The Eternal Kingdom (The Children Trilogy Book 3)

by Ben Peek

  ‘No, no.’ The man’s hand turned into a finger and he wagged it with each pronunciation. ‘No, not here. Not now. Not any more. I am not a creation of Se’Saera, not a soldier of a new god. I am a painter. I paint men and women. Even children. Most are prostitutes. I talk to them and I get to know them and I paint them. In each of them there is something beautiful and fragile and raw, but you can only see it when they are naked. When the symbols by which they define themselves are stripped away.’

  ‘Is that how you changed?’ Zaifyr asked. ‘Was Anguish a symbol?’

  ‘Sonen is a symbol.’ He laughed, a strange, dreamy laugh. ‘You should listen to this land. We are all symbols. We are all representations. You should sit and let it speak to you. It is—’

  ‘Paradise,’ finished Lor Jix. The Captain of Wayfair appeared before the two of them, as if he stepped from a world outside the one they were in. ‘We are in the paradise of the gods, where we will want for nothing and need for nothing.’

  In Zaifyr’s youth, in the cold mountains of Kakar, the shaman Meihir had told him that when he was dead, Hienka, the Feral God, would take him to a camp with a huge forest stretching below it. From there, he would be able to hunt, to trap, to fight. ‘No god promised this,’ Zaifyr said now, indicating the endless field. ‘This is no paradise.’

  ‘The Leviathan promised me an ocean, unlike any I had seen before.’ There was a note of bitterness in Jix’s voice. ‘But regardless of what we were promised, this is it.’

  ‘But this . . .’ Zaifyr’s voice trailed off. Before him, quite clearly, he could see himself. He was laid out on a stone floor. He could feel cold stone against his back, and could feel dirt in his hair, over his face and neck and exposed hands. He could see the shadowed outline of a figure standing over him, but he did not know who it was. The figure was accompanied by two others, though only the first stood close, while the second stood at a distance, like a servant. He could hear words, as well, but he could not understand them. ‘Can you see me?’ he asked Jix, feeling the weight in his chest grow heavier. ‘When you look down, can you?’

  ‘Look at your chest,’ Jix said, instead. ‘It is as if you have a wound there.’

  It came from where he felt heaviest, where his lungs would be, if he was alive, if he had a body. It was much larger than the red smear that had appeared in Mireea, before he had taken the Wanderer’s staff, but it was not dissimilar. He remembered what Anguish had said then – that his family had been bringing his body to his soul, that they had been trying to return him to life – but before he could say anything, he began to retch and water burst from his mouth, black like Leviathan’s Blood.

  He lifted his hand to his mouth as he gagged again, but more water burst from him, the second so fierce, so powerful that he stumbled to his knees.

  ‘Don’t fight it, Zaifyr,’ Se’Saera said, her face appearing before him in the room, and in the field. ‘It will only hurt more.’

  6.

  Beneath the morning’s gentle light, the blackened trees and grey-stained ground had a soft, dream-like quality.

  In a voice that seemed to emerge from the landscape, Aela Ren said, ‘Your soldiers watch us.’

  ‘Did you expect them to wait politely in the camp after we left?’ Heast rode beside him on a steady brown horse. Only an hour before, as he saddled the beast, Lehana had spoken to him in a hushed, urgent voice. You can’t trust him. She said that he had not seen what Ren had done in Cynama, had not seen the fires that burned from lava that rose from the ground, breaking through the stone canals by cracking the stone. She told him he had not seen the Innocent’s soldiers emerge from the night, a series of dark shadows who butchered people in the streets. You promised the Queen, she said, holding tightly onto the horse’s reins. You promised – he laid his hand on her shoulder, on the black metal of her armour, chipped around the edges, and interrupted her. I know what I promised, he said. And I have seen Sooia. I have seen what Aela Ren does. With a grunt he pulled himself up onto his horse. But he did not come here to kill us, not today. He wants to tell us something first. Lehana had stared up at him in disbelief. What could he tell us that wasn’t the promise of death? she asked him. ‘I imagine,’ Heast said to the man beside him, ‘that my lieutenant has archers on both sides of us. If you make a sudden move, their orders will be to cut your horse down first, to try and trap you beneath it. They will hope to break a leg in the fall. If they don’t, they will aim for your legs, to cut down your movement. Once that is done, they will come with axes, to break you apart.’

