Leviathan's Blood (20 page)

Sinae pushed his glass back to Heast, empty. ‘Yet you led him here in chains?’

‘He let us.’ He took the glass. ‘My advice is to keep a low profile while this plays out. But at any rate, I have a request, if you don’t mind?’

‘I don’t dance.’

Heast poured another two glasses. ‘I want you to tell Bnid Gaerl where I am.’

‘Your hands are not that clean, Captain.’

‘They never have been.’ He handed a glass back. ‘But I want you to tell the Captain of the Yeflam Guard where I am as well.’

‘Would you like a small army too?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But I would like you to move Faise and Zineer Kanar to somewhere safe after you’ve done that.’

A soft patter against the window woke him.

‘It is still beautiful to watch,’ Samuel Orlan said. The old cartographer stood at the window between their beds, the morning’s shadow-speckled sun falling over him. ‘I
remember the first time I saw it. I had been told, of course. Everyone who is not born here is told of the mornings of Ooila. But it does not prepare you for the sight. Before I arrived, I was told
the story of how the goddess Maita died and broke against the ground, falling to pieces. Thousands, millions: each piece was so tiny that cracks and holes and slivers in the ground took her deep
beneath the soil, to lava, to the hearts of the volcanoes, to where it was said she bathed while alive. It was said that after she fell, the bottles that the witches held turned cold. They had been
warm until then, but now they froze to the touch. So did the volcanoes. For a night, all of Ooila mourned, thinking that they had lost not just a god, but the souls of their brothers and sisters,
mothers and fathers, lovers and friends. They wept until the morning, until the butterflies emerged. Then they watched them die throughout the day. A few at first, until there was more, and the
tread of men and women broke their bodies. They wept again that night, until the morning, when more rose. Only this time, they noticed that lava in the volcanoes rose with them.’

‘And cooled only when all were dead.’ Bueralan had been told the same as a child. ‘Until I was ten, I thought it a myth.’

Orlan’s laugh was touched with bitterness. ‘Ooilans live near death every day, and think not to blame the gods, not once.’

‘Why blame the dead?’ He pushed back the bedcovers, the hits against the window continuing as he pulled the chamber pot out from beneath the bed. ‘I’m going to find us a
pair of horses this morning.’

‘Are we in a rush?’

After a moment, he nudged the chamber pot back and began to lace his breeches. ‘Tawain has surely sold our whereabouts to the Eyes of the Queen by now,’ he said, reaching for his
jerkin, and his sword.

‘You truly have nothing to fear in relation to that.’

Bueralan grunted in reply, pushed open the door, and left.

Out on the street, the humidity was already starting to rise. Butterflies scattered around him, bursting into the air with each step he took. They were reds and oranges, greens and blues, black
and white, and with so many patterns that no two seemed alike. It was impossible to count. Bueralan suspected that thousands upon thousands were around him, but not all were in the air. Many rested
on the walls of buildings, lying against glass and wood and brick without distinction, while others already lay on the muddy road, their colour nought but brown in death.

He had seen more, deeper into Ooila, but it was only around the volcanoes that one had to be careful of their mass. The faint outline of Karaanas lurked on the horizon, the biggest peak in the
range of mountains that divided the First and Third Provinces. There the sky would remain dark until the midday’s sun reached its zenith and the clouds of sulphur lifted free.

You could die in the morning there, if you were not careful.

The horses he bought were both grey, speckled with black. The merchant – a middle-aged woman whose head had been shaved – said that they were military mounts, at nine and ten too old
for service, but still strong. Both were scarred from front to end from bit and whip and sword, and the taller of the two had a mean eye that Bueralan responded to. The merchant said that they were
a deal: ‘They came together, they leave together,’ she said. For that inconvenience, she had given new shoes to both and offered saddles cheap.

‘You don’t want them that much?’

She already knew that she had made a sale. ‘The tall one tried to take a chunk out of a little girl the other day,’ she said. ‘The smaller has kicked two stable
boys.’

He dropped two of Mireea’s circular, hole-punched essr gold coins into her hand.

‘I’ll have to melt these down.’ One of the Ooilan golden raqs held the weight of two essr. ‘But we’re good. I hope they serve you well.’

