by Ben Peek
The first haunt she saw was that of a boy, no older than eight or nine. He crouched on the side of road, a rotting arm held in his grasp, the flesh torn open by his teeth.
At the sight of him, Ayae thought of Fo and Bau in Mireea, of the haunts that had torn into the flesh of the two Keepers, ripping them apart as if they were of no consequence. Yet what caused the sadness in her to deepen was not her memory, but rather the half-starved, feral look on the haunt’s face as he spotted the brothers and sisters walking down the road. With a swift motion, he scooped up the limb he had been eating and ran further into the city and into the heart of the blue light where Ayae knew, without a doubt, the main collection of the dead awaited.
The men and women beside her spread out as they continued towards the centre of Asila, yet, with no will of her own, Ayae remained beside Tinh Tu. Wordlessly, the old woman led her through empty buildings. Inside them, Ayae saw bodies in states of decay, the skin torn, the blood drained and the bones broken. Next to them lay spoiled food and broken plates and cups. Not one body looked as if it had been ready for what attacked it. In this way, each new street saw a new series of horrors unfold and each new street saw the sadness that emanated from the brothers and sisters grow. At the fourth, a sense of inevitability began to rise in each of them. Because she followed Tinh Tu’s memories, the thought began with her, but she knew, also, that Jae’le, Eidan and Aelyn thought as their sister did. By the time the pale glow from the city centre wound like a low fog around their feet and circles upon circles of dead flushed with Zaifyr’s power came into the sight, the four siblings had reached a terrible consensus.
For over ten thousand years, the dead had spoken to Zaifyr. For over ten thousand years they had whispered to him about the endless cold and about the hunger that accompanied it.
For over ten thousand years, they had asked him to stop it.
As the dead flushed with Zaifyr’s power began to part, as they created a path for his brothers and sisters to walk into the centre of Asila, Ayae realized for the first time the depth of the horror that Zaifyr had lived with. She finally understood the burden that he had inherited and accepted as his own. She saw the awful tragedy of his life, of the immortal life that saw the fate of all mortal men and women, the life that knew that everyone he loved and did not love ended the same. She understood, too, how he was powerless to alleviate their horror without creating a fresh, new horror. She saw for the first time the strength that he had to have to live with that for as long as he had. The discipline it took not to allow it to overwhelm him, for it not to consume him. But as she followed Jae’le, Eidan, Aelyn and Tinh Tu towards the huge, empty temple where he sat, the temple that had been built for him by the men and women who believed him to be a god, she saw the loss of all that control, all that discipline, and the madness in Zaifyr’s eyes. She saw that and knew that it had been inevitable. No one person could bear that burden. Only a god could hold such suffering and sadness within itself, could allow it to be the foundation of his or her divine being.
But none of them, she knew, was a god.
And that, Tinh Tu said softly to her, is how we came to realize that our beloved brother had to die.
3.
How would the Captain of Refuge greet the First Queen of Ooila, Zeala Fe?
The question kept Heast awake throughout the day, and when Anemone knocked on the door to his room after the last sun had set, he had not slept. He had not even tried.
Heast had returned to the inn where he and Anemone had rooms before the crowds began to fill the streets of Vaeasa. The inn, a two-storey, twisting construction that ran along an old wall and over it like a choking vine, was named A Private Folly. The owner was a dark-skinned man from Nmia, his wife a plump, olive-skinned woman from Faaisha. Neither looked to be the representation of a folly in purchase or service. They were a busy and industrious couple who did not pause when Heast and Anemone returned from The Undertow. They greeted them as they came out to serve the breakfast crowd and asked if they planned to eat. Both declined, then climbed the stairs. On the top floor, where the hotel began to run along the stone wall, the pair had two rooms, one next to each other. At the end of the hall, Heast offered a polite nod to Anemone before opening the door to his room. Once inside, he took two steps and stood in the centre silently. The First Queen of Ooila. He repeated the thought again. He ran his hand through his hair, staining his palm with the cheap black dye. Wordlessly, he found a wash basin and scrubbed out what he could. In the room’s mirror, he estimated half had gone easily, while the other half would have to be grown out.
