Leviathan's Blood (35 page)

Ayae left the house stiffly, heavy still with grief, but not reluctance. She arrived at the Enclave in a small carriage that she shared with Jae’le.

The carriage had struggled through the crowds and was finally forced to stop three blocks from the Enclave. It was halted by Yeflam soldiers who were directing traffic. Ayae had been aware of
the swelling crowd as they drew closer to their destination, but she was still unprepared for the sea of people before her when she stepped from the door of the vehicle. The crowd was of such a
mass and density that she would have struggled to make her way through to the Enclave had not Faje and half a dozen soldiers been waiting for her and Jae’le. Even with them, the walk was
slow. Fortunately, Ayae was not affected by the heat as others around her were. It had come from a mixture of the mass of bodies around her and an unseasonable, eerie calm in the weather that
resulted in a dead, clear sky, where not even the flags on the Yeflam Guard’s barracks moved. The morning’s sun caught the tops of the long glass tubes and food vendors struggled to
raise their voices over the crowds. Pamphlets and papers littered the road, torn from the stacks that had been left for people to take. She heard shouts, but mostly the crowd was well behaved, in
part due to the increase of blue armour. Yet, as the presence of the Yeflam Guard grew, so did that of the Leeran priests. They appeared in pairs and sometimes more, often standing around the glass
cylinders. Had the crowds not been so loud, she would have pointed that out to Jae’le – the first words that either would have spoken since they left Aelyn’s home.

Faje led them to a part of the crowd opposite the largest collection of Leeran priests. There the feel of teeth against her skin grew, much stronger than she had ever felt. Yet, it was
different, as if the skin that was exposed no longer felt the sharpness of the child’s need; the sensation was in the flesh beneath, the muscle and veins and sinew. Composing herself against
the feeling, Ayae found the beautiful young woman – the child – that the Faithful followed in the group opposite. For her part, the child’s gaze was on the men and women in the
podium, and on no one else. Behind her, however, stood the larger figure of Eidan. Unlike the child, the brother of Zaifyr had no interest in the twelve judges, and instead his gaze flicked along
the crowd, over the Keepers who watched him intently, over Jae’le, who ignored him, and to Ayae.

His gaze left her a moment later when Aelyn appeared on the podium. In a strong, clear voice, she began to speak, while the crowd parted, and Zaifyr was led through the crowd. Throughout it,
Zaifyr stood quietly beside the podium. The charms throughout his auburn hair caught the late morning’s sun, and the stillness of his body gave no threat. In truth, he had a closed, almost
meditative look that suggested a lack of interest or care in what was being said by his sister. He moved only when Xrie, with a gentle touch on his elbow, drew him to the box that stood behind him.
It had been removed from the rest of the podium and held a single seat that he placed himself in, before Xrie and Oake took up positions on either side. Once that was done, Aelyn turned to the
judges, and said, ‘We are ready to begin.’

The judges looked to each other, paper was passed, a few hushed words were said that Ayae could not hear, and then Kaqua, the Pauper, stood.

‘We call Keeper Paelor,’ he said.

The Ranger, dressed in expensive leathers that were more ornament than armour, and with his hair slicked back, stepped onto a second, smaller podium that forced him to face the crowd.

‘You are one of the few men and women who have travelled to Mireea since its fall. You are therefore one of the few who have seen where Keeper Fo and Keeper Bau died,’ Kaqua said.
‘Would you explain to us what happened to them?’

‘They were murdered in the courtyard of the Spine’s Keep.’ Beside Ayae, Jae’le gave a sour grunt at the word
murdered
and a murmur from the crowd accompanied the
language. ‘The bodies of both Keepers were ripped open by what appears to be hand and by tooth, the result of which was a massive trauma to their bodies that they could not overcome. Final
death was most likely the result of blood loss. All fluids had been drained from their bodies, leaving behind crushed veins and internal organs in a state of desiccation. This was especially true
of the heart of each.’

‘How many living creatures can kill a person this way?’

‘Spiders and wasps.’ The Ranger raised his right hand to indicate their size, none bigger than a fingernail. ‘Not one would be a threat to a person.’

‘What else would explain the wounds?’

‘Only the dead raised by Qian.’

‘Would you expand upon that?’ The Cold Witch, Eira, did not rise from where she sat. ‘The dead were raised here in Yeflam without any violence.’

