tell her to flee, but the guard swayed to her left as a heavy burst of brown-coloured spikes shot out, and her shout was lost in the sound of the hard ice hitting the ceiling. Ayae could not see Eira, but Caeli continued to move to her left, the spikes following her as she lifted herself over the edge of the bar and landed behind it only seconds before a large lance pierced where she had been standing. Another tore through the wood of the bar, but the guard, moving swiftly in a low crouch, came around the front of the bar. There was a pause and Ayae saw Eira regain her feet, but before she could shout out to Caeli, the guard grabbed the broken edge of the bar and vaulted back over it.
Ayae drew her sword and began to rush forward on her heavy legs, but just as she came to the edge of the bar, Caeli landed in front of Eira, and the latter spat.
The guard reeled backwards and Ayae realized that the cold blindness that had afflicted her before had now affected Caeli. But by then, she was at the bar. ‘Down!’ she shouted, her voice a bark that she did not know if Caeli would understand. But the guard dropped suddenly, leaving a space for Ayae’s heavy body to land as she cleared the bench of the bar, her sword lancing into Eira’s neck. The Cold Witch had been so focused on the woman before her that she had little time to react, but even as the blow landed, Ayae saw the thin layer of ice around her neck crack, deflecting the blow.