Leviathan's Blood

by Ben Peek

  9.

  The first of the birds to hit Aelyn was a storm petrel.

  It hit her from behind. It had pierced through the back of the storm giant’s blunt head while Zaifyr drove the dead pelicans into the wind that poured from its mouth. It was a move of desperation: he could feel the skin beneath his fingers breaking, could feel his clothes splitting, feel the remaining charms in his hair tearing free, but mostly, he could sense the pelicans breaking apart. The endless roar of the giant smashed into the bodies he strengthened. The sheer primal force was too much for the dead birds, and so he reached for the small petrel and drove it into her like a dagger. It caused the wind to break, for just a moment, and his power returned to the haunts of the pelicans, and the large birds surged towards Aelyn.

  Within moments, the ghosts had swarmed over her just as the ghosts of Asila had.

  She had arrived with Jae’le and Tinh Tu and Eidan, a week after he had made his last walk down the long road, a week after he had finally given the dead what they had asked from him. His memory of that time was not perfect: he could recall flashes of images, could remember some scenes, but he had lost himself. By the time his brothers and sisters arrived in Asila, they found not just a city in ruins, but a nation caught in the grips of a mad horror, and a brother who stood in the centre of it. Later, in the years that followed his release from the tower, Zaifyr had not asked Jae’le what he had seen that day. He had not asked him what they had done. How long they had fought. He did not ask because he wanted to put as much distance as he could between himself and the event. He was not that man. He would not be that man again. But he knew that, before Aelyn’s hands reached for his neck, before the ground beneath her began to break as Eidan’s construction came to life, that she had talked to him. All four of them had talked to him. They had pleaded with him to stop, but he had heard only the words of the dead.

  Zaifyr wanted to speak to Aelyn. He owed it to her. He wanted to pull the birds away from her to do it, but he knew that he could not. He did not have the words to undo what Kaqua had done. Nor, as the giant’s head began to web with lightning, did he have the words to undo what he himself had said. He could not take back the words he had used earlier, in the quiet rooms of her house and in the trial on Nale. For all that the Pauper had done, Jae’le was right: Aelyn was also a victim of the power he had, of his response to any who opposed him.

  He wanted to tell Aelyn that. He wanted her to know that he understood what he had done. He felt the urge keenly as his power flowed into the birds that tore at her skin. He wanted to tell her that he had not been trying to destroy her, that he had set out to destroy Se’Saera, to free the dead, to bring an end to the horror that he saw each day.

  But to what point?

  Around Aelyn, the winds burst out against the ghosts of the birds.

  Did he hope to stop her with these words, to somehow diffuse the situation that was before him?

  No.

  He knew better than that.

  Inside the storm giant’s skull, thunder crashed and, suddenly, its head burst apart.

  The wind slashed out towards him, the strength of it punching into his chest, cracking more ribs. His breath was stolen and his bloodied hands loosened their grip on the albatross. As if sensing his weakness, a second and third burst from the headless giant and hit him in the chest. It ripped at his clothes, tore away more charms, and bit into his skin. Trying desperately to focus through the pain and the short gasps of breath that he could manage, Zaifyr’s power surged into three of the pelicans that he could find. He gave them density and size – he turned their thick bodies solid like steel, made their heavy beaks like axes – and gave them as much life as he dared before he forced them into Aelyn’s fury.

  The birds struggled towards her. Their white bodies changed beyond the normal constraints that life gave them as more of Zaifyr’s power surged into them. They grew larger, more imposing, and he knew that he was making them into monsters. Monsters that he would use to break through her defences.

  Aelyn began to reform the head of the storm giant, to use it as a shield, but Zaifyr knew that she was too late. He tightened his hold of the monsters he had made, kept his control, for they were his responsibility, just as Asila had been the responsibility of his brothers and sisters.

  That was why they had come then, he knew. When it had become clear that he could no longer be responsible for his own actions, they had taken responsibility for him. They did it not because they were gods, or because they were the rulers of the Five Kingdoms: they did it because there was no one else to whom the duty could fall. They had stood before him for the same reasons that he had when he went to Yeflam in chains.

