Leviathan's Blood (8 page)

A man whom she knew.

‘Caeli.’ The guard lay behind her, wrapped in her cloak. ‘Caeli,’ Ayae said again and squeezed the guard’s naked foot. ‘The Soldier is here.’

‘Is he alone?’ She did not sound asleep, even though she had been. ‘Is he armed?’

‘No, but he leads a cart.’ Ayae pushed herself up. ‘I’ll get Lieutenant Mills.’

‘He’s here for you.’ There was a rustle as Caeli pulled on her trousers and grabbed a shirt. ‘You go and meet him. I’ll get Lady Wagan and the
Lieutenant.’

At the edge of the camp, in the thin folds of fabric nearest Leviathan’s Blood, Ayae could hear whispers from men and women woken by the steady step of the horse and the rattle of the
cart. In the snippets she heard, the Captain of the Yeflam Guard was not referred to by name, or even by title, and Ayae suspected that none of the people she passed had realized that it was him.
It did not surprise her. At the sight of him, she had felt keenly a sensation of steel, a balanced, tempered sword that lay not against her skin, but beneath it. She had finally begun to recognize
people like herself, just as Fo and Bau had said she would, but what she did not yet understand was why she had known immediately that it was the Soldier.

‘Ayae.’ Xrie greeted her from the bottom of the ramp. ‘Lady Aelyn Meah bids you a kind welcome to our nation.’

He was taller than Ayae, but she was not a tall woman by any standard, and to another, the Captain of the Yeflam Guard would have been only average in height. His skin was brown, lighter than
hers, as if it had been mixed with desert sand and diluted. He had dyed the tips of his hair blue, and wore a blue sash around his waist. He took her hand, and she was surprised when he made no
remark on the warmth of her touch and did not seek to withdraw from her grasp quickly. Instead, he held her hand, and inclined his head slightly in further greeting.

‘The Lady of the Spine,’ Ayae said awkwardly, ‘welcomes you to Wila.’

‘Her captain has organized tents and clothes and food.’ He released her hand to indicate the horse-drawn cart on the ramp. ‘But my business is mostly here with you.’

Behind her, people began to gather. Some, she knew, would be those who did not like her. Even though she did not believe them to be a majority, she had begun to be acutely aware of their
presence after Zaifyr had left – after the sensation of eternal patience and calm she had associated with him had been withdrawn – and the focus of those who hated ‘cursed’
people was no longer split between the two of them. In the last few days, she had felt their animosity building towards her, fuelled not just by bigotry, but by their grief, their frustration and
their boredom. Thus far, nothing had come to a head, and Ayae had not had to defend herself, but she knew that it would not be long before she was forced to do so.

‘You are not required to stay on Wila,’ the Captain of the Yeflam Guard continued. ‘You are a person of unique qualities and the Keepers of Yeflam do not believe that it is
right for you to be constrained by the negotiations that Lady Wagan made on behalf of her subjects.’

‘I’m no different to any of the people here,’ she said, a hint of reproach in her voice. ‘None of us should be here.’

‘But you are different. You are not a mortal woman, Ayae. You have left that behind. You are a god – or you will, one day, be a god.’ He said the words in a simple,
matter-of-fact tone. ‘One day soon you will understand that and the Keepers will aid you in that education. All of Yeflam will. An entire nation waits for you to explore the power that is in
you.’

‘She knows that and she will go with you.’ Muriel Wagan stepped from the crowd behind her, her feet bare. ‘The offer is greatly appreciated by all of us.’

Despite herself, Ayae wanted to tell her no. She wanted to tell him no, as well. She wanted to deny the authority of the Keepers, to reject the words that echoed so closely the ones that Fo had
said to her after she survived the fire in Samuel Orlan’s shop. She was not a god. She would not be a god. Nor did she want to be a god, not if Zaifyr was right. If a god was a being that
kept the dead in cages and bled their souls for her own power, then she did not think that anyone should be a god. Another part of her knew that the Lady Wagan was right, that what she had said to
her on the first day on Wila was still true: she did have to accept the offer. She did have to leave Wila.

After she agreed, after the horse was unhitched from the cart, after Xrie pulled it out onto the sand with one hand, the Captain of the Yeflam Guard said, ‘They are taking careful note of
you.’