‘You cannot be surprised,’ he said to his reflection. He was not talking about the dye. His cold, blue eyes returned his stare without pity. ‘You cannot afford surprise,’ his reflection said to him.
Before Heast had left the garden, Jye Tuael told him that the Queen had arrived a month ago. She had slipped into the country hidden on an old spice trader, Bounty, the bowels of the ship holding her private guard, gold, and little else. When she arrived in Vaeasa, she immediately met with Tuael and told him stories about the new god, Se’Saera, and about the Innocent. Her tales slipped out of the private meetings he held later with the First Queen and the Lords of Faaisha and their marshals. The Lords had not known who had let slip the information – they suspected the Queen – but Faet Cohn’s letter was enough to provide an answer. ‘Not that it stops what people know on the streets,’ Tuael admitted. ‘The First Queen has not made it easy, either. She has not come here to hide. She has come here to continue her battle against the Innocent. Let people know, she says. She does not care if the kingdoms are crippled by fear. She cares only about her war. But I cannot give her what she wants. I cannot give her command of Faaishan soldiers. I cannot make her a marshal. I cannot let her roam Faaisha on her own vendetta. But you: I could give her you, the captain she helped break twenty-six years ago in Illate.’
Heast had thanked him drily.
In his room, he sat on the edge of his bed and remembered when Refuge had fallen in Illate. Zeala Fe had not been the First Queen, not then. She had been the Third Queen.
The revolution on Illate had begun under the old First Queen Natai Fe’s reign. A festival had brought her across the strait between Ooila and Illate every year, and that year, the leaders of the Illate revolution had taken her hostage. They poisoned her guards while they slept. On the same night, Refuge shut down the ports, strangling access to the country. A lot of Illate was ugly mountain ranges and the passes were easily closed by rock-falls and cave-ins. The port was the only real entrance to the country and Refuge held it for just under a month before Zeala Fe broke through the barricade. Heast could still remember the day her forces stormed into the capital of Illate, the morning’s sun glinting off the gold-edged, white armour her soldiers wore. That morning, it was as if a second sun had risen.
Refuge did not survive the day.
After the battle, Heast and seven survivors hid in small houses throughout Illate. They slept in attics, beneath floorboards, injured survivors in a nation of people who had been denied the end of a brutal slavery that saw their children taken from them. Decades later, Heast was humbled by the risks those people had taken for his soldiers. In the face of their own bitter disappointment, they had cared for the remnants of Refuge, a task made considerably more difficult for himself after his leg had been amputated.
Eventually, Heast ended in Dosclna, a small town in Gogair, where he was tended by the elderly Anemone. The witch organized the construction of his leg and supervised its crafting to the end of the broken bone. After that, he had spent months learning how to stand with it, how to walk with the weight. He could still remember the awkwardness of those first months. His leg had not had the strength, not at first, and he had been forced to build up his lower body. He worried about the bleeding as well, but that, Anemone told him, was a consequence of the way she had amputated it. The old witch had done that with her magic. ‘I had to stop the rot,’ she told him. ‘
But you’ll carry the weakness of the flesh.’ He had nodded when she told him that. He was attempting to walk without a crutch for the first time when she spoke. He was trying to live with what he had. What she said was just another part of that task.
That was why, by the time Anemone – the younger Anemone, the granddaughter of the old woman who survived Illate with him – knocked on the door, Heast knew that he would speak to Zeala Fe in the same way he would speak to any other queen. He would treat her as the Captain of Refuge treated all who would employ him.
‘It is time, sir,’ Anemone said, after he opened the door.
‘I know.’
Outside, the streets were busy. Smoke from the walls curled into the dark sky, obscuring the stars, and crowds gathered in the streets outside bars and hotels and inns. They gathered in such numbers that, if Heast had not seen the barricades that lay outside Vaeasa, he would have said that there was no war taking place in the Kingdoms of Faaisha, no fear of rationing, no fear of being laid siege to. He knew that other kingdoms were not doing as well – Maosa was proof of that – and he gave Tuael his respect for managing to keep the calm and sense of normality in his capital that many leaders would have struggled to achieve.
