by Ben Peek
The padlock was thick, solid, but well oiled. It fell open and Heast cracked the door open. Like a bright burning eye, a partly shuttered lantern shone from within.
‘Lord Tuael,’ the Captain of Refuge said, easing through the door. ‘I hope we haven’t kept you waiting.’
‘One day, I will see you surprised.’ The Lord of Faaisha sat on the top of a square crate at the front of the warehouse, the lantern next to him. He held a book in his hand. ‘I worked very hard to be here ahead of you,’ he said, closing it and placing it in his lap.
‘You’ve worked hard to be ahead of me since I arrived,’ Heast said. Behind him, Anemone pulled the door shut. ‘Is there more light in here?’
Tuael lifted his right hand and clicked his fingers. A moment later, a dozen lamps flared, their shutters drawn back to reveal the warehouse and the soldiers throughout. They numbered over thirty and they stood on crates, in carts and on the ground. Each of them was armed.
‘You were expected,’ Tuael said, a bored note in his voice. ‘I wanted you to be here to advise the marshals against the Leerans. I did not think you would come, so I sent Lok to you. He surprised me when he drew the symbol of Refuge, but I thought it was a private code between the two of you. Refuge had ceased to exist nearly thirty years ago, after all. I certainly did not expect you to kill Iata, take his soldiers and rebuild Refuge before you came here.’
Heast pushed back the lid on one of the crates and found it filled with leather shirts, each of them dyed black. ‘Is that why you gave me to the First Queen?’
‘I had little choice. The other Lords could not accept you after you killed Iata. What message would that send to the people of Faaisha? they asked.’
‘It would have been difficult to explain why your marshals were so incompetent.’ Heast left the crate and began to walk towards a cart. Behind him, Anemone followed, while the Lord began to walk parallel to them along the crates. ‘You could have saved the people in Maosa.’
‘They lived a lot longer than we expected,’ Tuael admitted. ‘After Faet Cohn lost Celp, the other marshals argued that we should treat that part of the kingdom like a gangrenous limb. Cohn himself led the argument. It is not so difficult to see why, now.’
‘Waalstan never had the soldiers to hold that much land. Not securely, at any rate. It is why he split his forces up and scattered them.’
‘Whereas now he is too deeply embedded to push out easily. Whatever the past, that is the challenge we now face. In this regard, however, Marshal Cohn will provide us with some help.’
On the cart stood a soldier, one of the women Heast had seen in The Undertow. He motioned for her to grab one side of a crate.
‘After Cohn’s death,’ Jye Tuael continued, ‘I had my warlocks pick through his soul, and his estate. They’re still doing that, but they’ve already pulled out a number of things. A blank copy of The Eternal Kingdom held a number of scraps of paper, for example. Coordinates, for the most part, to where various outposts lay.’
Inside the crate were a series of spears, each of them carefully packed, the ends wrapped in soft paper. Gently, Heast pulled back the edge of one, to reveal a steel tube attached to the end. It held, he knew, a mix of black powder and iron balls, the latter of which would burst out in a spray after the wick was lit. At the sight of it, the guard holding the lamp jerked back, and looked at the crates nearby, crates that she had stood calmly upon with a lantern.
Heast lifted one of the weapons.
‘Tinalan fire lances,’ the Lord of Faaisha said, impressed. ‘The horror made by the Marble Royals. In the last five years they have become the world’s new monster story. Have you seen one before?’
‘A deserter from the Marble Palaces came through Mireea shortly after the lances became standard issue. For a few coins he would show you how it worked.’ Heast turned the spear over in his hands, remembering the splintered boards into which he had unleashed pieces of metal, stone and glass. ‘I wonder if Aela Ren and his soldiers have ever seen these in battle?’
‘I believe the First Queen thought not.’ Tuael tossed the book down from where he stood. ‘These are the coordinates that we’ve managed to take from Cohn’s notes. When you leave Vaeasa – when you leave Vaeasa by night with these weapons that Zeala Fe has left you – you would be best to start working through them. The marshals will be doing the same.’
