by Ben Peek
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ she said. ‘But yes. I am like him.’
The Lord of the Saan spoke. ‘And there are two others,’ his wife said. ‘Two men who have been alive for a long time?’
‘They keep their own counsel.’
‘But you speak for them?’
‘They speak for themselves.’
There was a brief conversation between the two, before Vyla spoke again. ‘You must forgive us,’ she said, shifting forwards on her seat, bridging the space between Ayae and her just a little more. ‘We were under the impression that you spoke for the two men, and Lady Wagan spoke for you. We have been led to believe that you would take part in our campaign in Leera should Lady Wagan agree to join us. We only wanted to confirm this.’
‘Jae’le and Eidan make up their own minds.’ And me? was the unasked question. ‘But they will not be soldiers for you.’
Miat Dvir nodded before his wife translated the words to him. He had heard the distinction in Ayae’s words clearly. At length, he spoke to Vyla. ‘My husband wants to be very clear to you,’ she said, when he paused. ‘The Saan will not be remaining here long. We will be going over the Spine of Ger. We will be going to war. He has seen a lot of things in this camp since his arrival. He has seen a lot of division. He supposes that it is only natural. But he would not bring that to war. He wants to make it very clear to you that he would bring a unified vision. He would stop this threat, not just to the Saan, but to all of us, before it can grow into something as large as the devastation in Sooia, or an empire like the Five Kingdoms. He hopes that you can remember this, and that you can pass it on to others, as well.’
The Lord of the Saan stood once she had finished. He inclined his head once to Ayae, and again to Caeli, before his wife stood and the warrior behind them picked up both chairs.
After they had left, Caeli let out a low laugh. ‘Not even Muriel speaks to Miat Dvir the way you just did.’
‘If he wants to speak to Jae’le or Eidan, he can go see them.’ She could hear the annoyance in her voice. ‘And he can speak to me himself.’
At that, Caeli laughed aloud. ‘Oh, look what we have become,’ she said. ‘We demand to be spoken to!’ She laughed again. ‘Do you know, that is the most I have heard him speak in the traders’ tongue. He showed us a lot of respect. In all the other meetings, Vyla speaks for him from the start. I’ve heard him say hello and goodbye, but that’s it. But what he said to you, he had practised. His wife would have taught him that before he came here. That is her job, after all. All the men of the Saan are illiterate. But you – you get paid the compliment and you don’t even know it. You just complain that he didn’t treat you like an equal.’
‘Shut up.’ Ayae slouched into her chair, trying to hide from her embarrassment. ‘Besides, you heard him. He just wants me to kill his enemies for him.’
‘Yes,’ the guard said, her smile fading. ‘Yes, he does.’
7.
Heast arrived in Vaeasa after the afternoon’s sun had set. He posed as Anemone’s servant, his hair darkened with a cheap dye complemented with a heavy lean on a staff that he did not need.
It was in the remains of a town half a day’s walk from the Leeran camp that he applied the dye. While he ran his hand through his hair, Anemone told him about the town that they stood in. It had once been named Niez and, though it was now little more than black stones covered in moss, over eight hundred years ago it had been the home of the third Lord of Faaisha. He had been found in his bed two years after he took office, poisoned. ‘Grandmother,’ she said to him as she walked around the outline of the house, ‘always believed that the assassination was a lesson to future lords. It was said that Lord Niez had wanted to stop the private ownership of land. He wanted land to be owned by the state so that the land taxes went straight to the nation, but in doing so, he threatened the power of those who owned much of the land. It was they who poisoned him. Grandmother described them as a single beast with many heads.’
‘I’ve heard similar stories before,’ Heast said.
She turned to him. ‘Do you not fear it happening to you? That the Lords of Faaisha will band together against you?’
‘No.’ He pushed his hands into a pool of rain water and began to scrub them free of the dye. The black drifted off in long twists. ‘I will not be welcomed by all the Lords of Faaisha. There will be no parade for us in the streets. But Tuael will not stand against us. He’ll be more flexible than the other Lords.’