  ‘Captain Xanan had a similar plan,’ the Innocent replied, not bothered by what he heard, not concerned enough to even turn his head left or right to search for the riders. ‘She was our first real defeat in Sooia.’

  ‘I heard that she died beneath the mountain she collapsed on you?’

  ‘Yes, she did. But it was a better fate than being trapped beneath stone for close to a decade. I can still remember the sensation of being crushed, of my bones breaking and repairing, of my skin splitting and healing. It is not a pleasant experience.’ The morning’s light caught his scars, crossing him with shadows. ‘I have felt worse,’ he said, meeting Heast’s gaze, as if he knew that the Captain of Refuge was trying to gauge if his injuries had come from that. ‘Physically and emotionally, I have felt worse. But being trapped beneath stone is a fate I am pleased Captain Xanan did not have to experience.’

  Heast nodded, but made no reply.

  ‘Does it surprise you?’ Ren asked.

  ‘Should it?’

  Ahead, the first ravine marked itself in a dark line, as if it were a fissure to another world.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the man beside him said. ‘I am aware that to many, I am considered a monster. I have done things that are not easily forgivable.’

  ‘Xanan wrote that you did not enjoy what you were doing in Sooia,’ he said. ‘Captain Ibori, the third Captain of Refuge to meet you, said otherwise.’

  ‘Both are correct. For a long time, I have been a man consumed by anger. When I say a long time, I do not mean a generation, or a few hundred years, but over ten thousand. I was born when the land looked very different from this. The mountain I lived upon for much of my life does not even exist any more. In such a life, in such a length of time, anger can find many a way to manifest itself. Especially my anger. I was the mortal instrument of the God of Truth, Wehwe. I was god-touched, to use our term. I gave my life to him and dedicated myself to his desires but, until recently, I did not know why he and the other gods went to war. Neither I, nor any of the others like me, were told that. Can you imagine what that was like?’ Nudging his horse, Ren began to move around the ravine, ash clouding the legs of his white and black speckled horse. ‘I had been so certain of my place in the world beside my god. I may not have always liked what I did – to stand beside a god is not to stand beside a being of kindness – but I understood what a divine being gave to the world, how it shaped the land and our lives. When that was gone, I had only my anger.’

  ‘But not now?’ Heast asked. ‘Now you are free of your anger?’

  ‘My new god has soothed it, but it is still within me. I can feel it, in the edges of my body, as if it were a weight.’

  ‘Your god watched me in Celp. She watched my soldiers and me ride against Waalstan. It was she who gave the order to her soldiers to douse themselves in flames.’ He indicated around him. ‘It was she who ordered all of this.’

  ‘Yes, she knew her general would die.’

  ‘And her soldiers?’

  ‘No.’ Ren’s horse stumbled as a fallen log broke into cinders beneath its hooves. It righted and the Innocent shifted in his saddle for balance. As he did, his left hand rearranged his sword, strapped to the side of his mount. ‘I can hear your anger, Captain. I recognize it. I can only tell you that it is futile to look for your own morals in a god.’

  Heast grunted. ‘It sounds like you’ve done that.’

  ‘No, not exactly. I once heard the morals of
a god. I heard them spoken to me. Wehwe would speak to me about the importance of truth, and of certainty, of how they defined the world. Over the thousands of years I stood beside him, my beliefs were shaped by those words. My anger rose from the fact that the War of the Gods betrayed those beliefs. The gods killed each other and left their creation in a state of anarchy. Without them, there were no truths, no paths for a righteous man to follow, no punishments for a deceitful woman to fear. There was only a descent into madness and oblivion. How could a god do that?’

  ‘Surely you can answer that?’ he asked. ‘After all those years?’

