by Ben Peek
‘Zean did this,’ Aelyn said, crouched over the bloody remains. ‘You can smell the scent in the air. Like rotting meat.’
The scent was new. When they had left Ranan, it had been blood, but that scent had not been perfect. It could be anyone’s blood, Aelyn said, after the trail disappeared, and reappeared. Bueralan had relied upon the tracks in the ground, but it was clear that the longer their chase continued, the more Zean grew, not just in size, but smell, and appetite. ‘He must have dragged this scout here.’ The saboteur walked past Aelyn and the body, to the edge of building’s frame. The low marshes ran out into the afternoon’s setting sun, the dark line of Leviathan’s Blood on the horizon. ‘The tracks come in this way.’
‘He has eaten part of the flesh here.’
He is Se’Saera’s child, he wanted to say.
Away from the body, at the edge of the town, they made a small camp. Bueralan could have pushed on, into the night, as he had done after leaving Ranan, but he was reluctant to do that now. He realized that he had slowed, had allowed himself to be diverted. He was unwilling to run down Zean in these last few miles. He was weighed down by grief and anger. He had slept poorly for the last nights, images of Taela and Orlan in his dreams, mixed with Zean, the Zean he had known, clawing out of Taela’s stomach, and he would shift between being furious and wracked by grief. Beside him, Aelyn said nothing, though she must have noticed, for she let him set the pace. He suspected that she knew where Zean was, though he did not know why she was reluctant to reach him, as well.
‘Years ago,’ she said, sitting next to him in the remains of a building, lit by the stars above, ‘I was given the present of a book of writings by a scholar called Irue Tq. My sister gave it to me as a birthday present.’ Aelyn smiled. ‘We don’t celebrate birthdays often, really, so it was a surprise. But my sister has never been the most subtle of us and there was a point to it. Irue Tq was born well before the War of the Gods and was known as the Fifth Philosopher. Tq argued that the number was one of balance, one that symbolized humans, both physically, and in relation to their senses. The book my sister sent wasn’t complete. I don’t think she has been able to compile a complete edition due to its age, but what she had was enough to read. It was about the impact of the gods on the evolution of humanity.’
‘How we’ve changed?’ Bueralan asked.
‘Bear in mind, this was before the gods died. What Tq argued was that the gods were resistant to change. They were forces that denied evolution. He argued that the gods treated all living creatures as if they were complete. He used the example of a raven, primarily. He said that the bird had been slowly developing the ability to speak but that, on the cusp of it, the gods had taken away the ability. He argued that the gods had done this, not just with ravens, but with all creatures, but primarily with humans. He said our technology, our intellectual pursuits, our ideas of the world, had not changed in thousands and thousands of years, and he claimed that this was a state maintained by the gods. He had a list of examples of experiments sabotaged, of philosophers burned at the stake, but the one that stayed with me related to literature. He had apparently spent some time collating the number of people who could read, and who could not, and argued that the number had remained static for over five thousand years.’
‘That’s hardly surprising. Even now, there are nations where illiteracy is high because of the poverty they live in.’ Bueralan suspected he knew what she was going to argue, however. ‘Are you saying our new god is going to take us back to that?’
‘As I said before, Zean is her vision of the future. We will see what that is soon enough.’ Aelyn shrugged. ‘No, what I am talking about is something different. I am talking about the notion of being unable to make a choice, or rather, being forced to make a choice defined by someone more powerful than you. The gods create the outcomes. You and I make a choice, but what choice is that really? Tq argued that the gods kept us blind because of that. He said that we would never be truly free while they existed. It is something that I can feel at this moment. I can feel it through my entire being. No matter what we do when we find Zean, there will be an outcome that serves our new god, or our old gods, but none that serves us.’
Bueralan did not tell her that she had been that figure. He did not need to. Aelyn Meah was not above the self-awareness required to see the hypocritical nature of her concern.
