Leviathan's Blood (12 page)

In the garden, the cart stopped and the men with the axes and saws began to circle a pair of trees. ‘When do you plan to allow the Mireeans to leave Wila?’ Ayae asked.

‘For the moment,’ Aelyn Meah said, ‘I have no plans.’

‘For the moment?’

She smiled, but there was no friendship in it. ‘I hear you talk to my brother,’ she said. ‘My guards tell me you are a regular visitor.’

‘No one has said that I shouldn’t be,’ Ayae said.

‘Nor will anyone.’ The sound of an axe hitting a tree trunk reached them dully. ‘You know what he did in Asila, don’t you?’

‘He has told me. He has also told me that he is not the man he once was.’

‘He is not that man, at least.’ Aelyn turned from the garden to her crowded office. It was not a large room. Ayae suspected that it was the smallest room in the Enclave. It nestled
in the highest, but shortest spiral of the building and the roof and walls of the room curved steeply inwards. The majority of the space was taken up by books and papers, filling the walls in
double and triple stacks, leaving only two doors unblocked. The first was the dark wooden door through which Ayae had entered. The second – lighter than the first – led to a sleeping
chamber. ‘But he reveals an important fact about the nature of atrocities.’

‘Which is?’

‘The further you are from them, the easier they are to forgive and forget. Take a seat.’ Aelyn indicated a cushioned chair, barely visible between books. ‘You have killed,
haven’t you?’

Ayae left the window. ‘In the siege.’

‘When your blood was up.’ The other woman smoothed her gown, eased into her own chair. ‘That is how I killed my first man. I was young then. No different from so many others at
that time. I had a job in an inn pouring drinks. I was learning to read. I had to work for the money to go to school because not everyone was taught, then. The man I killed came into the bar with
four others. They thought that they could rob the inn. They thought that they could take what they wanted. They were not very imaginative, so what they wanted was money and flesh. I drove a knife
into the first man’s stomach when he came close. I spent days afterwards washing my hands.’

Ayae thought of the first man she had killed. She remembered the filed teeth and the ruined eye socket. ‘Do you still remember what he looked like?’

‘Not now,’ Aelyn replied. ‘Once, I did, quite vividly. I stopped dreaming of him months after I had killed him, but I only stopped looking for him when years had passed. I have
not even thought of him until now for . . . it must be two thousand years, at least.’

‘I’ll not forget,’ Ayae said. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to.’

‘You will.’ She was matter of fact. ‘You will be glad to, soon enough. If you do not, you will be like Qian. You’ll hear the voice of every man and woman and child who
has died and it will distort the world for you. I do not think any of us fully comprehended that until Asila. We had heard him talk about what he saw, but it was not until the Five Kingdoms had to
be destroyed that we understood it, I think. I was wary that he would still have that view when he was released, but he has mostly preached a form of inaction much like what Yeflam is built on
– or he did, until very recently.’

‘He has a reason,’ Ayae said. ‘You yourself just said that you understood it.’

‘I do. But you and I are not like him. Neither are the people of Yeflam. It is not difficult to forget. It just takes time. In truth, we overlook deaths every day. We must, for our sanity.
Our minds cannot comprehend the fact that hundreds and thousands of people die in war, poverty and disease. They die every day from these things. It is for our own survival that we have such
callous disregard. Some of that needs to come to Yeflam in respect of the Mireeans. They need to forget Fo and Bau’s deaths. At the moment, with the presses printing what they are, it is
difficult.’

‘You own those presses,’ Ayae said. ‘You could stop them writing about Captain Heast and Lady Wagan. You could stop them reporting on Leera’s threat – which is
not
tied to Fo and Bau.’

‘I do not own all of them,’ Aelyn said. ‘In fact, I do not personally own any. Other Keepers own them – as do wealthy individuals throughout the cities. Not all of them
are happy and they are letting it be known. For myself, I do not want the Mireeans to be on Wila. The sooner I have them out of there, the sooner I can get rid of the priests who are in my streets.
I’m hoping that you will help with this. Indeed, I have made sure that there is an office on the lower levels for you.’

Ayae began to speak, to reject the offer.

‘You should take it,’ Aelyn said. ‘I am not your enemy, Ayae,’ she added, tiredly. ‘I am not my brother’s enemy, either. I just want to maintain
peace.’

Had there ever really been peace?
Ayae thought it was a naive thing for Aelyn to have said, much less believe. The thought remained, long after she had left the Enclave, after she had
returned to the streets of Nale. There, the ox plodded past her, the cart full of white wood. None of the men who had cut it down spared her much of a glance, but Faje, who came last, offered her a
polite, if impersonal nod.