He led the horses back to the inn without incident, but at the narrow entrance, his stomach tightened. The stable boy was nowhere to be seen and, inside, many of the stalls had been filled with
hay and saddles, leaving only one empty pair of stalls in the middle. With a rub on the nose of the smaller horse, he led them both in, his boots sounding a lonely beat as he did.

He had tied both horses in the stalls when new steps sounded. Heavy, booted steps, coming from opposite ends of the stable, slow and cautious.

Dropping his hand to his sword, Bueralan stepped into the middle of the stable and looked to his left, then his right.

Three: two first, one last.

He did not recognize any of the shaven men, but there was no mistaking their intent. From the left, the two men held short swords, while the one on the right had a heavy staff. They were not
soldiers, he knew: the rust on their blades was old, and the way they held them in both hands was similar to an axe. The man with the staff was different in that respect: he held his weapon
lightly, the balance of it letting Bueralan know that it had not been simply picked up off the road.

‘Lice really made you all very ugly.’ He drew his sword, felt his stomach settle. ‘I say that as a man who is bald by choice.’

He met the left pair first.

He stepped into them quickly, catching the man with the staff off-guard and leaving him a handful of steps behind. The two men in front of him stepped back, and Bueralan parried a clumsy thrust
from one, using his momentum to carry him past the other. Then, with a quick slash that pushed them back, he spun around, placing the pair neatly before the man with the staff.

One of the sword-wielders spat. Steel-clad hooves lashed out.

The hooves caught the two men with swords first, the back legs of both horses crashing out, uncaring of blade or armour, catching each man in chest and shoulder, before a second kick caught both
in the skull. Only the man with the staff escaped the sudden burst, but his step back – the start of a run – did not have a second as Bueralan shouldered forwards, his sword plunging
into the chest of the man, punching through to the other side. Placing his foot on the man’s chest to withdraw his sword, the saboteur turned back to the two other men, one still alive, but
struggling to rise – a desire never fulfilled, as Bueralan’s sword struck down.

Their bodies had a few coins, little more, but it didn’t matter. Bueralan knew how they had found him – and if Tawain was not responsible, then it was merely someone else who had
noticed him last night – and he dragged the corpses into one of the stalls and hid them behind the hay. He tossed some sawdust down over the blood outside the stalls. It would not fool anyone
who looked hard, but it would do for the time that he needed.

Upstairs, he found Orlan packing. ‘How did it go?’ the cartographer asked, as the door fell shut.

‘Just how I thought it would,’ he replied.

Yet, what of its contents?

You cannot hold
The Eternal Kingdom
unless you have pledged yourself to this new, nameless god. But you can hear it spoken – in parts, though, and never whole. The entirety of the
book is kept for those who are faithful.

What is read aloud is curious, for it is not so much a religious treaty as a treaty on history. It claims to clarify the events that led to the War of the Gods and, like a cheap stage magician,
it raises the curtain of a show that insists that the gods killed each other in an act of love. That what they did for thousands of years was, in fact, a form of ritual suicide that blessed their
only child. That what they were doing was making the world a better place.

—Tinh Tu,
Private Diary

Zaifyr had left a trail of books that Faise and Zineer had attempted to consolidate. They succeeded with the books he had read and did not want, but failed with those he had
not and those he had and wanted to keep. Those remained throughout the estate, lying like a line of his thoughts, left near the front door, or on the table, in the wine rack, on stairs – all
of them seemingly dropped at random. They lay face-down, or on their spines, open at a page he had stopped at, at times with a second book laid over the top. They were old, made from cracked
leather, thin parchment; and they were new, made in clean, straight lines from heavy paper produced in Yeflam. They were originals, copies of originals, translations of originals, written in
languages he knew well, in others he struggled with. Faise had asked him – as she picked up one that looked as if it had fallen beneath a chair – if he remembered any of the ones he
still needed and he said that he knew what they all were.

