The Eternal Kingdom (The Children Trilogy Book 3)

by Ben Peek

  The door fell shut.

  Been treated better, he finished.

  ‘Come on,’ Orlan said quietly. ‘We have someone to see.’

  The cathedral was lit by the time Bueralan and Orlan reached the stairs at the end, revealing its empty pews, dais and stairwells.

  The hallway to Taela’s room was silent. At the door to the room, he found Aelyn Meah, standing near the window, her arms folded over her chest, her gaze on the sleeping woman. The Keeper of the Divine was so still that she appeared like a statue, a creation that had been left on guard. At the sound of him and Orlan at the door, she raised her head. Gently, she placed a finger against her mouth, to caution them to be silent, and came over.

  ‘Taela is sleeping,’ she whispered, after she had stepped out into the hall. ‘She drifts in and out. She’s never awake for long, but we should let her sleep. She is in less pain when she sleeps.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Have you seen Kaze?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied quietly. ‘She told us that the child will need to be cut out.’

  ‘It is about all that can be done.’ There was little hope in Aelyn’s eyes. ‘My brother is here, is he not?’

  ‘His body is.’ It was Orlan who answered. He had been gazing into the room, and when he turned to Bueralan, his gaze mirrored Aelyn’s. ‘You go in and sit with her,’ he said. ‘I’ll grab a little bit of sleep and come back in a few hours. She shouldn’t be left alone, I think.’

  After the two had left, Bueralan entered the room. He half expected it to be stuffy, to feel closed up, and that a smell of sickness would have come to define it, but instead, he found a gentle breeze moving about the room, as if it had been captured.

  Quietly, he pulled a chair next to Taela. He could see the size of her stomach beneath the thin blanket that had been drawn over her, and she was much, much larger than when he had left. He had heard of women who had three children at once, and he imagined that such a pregnancy would equal Taela’s size, now. The rapid increase had clearly taken its toll: her face had lost a lot of weight, and she looked gaunt and hollow, as if she was being devoured by what grew inside her.

  Taela opened her eyes.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Tired.’ Her hand emerged from under the blanket and he took it. ‘I feel like I have this awful weight in me. Like metal.’ Her hand had little strength in it. ‘They want to cut it out of me,’ Taela said. ‘Kaze and – and the other woman. Aelyn. They say it is the only way. They think they can do it without her knowing.’

  ‘They can,’ he said, when she didn’t continue. ‘They can, I promise. They’ll free you from this.’

  But she had fallen back asleep.

  Gently, he placed her hand back on the bed, beneath the sheets. As he did, she shifted a little, revealing brown stains of dried blood. Unsurprised, he straightened out the sheet, to conceal it from her when she woke next.

  3.

  For two days, Tinh Tu’s forces made camp in the port town of Gtara. There, they dismantled the six ships that had been abandoned, left tied to the dock.

  To reach Gtara, the ragged force had marched along the edges of the Black Lake until the Leeran coastline emerged. The route had been forced upon them by the earth that – even now, nearly a week later – rolled from the Mountains of Ger. It was caused by continuing landslides and cave-ins along the range, Ayae thought, and the earthquakes that accompanied the two, along with the bad visibility, left the main roads a dangerous path of sink holes and expanding swamps. It had been a sink hole that forced Tinh Tu to leave the main roads: it was there the morning after she took command, the vanished ground leaving an inky darkness that, if it had grown any larger, would have swallowed the makeshift camp whole. As it was, they were woken by the protesting cries of swamp crows, which continued to complain while Ayae pored over a map to organize a path to Gtara. ‘We can reach Ranan from there,’ she said. ‘As for the town itself, I don’t know what kind of condition it will be in. I wouldn’t expect anything pretty.’

  When she said that, Ayae envisioned Gtara as a series of broken building frames, wire fences and a dock stretching into Leviathan’s Blood. She knew that there would be people there, but it did not occur to her that it would be they who were stripped down to a nearly unrecognizable state.

