Leviathan's Blood (57 page)

‘What we do now was once outlawed,’ she had said to Pueral a week earlier. ‘Even here, in the heart of Ooila, few witches will do this, but for Aela Ren, I will. During the
Five Kingdoms, the man known as Qian said that the cruellest thing we did to the dead was to use them as if they were but fuel. He said you had to honour them. It is from here that all our
practices of rebirth have come. But in this jar is another form of magic, one that goes much more to the heart of Qian’s own home and the horrors that happened there. In this jar are parts of
the dead themselves. Parts I have tied to the blood that Aela Ren wrote his letter in, parts that will wish to devour him, and that I can control to do so.’

The Eyes of the Queen drew her sword, the witch now in step beside her. Ahead, Aela Ren had killed six of her soldiers, and had wounded a seventh.

‘
Aela Ren!
’ she shouted, the words torn from her throat with all the military training she had, all the authority she knew, and all the anger she felt.

Her soldiers fell back and, in the middle of them, the Innocent turned to face her.

She raised her heavy sword to him.

A small smile parted his scarred lips, and she thought, as her pace began to increase, how his disregard for human life was apparent in that one motion, how it revealed just how little he
thought of those he had killed, and those who stood before him – and then her sword blocked his thrust, and the armour on her wrist fell like a shield before his dagger. He was quick in his
response, though, and his sword cut out in long slashes that she met with shrugged blocks of sword and armour while she angled herself around him, drew him away from where Tanith stood, and gave
her the time she needed to cut into her own hands, and give focus to the dead that she held in her grasp.

The glass jar struck the ground next to him.

Ren stepped back immediately, as if he felt the power flooding from the broken shards, and Pueral herself, though she had thought to press home her advantage, found herself stepping back from it
for that reason.

The ghosts that poured from it did so in such a flurry that their fury was undeniable. After a moment, Ren frowned and attempted to take another step back, only to find that he could not move.
Around his feet, the fragments of men and women that he had killed grasped at him, clawed deep into the boots he wore, and soon a miniature tornado began to spin around him and lift him from the
ground. Soon, Pueral could see faint ghostly hands holding his arms and legs, and the vague outline of a figure, neither male nor female, forming. Across the body hundreds of faces began to appear,
each snapping and biting, and puncturing the Innocent’s skin. In response, he snarled, and he drove his torn boots into the figure, where he found purchase, enough to break free from its
grasp and land on the ground.

Pueral took a step forward as the creature did, closing in on Ren. Yet, he twisted out of the way of her heavy sword, and moved backwards, keeping out of the cold reach of the creature.
You
take those steps.
Pueral felt a hard joy run through her, and she saw her remaining soldiers edge in closer, preparing to attack the Innocent. She struck again, forcing him to block, and her
return swing was quick, a vicious slash he stepped back from, close to a mounted soldier – but in a swiftness she could not follow, he slammed his sword into the front of the horse’s
legs, and as it tumbled forward, his dagger jammed into the soldier’s eye. But in the last movement, he did not have enough time to avoid the reach of the creature, and its hands latched
around his neck before it began to lift him up again.

And Tanith slumped to the ground.

It happened in such a blur that Pueral did not even notice that Ren’s dagger had caught her in the neck, had broken her control of the creature and freed him from its grasp.

Pueral charged, but Ren’s sword – so fast, so blistering fast – battered aside her thrust with ease. Her armour turned aside two of his return cuts, but she did not relent, she
did not fall back. She slammed her sword at him, losing all the finesse that she had once had, hoping to use her size and her armoured weight to overpower him . . . only to feel the hard end of his
blade part the steel she wore before it parted her flesh and sank into her stomach. She felt herself torn as the Innocent began to lift his sword, felt herself split, and as the blade ripped
through steel and flesh and bone, she gazed at him, at the fury that was deep on his face, and felt a certain satisfaction that he would not forget her, not any time soon.

The people I spoke with, the stories I recorded, are but a fraction of what I heard. On the slaves’ blocks throughout Gogair, more and more blind men and women are being
sold, and each of them has a similar story.

