by Ben Peek
‘His wounds heal,’ Jae’le said softly.
Ayae watched the flesh around Zaifyr’s neck begin to knit together.
‘Is he still alive?’ asked Aelyn.
Gently, Jae’le felt for a pulse. ‘No.’ But as he spoke, his free hand fell to his sword.
How must it have felt to kill a man you had called your brother for over ten thousand years? The loss must have been immense, and Ayae did not believe that she would have been able to pick up a sword again, if she had been present. The devastation she had felt after she killed Faise was still in her. Yet in Jae’le, the only hesitation she saw was that he had not already brought the length of steel up and cut down hard into the mending cut in his brother’s neck.
‘How is this possible?’ Eidan asked, his voice a whisper.
‘I do not know,’ Jae’le said.
‘Brother.’ Aelyn’s voice was a hiss. ‘Look—’
A flicker.
At first, Ayae thought she had imagined it, that what she saw was a shadow at the edge of her vision, a piece of dark that shifted for no reason: but it appeared again and again, and in each flicker, she began to make out an image. It was not a shadow, but rather a figure draped in a long, black robe. As if it were made from darkness, the robe fell over the figure’s body like no clothing that Ayae had seen before. It drifted. It wavered. It moved forwards. It moved back. As the flickers grew quicker and quicker, until they were almost constant, it became clear it was not a robe, but rather that the dark folds and movements were its body, its shifts and stutters an attempt to reach outwards, to grasp what was before it with its hand, and draw it upwards.
‘The Wanderer,’ Jae’le said softly. ‘But I do not sense him in the way I do other gods.’
Suddenly, a wet noise came from Zaifyr, and the image of the god disappeared.
The noise sounded again, a gasping breath taken, but one filtered through a choke, through a throat filled with blood.
Ayae turned to Zaifyr and saw that his eyes were open.
In their depths, she saw an awful anger, one fuelled by a terrible madness.
All of which ended, just as suddenly as it began, when Jae’le brought his sword down.
After a long, drawn-out moment, Eidan said, ‘He begins to heal again.’
‘The Wanderer,’ Aelyn said, her voice sounding small and distant. ‘He begins to appear again.’
‘If we could see a haunt, a soul,’ Jae’le said, ‘would we see him reach for our brother’s soul? Or is this something different altogether?’
The return of the Wanderer’s flickering body had detached Ayae from what was taking place. Instead, she saw beyond Zaifyr’s brothers and sisters, beyond their closed circle above his body. As if she were being offered an insight, she saw the complete devastation that surrounded her. She saw again the broken mountain and the fallen stone that lay across the streets. She saw the ground that had been destroyed by both the mountain and the lightning that struck it. She recalled the ghosts that had lined the now shattered streets and how they had been momentarily rendered to flesh, before being torn apart. She could still hear the whispers of a woman whose very words, she knew now, contained such power that she, perhaps more than any of her brothers and sisters, was the most deadly. And she heard again the smallness in Aelyn’s voice, the powerlessness that was at the core of it, the helplessness that was shared by the people who stood around her.
‘He cannot take him,’ Jae’le said, finally. ‘Whether the god is truly here, or if it is a sign of something else, it does not matter. Our brother is not his to take.’
‘No,’ Aelyn said. ‘He is our responsibility.’
11.
Tinh Tu did not reveal to Ayae the conversations that took place after Aelyn’s words. She did not allow her to hear how it was decided that a prison would be made. Instead, Ayae felt her eyes close, compelled to embrace the darkness they provided, though she was not tired. When she next opened them, she was standing on the deck of a ship that she did not know. It was long and sleek, but it sailed without a crew. The sails were full with wind and the decks empty but for a white raven at the helm. Ayae tried to take a step towards it, but she could not move. The head of the giant bird turned to her and its blue eyes held her. She went to speak, but instead her eyes once again closed and when she opened them next, she stood on a narrow trail in the Broken Mountains of Eakar.
She had only seen the mountains in old paintings. As an adult, Ayae’s world was not much larger than the roads that connected the Spine of Ger to the Floating Cities of Yeflam. Beyond the journey she had made from Sooia when she was but a child, the only time Ayae had left the roads that she knew was when she and Illaan took a holiday to the Kingdoms of Faaisha. Yet, even had her world been larger, Eakar and its mountains would have remained a mystery to her. It was a barren land: the soil was so deeply tainted that no living creature could remain on it. Linae, the Goddess of Fertility, had done that to the land after she was struck down by Sei, the God of Light. Until recently, Ayae had always believed that without Linae’s blessings, the fertility had been stripped from the land. She had never thought to question the belief, not until she had heard Lor Jix’s description of what had happened before the outbreak of the War of the Gods. The ancient dead, once a priest of the Leviathan, had said that the gods had gone to war not because of each other, but to deny the new god, Se’Saera, her birth.
