Leviathan's Blood (34 page)

‘It is.’

Soon, Zaifyr left her. He returned to collect his books, to bring her food and water and to speak to her, but for the most part, he gave her space. Jae’le was similar. He came into her
room quietly, spoke softly, but was a reluctant and poor carer, his attention always outside the door that he came through. Ayae understood that. Though she did not leave her room for the first
days after she awoke, she was aware of both men in the house below her, aware of their presences as they prepared for Zaifyr’s trial, though neither spoke directly of it to her. She was
thankful for that. She heard their voices through the floorboards and, in her dreams, Zaifyr’s upcoming trial and her guilt would entwine, blending Faise and Zineer with Fo and Bau. She would
awake believing that she should be subject to judgement, to the punishment Zaifyr was not seeking.

The thoughts might have lingered had not Aelyn Meah visited Ayae on the fifth day after the death of Faise and Zineer.

Ayae was not in her room when Aelyn arrived, but on the top of the tower. She had made the walk in the early hours of the morning to gaze at the smouldering ruins of Xeq, a walk she had
envisaged since she awoke, a vision that had been conjured in her dreams. When she took the final steps onto the top of the tower, the first thing that struck Ayae was that it looked nothing like
her dream. No smoke rose from Xeq, and the black sea lay still around Yeflam, as if it had been stilled by the violence she had created, as if it had been cowed by the cold destruction that rose
above it.

‘There will be no charges laid against you for Xeq.’ Aelyn Meah spoke as she stepped out of the stairwell. She offered no greeting. She wore a gown of blue and white, the latter a
thick fabric woven into the waist and hem to give the impression of layers and depth. ‘Perhaps you are lucky in the timing of it, but politics is mostly responsible.’

‘Politics.’ Ayae said the word as if it was an insult. ‘What I did was terrible.’

‘It was exactly what Bnid Gaerl deserved.’

‘I did not mean him.’

‘I know.’ Aelyn did not meet her gaze, but stared out across Yeflam. ‘There was little to discuss in the Enclave, but outside it, I thought there might be a call for justice.
Lian Alahn has seen to it that no such call has emerged. He argued the righteousness of your defence to the Traders’ Union and the survivors of Xeq.’

Ayae was surprised, but she did not feel relieved by it. Illaan’s father would not have done it for her, or for the memory of his son.

‘He asked me to convey to you that he wishes to meet,’ Aelyn continued. ‘He told me that he wants to offer his sympathies. It may be, however, that he desires to thank you for
weakening the Empty Sky. Without them, Le’ta’s supporters have returned to their old friendships with Lian Alahn, and Le’ta himself has been driven underground. No one has seen
the fat man for days, though many have looked. It has given more evidence to the theory that Le’ta has sided with the Leeran god. That he has been publishing
The Eternal Kingdom
.
Le’ta’s supporters have gone back to Alahn just as quickly for fear of being painted with the same brush.’

‘I feel as if I’m being pulled at,’ Ayae murmured. ‘As if a part of me is trying to break off.’

‘All of us feel the same,’ the other woman said. ‘It is worse when you are near her.’

‘You met her?’

‘Yes.’ Aelyn finally met her gaze. ‘She is not the child that Qian spoke about. She is nearly an adult and quite beautiful. When she walks down a street, crowds flood around
her.’

‘Maybe she is not the same person?’ Ayae suggested.

‘She can alter her appearance. That may be why, for the Leerans, and for my brother, she appeared as a child. A child is unable to protect itself and empowers those around it to do so. But
beyond the borders of Leera, the image of a child is not what she needs. She will not inspire devotion or adoration as an infant. To be that, she needs to be more. The appearance she has taken
leaves behind her need for protection, though not completely. For some, she will still need to be protected; for others, she will be an object of purity, of lust, and of obsession.’

‘What is she to you?’

‘I am undecided.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I have said that one day I will be a god.’ Aelyn laid her hands on the stone before her, on the house she did not live in. ‘It may be that such a path does not exist
for me, or for you, or the others who live in Yeflam. It could be that the path is only available to the child who has come to Yeflam – but what I feel around this girl is different to what I
feel beside the remains of a god. Yet, whatever she may or may not be, the truth is that the responsibility of how to react to her is mine. I have said to the people of Yeflam that I have a wisdom
and knowledge that they do not. I have said that to the Enclave as well. When I say to both that I will go to war or I will know peace, the
I
that I use is
we
and the
repercussions are
ours
.’

