The Eternal Kingdom (The Children Trilogy Book 3)

by Ben Peek

  ‘Tell me, Eilona,’ Faje said, ‘how did you feel when your father died?’

  She stopped halfway up the stairs. ‘What kind of question is that?’

  ‘A simple one.’ He was a handful of steps above her when he stopped and turned to her. ‘I meant nothing by it,’ he said.

  ‘If your plan is to intimidate me—’

  ‘It is not my plan.’

  ‘Then do not ask about my father.’

  Faje offered a small tilt of his head in an apology Eilona did not believe. ‘I mentioned your father not to offend you, but out of mutual interest. I was always greatly moved by the nature of his death.’

  ‘That is private,’ she said, a hint of her mother’s steel entering her voice now. ‘I have no desire to discuss it with you, as I just said.’

  ‘He was “cursed”, to use the more popular term.’ He resumed walking up the stairs. ‘It was, as you said, a private matter, but the Lord of Mireea’s death could have only so much privacy. It is the nature of politics, after all. It could have been an assassination by enemies, a family squabble turned bad, or a disease. The nature of his death was important to all of Mireea’s neighbours for no other reason than because the Kingdoms of Faaisha wanted to march upon Mireea. All it needed was for a small chink in your mother’s armour to appear. In my previous position, in my work for Aelyn Meah, I was given the task of learning what happened. It was one of my sadder duties, I assure you.’

  Despite herself, Eilona followed him up the stairs. The memories she had of her father were but a handful and she would not speak them now, to him.

  ‘For weeks, I wondered how he must have felt in his death. How it must have been for him to feel his heart turn heavy, to feel it become an object that he could feel in his chest.’ Faje stopped outside a door, but did not open it. ‘It was my first thought when I heard that his organs had turned to stone. I thought he must have felt it, piece by piece, as if each part of him was being separated. I imagined him trying to wake your mother, but unable, because his arms were too heavy to lift. I learned that when Muriel Wagan called for help, he had become so heavy that the bed had broken, and he lay in its ruins when he died. The official cause was suffocation, and not the curse of the late gods, but I think we can step outside such unnecessary differences. Indeed, when I reported to Aelyn Meah, she did not bother to pretend it was anything else. She told me that he was not the first to be inflicted by part of Ger’s power. She said most died because there was no balance within.’

  He pushed the door open.

  Inside waited horror. As with the floor below, the walls of the room had been knocked out, but rather than it being limited to three to accommodate the long form of the press, all the walls of the floor before Eilona had been cleared. Painted rubble lay strewn on the ground in chunks and the load-bearing support beams had been left exposed in their long, crude forms. It was from them that the horror began, for at the beams, chains had been attached, and the long chains ran out to the necks of men, women, and children.

  Each had been blinded.

  ‘It is a tragedy when someone is cursed,’ Faje said from behind Eilona. He stood close to her, blocking her exit from the room, but not touching her. ‘For some, I know, it is wished for, and for others, it is not. For some it changes their lives for the best, and for some it does not. But regardless, each have something that is not their own. They have a power that belongs to another.’

  The people could hear Faje, and at the sound of his voice began to move, to pull on the chains, and to make noises that Eilona had heard once before, from a man whose tongue had been torn out of his mouth.

  ‘The Keepers of the Divine kept detailed records of every cursed person within Yeflam,’ he said. ‘I was quite often in charge of those records. I would document a name, and a power. For example, the man directly in front of us, the man whose hands have been removed, had a bit of extra luck in card games. Across from him, the child you see had an ease with animals that went beyond what any mortal could cultivate. None of it was strong enough to grant them entry to the Keepers’ world, but it was enough to be noticed and to be watched. That is how I knew where they were when Yeflam broke apart. It is why Se’Saera told me gather them, and hold them for her, for when she came to claim the parts of her that had been stolen by these people.’

  Faje touched her, and Eilona flinched, but he held a letter in his hand, folded and sealed. He pressed it into her unresponsive grip.