They were halfway up the ramp when he said that. ‘They want to leave as well,’ she said.

‘I do not mean the Mireeans. I mean the men and women and children who stand on the edge of Neela and look down.’

She looked up and, this close to them, she noticed them properly for the first time. She thought that most looked poor.

The two left the ramp and stepped through the small ring of soldiers. Beyond them, streets ran in straight lines towards square buildings of discoloured stone. ‘The Yeflam Guard is
mine,’ Xrie said, in relation to his earlier comment. ‘But we are a large nation and the twenty thousand soldiers who serve beneath me are sometimes not enough to keep everyone
safe.’

He was leading her to a pair of horses hitched to a small carriage that had been painted blue.

‘Some of those people watching you will be employed by papers, some by politicians, and some will not be employed at all. They will try and sell what they have seen today.’ On a seat
near the top sat the carriage driver, an elderly grey-haired man in a blue cloak. ‘The ones whom you should be concerned about mainly belong to the Empty Sky. They are led by Bnid Gaerl and
he is primarily employed by the Traders’ Union. By Benan Le’ta, in fact. The Empty Sky,’ Xrie said, as if it were an afterthought, ‘is a reference to atheism.’

He opened the door, but Ayae did not step into the carriage. ‘I’ve no interest in the politics,’ she said. ‘I just want to help everyone get off Wila.’

‘That is politics,’ he said.

Inside the carriage, a sword waited for her.

The first person to visit Zaifyr was Kaqua, the Pauper.

The charm-laced man had not left Aelyn’s house. He knew that he was being watched, but he was content to wait, to think about his arguments, and to rest. In the dusty rooms, he had laid
his boots with burnt soles on the table near the doorway. He pulled out his clothes from his pack – a man made from wind had brought it on the second day – and cleaned his rank-smelling
clothes. On the day that Kaqua arrived, Zaifyr had taken his charms off, one by one, and set them on the table in front of his boots. He checked each for scratches and dents, aware as he did so
that not one of the pieces had the spells and prayers that his family had put into his charms, so long ago. Those pieces had been taken from him and he supposed that, even if they had survived the
rough treatment of the soldiers who had taken them, then time would have destroyed them anyway. No, it did not matter if the new charms he wore had scratches or dents: nothing would change if they
had them. But for Zaifyr, the charms – made from copper and bronze and brass and silver – were about his connection to the man he had once been, the man who had been born in a small
village in the mountains and who, at a young age, had been told he would die young.

He had nearly died in Mireea. The thought returned to him as he checked the links of chain, as he cleaned blemishes on a charm. It had been recurring to him for weeks, in truth. In moments of
quiet. When he was alone. He would think,
I almost died
. Fo had nearly killed him. Zaifyr could not remember another time when he had come that close to joining the haunts that were
trapped around him. For a while, he had asked himself if he
had
died. Over his long, long life, he had been attacked by living and the dead, by mortals and immortals, but he had never been
detached from his body in the way he had been in Mireea. Not even when he reached out to the dead as a massive whole – as he had done to bring the ghosts into view – had he felt like
that. He was always aware of his body, of himself. So, the question remained, had he died? Had there been no cord to lead him back, would he have found his way back? Was this his death?

He had no answer.

He polished and cleaned his charms. They had no answers, either.

Around him, the haunts whispered to him of their cold and their hunger. They knew as much as the guards made from wind at the gate knew.

‘They are not to keep you safe, but to keep the people of Yeflam safe,’ Aelyn said to him. On either side of her, swirling, squat figures waited patiently. It was the day that she
had delivered him to the house – he had not seen her since. ‘I cannot force you to leave,’ she continued. ‘But I can stop people visiting you. I can stop the newspapers, the
Traders’ Union, and whoever else will seek to find you. The Enclave will meet to discuss what is to be done with you tomorrow. We have been meeting all week, and I am afraid I cannot dissuade
them from a trial. Just as I cannot convince you to leave.’

‘You truly want me to leave?’ he asked. ‘It is your law I broke when I killed Fo and Bau.’

‘Take your war elsewhere, brother.’

My war.

The bitterness in her voice gave him pause, even now. He picked up a long copper chain and began to run his fingers along each link. He had wanted to tell her that there would be no war, but
even to say the words would be foolish. The child would not fall easily. She would not step out from behind the shield of her army for him to strike at her. He would have to go through it.
Lives
would be lost when he attacked her.