  Ayae rode into the town beside Jae’le, driven ahead of the main body of Tinh Tu’s army by the demands of the Mireean and Yeflam soldiers rather than by the old woman’s harsh command. After she had mapped a path to Gtara three dozen soldiers had waited for Ayae near the small roll she had slept on the night before.

  Vune, a middle-aged Mireean soldier, was their spokesperson. ‘We don’t feel like we have much choice going forward,’ he said. ‘It isn’t like we love Leera or the new god, but, well, we seen a lot of our friends die. Some may survive. We think we ought to go look for them.’ When she didn’t speak, he rubbed at his dirty cheek. ‘The woman who took away our voices, who made us kneel, you’re more like her than us,’ he said with blunt honesty. ‘You got that curse. You could speak to her. Tell her to let us go.’

  ‘I have no control over Tinh Tu.’ She glanced at the predominantly male soldiers in front of her. ‘You talk to her yourself.’

  ‘We want her to know we’ve done enough,’ Vune said. ‘We’re not dogs.’

  No, she told him, told all of them, you’re not, but no matter what she said, they kept trying to pressure her into speaking to Tinh Tu. After Vyla Dvir revealed that the Lord of the Saan was still unable to speak, they began to double their efforts, and by the end of the second day, their list of grievances had grown to include how hard Tinh Tu was driving them and how she was not listening to suggestions. Unfortunately, Ayae could sympathize with their festering resentment, and it left in her a rising frustration, because she knew that she could not address it. By the third and fourth day, she had taken to riding ahead with Jae’le as a scout, knowing that it was a coward’s solution, and one that would not last.

  When the two entered Gtara, the smell of decay was the first thing that they noticed. Bodies of men, women and children lay on the ground, covered in dirt from the Mountains of Ger. Jae’le had warned her about the bodies before they entered – ‘A bird told me,’ he said, scratching the chin of the swamp crow on his shoulder, perhaps the same one as the one in the tree or another she did not know – but even though she was prepared, the sheer number of the dead surprised Ayae. She stopped at the first of them, the smell leaving her nauseous, the sight of the crows picking through the remains only adding to the feeling. It took a moment before she realized that the man in dirty white armour was someone she knew.

  Paelor.

  ‘Jae’le,’ she said, nudging her horse forwards to catch up to him. ‘These are the Keepers.’

  ‘Some of them, yes.’ He indicated the single dock, the dock where they would soon stand and watch Eidan drag ships onto the shore. ‘The rest are slavers from Gogair, I believe.’ He slid off his horse. ‘Did you notice the condition of the bodies of the Keepers?’ Without qualm, he grabbed one by the leg and pulled the body clear, a pair of crows hopping calmly away as he did. The bird on his shoulder glided down and, with the other two, moved back to the body they had been poking at, leaving Ayae and Jae’le to stare at a face that showed no decay, but rather the signs of advanced age, as if its muscle had been removed. ‘Mequisa, the Bard,’ he said, ‘to judge by his clothes. Not that you would notice it from his body. It is as if his very essence has been stripped out.’

  ‘Do you think . . . ?’ She stopped, rephrased it so she would not mention Se’Saera’s name. ‘Is this what the new god does?’

  ‘To those like you and me?’ He shrugged. ‘I suspect so. We will have to ask Eidan to bury the bodies. We cannot leave them out in the open like this.’

  ‘We are surely not planning to stay here?’

  ‘Soon Faaishan scouts will be upon us, and we’ll want to be able to hold a meeting with their marshal
s. But more immediately, we will need to take those ships apart to build siege equipment. Our soldiers will need it.’

  ‘Our soldiers?’ she repeated. ‘Jae’le, why do we even need soldiers?’

  ‘You need an army in war.’

  ‘Think about the things we can do,’ she said. ‘They can’t do those things. In many ways we would have more freedom without them.’

  ‘No, not against the god-touched.’ The swamp crow squawked and lifted from the ground, to return to his shoulder. ‘We will need soldiers,’ he said. ‘Even those who want to mutiny, but can’t.’