It is clear that the child seeks only submission. She does not seek to engage men and women in terms of reason and purpose. Her desire to reclaim the world, to repair the damage, as her priests
claim, feels not just hollow, but a terrible falsity, one that hides an awful truth.

—Tinh Tu,
Private Diary

‘She had the better of you for a moment there,’ Bueralan said as he walked around Aela Ren. In his hand, he held a sword, the end pointed casually at the ground.
‘Her name was Ce Pueral. You’ll want to remember it.’

‘It will fade,’ the Innocent replied harshly, the bestial quality to his voice that Bueralan had heard a week ago returning. ‘They all fade.’ The scarred man regarded him
flatly from above her torn body, a figure whose tattoos of violence now included the wounds left by the ghostly mouths of the creature when they tore through his armour. ‘You will fade as
well.’

‘Do I look like a man who cares about being remembered?’ Around the saboteur, eight of Pueral’s soldiers remained. All but two had their stolen mounts, and of the latter, one
knelt painfully on the ground. ‘How about you all?’ he said to them. ‘You still got some fight left?’

‘Don’t be a fool.’ Ren ignored the soldiers around him and focused on Bueralan. ‘You cannot stand against me.’

‘I feel fatalistic,’ he said and raised his sword.

The saboteur had a realistic expectation of what he would accomplish in the final hours of the night as he paced around the Innocent. Behind him, the horizon was a ruinous line of fire, and when
the first sun rose and cast its orange-red haze over the First Province of Ooila, he did not expect to see it. He was the contrast to Pueral: the Eyes of the Queen had been angry, but her loyalty
and her service to the First Queen had refused to allow her mind to be overwhelmed by defeat. That was not to say that she could not acknowledge it: she had seen it and that was why she had named
him captain in the stables, why she issued him with a command to be obeyed before she began to walk into the broken horizon.

‘Get up,’ he had said to Samuel Orlan as Ce Pueral approached the witch. He grabbed hold of the grey’s reins. ‘Get up and hold tight to Taela.’

The cartographer shook his head. ‘The horse cannot carry all three of us.’

‘He won’t.’

‘Let me—’

‘Get up,’ he ordered.

‘Bueralan—’ Taela began.

‘Aela Ren will follow me.’ In the poor light of the stables, both had the appearance of being washed out, of being made from old colours. He offered them a smile without humour.
‘He wants to hear a name from me. You both know that. You will get nowhere if I am with you.’

‘We’ll get nowhere without you,’ she said. ‘Aela Ren’s army is out there.’

‘The grey will get you through.’ He rubbed the horse’s nose. ‘He’s an old soldier. He’ll find a way through. He and Orlan.’

‘You cannot kill him,’ the cartographer said, his voice heavy with resignation. ‘You can only make him kill you.’

‘All my friends are dead, old man.’ Bueralan grabbed the pouch around his neck and pulled it over his head. Gently, he placed it into Taela’s hand. ‘You take this. You
take it and you destroy it. You do what I could never do.’

She began to argue, to decline, and he felt the first push of her hand against his in rejection, but then her fingers curled around it. ‘It’s cold,’ she said quietly.

‘It always was.’

He helped Orlan onto the back of the tall grey and, though the cartographer resisted, though he argued that all three of them should go, that they were surrounded, Bueralan saw the pair out of
the stable. He stood in the doorway and watched the tall grey canter from the mansion, and out into the burning horizon. Maybe they would make it. He believed that they would. He had to believe
that. He remained there until the cries and shouts of Pueral and her soldiers reached him and he turned to face in that direction. He saw Aela Ren lifted from the ground by a figure he could not
rightly describe, but he knew it would not be enough.

On the stable floor, where the first of Pueral’s soldiers had fallen, a sword was still in its sheath. Bueralan bent down and rolled the corpse over before he pulled the blade free.

The weight was decent, but the cross-guard was a rounded piece of steel that did not cover his entire fist. ‘It will do,’ he said to the soldier, rising. ‘Let’s see if
you’ll be proud.’