  The first of the monstrous birds reached out to strike Aelyn, but Zaifyr stilled it.

  He could not hold it for long. He was exhausted, both mentally and physically. He needed to strike now, but he could not. Faced with the moment when he had to plunge his undead creations into Aelyn’s skin, into her body, he could not do it. He could not kill her. Yet not to kill her was to accept his own death. He saw that clearly. He saw her frustration and her loss, and even though he knew that Kaqua had woven his arguments into her, woven his fears and desires into all of the Keepers of the Divine, he could not kill her. He had to take responsibility for his own part in it, as well. He did not believe that what he had done was wrong, but he also knew that he had not done it correctly. He stilled his second and third birds. His emotions tore at him. He knew that he wanted to free the dead, knew that the horror they existed in could not continue. But the price – the price was not just the woman who was his sister, it was to give up his family, and it was to give up himself. To kill Aelyn was to give up the man he had crawled back to in the tower. It would be to return to the man he had once been.

  And he was not the man he had once been.

  A moment later, the wind took him.

  Epilogue

  Not so long ago, I received a letter from one of my brothers. I replied to it, but my reply was dismissive, angry for what he and another of my brothers planned to do to my sister. I had not yet arrived in Gogair. I was still in Salar, in my dark, warm corridors. Yet, as I sat at my desk to work, I could not escape his words. I read them again. And again. And eventually, I began to walk in the cities of Gogair, to follow the threads that were there, to see the tapestry that was being sewn before us all.

  In Yeflam, I imagine that I will have to apologize to him.

  —Tinh Tu, Private Diary

  1.

  The Captain of the Ghosts arrived at the gates of Maosa in the rain.

  Huddled in his cloak, Heast sat next to Kye Taaira and watched the gate slowly open. It was part of a large, solid wall made from stone and wood which encircled the town like a shackle around a wrist. A fool’s fortune had been spent on the wall sixteen years ago when Kotan Iata had first claimed the title of Warden and the people of Maosa had never broken free of it. It was not that the wall was poorly constructed, for it would not be easy to breach, but it had halted the expansion of a town on one of the least desirable tracts of flat land that Heast had seen. As the Kingdoms of Faaisha grew in wealth and size, many believed that Maosa had been in a good position to turn itself into a major city at the eastern edge of the nation, building political and economic bridges with the Plateau and Mireea. Under another leader, it might well have done so, but under Kotan Iata, a man who saw prosperity only through the sword and who was consumed by his ambition to be a Marshal of Faaisha, no such expansion was possible. It condemned the small town of Maosa to despair, a situation that was all-too apparent when Heast and Taaira rode through the gate.

  Isaap and his soldiers rode ahead of the two men as they made their way through the narrow streets of the town. To Heast, an inn that dominated the first street best symbolized the conditions that he saw as their horses made the slow, muddy trek to its centre. Made of thick cuts of wood, it was a low, long building, half of it closed off by a roof that had collapsed inwards. A pair
of wet crows sat at the top of the rubble, and a half-starved dog eyed them from a dangerous piece of dry cover that it lay under, reluctant to leave. The half of the inn that had not been repaired was the half that used to offer lodging, but the other half, the half that held the bar, was still open. It was empty but for one elderly barkeep who stared out of the large door with a flat expression as Heast rode towards the small castle in Maosa’s centre.

  The castle had been built at the same time as the wall, and it bore strong similarities to it in the stone and wood used to construct it. Its halls were cold and dark when Heast entered, and the echo of the group’s footsteps preceded them. At the two large doors that led to the throne room, the guards admitted them without collecting the swords that they carried.

  Behind the doors, Kotan Iata waited. He was a tall olive-skinned man who had long ago gone bald, but maintained his height and air of gravitas as he aged. In his late sixties now, he wore heavy robes of red and black and carried in his hand a large silver sceptre. He used the ceremonial piece to point to various wooden soldiers that had been placed around him and on top of a coloured chalk map of the Kingdoms of Faaisha. As Heast watched, young pages hastily picked up the figures at his orders, moving pieces that wore green and brown for Leera and red and silver of Faaisha across the floor.