‘How do we hold a god accountable for the crimes it commits?’ Zaifyr heard his sister address the crowd before he saw her. ‘That is the question at the heart
of the trial we begin today. Today, you will stand in judgement of a man who is not mortal. A man who once saw himself as a god. A man who was once viewed as a god. A man who has worshipped and
feared. You will stand before him and you will judge him, though not a single one of you is his equal. Not one of you could defeat him in combat, not one of you knows the history that he knows, and
not one of you has lived the lives that he has lived. It is only when you stand with each other, when you represent your families, your friends and your loves, that you have authority over
him.’

She stood beneath the twisting bone-white branches of twenty-three trees, their pale limbs a crown much too large to wear or assume. On either side of her – a few steps back – were
the empty plots of Bau and Fo’s trees, the torn earth smoothed over to look like recent graves. Between them was a huge podium made from dark wood so red it verged on black, on which sat a
dozen men and women – the judges. Mortal on one side, immortal on the other, they watched Zaifyr intently as he was led through the centre of the crowd. He was unchained, but with a guard on
either side of him – one immortal, one mortal. The first was the Soldier, Xrie; the other was a female soldier whose name was Oake. She had close-cut snow-white hair and looked as if she had
been carved from ice.

Before the judges was a sealed glass box, small and square, the companion to the dozens of tall glass cylinders that were peppered throughout the crowd.

‘The man who is led past you is known by many names,’ Aelyn continued. ‘Today, he will be referred to by the name he has used the longest. That name is Qian. For some of you,
his name will resonate. For a great many others, it will not. Whether you know it or not, what is important to know is that Qian stands before you because he has committed a crime. He has killed Fo
and Bau, two Keepers of the Divine. He did this in Mireea, on the back of Ger’s Spine, in a city that is now in ruins. In killing Fo and Bau, he broke a law that was made by his peers to
ensure that the War of the Gods could not begin again. He was fully aware of this law when he broke it. Indeed, he does not deny that he broke the law when he killed them. What he will insist today
is that it does not matter that he killed Fo and Bau. To Qian, their deaths are meaningless because there is a larger threat that stands before us. A threat that must unite us before we are
consumed by it.

‘He therefore does not argue a mortal defence to you. He argues, instead, an immortal one.’

In the last few days, after the judges had been announced, Zaifyr had learned who they were, had learned so that they were not strangers to him.

He had been unsurprised to find Kaqua at the centre of the Enclave’s representation. For all that his presence spoke of bias, either he or Aelyn had to head the Keepers’
representation. The crowd would accept no one else. According to Jae’le, Kaqua had resisted, had said that he could not, because of the very public knowledge of his role in the Million
Ghosts, but no one would admit that Aelyn’s presence as a judge was tenable. When Kaqua had accepted, Jae’le said that he had done so gruffly, angrily, though Jae’le believed a
part of it was an act. Still, if he was partial to Zaifyr’s guilt – and Zaifyr had to admit that it was likely – his presence paled next to the Keeper beside him. The brittle gaze
of Eira, the Cold Witch, had not left him since he had come within sight of the podium.

‘She controls what is written about you in the papers,’ Jae’le had said to him earlier. ‘She has let some bitter things be written about you.’

‘I have never met her.’

‘She was Fo’s lover.’

Next to Eira sat Kalesan, the Beauty, a man whose dark androgynous form held the division between the male and female body with a strange, alien ugliness. Zaifyr had been told that Kalesan
claimed to alternate his gender roles, and on the first day of the trial, he was a male, by body and by the black and dark-blue trousers and shirt that he wore. Next to him was a slim,
olive-skinned woman named Resao, the Swarm, a woman who was much feared by farmers for what she could – and occasionally did – to land holdings.

After her sat Mequisa, the Bard, who flowed in finery. He had been the first champion and first funder of the fabled presses of Yeflam. Beside him, the last of the Enclave’s
representatives, sat Fiel, the Feral. He was a squat, red-haired and bearded man who, in taking after Hienka, the god of Zaifyr’s childhood, had come to represent anarchy and rebellion
against the established order.

On the other side of the Pauper sat the mortal men and women of Yeflam. The head of them was Lian Alahn, present as a high-ranking figure from the Traders’ Union. His son Illaan Alahn had
been Ayae’s partner, a man whose dislike for Zaifyr had been based, Zaifyr assumed, on a bigotry he had learned from his family.