He strode out of the stables without armour, wearing the black clothes he had worn to Yoala Fe’s engagement party, but that did not concern him. In some way, he believed it was better.
Armour blunted a blow. It softened a thrust, it turned a cut, it kept a man alive when he otherwise should not be, and Bueralan had already been alive longer than he should have. He should have
died in Ranan. He had, to a degree, died in there. The wound had been struck when he had found Kae. He had been struck again when he found Ruk and Liaya, and then her sister, Aerala. He could see
them clearly, still, on the floor. But it had been when he found Zean, his body covered in what looked to be a thousand wounds, that the final blow had been delivered. His blood brother. His
family
. He should have drawn his sword then. He would have died in that cathedral, Bueralan knew, but he would have died beside the people who mattered to him. He would have been spared
the journey of grief to Ooila, the futile attempt to turn back what had happened, the path that ended with him standing before the Innocent, Aela Ren.

Pueral’s soldiers were the first to strike.

A rider from the far left charged first. She leant low on the saddle and urged her mount into a gallop while her sword swung free. In her wake, the other five found their footing, and soon the
six mounts were charging at the spot where Ren stood, his gaze never leaving Bueralan. When the first sword came close to him, its length holding the smoked horizon in its blade, he merely shifted
to his left. He continued to move to his left, turning in a full circle to come into the path of the mounts that had followed, but he did not move as they came closer. Instead, he met their slashes
with heavy, angry cuts, each quicker than Bueralan could follow – and within a handful of heartbeats, Ren had pulled himself into the saddle of one, replacing a man by grasping him by the
throat.

He had not quite got settled when Bueralan grabbed him, his hand snapping around Ren’s arm a moment before he hurled him from the saddle. The Innocent went with the movement and came up
from a roll with his sword thrusting at Bueralan, but the saboteur turned it aside. He met the speed with his own, catching each strike before returning in a low cut that allowed him to step
inward, grab Ren’s leathers, and bring his forehead down to strike the Innocent hard on the head. The blow hurt, but it always hurt, and it left the scarred man open to Bueralan’s fist,
which released the leather jerkin and jabbed shortly into his throat. He had killed other men with the move, but Ren was quick enough that he caught the punch only on the side of his neck, and
stiff-armed Bueralan hard in the chest to get some distance – only to find himself on the back foot as the saboteur quickly closed the space.

‘Let me take him.’

The words sounded distant to Zaifyr, as if spoken by a haunt he could no longer see; yet he knew that it was spoken by a man, by Jae’le, just as he knew that in his arms he held his
brother, Eidan. The large man’s blood was seeping over his right hand and down his arm. But his focus was on the beautiful young woman walking towards him, on the woman whose very presence
caused the dead to respond as they did to him: by whispers of words and cold touches, by imitating a sense of closeness that their brittle bodies remembered only in the most primal sense of
longing. In their need, they did not know that she was responsible for their situation, that she had kept their remains in the world to give her power. They merely responded to her power.

‘Brother,’ Jae’le said, his hands drawing the weight of Eidan from him, ‘you can let him go.’

‘You must beware of those with her.’ The large man’s voice was a pained whisper. ‘She raised them on the Plateau.’

‘I know where they are from,’ Zaifyr replied.

The large man’s hand grasped him. ‘Qian—’

‘That is not my name.’

‘I did not think she would bring them here,’ Eidan continued, his breath laboured. ‘I thought she had entered Yeflam only in the company of myself. I held no suspicion. I
thought she left them in Faaisha. But they are here. They came upon me before I reached the edge of Nale. There were seven of them. They were wet, as if they had been in the ocean, as if they had
been hidden beneath the black water for all this time. When they saw me, they let out a roar and attacked. I crushed their bones. I broke their limbs. But they would not die. I threw four back into
Leviathan’s Blood, but I fear there are more. I fear they are all here.’

As he spoke, Zaifyr heard shouts from outside the gates, while the drums from the ocean were lost beneath breaking waves.

‘Eidan,’ the child said, stopping a dozen paces before the three men. The white robe that she wore was unstained, either by dirt or by blood. ‘You must be stronger for me. I
want the first of my betrayers to rage against my justice. I want him to test my power before he fails. Only then will you be an inspiration to my faithful.’