by Ben Peek
The daughter of Muriel Wagan met her gaze. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know you.’
‘Hien,’ the witch whispered, her gaze directing them to the pack at her feet. ‘Ayae, please, don’t leave him.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘of course not.’ She picked up the solid bag, heavy with the weight of a rotting head, of what remained of Hien, the soldier Olcea had bound to her service years ago. Ayae was careful when she lifted it, careful of the thin blade in the strap that the witch used to cut her palms in times of danger. She slung it over her shoulder before she took hold of Olcea’s arm again.
Eidan and Tinh Tu were ahead, the old woman keeping an easy pace with her injured brother. For a moment, Ayae saw the emotional connection that she had thought absent when Eidan waded out into Leviathan’s Blood to draw the boat out of the water. She did not believe that the bond was as strong as the one between Eidan and Aelyn, or Zaifyr and Jae’le. Those bonds transcended the responsibilities and affections of family. In Tinh Tu, there was instead a cool reserve, a distance Ayae had seen in brothers and sisters whose lives took them in different directions, and whose lives left them with different experiences and mindsets.
‘Do you know her?’ Eilona asked as they began to walk. ‘You spoke to her, as if you did.’
‘No,’ Ayae replied. ‘I don’t know her.’
‘She is a frightening woman.’
‘I imagine she is.’
‘She told me that she had sewn her mouth shut. When I asked her why, she told me not to talk to her for the rest of the trip.’ A tremor entered her voice and she coughed to clear it. ‘And I didn’t. I didn’t say another word until I spoke to you.’
Ayae had not met Eilona before, but she knew of Muriel Wagan’s daughter. When Eilona left, Ayae had been no more than an orphan girl who worked occasionally for a witch, but even she had heard of the things she had done, of the trade deals she had ruined, the people she had insulted. It had seemed to Ayae that each week there had been a new story about Eilona where her stepfather or her mother had to make amends for her behaviour. The last, she recalled, had been in relation to a dead guard, and another guard’s family, but Ayae had been in Yeflam when it happened. When she returned, the news had mostly been about Eilona Wagan leaving Mireea.
She had returned when her stepfather was injured in Leera. Eilona arrived with her partner, and it was said, by the few who met her, that Lady Wagan’s daughter had changed. She was more measured, more thoughtful, more like her mother. That did not stop people from accusing her of being callous and cold because she had not stayed to care for her stepfather, however.
At Muriel Wagan’s tent, the three of them were met by Caeli, who greeted the daughter of the woman she protected coldly. Caeli wore a mix of dark leather and chain, and the long, straight sword on her hip moved with her body as if it were a limb. After she let the flap of the tent close, she cast a glance at Ayae, asking a question to which the other woman, holding more of Olcea’s weight than she had done when she left the shore, could only offer a slight shake of her head. No, the movement said, she did not know why Eilona was here.
The inside of the tent was a busy mess and in the centre of it stood the Lady of the Ghosts. Her right boot was on a wooden chair and her hands were pulling the laces that held the leather together when they entered. The boot and its companion would be hidden beneath a fraying gown of dark brown and red. As Muriel lifted her head from her task, Ayae was surprised to see how much likeness she had with her daughter, even after the months of living in tents. It was impossible to deny the mirrored squareness of their features, of the thickness of their bodies. The biggest difference between Lady Wagan and her daughter was that the former dyed her hair a dark brown, while the latter’s was red.
The lines around Muriel’s eyes and mouth deepened as she smiled at her daughter. Eilona, for her part, frowned at the sight of her mother. What the look signified was lost to Ayae as the silver-haired healer, Reila, came quickly over to see the witch she supported.
‘Olcea.’ Her careworn, white face mirrored the concern her murmur showed. ‘What have you done to yourself?’
‘She piloted a ship,’ Eilona said, again. ‘From Balana. She painted the deck with blood she collected from Zalhan.’
‘That’s a pirate town.’ Kal Essa spoke, then. He stood on the other side of the tent, beyond the wooden chairs and the frayed rug with the piles of parchment on it. A short man, the left side of his face was scarred like a thick spider web. ‘They sell flesh, if they sell anything.’