  It did not sit well with Ayae, not then, not later that day, when the two scouts entered Gtara and were taken to Tinh Tu. By then, the dead had been swallowed by the ground, and the stench of decay was hidden beneath the smell of Leviathan’s Blood. Still, Ayae felt a chill when the two men rode into the town, over the freshly churned soil, as if she was seeing an image of the future of all the soldiers around her.

  The scouts did not get to speak to Tinh Tu. After they were presented to her, she said, ‘Bring me the Lord of Faaisha and his marshals.’ She handed them a letter she had written. ‘I expect them in two days.’

  4.

  From the window of her room on Neela, Eilona gazed at the remains of the abandoned shoreline camp, half submerged in the mud that had rolled down from the Mountains of Ger.

  ‘What do you find so fascinating about the sight of that?’ Sinae Al’tor asked, unfolding a chair behind her. ‘We avoided a catastrophe.’

  ‘I sometimes see Mireea in it.’ Eilona turned to him as he opened the second chair. ‘Don’t you feel a bit sad, now that it is gone?’

  ‘Like you, I was happy to leave it, but unlike you right now, I am not interested in recasting it in my memory. Now, enough of that: we have my prize to drink.’ He reached down into the pack he had carried into the small house and began to pull out a kettle and a small brazier. ‘You have no idea how rare tea is,’ he said. ‘I have not been able to get it in the camp. If you hadn’t come to ask me for a kettle, I might not have even known you had any.’

  ‘It won’t do anything for your image,’ she teased. ‘You’re supposed to live on alcohol and vice.’

  ‘A cliché is only as good as the money it creates, my dear.’

  She laughed and he struck a match, lighting the brazier. Eilona had gone in search of Sinae last night, nearly a week after they had moved on to Neela. The move from the shoreline had been orderly, and nothing but a few semi-permanent structures could be seen of the camp now. Most of the people had lodgings on the southern side of the city, away from the broken stone ramp that led to Wila, the empty island where her mother and the Mireean people had been imprisoned when they first came to Yeflam for refuge.

  Eilona had been assigned a small house on the south-eastern curve of Neela, near her mother and her stepfather. There were enough houses that no one had to share, unless they wished, and though Eilona had felt decadent taking a whole house, she pushed aside the guilt by telling herself that there were still empty dwellings. Her new home had no furniture, nothing indeed, but for a small box of tea left in a piece of broken brickwork near where she had laid out her roll and blankets. The tin had been the colour of the brick, and when she had opened it, Eilona half expected coins, or letters of an affair, but the tea had been much more welcome. At least, until she realized that she had no kettle, no cups and no fire.

  Sinae had solved that, however.

  ‘Mireea is probably gone, now,’ she said to him as the fire took hold in the brazier. Sinae had arrived with the chairs and brazier and his beautiful, blonde guard, but the latter had little interest in the tea. Instead, she wandered around Eilona’s house, silent as a ghost. ‘When you look at the skyline, the whole mountain range has collapsed, as if it was hollow. As if there never was a god in it.’

  ‘I hear enough about gods every night.’ He poured some of Eilona’s water into the kettle, the tea leaves following. ‘It’s bad business. I’ve been able to sleep in the midnight hours because people are having such divine thoughts.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘If they’ve stopped paying, yes.’ He set the kettle down and rose. ‘Your mother would prefer I keep them all night and listen, but they’re not saying anything of importance.’

  No one was, anywhere, Eilona had learned.

  She had little to do on Neela, now that her mother’s plans had been so turned around. She did not have any complaints in regard to that: she did not want anyone planning to kill her. But she had been left at a loose end, to a degree, and she had taken to going to her mother’s house and listening in on the meetings she held in the evening with Reila, Olcea and Sinae. Most of what they talked about came from the witch, who had been spying on the leaders of the other cities – or, to be more precise, Hien had been spying – to try and gauge their position in relation to Faje and the Faithful. Two had become converts to Se’Saera, but Olcea was clear that the Faithful could be found in all the cities, and the ‘refugee’ problem was widespread in all but the furthest cities, Toake and Enilr. She also believed that all the cities had given their ‘cursed’ over to the Faithful.