It was enough, however, for her to indulge his reluctance to reach Zean. Enough for her to sit beside him and watch the night stars brighten and lighten until the morning’s sun began to rise. They said little to each during the night. Aelyn was lost in her thoughts, just as he was in his. Bueralan had the deaths of enough people to keep him company, and he supposed, if Aelyn’s thoughts were like his, then she had her own deaths, and her own regrets.
In the morning, the two of them followed the trail that led down to the coast, followed the fresh smell of blood that rose from the ocean, followed it like a scent.
In the last hours of the day, they found Zean.
5.
Laena
Eilona paused and dipped her quill into a small ink pot. It was the second of two she had carried from Pitak.
I do not know how this letter will find you. I do not know how any of the letters I have written will find you. I tell myself that you do not expect any yet. I tell myself you are back in Faer, back at the dig site, and you know the mail will take a long time to arrive. I tell myself that, even though I know Se’Saera’s arrival could have changed everything for you and you could still be in Pitak. You could be waiting. I try not to imagine your concern.
I try.
Once I have finished, I will place this letter with the others in my bag. I hope that, in the event of something terrible happening in the next twenty-four hours, they can be delivered to you. If it is to be granted by anyone who might be reading this, who has found it in my bag, I want it known that the delivery of this letter is my final wish. Consider it payment for sharing my newly found tea with another, not so long ago.
Laena, the afternoon’s sun has begun to set. It has turned the sky outside my window a dirty red, like old blood.
As I write this, two men and a small guard are arriving by boat. The two men are named Faje Metura and Nymar Alahn. They will be brought to my mother for a meeting. The man she shares her power with has insisted on this and my mother, who is growing weary, agreed. Just a moment ago, I watched her and half a dozen others walk over to the island where Faje and Nymar and their guard will disembark. Recently, the same island was a prison to my mother and the Mireean people. Its use today, however, is not a calculated insult, but a necessity: it is impossible to land on Yeflam’s shoreline. Mudslides over the last week have made it unsafe. At night, when the shadows are darkest, to look out at the shore is to look at a different world, one freshly made.
When they return from the island, a meeting will be held in my mother and stepfather’s house. I will be in attendance for that. I will listen to Faje Metura tell my mother that if she wishes to have a city for the Mireean people in his new Yeflam, she will have to give him the people who are ‘cursed’. It is an offer she will not take, and rightly so. I have seen with my own eyes what the Faithful do to the people who have been changed by the divinity of the gods, but it is not even for that reason that it should not be done. You cannot create a haven by denying others sanctuary. My mother sees that very clearly, but she has little support. The man she shares power with, Lian Alahn, will not agree. He will see the price of ‘cursed’ flesh as a small one.
I have begun to think that my mother and the god Ain share a common trait. Like the god, my mother has spent a lifetime placing representatives of herself in Mireea and Yeflam. They are made flesh, not stone, but still, her enemies have hunted them, much as the gods hunted Ain’s statues during the war. With each one that crumbled, a part of him was lost, and with each part of my mother’s network gone, so is she diminished. I no longer believe she can rely on any but four people, if I includ
e myself, and I fear she realizes that.
Eilona dipped the quill, tapped the side of the bottle. She did know how many times she had repeated the action during the letter so far, but she was conscious of it now. Each tap marked a second. Outside, a thin layer of the afternoon’s dirty light remained.
I do not consider myself a courageous woman, Laena. Of the two of us, it is you who would face this moment more bravely. You would raise your fists. You who would not be cowed. You who would seek to protect me.
But I do not wish you here. Not for this.
Whatever happens in the next few hours will happen. I will do my best, though as yet, I do not know what my best will be. I hope that I am not a bystander. I hope that whatever story emerges from tonight is one that you can be proud of. But as I said, I am not a brave woman.
In life, in death, please know that I loved you, Laena, and that I love you still.
She cleaned the quill with a small rag, wrapped it in a different cloth, screwed the lid on her ink bottle and placed both with the letter in her bag.