‘They don’t sell anything now.’
Essa began to speak again, but Lady Wagan lifted her hand slightly, stopping him. ‘It doesn’t matter right now,’ she said. ‘Reila?’
‘I’ll take care of her,’ the healer said.
‘Use this tent.’ She turned, then, and spoke to her daughter. ‘I’m pleased that you’re here,’ she said, a hint of warmth in her voice. ‘I really am. But I have a meeting over breakfast with the Lord of the Saan that I have to attend.’ She indicated the grey-haired, middle-aged white woman who stood beside Kal Essa. ‘Captain Mills and Caeli are accompanying me. Would you like to join us?’
Eilona looked down at her dirt- and blood stained clothes. ‘I am not dressed for that,’ she said. ‘But I could accompany you for some of the way. I have to ask you about some things – and tell you about others.’
After they had left, Ayae helped Reila move Olcea to the back of the tent. There she laid the exhausted woman down on a makeshift mattress. As she did, she was aware of Kal Essa coming up beside her. He stared down at the witch who, in getting comfortable, had drawn her pack to her and wrapped her arms around the solidness of Hien. ‘I can send a couple of my boys round,’ he said quietly. ‘I won’t say that they do pretty things, but if need be, they’ll shed a bit of blood for her.’
‘You know her?’ Ayae asked.
‘She was a war witch, once,’ he said. ‘Most of what she did was before my time, but I have heard a thing or two.’
‘She needs rest, mostly,’ Reila said, rising. ‘Maybe a little more, but not yet. If she does need anything, I’ll let you know.’
The cue to leave was not subtle, and both Ayae and the mercenary took it. Outside the tent, the camp bustled. With half a wave to Essa, Ayae took her leave from him and made her way towards the small camp Jae’le and Eidan kept.
Their camp was defined by its single small tent and empty campfire circle. Further past it, she could see Eidan and Tinh Tu standing on the shoreline, but it was not to them that her gaze immediately fell. Rather it was to the lean black figure who was emerging from the water.
And the body he held in his arms.
The Last Story of Asila
Aelyn Meah folded her hands together in her lap. ‘Did you ever meet Kaqua?’ she asked me.
Once, I told her.
There was a tone in my voice and she smiled knowingly at it. ‘You did well to ensure that he did not return. I was not so lucky. I thought I knew better,’ she said, melancholy in her voice. ‘I told myself I would never allow myself to be used. I told Eidan he was foolish to suggest I might be. I drove him away with those words. He came back, but he circled, and never landed. It is only later, much later, that I berated myself. I should have known, I told myself. I should have.
‘Kaqua worked with another’s desires, mostly. Not sexual ones, though he could, if he wished. But not with me. He saw what I feared, what I was enticed by, and what my intellectual compulsions were. He wove a web of them around me.
‘I am sure, if he was here, he would defend himself. He would tell us both that I had to provide him with the strands for him to work with, but that was part of his trick, part of the way he made you responsible for what he had done. He did not see that an emotion, however fleeting, was not automatically something you wanted to act upon. He refused to acknowledge that he could be responsible for the thoughts he found. He had no desire to take responsibility for what he did.
‘He did not realize what my brother’s death would mean.’
—Onaedo, Histories, Year 1029
1.
Ayae stood silently on the shoreline beside Eidan and Tinh Tu as Jae’le laid his brother on the sand, sinking to his bare knees before he released the dead weight.
She could not speak. She had not believed that he would find Zaifyr. Had not believed that there would be anything to find. For the last four months, Jae’le had stood on the edge of Leviathan’s Blood: it did not matter if a part of the sun had risen and the sky was alight or if all three suns had fallen into the dark and the night sky met the water without seam. He had stood there, before the water, searching. He spoke rarely and refused all food and drink. He had placed his consciousness inside the creatures that lived in the depths of Leviathan’s Blood, searching not just for Zaifyr, but for a beast that had the necessary strength and delicacy that would allow Jae’le to lift his brother’s body gently from where it lay and bring it to the shore. Now, when he released the corpse of his brother, nothing in Jae’le’s face expressed loss. Rather, Ayae saw only triumph.
