Leviathan's Blood (2 page)

Qian was one of the first ‘children of the gods’, one of five men and women who believed that they were gods. History would reveal that all five were simply ‘cursed’, as
Ayae would be called, ten thousand years later. Yet, with the four other men and women, whom he called his brothers and sisters, he would conquer much of the world and begin the age known to us as
the Five Kingdoms. That age would end with the publication of a book by Qian entitled
The Godless
. In it, he said that he was not a god. It is a difficult book to find now – it
suffered, as did so much in terms of books and art, in the wars that followed after the Five Kingdoms ended – but
The Godless
laid much of the base from which we form our current
understanding of the gods, and the men and women who are infected by their essence. Unfortunately, at the time of his writing the book, Qian had reportedly succumbed to madness, a result of having
heard and seen the dead for so long. His brothers and sisters were forced to imprison him for a thousand years in a tower that they built in Eakar.

Upon his release from his prison, Qian took the new name Zaifyr. He became something of a wanderer in that time. There are stories of him appearing in Gogair, Faer, even as far away as the White
Empire. It is said that he came to Mireea at the behest of his brother Jae’le, who had been watching the Leerans’ god for years. It was here that Zaifyr met Ayae and helped her better
understand her own powers. In doing so, however, he came into conflict with the two Keepers, Fo and Bau. When the former released a plague in Mireea, Zaifyr was brought to death’s door. In
such a state, he met the Leeran god in the soul of a dead soldier. She offered Zaifyr the opportunity to join her. However, in doing so, she revealed that she was responsible for the purgatory in
which the dead found themselves. She said that the dead, and the living, were hers to do with as she pleased. Furious, Zaifyr vowed to destroy her and, when he awoke, he killed Fo and Bau to set
into motion the events that led the Mireeans to Yeflam.

Imagine yourself there. As we pause to remember the Siege of Mireea this weekend, imagine how it felt to stand beside these three people. As you sit down to eat beside your family, or to walk
through the displays, or read the histories that will be published, imagine yourself beside these three people who carried so many of our hopes unknowingly.

Imagine:

It is the year 1023. The calendar – a relatively new one, considering the world’s long history – is edging towards a new year.

Mireea has fallen. Time has acknowledged Ger’s death. The mountain that he lay beneath is crumbling as his divine body rots. Lady Muriel Wagan and her captain, Aned Heast, have taken the
survivors of their city to Yeflam, where they now must enter the deadly game of politics between the Keepers of the Enclave and the Traders’ Union. On the other side of the Spine of Ger, the
Leeran forces are preparing to invade the Kingdoms of Faaisha. Betrayal awaits there. And in Leera, two men leave a cathedral, a terrible item in their grasp.

The world I knew is being unmade; the world you know is awakening.

Vyra Riemal is the noted historian and author of the
Chronicles of Refuge
. Originally born in the city of Mireea, she now makes her home in the city of Lumu in Yeflam and has done
so for the last thirty-two years. She is the owner of the famous bookshop Surfacing at the End of the World, the only bookstore to have seen two sword fights, one knife fight, a friendly ghost, and
an inordinate amount of romance. (Which was possibly the reason for both sword fights, but, she assures you, not the knife fight.) She shares the space with her husband, her granddaughter, and a
pair of black cats who are ‘cursed’. Well. Most likely.

Leviathan’s Blood was what Ja Nuural’s mother had always called the ocean.

He grew up a day’s walk from the coast and, in the early years of his life, his mother and he would make a pilgrimage to the empty beach each summer. They would leave in the evening, after
the bright, broken shard of the afternoon’s sun had sunk, but the heat remained. In the dark his mother would hold his hand as she walked silently beside her brothers and sisters to the
beach. In the morning’s light, his extended family would build a bonfire on the sand – often in the remains of the previous year’s – and they would eat and drink through the
day and the next night. They would tell the story of how, on the day the Leviathan died, the blood from her body filled the ocean, raising the sea-level and turning the ocean black. For her part,
his mother would tell the story of what happened to everything that had lived in the ocean. All the creatures in its depths, she said, were changed. Some were deformed. Some were turned violent
when they had not previously been. But all had become poisonous to the men and women who ate them.

