Leviathan's Blood (7 page)

The answer offered little. In truth, little made much sense after the cathedral. Outside, Ranan had been empty, and though Bueralan had felt as if he was being watched, he had not seen a single
person on the streets, or in the broken buildings. Both his horses were gone too. The tracks led off down the main street, and then disappeared into the thick sweltering marshes of Leera, but only
for a step or two. The tracks stopped suddenly and neither Bueralan nor Orlan had been able to pick them up again. With one sword between them, they had been left to walk through the marshes and
swamps, their direction mostly eastwards. The nearest port was Jeil in the Kingdoms of Faaisha, though Bueralan knew that it was not truly near. It would take weeks to walk there. Weeks, he had
told himself, without food or water.

On the first night out of Ranan, they had been found by eight Leeran raiders. Both men had slunk into a line of trees that offered some protection, and they had collapsed, exhausted. Bueralan
had meant to split a night’s watch with Orlan, but the old man had stumbled into a deep sleep, and his own grief had swamped him and kept him awake. He had not heard the raiders approaching
until all eight were around him.

He did not reach for his sword, did not stand. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I should never have walked out of that cathedral anyway.’

A man stepped forward. His teeth had been filed down and his white skin was sunk against his bones, as if he was being consumed by a disease. ‘She sent this for you.’ The raider
dropped a heavy sack on the ground. ‘To reach Jeil.’

He didn’t reach for it. ‘I don’t want it.’

‘You’ll starve before you reach the border,’ he said. ‘The old man before you. She has seen it.’

‘Then why would I take it?’

‘Because she has seen it.’

He asked another question, an angry question, because on those nights his grief gave way to anger, but the Leeran raider did not respond. A moment later, he and the seven men and women who had
stood around Bueralan disappeared.

Beneath the green-tinted light of the morning’s sun, Bueralan and Orlan had tipped the sack open, scattering fruit, bread, and water across the ground. It had been the meat that had given
them pause. It was a square, cured, and as the cartographer picked it up, Bueralan said, ‘I don’t think we should eat that.’ Despite having not eaten for two days, he felt
repulsed by the shape of it. ‘No telling what it is. Could be human.’

‘Smells like pig,’ Orlan said.

They had left it there without further conversation.

It had been the only time that the two of them had agreed on anything. Since then, they had niggled at each other, prodded and probed. Bueralan’s anger had been the source of his
antagonism. Orlan’s was guilt, he assumed. The old man had not apologized for what he had done – not that it would have meant much if he had. Orlan hadn’t given much away, either.
He hadn’t explained why the child had called him god-touched. Why she had not killed him. Or why, in his words, she was not quite a god yet.

Kal Essa was a man easily remembered. In the final days of Qaaina, in the days when the Oolian Queens were burning not just lives, but an entire nation, a heavy, spiked mace
had struck Essa across the left side of his head, tearing open his skin. It had been a glancing blow and the skin had been stitched back together in the field, but as often with such makeshift
work, it left scars. In the Captain of the Brotherhood’s case, it left a series of heavy, spider-webbed lines that ran from eye to ear in white scar tissue.

‘By the time the paperwork was done, two men were waiting for me outside the office,’ Essa said, after Heast had stepped through the back door of the building he had bought. The
expanse of empty floor waited to be filled with produce, with blankets, with whatever Heast could buy to fill it. ‘They followed me across Neela and into Maala. It was nearly a whole
day’s ride in those carriages. They’ve set up a rotation outside the hostel we rented – about eight of them – but they’re easy enough to lose and find again when we
need them.’

‘I had two following me before I came here, as well.’ At the far end of the room were two people, a man and a woman, who were doing a lap of the emptiness. ‘Did any follow
those two?’

‘No.’ Essa turned to Heast. ‘I told them to be careful with Gaerl, though.’

‘But they ignored you,’ he said.

‘They shrugged it off.’ The mercenary spat on the floor. ‘They don’t know him the way we do, Captain.’

Faise and Zineer drew closer. They carried leather satchels full of paper, full of orders and statements and purchasing plans. Already, in the week since the two had met Muriel on the mountain,
they had begun to set up a series of false names and long paper trails to hide the details of the majority of what they bought. They had helped Essa with his purchase and, Heast knew, it had been
reported to Benan Le’ta, but the act, much like the purchase of the factory they stood in, was one of misdirection. He wanted the merchant to be watching Essa and him. That way, the majority
of what Faise and Zineer would soon be buying would be kept from view, the paper trail lost while the Mireeans gained their leverage over the Traders’ Union.

