Leviathan's Blood (54 page)

‘And for my crimes, I stand here now.’

‘Your crimes?’ Irritated, he spread his legs out and slouched in the chair. ‘For your crimes, you’re drawing a map on a wall.’

‘And you’re sitting in an expensive chair.’ The quill tip scratched furiously across the pale-orange paint as he spoke. ‘In Jeil, I was given an opportunity to part ways
with you. I had expected it for days and I had, for my part, thought to let you go. It would have been very easy for me to do so. I am not a cruel man and I could see how painful my presence was to
you, but it was clear to me that you did not understand where you were going. You did not understand what had happened to you. Worse, you did not want to know.’ He sighed and lowered the
quill. ‘I tried to warn you what awaited here, Bueralan. I tried to steer you away from Ooila, from the Mother’s Gift, from Aela Ren, and from the child. I may have failed, but I have
not walked away, either. Try to acknowledge that I have done that for a reason.’

Bueralan did
not
want to acknowledge that. ‘Yeah, I’m in your debt,’ he said, but the dry defiance rang false. He cleared his throat. ‘Let me ask you, what will
happen when Ren hears the child’s name? If, that is, he hears her name?’

Orlan turned to him. ‘I imagine he’ll stop his war, if that is what you wish to call it,’ he said. ‘He’ll pledge allegiance to her and take his army to Leera to be
part of a new war.’

‘His fabled army,’ the saboteur said as he turned the words over in his head. ‘How come we haven’t seen that, yet?’

‘Just be grateful,’ he said. ‘It is a sad collection of men and women.’

‘What about the old man from Dirtwater?’ Bueralan asked. ‘Was he one of Aela Ren’s soldiers?’

‘No, not him.’

‘How’d he know you then?’

‘He had met other Samuel Orlans.’ His laugh had a hard edge on it. ‘Not one of the men or women who came before me has been beholden to Aela Ren, a point you should never
forget. He may view you and I as if we are sacred men, Bueralan, but he is a monster made from the wreckage of the War of the Gods. He has lost everything that gave him purpose, and without it, he
has fashioned his own terrible purpose, and of those who have seen it – well, that old fool in Dirtwater is one of the fortunate ones who has avoided it.’

Bueralan began to speak again, began to push further into the mystery of Ren’s army, when his voice was suddenly cut off by the front of the mansion crumbling beneath an explosion.

He was out the door ahead of Orlan. At the end of the hallway, where the first floor gave way to the large, open floor where Aela Ren had slaughtered the Saan warriors, sat two huge piles of
rocks. Roped together by thick netting, they had torn through the balcony and doors. The rocks had been followed by burning pitch, which was now taking hold of the building.

Bueralan and Orlan ran down the hall towards it, but took the first turn that presented to them, keeping ahead of the smoke that was rolling towards them. But soon its long fingers began to claw
ahead, a dark promise as the two turned again and again on their way to the small room that the Queen’s Voice had taken. Neither spoke, either to ask about Taela’s welfare, or about
Ren’s, though Bueralan assumed that no matter the damage done to the front of the mansion, the Innocent had not been killed.

The door to Taela’s room was shut and the saboteur shouldered it open . . . only to be greeted by an open window.

Ayae walked down to the carriage beside Caeli, a cut of the moon finally beginning to show through the fading cloud cover. She believed that the way it revealed itself mirrored
the way in which the world had begun to reveal itself to her. Captain Heast was in Faaisha. Lady Wagan was pushing to move the Mireeans from Wila. Caeli’s words – the words that, as
that first night had continued, and the laq had disappeared, had become more and more blunt – had not explained everything to her, but it had explained enough that, when she eventually slept,
in her dreams the black water around Wila had turned into the battle-scarred walls of her childhood and when she had awoken, Ayae had been able to stand easier than she had since awakening after
Faise’s death.

Before the two women began to walk down to the carriage on the night of Lady Wagan’s meeting with the Traders’ Union, Caeli had taken Ayae out into Yeflam. She had been surprised by
how many more guards filled the streets since she last left the house, and the sound of the Yeflam Navy’s drums had echoed each step she took. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she saw little of the
residents: most remained inside; many of the markets and shops had been shut up, with some of the shopkeepers going so far as to board up the windows.