‘What happens if we run into each other?’
‘Officially? You’re being tolerated, but Cohn had friends.’ He paused. ‘Anemone?’
‘Yes?’ the witch replied, her tone, Heast thought, deceptively mild. ‘What is it that I can do for you, Lord Tuael?’
‘I offered you work before,’ he said. ‘I’ll repeat the offer. My warlocks are breaking Cohn’s spirit, but the task is hard, they tell me. The new god has a small awareness around it, and they constantly touch her. You and your grandmother would be a great assistance to them and to me.’
‘As I said to you before, My Lord,’ she said, while Heast gently returned the spear to the crate. ‘I have other responsibilities.’
‘Are they more important than the fate of Faaisha?’
‘My Lord,’ Anemone repeated, and this time, the insult of the two words was clear, ‘I offer you and the other Lords of Faaisha no loyalty, because you have shown none to your people. I was raised in Maosa, your gangrenous limb. It was, I admit, a terrible place, but it need not have been. Not if you had recognized that it was part of your body. But you did not and because of that, I no longer recognize you, or any of the Lords, as being part of the body I exist within. Should you wish to contest that, should you wish to somehow bind me to your command because of some heritage of blood you think I have to you or this country, I can only say that my Lord does it at his own risk. I am no more or less than the Witch of Refuge now.’
5.
The Keepers of the Divine died in a battle that mirrored the one Bueralan fought. It was short, ugly and violent.
The saboteur did not raise his sword again. The Keepers could not reach cover and, without a defensive position, the numbers were against them. There was little for Bueralan to do but stand and watch. Watch them die as their powers failed to change the tide of the battle, as the god-touched tore into their ranks with a ferocity that was at times shocking.
‘His name was Paelor,’ Orlan said, as he approached. There was blood in the cartographer’s beard, but the stain did not come from any injury he had received. Before he turned to Bueralan, he had dropped an axe among the bodies of the slavers. ‘He was one of the younger Keepers,’ the cartographer added.
‘He tried to leave,’ Bueralan said.
‘They all should have done that.’
‘I expected more of a fight from the Keepers of the Divine.’
‘Against Ren and the god-touched?’ Orlan scratched the dried blood in his beard. ‘They are bad enough, but with Se’Saera here as well? They should have known better than to come to Gtara.’
Should they? Whatever lens the Keepers viewed the world through had been fragmented and cracked. Bueralan had always believed that it distorted their place in it and allowed them to believe that they were gods, a folly that was nakedly exposed now.
Raising his head, Bueralan gazed at Aelyn Meah. After the last of her Keepers fell, she had risen to her feet. She looked around the battlefield flatly, as if the reality of it was one that she had long suspected would come to pass. He half expected her to leave the pen she stood in, but she did not. Instead, Se’Saera left the slave pen and slowly approached each of the fallen Keepers.
No one spoke to her as she did this. It was as if they all understood that what they were witness to was an important ritual. Yet it was difficult for Bueralan to describe what that ritual was, for the new god did not touch, or reach out for the bodies in any way. She merely passed them, and in doing so, offered the faintest recognition of each of the dead.
After she had passed Bueralan and Orlan, the saboteur reached down and turned the Keeper
over. He was drawn to the broken, bloody skull of Paelor, to a difference in the man’s body that he could not quantify. It was difficult to describe, but it was clear to him that a quality Paelor had possessed was now absent. It was not as simple as the life of a man leaving him after he had died. Paelor was diminished beyond that, somehow. ‘She took his power, didn’t she?’ Bueralan said as he rose. ‘She is taking all their power.’
‘She believes it is hers,’ the cartographer said.
Ahead of him, Se’Saera headed back to the pen where Aelyn Meah waited. As if she had been summoned, Taela fell in beside her.