Later, when she had returned to Zaifyr’s lonely estate, when she had told him what Aelyn had said, he dismissed her words. ‘War has already come to Yeflam,’ he said. ‘She
knows that. That is why the priests are here. They’re the scouts, the first wave, like the raiders in Mireea. But the child knows that she cannot send cannibals here. You don’t ride
into Yeflam with steel and flesh and bend it to your will. You do it by attacking the Keepers’ right to godhood. You talk about the things they cannot fix.’

Ayae had heard the priests speak on the streets. ‘The sun and the ocean,’ she said. ‘But Faise tells me that that is what the Keepers say they will do all the time.’

‘That was always Aelyn’s goal,’ he agreed. ‘But she will not share it with them, I assure you.’

At the gates, one of the guards made from wind turned to Zaifyr. ‘Lady Aelyn requests that you do not leave.’ Its voice sounded like a thousand whispers spoken upon
each other. ‘There is nothing in the night for you, she says.’

‘There are priests,’ he said, walking past the guard. ‘You can tell her, but she knows that already.’

The night-lit streets of Nale ran ahead of him. On the corners and intersections stood the cold and frail figures of haunts to direct him towards the priest. Unseen by others, they led him
through late-night crowds; they ushered him into streets that passed dull bars and nearly empty restaurants; they took him to the sound of waves, to the edge of Nale and the sight of the bridge
that crossed into the Spires of Alati, where the tall universities and schools lay. The haunts did not lead him across the bridge. The woman he was searching for had not left Nale. She had turned
down a narrow alley, just as he did. She had gone to the small hotel that sat at the end, the hotel that was lit by two lamps; the third, high up on the building, had gone out.

The priest stood outside the front, but she was not alone. A male priest was beside her, but what surprised Zaifyr was that the two were in the company of three other men, who did not wear the
brown priestly robes of the priests.

All five were in deep conversation and Zaifyr could hear their voices, the sound carried by the night-silence of the city and the narrowness of the alley, but magnified in such a way that the
voices overlapped and cut across each other:

‘No, we’re not here for—’

‘—we hate to see people in pain.’

‘It will be winter soon—’

‘—hard to find work—’

‘—years in Gogair sleeping in snow—’

‘No, just campaigns of dead men and frostbite—’

‘—you shouldn’t have to carry the shame of amputation—’

‘—a small bit of magic, a gift from our god—’

‘—for our friends.’

Zaifyr had still not identified all the speakers when a haunt beside the female priest cried out in a voice that only Zaifyr could hear. With a small knife in her hand, the priest cut into her
thumb, and used her blood to draw power from the dead, to take from it so she could regrow the fingers of one of the men before her.

His power answered without thought: suddenly the haunt appeared among the five, the image of a young woman sketched into shape by broken white lines. She might have once been pretty, but her
face was distorted by streaks of pain and by the piercing scream that came from her throat. She snatched the man’s hand and tore his new, half-grown fingers from it. His scream matched hers
and his two friends grabbed him by the shirt in an attempt to pull him away. One even cried out to the two priests to help.

But they had run into the hotel.

Zaifyr sprinted past the haunt, whose scream turned into a horrible high-pitched wail as the man was pulled from her by his two friends, but she was on the three of them again moments later,
just as Zaifyr shouldered the hotel door open.

He moved quickly across the dull wooden floors to the stairs.

A haunt waited there, pointing upwards, indicating the direction the priests had taken. As he put his foot on the first step, a guard appeared before him. Even as she reached for her sword, the
haunt that had directed him leapt forward and snatched the blade from her scabbard in a small burst of Zaifyr’s power. It was enough to give a glimpse of the child that appeared and
disappeared and no more.

In the narrow hall of the next floor, a pair of haunts waited. Both directed him down the hall, where the doorway at the end slammed.

Inside – the door had not been locked – the two priests stood on opposite ends of the room. The male was by the window, the glass punched out by his robe-covered arm, while the
female was at the other side with two leather packs in her hands. Neither bag looked particularly full, but Zaifyr’s glance at both packs was enough to cause the man to punch out the
remaining glass and step towards the window. At the same time, the woman shouted, ‘
Go!
’ and hurled one of the bags at him. Her arm was halfway through the motion before the
haunt of a middle-aged man wrapped his arms around her, and his lover, a younger man, took hold of the other priest in the window.

‘You two.’ Zaifyr closed the door gently behind him. ‘You two are in trouble.’

‘We know who you are,’ spat the woman. ‘I saw you earlier, Madman! We are not afraid of you!’