Eilona stared around the bare room she was in and took a breath. She had been on the verge of tears at the end of her letter, and she needed to compose herself before she walked outside. A part of her wished she had a knife. The breath she took was dirty, but no breath in Neela was clean. A knife: she could hold a knife. It would have been something to hold as she left the room and stepped into the grimy, dying light of the day.
Outside her house, Eilona could see a line of figures entering her mother’s house, and at the end of them walked the shadowed figures of Sinae Al’tor and his blonde guard. In the last few days she had tried to warn her mother about him, to tell her what she thought, but there had been no time to speak to her alone. In the few moments Eilona thought to push the subject, she baulked. What could she say? That Sinae has said he fears death? That the return of a god has changed him? Of course he should fear death, of course Se’Saera should affect him.
She was the last to enter her mother’s house. The guard on the outside, a thickset man with his face wrapped to protect him against the dirt, opened the door for her, revealing the packed room inside.
A long table sat in the middle of the room, filled with glasses and water jugs. The other day, Lian Alahn had had it delivered, and it soaked up much of the room. On one side of it – the side closest to the door where Eilona came in – sat Faje Metura and Nymar Alahn. Next to them were six Faithful, two women, four men, and none of them was armed.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said to her mother. ‘Have I missed much?’
‘We haven’t begun.’ Muriel Wagan sat on the other side of Faje and Nymar. Beside her, Lian Alahn wore sombre finery to match the simple greys and blacks that her mother wore. On the left of the table, closest to the Lady of the Ghosts, sat Reila and Olcea, while Sinae and his guard sat on the right, next to Lian Alahn. Behind them, Caeli and Captain Oake stood patiently, the arms of the first clasped behind her back, while the latter, her arm free of a splint, held them crossed over her chest. ‘Now that everyone is here,’ her mother said said, turning to Faje, ‘I trust we can begin?’
‘We can,’ he said. ‘However, this will be a simple meeting, Lady Wagan. At the end of it, we expect the cursed to be delivered in chains, outside.’
‘What makes you think I will agree to that?’
‘Because I have already agreed,’ Lian Alahn said, irritated. ‘I have grown tired of your politics, Lady Wagan. You are but a refugee here, with no claim, either through birth or blood, to any of Yeflam. I will not see you continue to shatter it, when we could, tonight, unify it.’
6.
From where she stood, Eilona saw the tired resignation on her mother’s face. ‘You’re such a fool, Lian,’ she said, without surprise. ‘The people before you are not interested in unifying Yeflam. They wish to command it. They will use hatred, fear and greed to do that. They will subvert the honest by convincing them they must forgo their independence to protect the lives that they have. In the years after that, they will divide friends and family to ensure no one will rise against them. They will educate new children to believe that the laws they make are right, that anyone who questions them is disloyal, and those who criticize them deserve punishment.’ She sighed and turned to him. ‘Have you not seen these things before? Have you not read history?’
‘I will not be lectured by a stateless woman like yourself,’ Alahn said angrily, rising from his seat. ‘I have indulged you too long, and it must end now.’
‘Please, there is no need for this.’ Faje interrupted and held up both his hands for peace. ‘Please understand, Lady Wagan, we are here as a courtesy to you. The cursed that are here are your people, and we wish to make this as painless as possible. Your misguided beliefs are not helping the matter.’
Behind her mother, Caeli caught Eilona’s eye. The guard’s blue-eyed gaze flicked to her left, to the Yeflam Captain who stood calmly in acceptance of what had been said and, Eilona thought, Sinae and his guard.