The stories were laments from the ancestors of fishermen. The Nuural family had nurtured the words for generations and, on those long nights, Ja had lain beneath the smeared stars and dull shape
of the moon and seen visions of men and women striding beneath the waves. He tried to hold his breath as they had – to hold it longer than any other person – and he imagined holding a
spear made from the bones of a creature that had died in the intricate coral reefs of red and gold that had been the Leviathan’s shrines.

He could still hear his mother’s stories, two decades after her death, when he walked across the sand as the father of his own adult child. He could still hear her voice clearly on the
afternoon that he saw the ship
Glafanr
.

He had come to check the rods that leant out into the black ocean. The remains of the day’s butterflies were beneath his feet, their corpses cracking in the sand and on the stone as he
reached the rods and the nets that lay between. The lines had been set in the morning, shortly before the first of the broken suns rose, but the day had yielded little. The heavy lines were slack
in the water; he was not terribly surprised. The night was a better time to catch and he hoped that by the morning the lines would be taut with an inedible creature.

The heavy wooden rods had been attached to steel settings sunk deep into the rocks at the end of the beach. The coloured corpses of butterflies lay in wet circles at the ends of the poles but
were mostly clustered around the spools of the catgut lines. The lines had enough length for most of the black ocean’s large creatures to tire themselves out on, but he knew that in the
depths of Leviathan’s Blood were creatures that could break the line, even tear the rod from its setting and drag it away as if it were a twig.

The rising tide had washed the catgut lines and butterfly corpses into the rock pool between the poles, tangling the lines of both rods. The pool – twice his size in length and easily his
height in depth – had been cut by hand before a net was settled into its base. It was there that the men and women of the village would pull what they caught from the ocean and hold them for
examination. There, the caught beast would be marked and, occasionally, transported elsewhere. The last thing Ja needed was for the lines and rope to be entangled by the morning, so he bent down to
free the lines and carefully pull it out of the pool.

It was when he stood that he saw the ship.

A single ship, far out on the black waves, yet so large, so imposing, that in the fading light of the afternoon’s sun, he could see the red of its sails.

Glafanr
. He did not speak the word aloud.
Aela Ren
. He would not say the name of its captain, either. He— ‘The Innocent,’ he said in a voice that was not yet
a whisper.

Ja’s daughter, Iz, had been the first to tell him the rumours about the ship. Her dark, sharp eyes had pierced him to his chair when, two weeks earlier, she had burst into his hut,
trailing dirt and bright midday sun through the door. She stood in the middle of the room and spoke rapidly, but quietly, like his mother had. There was little other resemblance: Iz was tall and
lean, her skin a deep dark black, not the dark brown, heavy woman his mother had been. In his mid-forties, Ja had more in common with his mother than with his daughter. She took after
her
mother, his wife, who had died a dozen years ago.

‘The wreckage of a ship has washed up on shore,’ she had said. ‘The crew had been nailed to parts of the ship: to the hull, to the deck, to the mast, to the chairs. Nothing had
been stolen: they wore their jewellery and their payrolls had been left intact. They were returning from Gogair—’

‘Some people,’ he said to her, ‘do not like slavers. They think their money is tainted.’

‘The deaths – they are
his
.’

He told her that every wreckage, every lost ship, was attributed to Aela Ren. If it was not the man himself, it was
Glafanr
, his huge, stationary ship that had been moored on the coast
of Sooia for seven hundred years. She knew that, just as he did. She knew better than to repeat the stories she heard. He had been pleased when she had nodded, when she had agreed with him and had
promised not to repeat it in the village.