The pack she had attempted to throw had landed on the floor. He picked it up and upturned it onto the first of the two beds in the room.

A few coins, a knife and a book fell out.

‘Those are not for you!’ the man cried. ‘
She
will not allow it.’

‘
She
is not here.’ It was a mid-sized book, the cover made from leather, but without a title or author printed on it. With the tips of his fingers, Zaifyr reached for it,
intending to flip it open to see if it was
The Eternal Kingdom
, but as he touched it—

—it broke apart and disintegrated.

The male priest laughed. ‘She will not allow it,’ he repeated. ‘She will not allow you to read her words.’

‘You wanted to go out of the window, didn’t you?’ The man’s shout was lost as the haunt thrust him through the broken glass and out onto the street below. It was not a
long enough fall to kill him, but it was enough that he landed painfully, that he broke his leg, that he could not rise quickly – certainly not quickly enough to outrun the haunt that Zaifyr
had left on the street.

‘Do you have one in your bag?’ he asked the other priest, after the screams began. ‘Do you both have a book?’

‘You—’ The screams ended suddenly, causing her voice to stop. ‘You’re a monster,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to kill him.’

‘What is it that you think you did outside?’ Zaifyr asked, approaching her. ‘Do you think that your blood has power? That you take from yourself? Do you not know that you use
it to steal from the souls of the dead?’ The haunt that held her tightened his grip and whispered to Zaifyr that he was hungry. ‘No, you know. You know what you do. For nearly three
thousand years, I outlawed blood magic because of what you do. I made witches and warlocks the rarest of creatures. I did to them what I did to your friend. But they at least did not hide what they
did. They admitted that it was born in pain and suffering and that they themselves would share that fate.’

‘We will not,’ the priest hissed. ‘We are
hers
. She is the last god, the only god. She owns us. If you believed, you would understand that.’

‘I do.’ The second pack lay at her feet. He picked it up as a white light filled the room, as it caught the edges of his charms. ‘Of all the people in Yeflam, I am probably the
only one who knows as you do.’

The white light of the haunt from the street fell over the priest’s face. ‘You are not Faithful,’ she whispered. ‘To know is not enough.’ The haunt was stained in
blood and horrific to look at, but at least her screams had stopped.

‘Take the book out for me,’ Zaifyr said.

The priest shook her head.

‘The blood on her face is not yours,’ Zaifyr said. ‘Not yet.’

Slowly, her terror of the cold, dead woman settled through her and the priest reached into the pack and took out the book.

He tossed the bag aside. ‘Open it for me.’

She hesitated, then flipped it open. The pages were blank.

‘You cannot read it, you cannot touch it,’ she whispered. ‘But my god knows that I hold it. She knows that my life is hers. She knows that I give it freely.’

And, without sound, without evident injury, the Leeran priest slumped to the ground.

He reached out for her, intent on grabbing her haunt, on pushing into her mind; but as he reached for her, as his power took hold, the priest was drawn away from him. He felt her – then,
suddenly, he did not.

In her place, he saw for a moment a large dark shape, a shadow that was so huge and encompassing that it left him powerless.

Another two articles about Heast and Refuge were printed during the week and he read both while still in his room in The Engorged Whale. The authors wrote about how Refuge
broke in Illate: they related how two hundred soldiers died in a battle that ran through two villages, but the details of individuals were never clear and never consistent with the day itself.
There were hints of betrayals that hadn’t happened, cowardice that never eventuated. It left Heast unmoved, but he kept reading. He read the descriptions of the Ooilan armies and knew they
were twice the size of those mentioned; neither author discussed the slave trade that had ruined generations in Illate; nor did they mention the desire of Illate to be free; the destruction of the
Illate armies was barely touched upon, the mass graves no more than a couple of sentences. But both pieces mentioned that it was in these battles that Heast lost his leg. They said that, because of
it, he had been spirited away in the final days of the battle. He had heard that before: it was one of the strongest rumours in the months after Refuge’s defeat. It meant nothing to him
compared to the other lies in the articles, but he knew that the point of both was not Refuge, Illate or Ooila, but to circle back to Mireea. The authors wanted further to reason that the retreat
from the Spine of Ger and the arrival of the Mireeans on Wila were failures of his. More than that: it was a portent of worse to come. Neither article did it well, but the combination of
Gaerl’s disinformation and the memories of Refuge’s final days succeeded in returning Heast to his memory of Leviathan’s End, to the judgement that Onaedo delivered to Bnid Gaerl
upon the smooth deck of the ship that she made her home.