  ‘If your mother wishes to be part of Yeflam,’ he said, his lips close to her ear, ‘she will have to give us the people I have listed here. Some, I don’t doubt, will have died. Others may have fled. But those on the shore, those men and women cannot step onto Neela or Mesi and remake their life. Their lives are the price for the mortal men and women who wish to return to their own. They are the toll that Se’Saera has said must be paid.’

  10.

  ‘Does the abomination sleep?’ Lor Jix asked. Ahead, the dark creature shifted its curled body around the roof of the tallest building in the City of the Dead as if it were, indeed, asleep, and a dream had been the cause of its movement. ‘I would not have thought it possible.’

  ‘It is not,’ Anguish answered from his perch on Meina’s shoulder. ‘But her attention? That can be drawn away from here by all those who whisper to her.’

  ‘Do those spirits in the water not call to her?’

  The spirits thrashed through the water, generating a white spray that looked, at times, as if it sought to devour both mount and rider. ‘If they speak, I do not hear them,’ the creature said.

  ‘Anguish,’ Zaifyr said. ‘How many were taken from the Plateau?’

  ‘Forty.’

  ‘We outnumber them at least six to one,’ Meina said. ‘If that is how many are behind the walls, that is.’

  ‘But where will they go once they have been struck down? Where does a dead soldier go if he or she dies in the City of the Dead?’ Lor Jix held out his dark hand. ‘And where do we go, for that matter? We do not look like them, not now.’

  ‘The answers will be offered soon enough.’ She nodded at the closing docks. ‘But which path will we take to get there?’

  Zaifyr glanced at each one, and could not see that any would be better than another. The choice was made by the scouts, whose mounts pulled them from the still water and went without hesitation up the road that was paved with gold. ‘The pauper’s road,’ he said, as Glafanr nudged against the dock. ‘Let them go as kings and queens. We will go as beggars.’

  ‘We will be humble,’ Jix corrected, a hint of disapproval in his voice. ‘We will go to Heüala as we were born.’

  It was easy to forget that the Captain of Wayfair had been one of the Leviathan’s priests, and that his piety, so alien and ill-conceived to Zaifyr and Meina, had carried him through the long years at the bottom of the ocean. Meina’s response to it was different from Zaifyr’s, however. The charm-laced man watched her shake her head, dismiss it and call out to her soldiers around her, to prepare them for the path that they would walk to the city. Zaifyr, in comparison, was reminded of what his brother had said to him of the priests who had served of the gods, of their power and their devotion. He had seen none of it: the shaman in the village where he had grown up had been a minor figure, Zaifyr knew: a woman who lost her faith before she died and was punished by a god who had little concern for the people she had served. He had never seen the priests in all their power, all their awful certainty.

  Lor Jix was the first to step on the dirt road outside the docks, and he led them along the long, twisting road without hesitation.

  It was a path that Zaifyr could not judge the length of, nor how long he and the others spent on it. When he glanced behind him, the huge shape of Glafanr was at times close, then far away, on his left, on his right, and close again, and he found it difficult to tell how far he had come from the docks. In contrast, Heüala appeared to be closing in, continually, but in such incremental measurements that more than once Za
ifyr convinced himself that his belief that it was closer was foolish.

  He could see the other roads around him, as well. They ran at times beside him – the road of gold was most common – but at other times they crossed above or below the road. In each road that he saw, however, there were shapes on it, dark, shadowed figures that would gaze not just at him, but at Meina, Anguish, and the soldiers that followed in a long line.

  Then, as if the road had been short, no more than a crossing, Heüala appeared.

  The dark star-brushed gate was closed, and none of the spirits who had ridden ahead were at it, or above it. From where he stood, Zaifyr could not even see Se’Saera’s body, curled around the tower.

  There was no break on the gate, no hinges, nothing to suggest that it swung open at all, and when Zaifyr placed his hand on it, he met a firm, solid gate, no different from any he had seen while alive. He glanced at Jix, who offered him only a shrug, then at Meina and Anguish. The latter made a swinging motion, like a bat, while the former made a spearing motion.

  He lifted the staff and, gently, tapped it against the gate.