‘You hear that a marshal died today?’ The words were spoken by a middle-aged man outside a bar that Heast and Anemone walked past. The man spoke to another middled-aged man, who said, ‘Cohn. He took his own life—’ At the corner, an elderly woman finished the sentence when she said, ‘A rope.’ ‘It is said he was in deep mourning over his failures,’ a young woman said; a young man added, ‘Celp was a disaster.’
‘The Lord did not wait long, did he?’ Anemone said quietly, once they had past the last two.
‘No,’ Heast agreed. ‘But at least he did not ask us to do it.’
‘What would you have said, had he?’
‘No. That work is for the lord. We are not assassins.’
‘Not ever?’
‘Not here.’
The estate the First Queen of Ooila lived on was near the centre of Vaeasa. Above it, the stars were a smoky smear and, outside its large, ornate black steel gate, stood two of Tuael’s purple-cloaked guards. At the approach of Heast and Anemone, the one on the left opened the gate. Immaculate gardens led up to a large two-storey building made of stone and wood.
The grounds were quiet, eerily so, and Heast dropped his hand unconsciously to where his sword usually sat. No steel touched his flesh, however, and he curled his hand into a fist instead.
At the door to the house, a single guard waited. Her skin was a dark black, and her face was narrow. Like a cat, Heast thought suddenly, though he was not given to such comparisons. Yet, as he drew closer, and her tawny eyes watched both him and Anemone without concern, he thought his description apt. There was, in the soldier, something careful and intent about her, like a cat who watched from a secret perch as a stranger approached.
‘Captain Heast,’ she said, when he came to stand in front of her. ‘Anemone.’ She wore black armour made from chain and plate. When she bowed to them, flashes of red could be seen in the joints. ‘My name is Captain Lehana. The First Queen of Ooila has been expecting both of you.’
4.
‘Qian—’
‘That is not my name.’ In Asila, Zaifyr sat on a small stool, surrounded by the dead. ‘It has never been my name,’ he said.
‘It is the name of my brother,’ Tinh Tu replied.
‘It is a lie.’
An image flashed before Ayae, a sliver of a memory. The inside of a small house dominated by shelves of books, by papers that stuck out of pages, laid across a beautiful table, documents held in place by scrolls both old and new. Some were rolled tightly, and others were spread flat. Jae’le sat across from Tinh Tu. He approached her house as warlord, a man who was drenched in the violence of victory, a man who told her that she was no different from him. But the words that Jae’le used were not what Ayae heard. Rather, she heard the words that Tinh Tu spoke to the man behind Jae’le, the white man adorned with charms who leant against her wall. Your name? she asked him. Qian, he replied. She could detect no lie. She could feel only truth. ‘Qian,’ Tinh Tu said again in Asila. ‘Qian.’ The emphasis contained in his name held an urge, a suggestion, an attempt to latch onto the belief he had had when he stood in her home so long ago. ‘Listen to me, please.’
‘That is not my name.’ He repeated the words. ‘That is not who I am.’
‘You can stop this,’ she said. ‘You can let these people go.’
‘There is no place for them to go.’
We did not want to kill him, Tinh Tu said to Ayae, the scene paused. We had arrived on the shore of Asila as gods who could remember the war between our parents and the devastation it brought our world. We had a responsibility not to repeat that horror. But Qian would never be able to remember the day fully. Parts of it, he would: the devastation, the desperation, but never his death. For him, the moment was always absent, always blank.
It was Jae’le who struck first.
He moved with such speed that, if Ayae had not felt a sudden sickening lurch – as if more sand had given way beneath her feet – when the scene she was witnessing slowed, she was not sure that she would have seen the steps that he took, nor the sword that he drew. She knew only that she would have seen him stop, suddenly.