  ‘Aned Heast,’ Iata said without raising his head. ‘You have cost me a tower.’

  ‘I saved your soldiers,’ he replied.

  ‘A tower is worth two score of men. You know that as well as I.’

  A fool’s statement, made by a fool, Heast knew. The soldiers around him – from the veteran Qiyala to the newly appointed First Talon Isaap – shifted uncomfortably.

  After the silence stretched out longer than was socially acceptable, Iata looked up and met Heast’s gaze. ‘I have heard that Lord Tuael has requested you,’ he said, finally. ‘Please know that I do not agree that you are needed.’

  ‘I will only be here briefly.’

  ‘See to it that you are,’ he said, dismissing him.

  Outside the castle, he and Taaira parted from Isaap and his soldiers, except Qiyala. The veteran planned to direct them to an inn, but after travelling a block, Heast dismounted and told her and the tribesman that he had another person to see first. Kye Taaira gave him a curious look, but Heast merely handed him the reins of his own horse in answer to the unspoken question. ‘I’ll find you in The Eel later,’ he said. ‘See that the horses are fed and watered.’

  ‘Of course,’ Taaira replied, taking the reins. ‘May your friend remember you kindly, Captain.’

  Maosa unravelled before Heast in a nest of poverty and quiet despair, very different from when he had last walked its muddy roads. Then, it had been an angry town, on the verge of revolt against Iata, and it had taken Lord Tuael himself to calm them. Heast had been the Captain of the Spine then, and he had advised Tuael otherwise, words that he knew had reached Iata later. But, as he made his slow, uneven walk down the streets, as he passed men and women who met his gaze with dull, flat eyes, and saw into houses that were empty tombs, he did not reconsider his advice. As the rain began to fall harder, he began to hope that he was wrong and that the old witch Anemone no longer lived in the tangled sprawl of houses at the back of Maosa.

  Sadly, her house remained. It stood buried in a warren of narrow streets among a collection of small, poorly built houses that leant against each other. With his hand pressed against the joint where flesh and steel met, Heast made his way up the path to her front door. He passed a rangy cat and a pair of muddy chickens, but it was the fold of the curtains in the windows and the potted plants outside the house that assured him that it was still occupied.

  The door was opened by a young, olive-skinned woman. She was thin to the point of being underfed, emphasized by the oversized leather trousers and shirt that she wore. She had dyed her hair a dark, unnatural red and it was pulled back into a ponytail, revealing the edges of dark tattoos that wound around the base of her neck. She could not have been much older that seventeen, Heast thought.

  ‘You are late, Captain,’ she said. ‘My grandmother wishes you to know that.’

  ‘I did not know I was on a schedule.’

  ‘You were on her schedule. She died a month ago.’

  ‘Does she still wait for me?’

  ‘Yes, Captain, she does.’

  2.

  Bueralan awoke to the sound of a horse being led through the stables. He had not expected to fall asleep, certainly not as heavily as he had, and he was surprised to find that a blanket had been laid across him. Groggily, he turned his head and, through swollen eyes, watched Samuel Orlan lead a grey horse past him and into the stable next to Bueralan’s tall grey. Grunting, the saboteur pushed himself to his feet slowly, his splinted arm held across his chest and his broken hand cradled above it. Finally, he struggled out of the stall where he had lain and came to stand next to the older man, saying, ‘That’s your horse, isn’t it?’

  ‘She has done better than either of us.’ Orlan was running a brush along the back of the grey, picking out burrs and leaves, while also checking her for wounds. ‘I can only imagine the horror she had to come through to reach us.’

  ‘You have only to look out of the door to see it.’

  ‘She was stabled at my shop,’ he said. ‘Aela Ren and Se’Saera have gone to Cynama.’

  Bueralan then realized that the two were alone in the stables. With a heavy step, he made his way to the open door and gazed at the empty but broken land outside, the land that was still littered with the bodies of men and women and horses, and where a faint sulphuric odour hung in the air from the lava that had burst through the ground.