Most had come from the Enclave’s library. Kaqua borrowed some for him and so did Ayae. But he had gone outside the library as well. An elderly woman who owned an antique bookstore in Nale
had received a number of orders from him, orders that sent her deep into her stacks of books, into narrow heavy-titled lanes that her cane tapped against, where he, gazing through the eyes of a
dead scholar, had isolated a hidden set of expensive treasures.

‘I borrowed the money off Faise to buy them,’ Zaifyr said. He led Jae’le deep into the dark house, letting the shadows of the stacks guide him. ‘They have given me a
couple of names that I can use in the trial, but none is a witness to the War of the Gods. I’m still struggling to find those.’

‘Our own fault.’ The storm petrel drifted from stack to stack, shifting from half-read, to read, to unread titles. ‘We left the mountains after imprisoning you and returned to
riots and revolutions.’

‘The real damage was done before that.’ He entered the back room and struck a match. ‘We burnt much of what was lost.’

‘I know. For our crimes, Tinh Tu spends her days trying to recreate what we destroyed. She may well ask you again to help her recreate those lost books after all this is
finished.’

He remembered the day she had asked in person: a sticky, warm day in the twisting limbs of Jae’le’s house. ‘It is a cruel thing to do to the dead,’ Zaifyr had said to
her. He repeated the same words to his brother now. ‘It is still cruel,’ he added as the wick on the first candle caught light.

‘Is it any less cruel than what you are doing now?’

‘It is for them that I do it.’

‘I have heard those words before.’ The flame reflected in the bird’s dark eyes. ‘They remind me of old times in Asila, brother.’

‘Then do not listen.’

‘I already have that regret.’

‘I thought you wanted to help me, not lecture me.’ He smothered the match’s flame with his thumb, felt the sharp pain. ‘It was you who sent me to Mireea.’

The petrel’s wings fluttered in irritation. ‘I am only concerned for you.’

‘There is plenty to be concerned with.’ Zaifyr picked up the candle, placed its flame next to a second. ‘That is why there are so many books.’

‘What do you search for, exactly?’

‘Mentions of the child, of the gods’ division, of Linae’s death.’ Another candle lit. ‘The latter is proving the hardest, simply because most of it is rereading. We
searched for why the gods went to war a long time ago, but there was no specific evidence for it then, and there is none now. We put it down to the fact that they were alien to us and that we would
never know. Whatever divisions lay between each god we thought would never be known. But what if it was? What if a story that we thought was about someone like you or me was really a story about
the child?’ He shrugged. ‘The rereading hasn’t amounted to much.’

‘Have you considered using recent evidence?’ the storm petrel said. ‘You could argue Ger’s reaction to you.’

‘Using a god as the base of my argument will not make it strong.’

‘All your evidence will be argued against.’

‘Not if I find the right dead.’

‘They will still question, brother.’

‘I watched her destroy a soul.’ Zaifyr finished lighting the last candle, the seventh in the room. ‘I could not do that. Flesh and bone has its limitation, it is true, but
there is more to it. The power she had, the casual cruelty of it. The way it meant nothing to her. She viewed the soul as an object she owned. Once that is shown, no one will question
it.’

‘We were no different at one stage,’ Jae’le said quietly. ‘Souls, minds, flesh, land and air, we once believed that it was all ours. How did we respond to those who
argued against us?’

He met the bird’s gaze. ‘No one spoke against us.’

‘Not until your book, that is.’

Zaifyr did not respond to the barb. With Jae’le’s inhuman gaze on him, he approached one of the unread piles before him and began to flip through the books. ‘Do you plan to
help?’ he asked, pulling a large volume from the bottom.
Against Darkness:
a biography of Sir Alric Caloise, the religious knight, written by his squire.

‘Birds cannot read.’ The petrel shifted to the back of the chair. ‘It’s difficult for me to read more than a title like this.’

‘That is not what I meant.’

‘I will, but I am in Enilr. It will take me a day to reach you. I may even stop to enjoy this country our brother and sister made.’

The joke – even from a bird – fell flat on Zaifyr. His brother had not left the huge branches of his home since the construction of the tower where Zaifyr had been held captive. He
had hidden his flesh away, put his body into exile and travelled only by animal, speaking to his brothers and sisters through the voices of others. It was a sign of how worried he was that he had
come to Yeflam himself.