‘Se’Saera has come to us with a promise to rebuild the world we share,’ the former steward of the Keepers said. ‘I know I am not alone when I look at our world and see only destruction. Our ocean is black and our sun is broken. We have a shoreline where only the mad can walk. A plateau where the barest hint of blood on the ground causes horrors to erupt. A mountain that breaks apart as the bones of a god decay. This is just the continent directly off Yeflam’s edge. I could continue to other parts of the world, but it would be the same. Every one of these anomalies is an illness that none of us can cure. Indeed, to a certain degree, we have constructed our lives around these horrors as if they do not need to be changed. We speak instead of managing them. In my role with the Keepers of the Divine, I listened to immortal men and women address this very issue. Each one of them made a promise to repair the world once he or she was a god and I hoped that I would see the day where it was true, but it was not to come. They have not become gods. They will not. I know now that a god cannot be made from human flesh.’ He paused to let his words sink in. ‘I understand that it is difficult for you to hear this, Lady Wagan. You have lost your home to Se’Saera and her Faithful, but your home was built on the body of her father, and you can surely see the sacrilege involved in building a city on top of him. You have lost friends, and your own husband—’
Elan Wagan began to scream.
The noise from upstairs interrupted Faje’s speech, but it was her mother that Eilona focused on. At the sound of her husband, the weariness in her face etched itself deeper. It was as if the last two years had been revealed by her stepfather’s screams, exposed for everyone to see the weight she carried. Eilona was not the only one who had noticed her mother’s change, either: Sinae had risen at the sound of her stepfather’s screams and attempted to guide Alahn back to his seat, to calm him down.
‘Eilona,’ her mother said, breaking her thoughts. ‘Help Reila with your stepfather, please.’
She wanted to reply, but in her hesitation, Elan Wagan screamed again, and she hurried up the stairs with Reila.
Her stepfather’s screams grew louder as the two drew closer. When she and the silver-haired healer entered his room, they found him not in his wheelchair, but on the floor, just short of the window. The chair lay on its back, as if her stepfather had leapt from it and thrown it back. He might well have done that, Eilona admitted, but he did not have the strength in his legs to walk. He was now trying to find a grip on the floor, to pull himself forwards, to reach the empty window.
Eilona bent down to her stepfather and whispered to him, but her voice was lost under his yelling.
‘Pull him into a sitting position,’ Reila instructed as she rummaged through a leather bag in the corner of the room. ‘Quickly now.’
Eilona picked up her stepfather as she would a child and carried him to the cot against the wall. She lowered herself, still holding him, as his screams became angry, violent mutters. All his strength was in his voice and, though h
e squirmed and tried to break her hold, he could not. Reila appeared before him, a glass jar filled with a smoke-coloured liquid in her hand. With no ceremony, the healer tilted her stepfather’s head back and poured the liquid into him, causing him to choke, to spit, but she held his mouth shut to force him to swallow most of it. After he did, Reila released his head, and her stepfather sagged against Eilona.
Below, she heard voices, her mother’s first, then Faje and Alahn.
‘Daughter.’ Her stepfather’s whisper startled Eilona more than his screams had. ‘Daughter,’ he whispered, again. ‘She’s not here. Se’Saera is not here. She was, but then she wasn’t. I was riding towards her and then she wasn’t there. I was screaming and then I wasn’t. She won’t take my eyes out of envy. She won’t take what I see and show me battles I won’t fight in. She won’t show me that all who I love are dead.’ Eilona began to speak, to tell him that she was safe, but Reila lifted her hand. No, she mouthed. Listen. ‘Se’Saera can’t see us. She can’t see our lives. That is why she takes our eyes.’ He relaxed into her arms. ‘She can’t hear us tonight,’ he said, his voice slurred. ‘She has had to turn her attention away. She has had to stop listening to our screams. To my screams. She has had to leave me. But she’ll be back. She’ll take my eyes when she comes back.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said quietly, her vision blurred by tears, ‘It’s okay.’
‘Something has happened,’ he said, as if he had not heard her. ‘Something has begun . . .’ His voice faded and Eilona lowered her ear to his mouth. ‘Tell your mother she has only this moment, Eilona.’
Voices erupted in argument below, but Elan Wagan had stopped speaking. His head rested on her shoulder, his breath steady, his body curled like an infant’s. Yet, driven by her stepfather’s lucidity, Eilona laid him on the cot and rose. As she did, she heard footsteps outside the open window. At the sound, she began to run out of the room.