‘That is true,’ the man replied. ‘However, the injuries were consistent with the essays that Keeper Fo wrote about the fall of Asila.’

More questions followed, each designed to give more colour to the scene that Paelor had begun to draw. Fiel asked about Fo’s connection to Asila; Kalesan added to it by asking for the age
of the Keeper, linking it to the date of the fall of Asila. The six Keepers began their narrative with ease, with none of the other men or women challenging them. Gaarax Gaarax asked about the rest
of the Spine’s Keep, and Paelor spoke of the burnt remains of the tower in Mireea, the broken ground – ‘The tower broke apart from its damage’ – and, to Ayae’s
frustration, none of them tried to expand the story beyond what had happened to the Keepers. Ayae felt herself grow heavier with every answer that Paelor gave, a feeling that only increased when,
with the judges’ questions to the Ranger exhausted, Kaqua turned to Zaifyr and asked him if he had a question for the Keeper.

‘No,’ Zaifyr said, ‘I have no questions.’

The crowd murmured, but fell silent again when, a moment later, Lian Alahn rose. ‘We wish to call Faje Metura to the stand.’

The old man emerged from the crowd in the same faded pale-blue robes that he had worn since Ayae had first met him on the road to Yeflam. He walked with a severe dignity and took Paelor’s
place on the podium.

‘Tell us,’ Alahn said, ‘on what orders did Keepers Fo and Bau go to Mireea?’

‘A request had come from the Lady of the Spine, Muriel Wagan, for aid against the Leerans,’ Faje replied immediately. ‘The Enclave met in the month of Deuan to respond. It was
during that time that the Keepers of the Enclave agreed to send Fo and Bau in an observation roll to Mireea. It was agreed upon by all that the neutrality of Yeflam would not be broken. Both Fo and
Bau were instructed to leave before the fighting began.’

‘Deuan,’ Alahn mused. ‘Was that not shortly after the epidemic on Xeq?’

‘It was.’

‘What was the Enclave’s response to the disease?’

‘No conclusive evidence has ever been produced to link Keeper Fo and Keeper Bau to the sickness on Xeq. Yet, because of their work in treating the sufferers, it had been reported in the
papers of Olivia Raz that they were responsible, resulting in a public outrage.’ At Faje’s words an angry ripple passed through the crowd and Ayae heard, more than once, a man or a
woman claim that it had not been the
papers
that caused the outrage. ‘Because there was no evidence that could prove either their guilt or innocence, members of the Enclave, led by
Keeper Kaqua and Keeper Aelyn, argued in favour of both going to Mireea so that public anger could subside.’

Lian Alahn waited for the murmur of anger to calm. ‘And their response?’ he asked, once Nale fell quiet.

‘They believed it was a politically weak move.’

The new leader of the Traders’ Union smiled as the crowd burst out in complaint.

Once order had been restored, Mequisa, the Bard, attempted to challenge the characterization of Fo and Bau, but his point that both had gone, regardless of what they thought, echoed flatly in
the crowd. It was clear that Alahn had dulled some of Paelor’s testimony in favour of Zaifyr, and Ayae was pleased when Fean Bertan pressed Faje for other instances of disease outbreak. None
could be officially proved, Faje responded, but when Gall Bertan listed two outbreaks in the last thirty years, the steward had to admit that the two Keepers could not be exonerated completely.
Yet, with the characters of Fo and Bau sitting on the edge of immoral, needing only to be pushed further to complete such a representation, Zaifyr still did not rise from the box.

As with Paelor, Kaqua turned to Zaifyr once the judges had finished questioning Faje, and asked him if he had a question.

‘No,’ the charm-laced man said. ‘I have no questions.’

‘What is he doing?’ Ayae whispered to Jae’le. ‘He had an opportunity to press – he needs to do that.’

‘He is searching for his witness,’ he replied. ‘He has been searching for the remains of the man all week – he searches still.’

The heaviness of her body felt as if it grew, and she said, ‘He should not ignore them.’

‘He has no choice.’

After the ruined coastline, Ce Pueral no longer buried the dead.