In her mind, Ayae had been easily able to imagine the state of Zaifyr’s body at the bottom of the ocean: the rotted skin, the discoloration in his face, and the bloat that ballooned his stomach. Yet, the horror she could so easily detail was not before her. Zaifyr looked as he did in life. With his green eyes open, he gazed up at Ayae lifelessly as she stared down at him. His auburn hair was clumped in wet knots, the charms of bronze and silver he had threaded through his hair tangled among each other. Across the rest of him, the charms that had once adorned his living body were still tied to his corpse, some bent and broken. Only his clothes showed the rot that she had expected to see in his flesh. It was in stark contrast to his body, a pale, white-skinned body that she could not turn away from—
‘It is just as it once was,’ Tinh Tu said.
—and which served only to highlight the unnaturalness of what she saw. ‘How is he like this?’ Ayae asked, finding her voice. ‘What has happened?’
‘He has died,’ the other woman said.
‘But his body! This is not how a body looks after so long!’
‘Do you plan to be hysterical, child?’ she said, turning her dark gaze on Ayae. ‘You would be exactly as I thought you to be, then.’
‘Enough.’ Jae’le rose from the sand, the word a command given harshly. ‘She is not to blame for what has happened here, sister.’
‘You have grown sentimental.’ Tinh Tu did not turn from her. ‘She is but another wedge that drives our family apart.’
‘We were splintered before she was born,’ Eidan said evenly. ‘It is not her fault that we find ourselves here, again.’
‘Again?’ Ayae broke away from the old woman’s gaze. ‘Again here in Yeflam? Again before the Mountains of Ger?’
‘Again,’ he said, simply, ‘in Asila.’
‘But he is not—’ She stopped herself. ‘You did not kill Zaifyr in Asila.’
‘We did.’
She tried to respond, but could not find any words.
‘He inherited the Wanderer’s divinity.’ As Jae’le spoke, a small pitch-black figure, no bigger than a cat, wound around her legs, its touch chill against her skin. Ayae had not seen Anguish leave the small tent. ‘When I was a child,’ Jae’le continued, ‘and when my brother was but a child as well, the Wanderer would walk the roads and paths of our world. He would be seen in villages and in towns and in cities reaching for the dead. He wore a black robe that hid all of his body, and when he arrived, you would see but moments of him, as if he were an image, flickering. It was said that the Wanderer took the dead into his own kingdom and that there they would be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. He was said to come for the gods themselves, but I do not believe that. We know that the gods were not normal beings like us. They had no souls. They have no souls.’
The chill on her leg ran through her body. ‘But Zaifyr,’ she said softly.
‘Zaifyr is like you and I,’ he said. ‘For a long time, we believed otherwise, but it is not true. Our divinity is not our being. What is inside us now has reached an understanding with the immortal part of us that transcends flesh. I often think that when others like us are afflicted poorly, when their bodies turn to stone, or gills grow along their neck and they cannot breathe our air, it is not because of the divine power within them, but because their souls have rejected the divinity that has been offered.’ He paused, letting his words sink in for a moment. ‘Or perhaps it is something different. A century from now, I may think so. But what I will not go back on is the knowledge that we are not divine, that we are gods, because I know that we have a soul, that we are tied to our flesh.’
‘In Zaifyr’s case, the Wanderer’s power holds tight to that soul, and when the bond is severed, when it is broken, it looks for him,’ Tinh Tu said, the end of her staff beginning to make a line in the sand, the start of a map, of a continent that Ayae could not immediately place despite all the maps she had seen.
‘So you could not kill him?’ Ayae said.
‘He could not die.’
The distinction was not lost on her. ‘Why did Zaifyr never tell me this?’
‘Because he does not know,’ Anguish said suddenly, his closed eyes on the body before him. ‘Is that not the truth?’