  The Innocent offered a faint smile, a bittersweet line in his scarred face. ‘Not with any certainty. It is merely a question that I return to again and again. As I said earlier to you, war is not due to one event. Not even the war I have waged in Sooia was a snap of my fingers and a decision made on whim. I chose it because it was the most progressed of our nations, because it alone had weathered the fall of the Five Kingdoms the best, never having been ruled by those five. But what if there was more than that? What if fate had been touched, shifted by a divine hand, and moved to ensure that I was there? That the hatred I felt sent me there, instead of elsewhere? What if it sent me there to do what I have done, so I may come here now to stand beside a new god and act as a reflection to her?’

  Ahead, the blackened ruins of Celp appeared, like charcoal markings on a piece of paper.

  ‘I have been used before,’ Heast said. ‘That’s what you’re describing, after all. Being used like a tool. You can’t be a mercenary and not feel that once or twice. But when you feel it, you have to make a choice. You must decide if you will let that continue, or if you will step aside from it.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ Slowly, conscious of the archers who moved through the darkened trees, Aela Ren reached into his saddle bag. From it, he removed a book, bent at the spine, the pages warped, as if they had been written upon. ‘You have heard,’ he said to Heast, ‘of The Eternal Kingdom?’

  ‘I have,’ he replied. ‘It is said that only the Faithful can read it.’

  ‘They can write in it, as well.’ The Innocent held out the book to him. ‘My choice is already made, Captain. I have looked into my new god, and I have seen what is inside her, and I cannot turn from her. I am but a servant, and I have been one, even when I believed I was not. You, however, are not a servant. You are a mortal man born in this world without a god.’

  Heast took the book. ‘What will I find in this?’

  ‘A choice. A choice between a promised world and’ – he turned to the black trees and ash-covered ground – ‘the one you know.’

  7.

  ‘Mortals are born in pain,’ Se’Saera said. ‘My parents wanted that for you, for all of you. The pain was to be divine.’

  She stood before Zaifyr twice, on a still field and in a dark room. In the latter, she appeared as a young and beautiful woman, but in the former, she was a child whose wings unfolded from her back.

  ‘I have wondered,’ the new god continued, speaking both in the field and in the room, one voice echoing the other. ‘I have wondered why they made birth painful. It is such a necessary part of mortality that you might think they would make it pleasurable for the mother and the child. But it is not. It is painful, as if it must teach you a lesson, but what, exactly? I travel with a woman who was the servant of Linae, my mother. Do you know what she told me when I asked her that question?’

  Zaifyr could not answer her, could not find a voice to speak. In the dark room, the light was growing, as if the still sun of the second world was seeping into the first. He could see the windows and the light – was it the morning, the midday, or the afternoon’s? – revealed not just the size and shape of the room, but the people in it, as well.

  ‘Zaifyr,’ Se’Saera said, standing above him. ‘Don’t you wish to know?’

  A blond man stood beside Se’Saera, black leather strips wrapped around his body. He stared at him with anger, though Zaifyr had never seen him before.

  ‘Zaifyr?’

  A deformed woman crouched further back.

  ‘Leave him be, abomination.’ Lor Jix stepped in front of Zaifyr, stepped between him and the god in the still world. In the sunlit room, no one moved. ‘Why don’t you tell us what have you done to the paradises that the gods promised us?’

  ‘I have done nothing,’ she replied. ‘All the doors of Heüala opened onto this field. They have done so as long as I have existed.’

  ‘Do not lie to me. The Leviathan spoke of a world of endless oceans. A world those loyal to her would share. This is not that promise.’

  ‘No, it is not.’ In the bright room, Se’Saera smiled. When she spoke on the still grassland, the humour was not evident. ‘I can see more of the world now. More of what was, what is, and what will be. When the Wanderer was here, when the gods left pieces of themselves with him to be put inside the houses of Heüala, you could open a door to what they promised. You would see oceans and another would see castles that rose high into the sky and chariots that took you to the sun, to palaces made of light. But in truth, it was an illusion. You sat as you do now.’

  ‘It was all symbols,’ Sonen said, still lying on the ground. ‘All metaphor and simile for your soul, for the part of you that cannot die.’

  ‘Even this grass is not real,’ the god said. ‘But I could not abide the emptiness, so I made the sun shine over a field.’

  ‘You speak in lies,’ Lor Jix said, grinding the words out in anger.