‘Could they have actually been gods, then? I had always thought that they couldn’t be,’ Bueralan added quietly. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘They were not like gods,’ Orlan said. ‘At least, they were not like the gods I read about. You will have to ask others we travel with for their recollections, and when you do, you will hear what I have heard and read. You will see how they lived a life, not as we do, of moments, but of time. It is in our new god, actually. She sees the fragments of time that we cannot. She sees the past, the present and the future, and she lives in those moments. She uses them to understand the world that we live in. No Keeper ever lived like that.’
He saw the god take Taela’s arm in her own. ‘Does that mean she doesn’t have free will?’ he asked.
‘If you had asked these questions before we went to Ooila, we would be in a different place, now.’
‘Would we?’
Orlan shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He added quietly, ‘So much has changed.’
Divinity was not humanity. That much was clear to Bueralan. He had begun to suspect, as he watched Se’Saera and Taela approach Aelyn Meah, that to be divine was to be a vessel. It was to be a structure in which divinity could express itself. In many ways, it was akin to the power of royalty, or office, or rank: its ability to command was independent of the body that contained it, but it was the individual who held it that detailed its expression. Where that comparison failed was that the power of rule was a socially created one, enabled through generations of teaching. The power of the divine was, if not tangible, then actual, and was something that was gathered, much in the way that a farmer might harvest wheat or corn, and if that was the case, then it was possible that Se’Saera did not have as much freedom to express the power within her as the ruler of a nation, or the captain of a mercenary army.
But if Se’Saera had limited agency, then what of him? Bueralan had carried her name within himself. He did not know if it had been given to him when Ger had reached out to him in his sunken temple, nearly a year ago. To be god-touched, according to Orlan and Ren and the others whose company he was in, was to have your mortality hidden in time, to be safely secured until you had done enough of the god’s work, or until it tired of you. Bueralan did not know what caused a god to be finished with his or her servant, but he knew that it was not a request that the god-touched made for him or herself.
‘I had heard stories of you, Bueralan.’ Lost in his thoughts, the saboteur had not seen Zilt’s approach. Instead, he had been watching Se’Saera talk with Aelyn, watching Taela fall a step behind her, as she had done with the First Queen. Before him, the blond man nudged Paelor’s body with the end of his boot. ‘I had heard that you were something of a swordsman. A warrior. But this? This was ugly. Dirty, even.’
‘I can’t imagine that truly disappoints you,’ he said.
‘Do not think of me as a man who does not value skill. I strived for perfection in my last life and I strive for it now, in my new one.’
‘And the thousands you killed before?’ Orlan said cynically. ‘They were just imperfect?’
‘Racially, morally, religiously.’ Zilt glanced at him. ‘Much like you.’
‘What about me?’ the Innocent asked as he approached the three of them. ‘Would you say the same?’
‘No,’ the other man said.
‘But these men are my kin,’ Ren continued. ‘I am like them and they are like me. Should you view one as flawed, you must, therefore, view the other in the same light.’
‘If I have offended you, I apologize.’ Beyond him, in the pen, Bueralan’s gaze was caught by a sudden movement. ‘It was not my intent.’
‘Taela—’
But he was too late: alone, unguarded, the woman who had been a Queen’s Voice thrust a dagger into the neck of the new god.
The darkness that erupted from Se’Saera washed over not just Taela and Aelyn, but all those who stood in Gtara, as if it was suddenly enfolded in a whole sun of pitch blackness. Bueralan was one of the last to lose his sight, and because of that, he saw the shape that bloomed around Se’Saera, the body that was, itself, darkness.
He saw a horrific half-formed shape, a creation of nightmares, of a beast with more than one face. It was like nothing he had seen before.
But he knew what it was.
It was Se’Saera’s true form.
6.
On the day that Ayae left the shore of Yeflam, a storm rushed in from Leviathan’s Blood. It turned the camp into a series of muddy, churned-up lanes that mirrored her emotional state.