‘And after?’
‘After?’ Heast shrugged. ‘He’ll blame us for anything that isn’t good for him. Of course, that assumes we’ll be successful. He may not have to bother denying what he knew about Refuge if we are killed by the Leerans.’
‘How can you just accept that?’ The young witch sounded surprised. ‘Don’t you want to be thanked for what you have done?’
‘It is the way it is.’ He did not say it with rancour or bitterness, for those, he knew, were the inflections of youth. ‘Even the novels about mercenaries have that right.’
When Heast and Anemone arrived in Vaeasa two days later, they were guided to its gates by the torches that lined the angular walls, as if they were a beacon of hope and safety.
As with most cities in the Kingdoms of Faaisha, Vaeasa was a huge, walled creation that had grown as the population within it did. The thick, white stone walls were laid in straight lines and, in the paintings Heast had seen of it from above, they gave the city the appearance of an unbalanced star. The walls did not just stretch around it in a single line. Each decade of new expansion had given rise to a new wall outside the old, making the city bigger with every new generation. Because of that, the interior was divided by old, discoloured walls which segregated the poor from the rich.
To reach the main gate of Vaeasa, Heast and Anemone walked through three barricades and hundreds of armed guards. The purple-and-gold cloaks and chain and leather armour that they were forced to wear offered little relief to the night’s thick humidity and it had made the soldiers irritable. It rendered the walk that Heast and Anemone made through the barricades of thick wood and barbed wire twice the length that it should have been as they were forced to wait at all three of the checkpoints before they were questioned.
‘Where are you from?’ The first who spoke to them was a young man, a year or two older than Anemone. He directed his questions to her and purposely did not focus on Heast. When she told him that she had come from Maosa, he said without pause, ‘And the white man with you?’
‘He worked for my grandmother,’ the witch told the woman at the second checkpoint. She was a heavy-set, olive-skinned woman who was sweating profusely. ‘He is a cripple she took pity on,’ Anemone added.
‘You will be responsible for him.’ The guard glanced at the tattoos on Anemone’s hands. ‘It does not matter who you are already responsible for.’
‘Can you speak for yourself?’ It was the third guard who addressed Heast. He was an older man, a Third Talon, to judge from the gold marks sewn into the purple cloak that lay next to him. He had spared only a glance for Anemone before turning to Heast and, interrupting the witch, asked his question. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Gogair.’ Heast met the man’s gaze. ‘Originally.’
‘Originally?’ the man repeated.
‘He is a cripple my grandmother took pity on,’ Anemone said. ‘Nothing more.’
‘Your hand is bleeding, girl.’ The guard did not turn to her. ‘Your grandmother should have taught you how to hide that better when talking to someone.’
‘It has been a long walk to the gate,’ Heast said, before she could answer.
‘Things are slow, but in fairness, a lot of people come through here. A lot leave, as well. A friend of mine left with a Hollow months ago,’ he said. ‘My friend’s name was Baeh Lok. You haven’t met him on the road, have you?’
‘He travels a different road now.’
‘I thought as much.’ The guard spat on the side of the b
arricade. ‘You two better hurry through, now. There’s more people coming. After you find a place to stay, you have a drink for my friend at The Undertow. It was his favourite bar. Maybe I’ll see you there when the sun is up.’
8.
‘Shouldn’t you be sleeping?’ Bueralan asked.
‘I do not like it,’ Aela Ren said. He stood in the middle of Glafanr’s deck, Leviathan’s Blood spread around him in an endless, shifting darkness. Above, the stars and the moon appeared pale, as if they were part of another world, dwindling. ‘I am unaccustomed to sleep. After all these years it feels like the embrace of emptiness. When I awake, I feel as if the world has tried to reorganize itself. As if a thousand possibilities have suddenly been removed. It is an unsettling experience.’
Bueralan, who had stood on Mercy with him and listened to him speak about Se’Saera, was surprised.
‘Shouldn’t you be enjoying that experience?’ Taela said, as if reading his mind. ‘You don’t want your new god to think you disapprove, do you?’