‘We’ll start buying farmland next week,’ Faise said, after they had greeted Heast and then crossed the stone floor to stand next to him and Essa. ‘We’re going to
start on the northern side, on farms that are near to Mireea. Some of that is already owned by Muriel Wagan, and the loss of Mireea will make the sellers a little easier to shift.’

Heast took the map she handed him. She had circled the lots of land. ‘Who do you plan to use as a buyer?’ he asked.

‘A Zoum banker,’ Zineer said. ‘A lot of the world’s coin routes through there and the bankers are often used to represent buyers. We were lucky that one was in Yeflam
when we needed her.’

‘How long until it becomes public, do you think?’ He passed the map back to Faise. ‘Before the Traders’ Union and the Keepers realize?’

‘A pattern will start to emerge after a month or two,’ Faise said. ‘Lady Wagan wanted us to run an aggressive purchasing campaign, so they’ll be alerted to the loss of
their assets reasonably quickly.’

‘Then it’ll be the money they follow.’ Zineer gave a slight shrug. ‘That could stretch on for years.’

‘Don’t plan on that,’ Heast said. ‘Captain Essa and I have soldiers tailing us. If you aren’t being followed already, it won’t be long until you
are.’

‘We understand that.’

‘Get a guard,’ Essa said bluntly. ‘Some of my boys and girls will do well by you.’

‘That will draw attention to us straight away.’ Zineer pushed his glasses up his nose, smiling ruefully. ‘The work we did for you here is very easily explained by anyone
watching. My wife is Mireean. She has friends who are being kept on Wila. We’re helping with the clothing and food. But if we are seen to do more than that, I am afraid something will look
wrong very quickly. Benan Le’ta is well aware that we are completely broke and in a lot of debt.’

‘He was the one who ruined us, after all,’ Faise said.

After they had gone, Essa called them foolish children. Heast responded by telling the other man that they had a point.

‘And when things get up and running?’ the mercenary captain asked. ‘In a couple of months, my boys and girls are going to be spread out across these farms that those two will
be buying, ready for the crop season. There’s not going to be much we can do to help Faise and Zineer then.’ He made his way to the edge of the factory floor, where a leather backpack
lay. There, he pulled out a long silver container. ‘Cold coffee.’ He shook it. ‘You tried it?’

‘No,’ Heast replied. ‘I saw the Soldier yesterday, by the way.’

Essa held out a tin cup to him. ‘How did that go?’

‘He agreed to send the tents and food down to Wila. He wants to look through what we send first, but we can start buying now.’

Yet, as he tasted the not-quite-chilled coffee, Heast admitted to himself that the meeting had been a strange one. He had ridden one of the large, sixteen-horse carriages to Nale two days
earlier. He had not seen one that size before – it was essentially two carriages joined together – but the driver managed it much like the carriages that were of one piece and pulled by
four or eight horses. From the latter half of the day, after the carriages left Ghaam, the Keepers’ Enclave had become the lodestone by which the journey was made. It sat on the horizon like
an artificial mountain on an artificial land, a building formed from long white tunnels of stone, built to mirror a large spiral that rose into the sky. The walls were lined with windows and, even
from a distance, it gave the appearance of a thousand glass eyes that watched you.

The roads of Nale were swollen with congestion and, beneath the gaze of the Enclave, the carriage made its way past the tall, thick buildings that struggled to match the elegance of the white
tower. By the time the carriage came to stop at a huge depot on the edge of the city, the afternoon’s sun had set and Heast had spent a whole day travelling. He had left Mesi just as the
morning’s sun had begun to rise without warmth. Throughout the day, he had seen fellow passengers come and go, and bits and pieces of their conversation had sifted around him. Some of it had
been about the Mireeans: ‘They bring the Leerans here,’ one old man had said. ‘But we should not be afraid of that,’ another old man had said in reply. ‘The Yeflam
Guard—’ ‘Gogair is unhappy,’ a young woman said. She held up a paper. ‘It says right here: “The ambassador met with the Enclave to discuss what could be a
violation of important agreements.”’ He heard a young man, not realizing that Heast was there, refer to him as the Captain of the Ghosts, even. But mostly, he heard men and women
arguing whether it was their fight or not. Some said that they had heard that there were priests in the Leeran army, in the Faithful, and that made it Yeflam’s fight. Very few people
mentioned Zaifyr, or the deaths of Fo and Bau; beneath the multi-eyed gaze of the Enclave, it did not surprise Heast.