  ‘Se’Saera took Taela with her.’ Orlan came up to stand beside him. ‘I tried to stop it from happening, but I was ignored. I tried to tell them that Taela was in great pain, and great distress, but . . . You could still see the scratches around her mouth and the despair in her eyes when Se’Saera took her arm . . .’

  Bueralan did not close his eyes, for fear that he would be able to see it. ‘You could leave,’ he said. ‘You could get on your horse and ride away, ride far away.’

  ‘Before I came here, I said I would see this to the end,’ the cartographer replied. ‘Even if I could, I would not step away now.’

  ‘The end?’ A hollow laugh escaped him. ‘I will tell you the end, old man. They’ll burn Ooila to the ground and they’ll torture Taela every day until she gives birth.’

  ‘No,’ Orlan corrected him softly. ‘No, I am sorry to say that they will not do all of that. Se’Saera has issued an order to Ren and his soldiers. She has ordered them to leave the country. She has demanded that Aela Ren and his soldiers destroy Cynama so that the path to Dyanos is clear. Glafanr will meet us there. After that, we are to head to Leera – and you and I are to be part of that journey, I am afraid. There may be no guards around us, Bueralan, but we are prisoners who are to be loaded onto that ship before it sails into her war against the Kingdoms of Faaisha, against Yeflam, and against the remains of Mireea.’

  ‘Why the rush?’

  ‘She has seen the future,’ he said, as a single butterfly rose into the burnt sky before them. ‘General Waalstan will not survive the year.’

  3.

  The girl led him into the small, warm house. It had only two bedrooms, a kitchen that led into a tiny backyard, and a small living room filled with jars and books and boxes. In the last, Heast knew, the bones of the witch, Anemone, were packed beside the bones of her daughter, her sister, her mother, and the two generations of women who had come before her. They had bound themselves to their daughters in servitude and, Heast suspected, the old witch had done the same to the girl who he followed.

  ‘Have you taken her name?’ he asked.

  ‘It is an old name,’ the girl replied. ‘One with power, one without.’

  ‘It is also a flower.’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘My grandmother bids you hello.’

  He sa
t on an old lounge, the fabric torn around the edges of the arms, and stretched his steel leg out. ‘I am sorry I missed the funeral.’

  ‘She knows you are not, Captain,’ the young Anemone replied. ‘The rituals that bound her to me are nothing you would find pleasant. In fact, if I were to be honest, my grandmother’s opinion is that you do not like witches at all.’

  ‘I liked her,’ he said. ‘But she and I have had that conversation before. If she is to haunt me with it, she can begin another day. What else does she have to say?’

  The girl laughed, and in her laugh, Heast heard echoes of the old woman he had known. ‘She wants you to know that she is sorry to hear about Baeh Lok,’ Anemone said, sitting on a chair opposite him. ‘She wished that she could have spared him that fate. However, it is her opinion that he was right to take the letter to you. The war is going poorly for the Lords of Faaisha. The rumours of defections in the smaller kingdoms are true, just as the defeats in others are. But she says that is not the reason she agrees with the calling of Refuge. Kingdoms rise and fall, she says. But now there is a god. Se’Saera has been named. She has been revealed. She says that you have seen the soldiers she has made and you have heard about the slave routes to Gogair. Grandmother says that is enough for Refuge. She says it was enough for the soldiers, it is enough for the witch, and it should be enough for the captain.’

  ‘Should it?’

  ‘She also wants you to know that your friend, the one who accompanied you long ago, the one who frightened her.’ The girl paused. ‘Zaifyr,’ she said. ‘Grandmother says that he has died.’

  ‘And Muriel Wagan?’ he asked.

  ‘She still lives.’

  Heast pushed himself slowly from the couch and thanked the girl.

  ‘My grandmother,’ Anemone said, as he reached the front door of the house, ‘wants to know what you think.’

  He met the girl’s dark eyes. ‘It is enough,’ he said.