In attempting that, the gods very nearly destroyed the world. For the first time since Zaifyr’s trial the entirety of that realization began to unfold within Ayae. Beneath her feet, she could feel the soles of her boots weakening, as if the ground was trying to devour anything that walked on it. But for all that the sensation was not a pleasant one, it was not unique, either: for all her life Ayae walked over the damage the War of the Gods had created. She had lived most of her time on the cairn that Ger had built after he had fallen. She had grown up watching men and women set up small towns to dig for gold, for the fabled fortunes around his body. She had heard stories of betrayal and violence before she could properly speak the traders’ tongue of the city. She had seen the black ocean regularly. She had seen ships pulled out of its water, the hulls stripped of paint, the wood in a slow rot and warping. She had read of butterflies in Ooila that rose into the sky every morning and died throughout the day. She had heard of people being suffocated by the insects’ masses. She had seen huge paintings of Leviathan’s End, the famed mercenary port that had been built in the Leviathan’s skull, and from which bone-white trees grew without leaves. As she walked across the dead land of Eakar in Tinh Tu’s memory, as she passed through villages defined by petrified bones and wood, Ayae realized she had never thought about the responsibility that the gods had to the world. She had never thought about the fact that the gods had not cared what happened to those who had spent generations worshipping them.
Their war had been an act of self-preservation, an act of pure selfishness that had left only devastation in its wake.
It was a thought that lingered as she arrived at the spot where the tower would be built.
Eidan held Zaifyr. The stocky man had carried his body through the Eakar Mountains and along the barren plains. It was to him that the task of designing the tower fell, and when he began, he did not set Zaifyr upon the ground. During the construction he passed Zaifyr to the others, but before the night fell, the body would return to him. Ayae saw the reason briefly, for one night, with a long, indrawn breath, Zaifyr returned to life, and the confusion that he felt in Eidan’s grip offered more than enough time for one of the others to drive a knife deeply into him. This time, the image of the Wanderer did not appear.
The tower, once complete, did not rise into the sky in elegant spirals. No matter what Eidan said to his brother and sisters, no matter what he did with his hands or his power, the building refused to take the shape he had envisioned. Rather, it sagged and leant, small in both height and width, and fragile in its appearance.
Inside it was worse.
With her arms outstretched, Ayae could reach each wall with the tips of her fingers, and if she lay down on the dirt, if she lay on her back, she could not stretch herself out. It would offer less room to Zaifyr, and he would find no shelves, no food, no books, no stool, and not even a privy.
The crooked tower was no more than a cage.
It did not matter what we did, Tinh Tu said to her. It did not matter what Eidan said to us, or how he made the bricks, or how he reinforced the bricks within, the tower would simply not support a second floor or a second room. You have watched him bring in stone from the broken mountains, hauling it with his great strength for hours without complaint. You have seen him spend hours making his mix. None of it worked. Not one thing he did could lift it above the sad, pathetic thing that you see now.
‘You left Zaifyr in this.’ She heard her voice as if it were from a great distance. ‘You left him in this for a thousand years.’
Until Jae’le released him.
‘Jae’le.’
She felt her eyes open.
‘Jae’le,’ she said again. ‘You gave the tower life.’
‘Yes.’ Behind Jae’le, the black water of Leviathan’s Blood melded with the night’s dirty star-scarred sky. The three suns had risen and fallen while Ayae witnessed what had happened in Asila, but she felt as if more than a day had passed. She felt as if weeks had passed. ‘It could never have held him, not in such a state. At first, I gave a little of my power, but after a while, it was more. The soil beneath it returned to life and worms began to live in the bricks, the first keepers of the tower, the first of a small ecology to grow in the walls we made. But do you know what concerns me now, Ayae? It is not the choices we made then, nor even the sight of the Wanderer. No, it is the choice I made when I released Zaifyr. In these last few months, I have had long to think. I have thought of Eidan finding the Wayfair and of the god-touched man who told him of Lor Jix. Of Lor Jix himself at the trial, and the words that he used, words that had been rehearsed for a long time.’
‘The gods and their influence,’ Eidan murmured. ‘I have thought of it as well.’
‘You think that it is planned?’ Tinh Tu asked.
‘But Aelyn—’ Ayae began.
‘Aelyn knew what we know,’ Jae’le said. ‘She knew that she could not kill him.’
Before she could reply, Anguish laughed in his low, rasping voice. ‘You are desperate.’ He had climbed onto Zaifyr’s body and squatted now on his chest, a dark, inky stain that the four had forgotten. ‘To think that fate is at work for you, that it has somehow been pushed to aid you by all these gods that lie around you in a state of decay? Fate is not on your side, Jae’le. It is only on the side of its creation. The same creation that the gods went to war to destroy.’ Gently, he laid his cold black hands on Zaifyr’s chest. ‘Your brother may not decay, but there is no breath in him, either. He has no soul.’
‘You are right.’ Jae’le’s filed teeth were revealed as he smiled. ‘But do we not have with us a man who can see what my brother sees? Who sees the dead as well as he did?’
‘Only with my eyes open,’ Anguish said.
‘Then open them.’
‘Se’Saera will know.’
‘But she will not trust what you see,’ Eidan said quietly. ‘After all, you are but a deceit.’
12.