The Keeper of the Divine, Xrie, had greeted Heast at the front door of the barracks. The building was a huge four-storey complex, and the Captain of the Yeflam Guard had led him up the floors
without a hint of pride in the building itself. He was a handsome brown-skinned man, and his handshake was firm and confident, but when he paused to point something out to Heast, he seemed to be a
soldier at practice, a soldier in training. Xrie looked no older than twenty-two or -three, but Heast knew that he had been the Captain of the Yeflam Guard for over forty years, and when he stopped
to point out the men and women around him, to speak to them by name and rank, they responded to him crisply and loyally, as to a figure clearly beloved by his soldiers.

Heast had met Xrie only a handful of times since he himself had become the Captain of the Spine. He had sent a prisoner, and picked up two, and they had met when the last treaty between the two
states had been signed. Still, they had an easy formality that, once the two were in Xrie’s office on the top floor, allowed for an agreement to be reached that new tents, new clothes and
food and water had to be taken down to Wila. ‘In its current state, the island is entirely unacceptable,’ Xrie had said, at the end. ‘You have my apologies. I was told by Faje
that the Traders’ Union was going to supply the shelter. What is down there is what they provided.’

‘The politics of kindness,’ Heast had said drily. ‘We’ll have a warehouse soon that we’ll send items from.’

‘I’ll be honest, Captain, I am not a fan of the current pacifism that is in vogue with my kin,’ the other man continued. ‘It is hardly surprising, given who I am, but
what happened in Mireea was a message for all of us. That was its point. We were to pay attention to it. The stalemate that you reached between Mireea and Leera diluted the message a little, but it
still remains true that one day Leera’s General Waalstan will bring his army to Yeflam. His new god will demand that.’
Or
, Heast thought,
your old gods will demand
that
. ‘But on a personal level, it greatly disappoints me that I cannot tell the Captain of Refuge that we will stand beside him on the field.’

‘Refuge appears to be a popular topic,’ Heast had answered. ‘I expected it from Bnid Gaerl, but from you? My duty is not to Refuge any more.’

‘You will have to forgive me, Captain. I am well aware of your duty to Lady Wagan.’ In the narrow windows behind him, the last of the afternoon’s sun had begun to fade.
‘But I am not a man who forgets war’s loyal servants. I would be a poor man if I did. However, I should say, it is not just myself who remembers. Your history was raised with me this
morning by a writer from one of the papers in the city. Despite my reluctance, I am afraid that you will soon be well known in Yeflam.’

‘Unlike Zaifyr.’

‘We call him Qian, but your point is taken,’ Xrie had said. ‘My kin have kept him out of most of the print shops. It is part of the politics of pacifism.’

Heast was, by his nature, rarely surprised by what happened in the corridors of power, be it by a crown, a sword, or an immortal hand. A good soldier, he once heard it said, accepted what was
laid before him. He thought of the thousands of eyes from the Enclave and added to himself that a good captain learned to anticipate.

Holding the tin cup in his hand, Heast took another sip of the not quite cold coffee.

‘This is really awful,’ he said to Kal Essa. ‘Did you pay for this?’

‘It was better before the ice melted,’ the other man replied sourly, before he tipped it on the ground. ‘There’s a bar around here. I’ll stand you a drink
there.’

On the fifth morning Ayae spent on Wila, the morning’s sun rose in a dull, flat light, but the smell of blood and salt rose strongly off the ocean. She sat in the opening
of her small tent. Unable to sleep well – she felt stifled and restless in the fabric – she had eased herself quietly into position to watch the first sun rise. With one foot pushed out
of the flap of the tent and the other drawn up against her chest, Ayae gazed at the grainy edge of the island, at the black ocean that soaked the light and the stone ramp that led up to the flat
base of Neela. There, a line of sky blue cloaks revealed the guards. Usually, half of them faced the island, and the other half out into the city, but this morning all were facing away from the
island. Ayae could not make out why they were turned but, she admitted to herself, it did not matter. Yesterday, before the third sun sank, the guards had stopped children who had arrived. They had
been loaded with papers to throw over the edge, and the boxes had sat there beneath a lamp all night. This morning was probably no different, she thought – until the guards parted. They moved
apart to reveal a single man leading a horse and cart down to Wila.