  ‘It makes me think of death,’ Sinae said, breaking into her thoughts. He stood beside her, his gaze on the new, strangely shaped mountain range. ‘What happens to a god when its body turns to dust?’

  ‘I can’t believe people come to you seeking pleasure.’

  ‘Prostitutes and philosophy. Empires are built on the back of both.’

  Eilona smiled. ‘I don’t know what happens to a god,’ she said. ‘There are theories. Most of them based on the “cursed”, on the gods’ divinity seeping into the world, as if it was always part of that. But others have suggested that they return to their paradises, that they become one with it and maintain it for the rest of eternity with those who were faithful.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t particularly subscribe to that. It is a theory that has risen in the last century, as more and more is found out about the old gods. A lot that was thought lost in the Five Kingdoms has started to turn up on small islands, and in parts of the world where their rule did not spread. But the people who propose it seem almost to be trying to reach out to the old gods, to believe in what they once represented, to bring them back, in their own way. The work is half research, half wish-fulfilment, half wanting to go back to a simpler age.’

  ‘I would not have thought seventy-eight gods was a simpler age,’ Sinae said.

  ‘Controlled is probably a better description,’ she said.

  He frowned and turned from the broken skyline. ‘What happened to the people who wanted to be free of the gods, back then?’

  ‘There weren’t many. There’s some evidence of people who didn’t want an afterlife, and didn’t want to be reborn, but not much. It was hard to escape the influence of the gods when they stood around you.’

  ‘So you could not be free?’

  The tone of his voice caught Eilona’s attention. ‘Not really,’ she said, slowly, as the kettle on the brazier began to steam. ‘People who didn’t want anything to do with the gods were not largely accepted by others. They were driven out of villages, stripped of titles and wealth and, in some cases, stoned. There would be a lot more sympathy for them now, I suspect, but not then. When you think about it, it’s not terribly surprising. The gods stood around you, then. Ain, the God of Life, creator of the very planet we stand on, left statues through forests and deserts for people to make pilgrimages to. We have found some of those: they’re of men and women and children, but they’re not carved by any hand – they’re made. Even without the god to power them, they resonate, still. It was difficult to be anything but loyal in a world where the gods were so accessible.’

  Sinae nodded, but if he had more to say, more that could give substance to Eilona’s concern, or push it away, he did not. Instead, his blonde guard silently entered the room, and he asked Eilona if she knew what flavour the tea was that she had found.

  5.


  Zaifyr walked alone, but for how long, and how far, he did not know.

  There was no change in the world around him. The grass spread from horizon to horizon, with no rises into hills, or mountains, or dips into rivers and oceans.

  He did not know where Lor Jix and Anguish were. Though he had stepped through the door with both, neither stood on the field. He called out their names, and did so until he realized that there was nothing alive around him. No birds flew, no insects moved, and no animals or people could be seen. Zaifyr was not confident that his voice had even truly emerged in the shout he gave, either. He did not draw a breath and, after he had finished shouting, he felt a heaviness settle on his chest, similar to the weight that had been upon him in Mireea.

  He wanted to sit down on the grass, but he did not. Though he did not know why he thought it, he believed that if he did lower himself, he would not rise. The grass would welcome him, unlike any other grass, and he would lie back in it and stare up at the sun. The sun did not move in the clear sky, and it was this stillness, more than anything else, that warned him against sitting on the ground, not to give in to the desire to stop. It would be easy, though. The thought was ever present. He could take a moment to rest. A moment wouldn’t hurt. Nothing of importance would happen in a moment, even here, where time was strangely suspended yet accelerated, as if it had taken place, was taking place, and would soon take place.

  Suddenly, a figure appeared before him.

  He lay on his back in the grass, a young white man, dark-haired, and with a thin, long face that, though Zaifyr had never seen him before, was familiar. He wore loose-fitting, paint-stained clothes and would occasionally lift his hand to the sky, as if he was painting the sun, though he held no brush, had no paint, and no canvas. The only personal item near him was a rusted sword.

  ‘My name,’ the man said, after Zaifyr appeared in his line of sight, ‘is Sonen Kint.’

  The voice was familiar. ‘Anguish?’