‘I do not fear Se’Saera knowing how I feel. In truth,’ the Innocent said, ‘it is right that I feel this way. I am a man who has lived a long life in a world that is slowly coming to an end.’
‘You say the most reassuring things,’ she said drily.
‘I meant only that Se’Saera will rebuild this world.’ He turned to her, the faded moonlight highlighting the scars along his face, allowing it, for a moment, to look as if his skull had revealed itself. ‘But both you and Bueralan appear to have been raised with a similar belief that a god must act in kindness, that a god is kindness. No doubt it is because you were born into a world without divinity that allows you to believe such a thing. It is oddly touching, in a certain way. Like a child believing that their parents are perfect.’
‘Just imagine if the world was built on benevolence and kindness.’ Bueralan could not keep the cynicism from his voice. ‘It would be nothing but endless suffering.’
‘It would be someone’s.’ The ghost of a smile touched Ren’s scarred lips. ‘The two of you are not new to power. You have stood beside people who wield it. Who is it better for? I ask you. A soldier, a queen, or a slave?’
‘A god is meant to be different.’
‘You have never known a god, so how can you say such a thing? What if a god is naught but a divine power forming itself into a philosophy? Or an idea that is prevalent among mortals?’ Around them, Glafanr pushed through a swell. ‘I stood by my god Wehwe for thousands of years and I do not claim to know him intimately. I would not dare. To do so would be to suggest that divinity is something that I can know, but it is nothing of the kind.’
‘Then why stand beside a god?’ Taela asked. ‘If it cannot be known, why would anyone offer it loyalty?’
‘Again, you think of a god as you do a king, or a queen,’ the Innocent said. ‘Perhaps it is our fault that you do,’ he added. ‘It is the responsibility of all god-touched men and women to represent the gods. It was our task to translate what they were to everyone else. When the War of the Gods ended, we stopped doing that. I have upon occasion thought that we should have defined what a god was in those years after. It would have made it harder for the pretenders of the Five Kingdoms to come to power. Of course, we were in no condition to do that after the war. Still, it would make things easier now. Not just for all of the mortal men and women in the world, but for you, Taela. If we had stayed in the world, you would know that the Goddess of Fertility saw birth as one aspect of a child’s arrival in the world. She concerned herself with parents, with conception, and with the rearing of the child itself.’
‘Ren,’ Bueralan began.
‘Let him say it,’ Taela said, a measured defiance in her voice. ‘Let me hear it.’
‘Kaze will be of great help you,’ Aela Ren said, unconcerned by her tone. ‘She was made to stand beside mothers. She will do all that she can for you.’
‘No.’
There was no give in her voice.
Earlier, Bueralan had been awoken by the sound of Taela heaving, the smell of vomit tart in the cabin. Wordlessly, he had pushed himself up, poured a glass of water, and handed it to her. He had taken the wooden bucket to the window and tossed what was in it outside. It was the same bucket he had carried to the deck with Taela, after she had finished drinking, and said that she could do with some fresh air. She apologised for waking him while they walked through the corridor, but he said that he should thank her. He had been dreaming about the City of Ger, beneath Mireea, and the Temple of Ger. In his dream, he had stood above the glass covering. He had not seen a piece of Ger’s skin, as he had when he had stood there before, but a huge eye. It had stared up at him in question, and the fact that he had no answer had been deeply unsettling to him. ‘I’ll try and throw up tomorrow night then,’ Taela had said, as they walked up the stairs, onto the deck, where Aela Ren stood.
‘I am trying to help you,’ the Innocent was saying, now. ‘I know you will not believe that. I know that I am a monster to you. But soon, we will reach the shore of Leera, and we will be in danger there. You will need assistance.’
‘I’ve had enough assistance from you.’ There was no mistaking her tone. ‘From all of you. You all stood and watched me be raped by your new god.’
‘And we would do it again,’ he said.
Taela spat at him.