  It was the staff that broke first: the wood fell apart in his hand, the faint slivers of the dead in it breaking free and rushing outwards, into the starred wall of the gate. Once they hit it, it began to split apart, but not in destruction. Instead, it began to slide back, as if it were a giant puzzle that had been used to make an intricate lock which the staff had broken.

  Behind it, a street made from simple paved stone appeared. As more and more of the gate slid back, more of Heüala was revealed, including buildings, lamps, all of them in a mash of old, near-forgotten cultures, the kind that Zaifyr had only seen in ruins, or in the restored sites that his brother Eidan had visited. Much as he wanted to gaze at the buildings, he was drawn away from them, and to the thirty-four spirits that sat in the middle of the square, mounted on horses that threatened to dissolve beneath them.

  ‘No,’ Lor Jix said, a growing horror in his voice. ‘Not my crew, no.’

  Free from the staff, free from the gate, the spirits that had spent thousands and thousands of years at the bottom of Leviathan’s Blood beside their captain, began to take shape.

  At first, Zaifyr did not understand what had caused the ancient dead’s concern, until he realized that the new spirits were silvered, and that they did not take their place to protect them from the warriors.

  Rather, they took their place beside the warriors.

  11.

  The tunnel was long, but Irue’s pace did not slacken, not even when it began to shake with tremors. At first, they were gentle, not enough to cause Ayae concern, but after the fourth, they had become stronger, as if they were waves, washing up before one larger than all the others. On the sixth, part of the tunnel behind them collapsed, and in its wake, Eidan said, ‘That was not the last. Old man, we do not want to be trapped down here when the final quake hits.’

  ‘You don’t want to go back that way, anyway,’ Irue said as he waved the dust away from his eyes. ‘Not that you want to go backwards, of course.’ He blew on the dust in front of him. ‘You should go forwards because forwards leads you to Leera and Leera is where Zaifyr is.’ With a dusty smile, he pushed his way past Jae’le and Tinh Tu to reach Ayae. In the pale, dirty light, he lifted the broken stick in his hand. ‘Could you light this, please?’ he asked. ‘Just a small flame. No need to set the whole thing on fire. Just the end, please.’

  ‘Eidan’s light is better,’ she said, pointing to the dusty phosphorescent glow that came from the ground, from their footsteps.

  He waved the stick. ‘Please,’ he repeated.

  She shrugged, and a flame rose. It was small and would in no way push back the darkness ahead. Yet Irue’s smile grew, as if he had been given a toy, and he waved it in the air in a pattern. ‘Thank you,’ he said and wrapped his free arm around Ayae’s. With a gentle, but firm tug, he pulled her ahead of Tinh Tu and Jae’le, leaving them behind her with Eidan. ‘Now, I have a question for you. Just for you, not for the others. For you. My question is: why did the elements need a warden?’

  The question caught Ayae off-guard. ‘Because some were fickle.’ She tried to remember what she had read in Yeflam, months ago. ‘Some said that they were childish. That they gave in to their emotions. Ger kept them from destroying things.’

  ‘But nothing has been destroyed since he died,’ the old man said, a hint of excitement in his voice. ‘The sky is not filled with tornadoes, the ground does not break apart with earthquakes – well, not this ground, this ground does – but my point is, if the elements were uncontrollable and we needed a controller, why have we not been destroyed by them?’

  ‘We have storms and cyclones and earthquakes and fires,’ she said, but as she spoke, Ayae knew that it sounded simple.

  ‘Zaifyr believed the elements were fine,’ Jae’le added from behind her. ‘He often said that they never needed to be chained. Occasionally, he would argue that Ger chained them not for their crimes, but for their power, but he had no evidence for that.’

  ‘This is why a god needs a servant,’ Irue said in a loud whisper, as if he was confessing to Ayae a deep, dark secret. Ahead, the tunnel opened into a large and undefined darkness. ‘With a good servant, a god can define what it is to the mortals like you and me. Ah, I see your look, but think: no one ever accused Taane of wanting the mad for their power. No one thought she wanted them to lock away her enemies. No, no – everyone knew Taane wanted you to look after the mad. If you didn’t, Taane would punish you. And by Taane, I mean me. She told me that and she made me do that. Not always, but sometimes. But people, people knew.’