‘There was some debate in the Enclave about that very fact,’ Jae’le said when Zaifyr pointed it out. His tone was one of dry distaste, for he had found the endless debating of
the Enclave to be tedious. He thought, Zaifyr knew, that Aelyn should simply do away with them all. ‘He is said to want power to be given to mortal men and women in Yeflam, but he is also a
moderate when it comes to war. It is believed that he will be a balance to the Bertan Brothers.’

Fean and Gall Bertan were the largest owners of farmland in the south of Yeflam, a pair of large, hulking white men. They were grey- and silver-haired and had, until recently, been strong allies
of Benan Le’ta.

Beside the two brothers sat Saliense Ma’Laar, a small elderly woman whose skin was a dark black. She was an academic who had been born on one of the small islands spread throughout
Leviathan’s Blood and she had become a strong voice in favour of evolution in the Keepers, suggesting that divinity was the natural end-product of the men and women who ruled the Floating
Cities. Next to her, Gaarax Gaarax, a youthful-looking man of pale skin and twisting dark-patterned tattoos, was also an academic, though based in Zoum. According to Jae’le, he argued
similarly to Ma’Laar, though he claimed that it was anything but natural and rather a universal necessity.

At the end of the line of judges sat Olivia Raz, a middle-aged woman who had begun to lose shape in her body. She was responsible for a large amount of the cheap pamphlets and newspapers that
were printed throughout the cities. Hers was one of the presses that the Enclave had enlisted to help explain the long glass containers that had been secured throughout Nale.

Aelyn continued to address the crowd before her:

‘You are a jury of one thousand and one. You have been selected carefully to represent the mortal men and women of Yeflam in this trial.’ She held up her hands, revealing a pair of
stones, one red and one white. ‘You will listen to both the mortal accusation and the immortal defence today. You will hear the arguments that are laid out by the men and women you see before
you and the defence. To do so fairly, you should clear your minds. You should listen to your intellect and your heart. You should be modest and you should be proud of your presence here today. You
will make history. We will all make history.’

Lastly, as he approached the podium, Zaifyr felt the child. The pain of her sharpened against him, but he did not see her until he was led to stand at the right side of the judges. He had heard
that she was not a child in appearance any more, but when he first found her in the crowd, he saw not the woman that she had made herself into, but the broken body she had controlled while he had
been no more than a haunt: he saw what she had done to that body when he recalled Anguish. The image lasted for but a handful of seconds, and when he looked at her again, he saw that she was young
and beautiful. Her blonde hair fell in a wave down to her shoulders. Her eyes were green – the green he had seen first in the mind of a haunt – and she met his gaze through the crowd
with a casual ease, with no hint of fear.

Beside her stood priests in brown robes and his brother, Eidan. He was behind her, a man who could reach out and snap her neck with a single movement, but he was a man who could not – or
would not – do so.

You gave me a name, brother: Lor Jix, Captain of
Wayfair
. An ancient dead. What is it that you know that I do not?

‘Each of you holds a stone of red and a stone of white. A stone for guilt and innocence. Only one can be placed in the glass tubes at the end of this trial,’ Aelyn said. ‘You
have given blood for each and the blood you have given will ensure that you can cast only one. The other will crumble into the palm of your hand once your vote is cast. At the end of this trial,
your votes will be tallied, and the verdict will be reached – at which point, the men and women behind me, the judges of this trial, will act.

‘I have faith in you. I have faith in all of you, but I cannot stand beside you as you pass judgement. Qian is my brother. We have stood together on every continent in this world. We have
fought together. We have grieved together. We have ruled together. In the Five Kingdoms, he was the ruler of Asila, the man who was known as the Speaker of the Dead, and later, after all five had
fallen, the Madman. He has performed both great and horrific actions. If he is found guilty of a mortal crime, he will be sentenced to imprisonment in the poisoned lands of Eakar. He will be locked
in a small tower that has been made by myself and my family. He will have no access to food or water or mortal or immortal company. He will be kept in there until future generations decide he will
be released. For, if Qian is found guilty of his mortal crime, if his immortal defence does not convince you to overlook his actions, then it will be you and your kin who will decide when, or if,
he is released. Once before, immortals held that key, and if he is found guilty, then it is our judgement that has failed you. If he is found guilty, the key cannot be held by the same people who
held it before. Such a change is, we feel, only right.’