She struggled with her doubt, self-recrimination and frustration beneath the morning sun’s leaked grey light. Out on the ocean, heavy clouds suggested another storm, but it did not stop people in the camp coming out and lining the makeshift streets to bid farewell to the men and women who would soon be led up the road to Mireea, through its ruins and onto the battlefields beyond. It was, Ayae thought, a sombre procession. The Mireean soldiers who joined Captain Mills at the edge of the camp were accompanied by their families and their friends. Men and women handed them tokens – trinkets, small carvings, pieces of cloth – when they passed. The soldiers who were part of the Yeflam Guard were similarly treated as they left the camp and lined up behind Xrie. Only Kal Essa’s Brotherhood avoided it, but they had been mobilized in the early morning’s rain and now waited alongside the larger force of the Saan.
‘There was some talk of having a parade,’ Caeli said, standing beside her. ‘Alahn suggested it, but Xrie refused it. He said the war had already begun.’
Se’Saera’s War. Ayae had heard the phrase used a week ago, after the announcement that the Mireean and Yeflam Guard would be joining the Saan. ‘How many do you think will die?’ she asked.
‘A lot of them.’
Ayae winced, despite herself.
‘You still made the right choice,’ Caeli said.
‘I’m not so sure,’ she admitted, letting her frustration have voice. ‘Jae’le and the others don’t need me. Anguish will take them to Zaifyr. I can’t help there. I can’t help when they find him.’
‘When they find his spirit, you mean.’ The guard shrugged. ‘From everything you’ve told me, they don’t know what they’re doing, either. Who knows what will happen when they find him?’
Jae’le had told her that the four of them – he, Eidan, Tinh Tu and Anguish – planned to follow the lines that led to Zaifyr.
‘What lines?’ Ayae had asked him.
‘I am not sure how best to describe them. Anguish sees them,’ he said. Jae’le had come into the camp the morning after Ayae had witnessed Tinh Tu’s vision of what had happened in Asila. He had come to the tent that she and Caeli shared. Ayae had been so surprised by the sight of him in the early morning dark that she invited him inside. Caeli, who had also awoken at the sound of his approach, sat on her bedroll, her naked feet strangely obscene while Jae’le spoke. ‘They are like thin cords. Anguish described them as frayed rope. Broken parts of a larger cord. He said that they lead from Zaifyr’s body up into the mountains.’
‘How can you trust what he tells you? Even Eidan calls him a deception.’
‘You must trust that everything is happening for a reason. All the words we say, all the actions we take.’
‘How do you know this cord is even attached to Zaifyr?’ Ayae pressed. ‘I have never heard him mention that when he sees t
he dead. How do you even know it is real?’
‘As I said, you must trust.’ In the dark of the tent, he was a collection of strange shadows, as if he was a man who had not yet been fully formed. ‘If we do not have trust, we do not have a way forward.’
She did not yet know what the way was, and she said that to him.
‘If we can find Zaifyr,’ Jae’le explained, ‘if we can return him to his body, we may well be able to stand against the new god much more easily. She is afraid of him, after all. I saw that clearly in Yeflam.’
‘If and may . . .’ She let the words fade. ‘You don’t know what state he will be in,’ she said instead.
‘No, I do not. I am not blind to that. It may be that my brother will need years to recover once we return him to flesh. It took centuries for him to return to himself mentally after Asila. I have not forgotten that he does not remember the worst of those days’ events, either. It could be that he does not remember what has happened at all when he awakes. The circumstances of his death in Yeflam are very different from his death in Asila.’
‘Yet, by the same logic, he might remember all of it,’ Ayae said.
‘He might,’ the immortal man admitted. ‘And it could be that we will bring him to life only to kill him again.’
‘Maybe it is better to leave him.’ It would be the most humane thing that they could do, she thought, but did not say it. ‘I know when we die there is a half-life for us, but it could be that is best. For him, that is.’
‘You do not believe that,’ Jae’le said.
‘What will you do if he needs . . .’ Caeli, speaking for the first time, paused. She was, Ayae thought, struggling with the word centuries. Struggling with the concept of talking to people who were thousands of years old. ‘What if he cannot fight Se’Saera straight away?’