  ‘Do you not want to know why they did it?’ The Captain of Wayfair did not respond. ‘There are a finite number of souls in the world,’ she said. ‘It was the first thing I learned when I became aware. At that time, there were souls stretched throughout paradise, waiting to be reborn. More were being punished beside the River of the Dead. The number of both was greater than you can imagine, but it was still a number. It had a beginning and an end. And each one of them was power, stored for my parents, waiting their return.’ In the sunlit room the god laughed in delight. ‘The first thing I did was to let everyone go through the turn, to take hold of the wheel and return, to live again. I thought that they had been left for me. I thought that they were my parents’ gift. Now, of course – now I see differently.’

  ‘The gods create—’ the ancient dead began.

  ‘—and the mortals decide,’ Se’Saera finished. ‘That is why birth is painful. The lives of mortals must be staggered, no matter if they are human or not. Even after I released them, there was no wave of births. There was the usual trickle, the souls of mortals caught in safeguards and filters my parents made. They are nearly empty now, though. Soon children will become rarer and rarer.’

  ‘But this sedation of the afterlife, this robbing of all desire?’ Jix had lost his bitterness. ‘Why would they do this to us?’

  ‘Did you not lead an army of the dead to attack Heüala? Ask yourself, at what point do the living become a threat to the gods and their plans?’

  He did not reply.

  ‘Step aside for me, Captain,’ the god said, a note of kindness in her voice. ‘I could make you do it, but I will offer you a choice, instead. I will offer it to you because my parents have lied to you. My mother, the Leviathan, took your soul and trapped it for thousands of years, all because she was afraid of me. My father, the Wanderer, ensured that your crew would be trapped in his staff because he was afraid of what I would become. Their acts are no different to those of all my parents. They have broken their world. They have left it in tatters. They wanted to leave nothing alive but those that had been infected with their power. They sought to keep control of their world by keeping all the dead here, in Heüala. They wanted to keep fate splintered so that they could continue to make the world in the images they so desired. They wanted to deny a single fate. They wanted to deny me and, in doing so, deny you. But it has not worked. I have sent the souls back into the world. I have let them go to grow without them. I have let them make designs that break
the plans of my parents. They have given me choices. They have given me the chance to repair the world. That is what is at stake here. If you step aside, I will be able to remake this world. I will create real rewards and real punishments for those who are loyal to me. Let me return Zaifyr to his body and put an end to the horrors my parents have created.’

  ‘No.’ Black water burst from Zaifyr’s mouth as he struggled to speak, the word incoherent as he tried to deny what Se’Saera said, to tell Jix of the laughter that mingled with her words, to tell him that he could not trust the new god, just as he could not trust the old ones. He opened his mouth to speak again, but in the sunlit room Se’Saera placed her hand on his mouth, and nothing emerged in the still grassland. No. You must deny her. She has used us. You heard her. She has done just as her parents did. She has left the dead in purgatory after they have done what she wanted. You must not trust her.

  The Captain of Wayfair, the priest whose faith in his god saw him accept a curse for over ten thousand years, stepped aside.

  8.

  After the tea was drunk, after the midday’s sun had begun to rise, after Sinae left, Eilona walked the short distance to her mother’s house. Her mind turned over what Sinae had said, and she considered her own responses, asking herself if her concern was legitimate. She was probably over-reacting, Eilona told herself. A lot of people had questions about gods, about the old gods, the new god, and Sinae did not have to be any different from them. It was impossible that Sinae would be anything but loyal to her mother, but even as she thought that, approaching the two-storey house Muriel Wagan and her husband were in, Eilona had to admit that how she knew Sinae was through his relationship with her mother. Five years ago, a few years after she had left for Pitak, her mother had brought Sinae into the Keep, bruised and beaten, a young man whose story of being chained in a house and abused by a rich, older man, emerged in whispers when Eilona returned for a visit. He had been the cause of a public argument with her father, after she had heard him announce at a dinner table that the boy was damaged, pointing him out with a fork. Before two dozen people, Eilona had told her father to be quiet, had scolded him in front of diplomats, then left the hall. The outburst had not helped her reputation, but—