The next morning, two young families, nine people in total, left the village. It was nine that he could not afford to lose, but he had not been surprised by who left. Both families had come down
to the coast, lured by the gold in his work, by the Fifth Queen’s financial support for what he did; but neither had believed in the task. They had not understood why the witches did not do
the work, why they did not work with the blood in the ocean, why they did not accelerate the process of breeding out the poison and disease in fish. He had told them the stories of what had
happened to the witches and warlocks who had tried just that, but he did not believe that they accepted what he said. They had never stopped asking him why it was necessary to breed the fish the
way they did, why they needed to breed both the large and the small, the dangerous and the sedate, and why all must have the poison of the ocean removed from their flesh.

But they had not left because of the work.

‘It is him.’ The oldest of the women, Un Daleem, had been the one to tell him. A large, raw-boned woman with black skin, she wore a small dark stone around her neck like a blind
third eye. ‘Aela Ren. He is coming here, to the Fifth Province. To Ooila.’

‘You do not know that,’ he said.

‘I hear the stories.’

‘There are always stories.’

‘It is different this time.’

Her gaze never left the empty black waves and the long lines of sunlight that ran towards the village like blades made from the morning’s sun.

‘I have never believed the rumours of his arrival,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Not before this. My mother told them to me the day I was born and every day until her death. Aela
Ren will come. The Innocent is coming. But I would tell her that Aela Ren has had his war on Sooia for seven hundred years. He will not leave that land. That is why no other country ever invaded.
Why no one has gone to help the poor people there. But now . . . now is different, Ja.
Glafanr
has been seen. More than one sailor, more than one ship – you have heard that as well
as I have. And now that wreckage washes up half a day’s ride from here? That was not the work of a raider, or a mercenary, or another country. That was him. That was the Innocent and his army
and Leviathan’s Blood has brought the dead crew as warning to us.’

That had been a week ago, and he recalled Un Daleem’s words with a chill as he stood on the wet rocks, staring at
Glafanr
.

It is not the Innocent’s ship
, he told himself.
Red sails are used by more than one ship on the black ocean. And besides
. . . besides, as he strained his fading
eyesight, he could not see movement on deck.

The ship was abandoned, surely. It was derelict and nothing more.

The words felt more like hope than truth, but he repeated them. Ships struck bad weather. Ships tore their sails. Ships broke their keel. Ships were abandoned for many reasons, and Ja Nuural ran
through the list as he made his way back along the beach, the afternoon’s sun setting in a dark orange light behind him.

In the village he nodded to the few people he passed on the streets, but he did not tell them about the ship. If they noted that there was something strange about him – a tension, perhaps
– they did not comment. The empty houses that stared at all of them with blank eyes gave them more than enough reason to think he was troubled.

Three years ago, he had petitioned the Fifth Queen for funding, not just for his work with the fish, but for the village. The old Queen had died and it was said that the new one was sympathetic
to what he was doing, so he wrote to her. Originally, he had named the village Stone River, but the name had never taken, and the people who lived in it, and those in the area, simply referred to
it as the village. No capitalization, no title. He had used the name Stone River when he had petitioned the Fifth Queen, but when she had approved the funding for more buildings and new wells, she
had signed it to Ja Nuural, ‘of the village’. Yet, despite her support, he had never been able to grow the village as he wanted, had never been able to attract enough people. Many of
the new houses sat like the dark husks of the butterflies, waiting to be crushed and reborn. It was widely believed that the Fifth Queen would not fund him for another year once she found out how
little her gold had bought.

The thought entwined with the image of the ship – not
Glafanr
, but
the ship
, he repeated – and he thought of how much he had worked to build the village, how much
he had sacrificed of his life, of his youth. He considered that as he walked out the other side of the village.

The woods began shortly past the beach, and it was there that a series of large wide rock pools awaited. There were over twenty, including two large enough to hold five creatures that were twice
the size of him. These large beasts had long, ugly teeth. Their grey skin shimmered beneath the surface when they were close, but the light disappeared when they went deeper – and they were
often in the depths for days at a time. In the old books, fishermen had called them sharks, but Leviathan’s Blood had changed them. Their fins were made from hard bone and their dark eyes
wept a black mucus at times of great anger and hunger. They had lost two villagers to the sharks over the last five years, but he still regarded the work as a success: three of the five had only
known the clean water of the pool.