‘Truth,’ Tinh Tu repeated, lifting her staff from the sand, before bringing it down, once, then twice in the centre of her image. The sand flattened, the lines in it straightened, and Ayae was finally able to make it out, to understand what she had drawn. ‘I despise that word,’ she said, her staff rising again.
‘Sister,’ Eidan began.
‘No,’ she said, an edge in her voice. ‘Let her experience it. Let her know.’
Her staff fell a third time on the image of Asila.
2.
Ayae was struck blind.
In panic, she felt herself stumble backwards, felt her hand drop to her sword, felt a curl of flame open inside her, ready to strike out in defence. But the ground began to fall away, the sand not sinking beneath her heels, but rather turning to emptiness, as if nothing was below her. She desperately tried to regain her footing, tried to find solid ground—
There is a road beneath your feet because there is a road beneath mine, Ayae. It is narrow. It has been made by children who play in a lake nearby and it is surrounded by trees that turn brown and skeletal as the hard winter begins to approach. Ayae could feel mud beneath her boots and she stumbled in surprise at its touch. Despite her bad footing, she continued to walk, even though she had no desire to do so. You are not alone on this child’s path. Tinh Tu’s words were hard and precise, a steady and sure narrator. It is the path that my family and I walked a thousand years ago. A walk guided by a blue light. It is a single strange light that grows and grows until you come to the edge of the woods and you stand before Asila.
The city lay before her unlike any she had seen before. Its shape and form followed the side of a large mountain. Halfway up the mountain, on a flat piece of land, a dark tower rose in a straight line. From it a long path wound its way down to the base of the mountain, ending where the sprawl of the city began, nestled against both the natural and unnatural creations that reached high into the sky. It was from the city that the light that had guided Ayae through the woods originated. It was not a natural light, but it swept through the streets of Asila with a certain softness, and she felt, for a moment, that comfort was offered by it. Yet the longer she gazed at it, the more the comfort began to turn into a great sadness, an emotion that was shared by the men and women who began to appear beside her.
Our brother’s book had come to all our nations that season, Tinh Tu said. The seventy-first Samuel Orlan had written to us before, to warn us, but in our arrogance we had ignored him. It was not until each of us held the book that we b
egan to sense the madness that gripped Qian. It was then that we heard about the horrors that were taking place in Asila.
Beside her, Jae’le stepped past Ayae and began to walk down the slope and into the city. He was different from the man she knew now. His face was full, he was clean-shaven, and his hair was shorter, the length of it tied back into a short tail at the top of his skull. At his waist he wore a pair of swords, the hilts an elaborate design of a fierce, taloned bird, the likes of which Ayae had never seen before. The leather armour he wore was beautiful. Strips of dark green leather had been woven into the stitching, the colour blending with the thick, green-feathered cloak he wore, the cloak he still wore. Jae’le was followed by Eidan. The stocky man wore a chain-mail vest made from dark metal, and though it reached up to his neck and over his impressive shoulders, it did not cover his thick arms. Instead, a leather shirt ran down to his wrists and ended where leather gloves began. Over his back he carried a huge, two-handed axe, the whole piece a construction of steel, rather than a mix of wood and metal. It must have weighed a ton, but Eidan bore it with no discomfort. Aelyn came after him. The armour that she wore was light, thickest at her chest, but around her arms it was only solid black cloth. Despite that, there was a severe quality to Aelyn’s appearance that surprised Ayae. Her hair had been cut against her skull, just as the rest of her body had been stripped of any fat, leaving nothing but muscle, blunt nails and a certain raw violence that surprised Ayae. Lastly, Tinh Tu emerged from behind her, holding the same ash staff that she held now on Yeflam’s shoreline. She wore robes of the finest fabric, made with the finest needlework.
Ayae followed the four down the hill to the outskirts of Asila. The houses defined themselves in the glow of the blue light, but what struck her most strongly about each building that she passed was not the colour, but the stillness in each of them. It felt ingrained, as if it had become part of the brickwork and timber, as if it filled the open windows and opened the shutters and the doors. In those gaps, Ayae saw wilting plants, rotting food, and she smelt an odour of decay that soon began to choke the air around her.