No more than an inch before Zaifyr, Jae’le was halted by a dozen ghosts. Their cold hands held not just him, but the two swords that he had drawn, and which were within touching distance of the charm-laced man. Before Ayae’s gaze, the swords were forced back, and she thought for sure the bones in Jae’le’s arms would splinter, but then he released the hilts, and his hands plunged into the ghosts. A ripple followed, and each of the ghosts he touched appeared to be made of flesh, to be alive, only for them to fall back, their bodies incorporeal, but with a wound knitting across their chest: a wound made by a hand.
‘No!’
The shout came from Zaifyr, a cry of horror for what he had witnessed, and the ghosts that still held Jae’le launched their captive through the air – but even as Ayae watched Jae’le fall, she felt the ground begin to shudder. The mountain looming over Asila splintered, huge pieces of it falling to the ground. They tore through the ghosts as they plunged into the ground, guided like spears by Eidan. Above, the sky turned black and a loud rumble of thunder emerged. For a moment, Ayae thought that it sounded like a sound of disapproval from a god, of a giant being that would emerge from the black clouds that gathered. But the lightning that webbed along the clouds answered to the call of Aelyn on the ground, and the bolts, when they fell, burst through ghosts and houses, and started fires.
Ayae had never seen such a display. For every dead man and woman who had been filled with Zaifyr’s power and was struck, another rose from the remains, the cold hands appearing at times from the ground, and at times from nothing but thin air. On these occasions, it was as if the dead waited behind a curtain and needed only the nod of another to step forward and announce their presence. They would then flicker, as if turned to flesh. Or they would burst apart, no matter whether they were flesh or not. Watching it all, Ayae found that she could not turn away. A part of her wanted to do so, but a larger part of her could not. It was not Tinh Tu who ensured that she could not turn away. No, before her was a display of such power that it surpassed anything that she had seen in Mireea, or in Yeflam, and she was both humbled to witness it and terrified by the boundaries it broke, not just of the weather, or the shape of the land, but of the very divide between life and death.
None of the men and women she watched was a god, yet Ayae could see how another would believe they were.
The ground lifted around her and splintered and, as it did, her understanding of how reality functioned, how the gods had existed, broke apart with it. For the last year, she had heard how the gods had not viewed the world in the way that mortals did, that time and fate wound around them, each and every strand a possibility, but it was not
until she saw Jae’le, Aelyn, Eidan and Tinh Tu locked in battle with Zaifyr that she truly understood that. It was not until then that she realized that within her was a power that did not adhere to any rule because it formed rules. Yet Ayae also knew that she did not have the power to do that. The world was created not by the sliver of a god’s power that was within her, or the power that she saw around her, but by the complete and full version of it. By the unified whole of a divine presence that did not react to the world that it lived in, but created it, nurtured it, shaped it, and did so until finally it decided that what it had made could be broken.
‘Qian.’ She heard Tinh Tu’s voice faintly. ‘Qian, the house. My house. The house I grew up in. That my parents had owned. That their parents had built. That small, simple house.’ Ayae heard Tinh Tu’s words of truth, could sense, for the first time, the power in them. ‘Qian, you are standing in that house.’
Across from her, Zaifyr paused.
‘Qian, you are not in Asila. You are in my house. There is no destruction around you, there is no dead, there is nothing but my books, my papers, and you and Jae’le.’
Behind him, Ayae saw Aelyn emerge from the broken remains of the temple, from the debris of the city as a whole. The quiet sadness that had led her through the streets was now gone, replaced by a violence so thorough and complete that it had destroyed not just the infrastructure of the city, but the mountain itself. The remains of it sat like a shattered crown around the battle, an arena for men and women who had been, until recently, more powerful than any king or queen. It was through that debris that Aelyn emerged, unarmed, behind her brother. Her footsteps fell quietly, surely, and her hard hands flexed as she drew nearer. For a moment, Ayae believed that she would reach Zaifyr, that her hands would find his neck, and she would break the bone, and that he would be killed by her—