Lanos led them on a trail that proved, at times, deceptive, and at others, honest. At Enalan, the first village they came to after the coast, the trail told the horror of Aela Ren stalking the
edges. Once he had circled it twice, he had sat on the long limb of a branch beneath the afternoon’s sun and watched the people end their day and close their gates. He ate nothing, drank
nothing, and left no leavings, but his thick-soled boots scored the tree as he climbed it, and he made lines in the flesh of the tree with his fingernail, a count of the people before him. When he
dropped from the branch – in the last of the afternoon’s light, to judge by the final score on the tree – he moved to the pens of animals and the warehouses. His trail was easy to
follow, Lanos’s old face in a permanent scowl as the pigs and chickens gathered around his feet, following him into the open barns and silos where food was spilled next to blood. ‘He
killed them all in here,’ the tracker murmured. ‘It was not like the beach: they fought him here. They defended themselves. They came into the barns to hold him out. But it did not
work. He waited – he released the animals and he waited. You can see by their waste that they stayed behind the doors for a week at the least. Enough time for the smells to get to each of
them, for the little fights to begin, for the animals to start calling for them, for the children to hear the animals and want to go to them, for people to start saying that he wasn’t
outside, that he wasn’t who they thought he was.’

Their bodies were spread throughout. They had been killed by hand, by pitchfork and rake and axe, but not once by sword, not even the few that the villagers owned.

‘Why didn’t he take the swords?’ Lanos had asked.

‘Because he does not need them.’ She dipped her foot under the blade and flipped it over. It was as if new. ‘He is sending a message to us.’

Pueral was not flattered and neither were her soldiers. The witch, Tanith, who had become – if possible – even more silent, began to collect blood from the villagers. She scraped the
samples into a cracked jar from the blade of an old, dull knife. The jar had to be cracked for the spell to work, but Pueral suspected that Tanith would struggle to use it. The Innocent had left
nothing personal in either location, and she doubted that he would in any future ones – and Tanith needed a personal item to give the blood something to grip. Pueral had offered her the
letter the Fifth Queen had given her, but the witch had shaken her head. ‘He did not write it,’ she muttered, before taking her knife to the wounds on the dead, and Pueral said no more.
Just as soldiers sharpened blades and patched armour, a witch had her rituals before battle as well, and she did them beside the soldiers. They all knew that the message left was not a personal
one: if it had not been them who had discovered the beach and its crucifixes first, and if it had not been them to enter the village, then it would have been someone else, and the message would
have remained the same. Regardless of who found it, it was a message of contempt, delivered by a being who believed that the men and women he killed were so far beneath him that he need not even
draw a sword.

After Enalan, the trail continued inland, pushing west, deep and far from the main highway that Pueral and her soldiers had used to travel down to the coast. As if he knew that they were behind
him, Aela Ren led them into isolated land, where rocks lined the ground and sparse trees stood in lonely contemplation. Volcanic ash and butterflies rose and fell in the morning and the evening.
Yet he did not mark a trail to the volcanoes, and Pueral and her soldiers were never forced to wrap their faces for ease of breath. Instead, he led them to another village, and another, with no
sense of deceit until they came upon the first village that had not been destroyed. There, Lanos believed that they had lost him, and that Aela Ren had simply disappeared. So convinced of it was he
that the old tracker spent half a day going through the trail that he had followed, sure it held a lie, a falseness that he had missed, but Pueral trusted the skill that had led him here, and when
she rode into the village, she was unsurprised to be told of a stranger who had stayed a night.

‘He was a scarred man,’ the village leader, a thick-set woman said, ‘but polite. A coop had broken in the evening, and he brought our chickens back.’

‘No, he did not speak much,’ a young man in a tiny hut said two days later. ‘He drank some water from our well and asked the name of the species of butterflies beneath his
feet.’

‘Did you tell him?’

‘What I could.’ The man shrugged. ‘He did not stay long.’

Despite what she heard, Pueral did not doubt whose trail she followed, and neither did her soldiers. They knew that a game was being played, and they knew, also, that the rules had changed.

In her quiet moments, Pueral would think of the beach, and the barns in Enalan, but rarely of the villages that followed. It was as if, after the first two, she had turned off the part of her
mind that recorded memories to spare herself the recurring images of what she saw. It surprised her, for Pueral had been witness to violent acts all her life, and had been responsible for more than
a few. But what she had seen on the beach had been singular, not just in the acts of violence, but in the force of will that delivered them – a will that was, she believed, now demonstrating
to her just how easy it was for him not to kill, how little life and death meant to him, a statement made somehow worse by the lives he spared after the deaths he had caused.