‘The girl you came with?’ Aelyn said, in her final conversation with him. ‘The one from Mireea?’

‘Ayae.’

‘Do you lay claim to her?’

‘Is that what you do here to ensure loyalty?’ His tone was mild, but he could not hide the reproach. ‘She is her own person.’

‘She is—’

‘—my friend.’

Aelyn’s smile was cool, humourless. ‘You do not have friends, brother.’

I have family, instead
, he had begun to say, but bit back the reply. Instead, he had watched her leave, watched the carriage and horses made from wind rise into the sky.

He did not have the right to ask his family to go to war for him. He knew that. In Aelyn’s house – in her replica of the house she had once lived in – he could not escape the
sense of loss that she held for Maewe. It surprised him that she still had the wound. Yet that had defined her reaction to him here, in Yeflam. Aelyn feared that she would lose Yeflam.

Would Zaifyr’s other siblings be any different? Eidan had lost the twisting mines of Mahga. The wealth and beauty he had drawn from the ground had been melted and buried by the volcanoes
and earthquakes he had caused to destroy his own empire. After his release, Zaifyr had spoken to Eidan on two different occasions and both had been defined by their brevity. But Yeflam was
Eidan’s construction. Anything Zaifyr could say about Aelyn could be just as easily said about Eidan.

There was no trace of Tinh Tu in Yeflam, however. She had retreated to the lost library of Salar after Asila and, from all that Zaifyr understood, rarely left it. The library lay in the marshes
of Faer, in an area where the trees and swamps moved, where a person could go mad trying to navigate to the centre. But, whereas Aelyn and Eidan had chosen a new piece of land for their country,
Tinh Tu had built her library in the land that had held her empire. She even used the same name, leading Zaifyr to believe that she, like Aelyn, still carried the wound of what she had lost.

And Jae’le . . .?

His eldest brother was not like the others. He had not rebuilt a kingdom. He had not begun to give animals voices again. He had left his previous life behind and he would come to Yeflam, Zaifyr
was sure of that. Jae’le would not have to be asked. He would arrive out of loyalty, out of concern, and out of a sense of responsibility. He would come, also, because he knew what was taking
place in Leera. He knew about the child. Zaifyr was not convinced that Jae’le had known that she was a god, but he had known that she was something different. If he had known she was a god,
his brother would have surely killed her. For all the power that Zaifyr had, for all that Aelyn, Eidan and Tinh Tu had, they lived in Jae’le’s shadow.

When Kaqua arrived, Zaifyr had almost finished cleaning and repairing his charms.

The Pauper was one of the oldest beings in Yeflam. A tall, lean man with a serious face, he had midnight-black skin and appeared to be anywhere between the ages of forty and sixty. His black
hair was cut short and touched with grey, because of which Zaifyr had always thought of him as an older man. Before Zaifyr’s arrival in Yeflam, Kaqua would have in fact been second to Aelyn
in terms of age: he had been born in the centuries after the War of the Gods, in the period when Zaifyr and his family had been creating the Five Kingdoms. In those years, however, he had remained
hidden; he had not challenged Zaifyr’s family as so many others had, or offered to join them, as had those whose power was weaker or less well formed than the family’s. He had simply
lived on what would later become Illate until Aelyn found him.

He was a man who was preceded by a sense of humbleness. It was not uncommon for people to believe that he had only simple and honest advice to give, that he cared only for what was fair, and
Zaifyr was not surprised that Aelyn had sent him. The Pauper had long spoken for her with his deep, sonorous voice, and he had used that voice to convince others that what they wanted was not for
the best.

Zaifyr met him at the door.

‘Qian.’ Kaqua wore a faded multicoloured robe of brown and white and grey, the colours entwining in the folds around his shoulders and waist. He carried an old leather satchel.
‘I am here to discuss your trial.’

‘It is a gift,’ Xrie said to her, after she had picked up the sword. ‘Nothing more.’

It was a short-bladed weapon, simple in its design, but well weighted. Seated across from the Soldier, Ayae turned the blade over in her hand, then returned it into its leather sheath.
‘You need to bring better gifts,’ she said, holding out the sword back to him. ‘I can make you a list of all that you could give me, if you would like. It only has names on
it.’