  As abruptly as he had taken Ayae’s arm, he released it. He did an ugly skip and run to get ahead of her and his tiny flame disappeared into the black.

  ‘When Ger fell, he spoke for years,’ he said from the darkness. As he spoke, a second flame emerged, larger than the first. ‘Priests wrote it down. All of it. Then people destroyed it and people saved it and people rewrote it and on and on and on.’ A third and fourth flame flickered to life and, as they did, a wall of torches was revealed. Ayae saw it when she stepped into the cavern, where Irue waited for her. To her left and right, the torches stretched down the wall of a huge cavern, the one before it lighting the other through a strip of oiled cloth that joined each together. ‘But because there was no one to define what he said,’ Irue continued, ‘no one to say yes and no, everyone said yes, and everyone said no, and nothing was right. They said he was the Warden of the Elements, but they did not say he was the Warden of the Elements. They did not see that he was both the warden and the elements. Or that the elements were his domain. They did not, they could not, and so we did not understand these.’

  In the middle of the cavern lay a huge set of dark, corroded chains.

  They were so large that, from the edges of the cavern, Ayae thought that they were boulders, or broken stalagmites. She even thought that they might be another City of Ger, one of such largesse and magnificence that the whole city would have belonged to a society of people with a wealth she could not fully imagine. But, the closer Ayae walked towards the chains, and the more torches that were ignited – there must have been over two, three hundred, each of them painstakingly attached to the cavern wall – the more her understanding of what she saw was challenged. They were chains, the chains Ger had held, the chains that bound the elements, the metal that was so heavy that no mortal hand could ever have lifted or forged it.

  ‘There are no links,’ Eidan said, beside her. ‘There are no breaks. No hint of a hammer. There is just—’

  ‘Decay,’ Jae’le finished.

  ‘There was not always,’ Irue said. ‘When I first came here, they were pristine. I sneaked past all the Cities of Ger, past all the priests, and all the gold diggers, and I found them here. Ger told me to make sure that no one would find them and I did that. But I would come in here, at times, and just look at them. They were immaculate, then. They had never held anyt
hing. They never will now.’

  ‘How do you know the chains never held anything?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘In his four voices,’ Ayae said softly.

  ‘A voice for the fire, the wind, the earth and the water.’ The old man dropped his burning stick to the ground and stamped his foot on it. ‘I had heard worse, before. Perhaps that is why he asked my mistress for me.’

  ‘Did he tell you what the chains were for?’

  ‘They were for a god,’ Jae’le said, before he could answer. ‘For a new god.’

  ‘He did not say,’ Irue admitted. ‘But maybe. Or maybe not.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Ayae was surprised by Tinh Tu’s voice when she spoke. In it there was a strange, hard anger. ‘What did the Warden of the Elements tell you? What image of the future did he show you when he gave you his orders?’

  ‘Not this one,’ the old man said quietly. ‘He showed me Mireea, but it was not destroyed in the war. He showed me Yeflam, as well. A Yeflam like the one we can see now. And Leera. Leera. He showed me all of it, but when he did, he was not dead. He was not in the state we see him now. His flesh opened and closed with wounds. He lay in the mountains. He waited for us to deny the new god her power.’

  ‘And then what?’

  Irue shrugged.

  ‘He returned.’ Ayae gazed at the three around her, at the three who had once ruled much of the world with Aelyn and Zaifyr. ‘He and the other gods. Why else would they do this, if they did not plan to return?’

  ‘It would not have been for kindness,’ the servant of Taane said. ‘I have hated my god for all my life, and I have only learned to hate her more in her absence. It may have taken over ten thousand years, but I have regained some measure of myself to do that. I have fought for it. If Taane returned she would not allow me to keep it.’ A shudder ran through the ground, but Irue ignored it. As the single tremor turned into a second and then continued to grow, Irue approached the corroded chain and laid his small, weathered hand on it. ‘The gods have never cared for us. The plans that they made, they made for themselves. That has been clear to me since I was given my list of tasks. But I was not meant to stand before Ger, not like this. I fear that the futures the gods made are all but gone, now.’