She had thought that Caeli would leave her after they returned to Faise and Zineer’s house, but she had not. A day waited before Lady Wagan’s meeting with the Traders’ Union, a
day of quiet if she had wished, but instead, Caeli had looked at the broken remains of the back door, at the material Ayae had to fix it, and the two had begun to repair it as best they could. It
was solid labour, work with their hands and, before they left the house to take the carriage to the Traders’ Union meeting, they stood before it to admire the finished product.

There, Caeli offered her a dagger.

‘I still have a sword,’ Ayae said, declining the weapon. ‘It’s in my room upstairs.’

The other woman spun the weapon over her hand and then slipped it back into the leather sheath at the back of her belt. ‘You should bring it,’ she said.

The sword lay on the bed, dropped there after Ayae’s heavy body had threatened to break the bed frame and she had taken to sleeping on the floor.

The carriage that awaited them now was drawn by two horses, both black. At a casual glance, it appeared as most carriages in the streets of Yeflam did. It was made from darkly lacquered wood,
had a single door with a window and a second window at the back, both covered by cloth. Its shell had seen better days, with the salt water leaving stains on the wood, and with an array of chips
and scratches around the bottom of the door where people stepped in and out, and where stones had flown up from the ground. The wheels had fared no better. But the driver, a large white man who
gave the appearance of huddling deeply in a cloak for warmth, did not quite pull the thick covering around him as he might if he were cold, and the look he directed at Ayae and Caeli as they
approached was not that of the casual driver, a man who might appraise either with a gaze she found uncomfortable, but rather he looked at them with a soldier’s gaze. His nod to Caeli, faint
though it was, was that of a subordinate to a superior. Ayae’s observation was further supported when the door to the carriage opened and the Lady of the Ghosts, Muriel Wagan, was revealed to
be sitting within.

The carriage sagged with her heavy weight as she climbed in. ‘Lady Wagan,’ she said.

‘Ayae.’ The carriage jolted as it began to move, interrupting her. Once it settled into its pace, she said, ‘I had thought I would see you here. It is a pleasure, of
course.’

If Caeli’s appearance at her door the other night had suggested a week of living rough, of a series of cold meals, and a cloak wrapped around a sword as a pillow, Muriel Wagan’s
appearance suggested an altogether different experience. She wore the green and white gown that she had worn to the trial, though it had been cleaned since, and had neither the rumple nor crease of
a gown previously worn. Her hair had been freshly dyed, but while the grey had been removed, so had the red, and her hair had a dark-brown colour that sat oddly against her pale skin. It was her
eyes that spoke the most difference, for while Caeli’s had taken on a certain flat hardness, Muriel Wagan’s were set behind dark bags, and had a sharpness to them that Ayae could not
meet for long.

‘Were you told,’ the Lady of the Ghosts asked, ‘that we are going to a brothel?’

Ayae glanced at Caeli who, across from her, shrugged. ‘Sin’s Hand?’ she said.

‘That is the place,’ the older woman said. ‘It is a building I have owned in Yeflam for a long time, just as I own the man it is named after, Sinae Al’tor. Did Aned tell
you of him?’

‘He was to help Faise and Zineer leave,’ she said. ‘He helped them get passages.’

She nodded. ‘Once we leave this carriage, only he out of the people you meet will be trustworthy.’

‘Who will we be meeting?’

‘Lian Alahn and Benan Le’ta.’

The carriage bumped as it began to climb one of the stone bridges between cities.

‘Alahn has wanted to meet you for a long time,’ Lady Wagan said, after it became clear that Ayae would not speak. ‘He has wanted to tell you about the Enclave’s agreement
with Leera. He knew the extent of it before the trial, so his outrage then was opportunistic, of course. I imagine that he still wants to try and convince you to become a tool for him to use to
hollow out the Enclave, since tomorrow’s announcement will make the task he has been working on for years difficult. Since you’ve had no desire to meet him, I can only imagine you will
say no. Still, he is going to help us move the Mireean people from Wila to the southern land of Yeflam over the next month, so he has his uses, even if the price I had to pay for doors to be opened
for him in Zoum was somewhat steeper than I wanted.’

‘And Benan Le’ta?’ Ayae asked quietly, her voice sounding to her as if it were spoken by another. ‘Why is he there?’