Bueralan tensed, but Ren simply wiped the spittle from his face. He did not seem angry, or amused. Instead, he watched Taela as she walked across the deck to the prow of Glafanr. ‘Once we land,’ the Innocent said to the saboteur, ‘we will be at war. It will be a different war to the one that my soldiers and I fought in Sooia.’
Taela blended into the shadows of the ship, her body a faint outline. ‘Because of Zilt and his soldiers?’ Bueralan asked.
‘Because they were once the God of War’s favourites.’
‘Kaze told me that earlier, but she did not say it would make a difference to anything once we landed.’
‘Baar saw war as many things. He was like Linae and Wehwe, like all the other gods. He saw war as liberating, but also an act of oppression. He knew that mortals took up a blade for coin, and that they took it up because of morals. Much of Onaedo’s time was spent campaigning against the propaganda that many a nation created about it.’
‘Onaedo?’ It surprised him to hear Ren mention the ruler of Leviathan’s End. ‘What does she have to do with this?’
‘A long time ago, she asked Baar to help her show the dichotomy of war to men and women. In every generation she asked him to bless a soldier to destroy and a soldier to preserve. General Zilt was one of the last that Baar favoured. The other was a man by the name of Kues—’
‘Who led the Tribes into the Plateau,’ Bueralan finished. ‘Are you saying that they will rise up against us?’
‘No,’ Aela Ren said. ‘But Onaedo will know that Zilt has returned. She will have felt it. And she will bring balance to this conflict. On Leera, we will find ourselves challenged in ways we have not been before.’
9.
Ayae’s embarrassment over what she’d said when meeting Miat Dvir followed her into her dreams.
In her dreams, she wrote a letter to the Lord of the Saan and apologized for her behaviour. In it, she said that she knew better. She had been Samuel Orlan’s apprentice. On the first official day of her apprenticeship, he had told her how important it was to understand other cultures. He gave her a stack of books, books larger than she had ever read before, each of them filled with maps and with descriptions of cultures and leaders. He said to her that learning to speak as many languages as she could would be invaluable in her new world. ‘You will make maps for everyone,’ he said, ‘and each customer will have a different demand, a different desire, and a different way of thanking you.’ As she wrote, she could feel the paper beneath her hand so strongly that she knew it was thick and of a fine quality. The sturdy length of the quill was also fine. So much so that, after she awoke, she could still feel it in
her hands.
Across from her, on her own roll, Caeli slept soundly. One foot had been thrust out from under the blanket and Ayae briefly considered dipping it into a bowl of water, or tying it to her boots in a small but petty revenge. Instead, she pulled on her clothes quietly and, with the sensation of the quill still in her fingers, stepped outside the tent. Beneath the firelit sky she pulled on her boots and laced them tightly, before she threaded the sheath of her sword in place. Making sure that the tent was shut, she made her way down to the stables, to where Jaysun waited. In the cart, she drove out to Eidan and Jae’le’s small camp.
Eidan waited outside his tent, sitting on a large log that lay before a dead fire pit. He was dressed in the same loose clothes that he always wore and, from a distance, she was struck by how harmless he looked. She wondered if the Lord of the Saan had thought that. Surely he would have made an attempt to see both brothers, even if he had not yet talked to them. She could see Jae’le standing in the shallows of Leviathan’s Blood and wondered what Dvir would have thought of him.
In Neela, Eidan checked the work that had been done on the city’s buildings and roads. In the last few nights, a sudden surge of progress had been made, with close to half of Neela becoming a series of straight, complete lines as scaffolding was removed and rebuilt around other buildings. It seemed to Ayae that, if Eidan wished, many of the lamps that lined the streets could now be lit and people could be let in.
When she mentioned it to him, he shook his head. ‘We don’t want people on Neela yet,’ he said. ‘There are still a number of factories to be demolished.’
They were close to the bridge that connected Neela to Mesi. When they stopped before it, Eidan left the cart, but instead of approaching it, he paused and stared out into Leviathan’s Blood, where the wreckage of the other cities lay beneath the water.
‘Is something wrong?’ Ayae asked.
‘No.’ He turned back to the bridge. ‘But from here we will need new stone.’