The morning’s sun revealed the ragged length of the Leeran port of Gtara. The sunlight ran across the black water like lances as Glafanr closed in on its docks.
Bueralan stood alone at the bow of the ship, listening to the oars dip in and out of the water as it navigated past half a dozen other vessels. From his perch, the saboteur could gaze into the open holds of the other ships. From them, chains spilled out onto the decks as if they were metal digestive tracts. In a future world, he imagined, in another time line, the chains might be part of a clockwork construction, part of a giant and elaborate mechanism that powered the ships across the black ocean. In this world, however, in his world now, Bueralan knew that the chains belonged to slavers. When the ships left Gtara, the chains would be thrust back into the holds, and men, women and children would be attached to each joint. The crew would thrust the chains and the people into the dark below the decks where they would huddle inside for the months it took to cross Leviathan’s Blood to Gogair.
Jao, the ship that had taken them to and from Leviathan’s End, had once been used to carry slaves. Zean had known the moment that they stepped on it.
Bueralan had said—
‘I haven’t seen ships like this for a long time.’ Kaze came up behind him now. She was dressed in dark leather pants and a dark, stained leather shirt that was studded with iron at the wrists and shoulders. In addition, she had a long sword on her hip, a weight she carried comfortably. ‘I had almost hoped they had stopped being used.’
‘But not the trade itself?’ he asked.
‘I am too old for that.’ She took hold of Glafanr’s rail as water sprayed up. ‘There is a great wealth to be made in the exploitation of others.’
Bueralan smiled ruefully.
‘I know how it sounds,’ the god-touched woman said. ‘It would be easier for you if I said that I was lured to sleep by the sound of human misery, would it not?’ She took off her glasses and, with a piece of cloth, began to clean them. ‘Some days, I think it would be easier for me, as well. I would not have to ask if my guilt was mine, or if it was simply weakness and regret within me for all that I have done.’
He did not want to respond to her words, not now. ‘I thought you were going to stay with the horses,’ he said instead.
‘Se’Saera wants us all on deck.’ As she spoke, Bueralan saw Zilt emerge from below, his deformed soldiers with him. Taela and Se’Saera followed. ‘She wants us all to be present when she meets the Keepers of the Divine,’ Kaze added.
‘I wouldn’t have thought she needed a show of strength.’ The last to emerge was Samuel Orlan.
‘You heard what happened to Zilt.’ She nodded ahead. ‘Is that them at the end of the dock?’
The wooden planks were empty of men and women, just as the ships and chains were, until the dock touched the land. There, and only there, waited a group of men and women.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I recognize some. The one in the multicoloured robes is called Kaqua.’
‘Which one is Aelyn Meah?’
‘I don’t see her.’
Kaze made a sound of disapproval.
‘You would make the same sound if she stood there,’ Bueralan said.
‘I imagine so.’ She hooked her clean glasses back over her ears. ‘Long ago I learned that her kind are worthless.’
Glafanr gently bumped against the dock and a heavy rope was thrown over the side. One of the god-touched soldiers followed it down, to tie it securely to the dock.
The gangway followed and, as it was lowered to the dock, Kaze touched Bueralan’s arm. He had not responded to her last comment, and he thought, for a moment, that she was inviting him to do so; but instead she was, much like a tutor, directing him to the line that had formed behind her new god. At the head of the line was Aela Ren, but he did not stand beside Se’Saera. Zilt stood by her side, while behind him – and before Ren and the others – waited his two deformed soldiers. For a moment, Bueralan thought there was symbolism in it, but he soon corrected himself. Orlan was right: Ren needed a god to define him. From a god, he took certainty and absoluteness, a sense of place and definition that Bueralan had seen in Onaedo. To her, Baar was gone, and his absence was a betrayal, but in his absence she was still defined by him. In that, she offered a stark contrast to those around him, a sudden insight into the blind need of the Innocent and his soldiers, into the desire of Kaze to care for Taela, into Ai Sela’s captaincy of a ship that needed no captain, and the others, whose names and faces he had learned over the last months at sea.
Wordlessly, Bueralan joined the line. He took his place behind Samuel Orlan and Taela, and he did so alone.
/> An Unfinished Divinity
‘Once I was fit to move, Kaqua ordered the Keepers to a small town called Gtara in Leera. I do not remember much of how we got there. I believe we walked. But because of the attempts I had made on my own life, I had been heavily wrapped in Kaqua’s will. I have only flashes of the journey: a swamp here, a pair of crows there. There was some conflict when we arrived, but not much.’
Had Kaqua been in contact with Se’Saera? I asked.
‘To my mind it was constant,’ Aelyn replied. ‘He was not Faithful, but he would speak to her regularly.
‘He was unwavering in his belief that the god would show him how to ascend from his mortal body.’ Here, her tone changed. A quality close to embarrassment emerged. ‘Even I believed it. Under Kaqua’s influence, the desire to be completely divine had come to consume me. I remember, on the day Se’Saera arrived at Gtara, looking around me at the sudden, dirty world I where found myself, and thinking that when I was divine, I would repair all that I saw before me.’