‘That,’ she said, ‘is something we all have to wait and see.’

‘Do not look for him tonight, brother.’

‘He is out there.’ The door stood open, a cold wind touching the frame. ‘If he is in need, I cannot ignore him.’

‘After tomorrow, I will help you. We will both help you, but—’

‘Tonight is before tomorrow.’

Eidan closed the door behind him and his heavy steps took him down to the gate.

Zaifyr continued down the stairs to the bottom floor, the shadows of the stairwell falling off him as if he were a spectre. He had been working upstairs when the door had opened and he had
arrived only to hear the end of Jae’le and Eidan’s conversation, but he did not need to ask where the latter was going. He had watched Eidan go past the gate of Aelyn’s estate and
disappear into the dark streets of Yeflam after her visit the previous night. Eidan had returned in the final hour of the afternoon only after he had walked throughout Nale, his deep-set eyes and
creased face scouring each corner and rooftop with the concern he had for the creature named Anguish. After he had returned, he had done nothing but relentlessly prowl the floors of the house. That
was what had driven Zaifyr upstairs.

‘You cannot be surprised,’ he said, watching Jae’le turn in frustration to retreat to the candle-lit back room he had been in when the door opened. ‘He clearly believes
he has a responsibility to the creature.’

‘He knows better,’ Jae’le replied. ‘The man he was would never have exposed himself the way he does now.’

Zaifyr left the stairwell and followed his brother into the room. ‘He is not the same man he once was,’ he said.

‘I see that.’

‘
None
of us is the same man.’

‘I am aware of that, as well.’ His brother stood before the chair he had been seated in. Over the arms lay his sword, a whetstone resting on the right. ‘Would you like to count
the ways, brother?’

‘You’ll not need the sword tomorrow. It is just an announcement, that’s all.’ The books he had borrowed were still in the room, the heavy stacks like dark, weighted
shadows to hold the world down. ‘But you would not have needed it if we were the men we once were, either. Those men would have stood beside the child.’

Jae’le laughed. ‘I think you have forgotten who we were.’

‘Gods.’ Zaifyr took a book from one of the chairs and sat down. ‘We would have seen a mirror of ourselves and we would have stood beside her.’

‘To varying degrees, Eidan and Aelyn have already done that. You and I have not.’

‘We are perhaps the most changed.’

‘You are wrong. We would never have stood by her side.’ Jae’le lifted the straight blade up. ‘All of us have responded to her power, just as we have always responded to
power: if we cannot dominate it, we either kneel before it, or we destroy it.’

‘We have never been that simple,’ he said.

His brother pointed the sword at him. ‘Consider what I hold in my hand as a representation of who we are. We have adhered to the logic of this weapon our entire lives. It has been true
from the first of the men and women like us that I met. She was a woman with the gifts of Jeinan, the first Soldier, if we were to use a name we use now. She was called Zelula, but it may not have
been the name she was born with, for she was mute and illiterate. When she spoke, she spoke through a man whom she kept by her side. It was he who told me her name. But most of her conversation was
done with a sword. With it, she was but the purest distillation of grace and violence I have ever known. When I first met her, she was part of a group that came to the island of my home, and she
was part of those who thought to conquer it. But she was there for me, first. She would not allow another to exist who could surpass her. She needed no words to say this to me. I understood
intently that I would bow to her or I would die to her.’

‘Much has changed since then; even had it not, you and I have never fought.’

Jae’le’s sword fell to his side. ‘But we did not begin as equals, either.’

Zaifyr had been a prisoner for fifteen years in the marble palace of Emperor Kee when he had first seen Jae’le. The soldiers who had destroyed his village had been sent by the Emperor to
enact his law of reprisal for the loss of a relative whom one of the people in Zaifyr’s village had killed. A sister, he had once been told. But, after Zaifyr had been taken across
Leviathan’s Blood, the Emperor had quickly realized that he had gained a much finer prize: an ageless man to sit in a dungeon in the floor of his court, a reminder of the law he held over the
people who came to speak to him, a law that remained until Jae’le entered his court.

‘Nor should we pretend,’ the other man continued, ‘that the five of us have always been equals. In our wars, in our kingdoms. Even now, what you have done to Aelyn in Yeflam is
nothing but a display of authority and power over her.’