The Eternal Kingdom (The Children Trilogy Book 3)

by Ben Peek

  ‘Come with me.’ Jix looked the same in death as he had in life: a bald, bearded man with one eye a solid colour, wearing tattered pants and a jacket. With his thick hand, he beckoned to Zaifyr. ‘Let us leave here. I will show you.’

  He was strangely horrified at the prospect. ‘I can’t leave my body.’

  ‘Do not be like them, godling,’ Jix said harshly. ‘Do not disrespect your heritage.’

  The ancient dead moved away from Zaifyr, his body caught halfway between swimming and walking, his actions suggesting that for all his disgust, he could not leave his mortal remains behind easily, either. Where is your body kept? Zaifyr asked himself. In the wreckage of Wayfair, he was sure. In that broken ship on the floor of Leviathan’s Blood, safely locked in a coffin where both the lock and the hinges had rusted shut so solidly that no creature could break either open. But yet, as Zaifyr pushed away from his body with a backward glance, he felt a tremendous urge to return to it, as if something quite real bound him to it. Instead, he made his way after Lor Jix.

  The Captain of Wayfair made his way out of Leviathan’s Blood in silence. He ignored any attempt Zaifyr made to speak to him, even after they emerged from the water, like two survivors of a wreck.

  The coast that the two strode upon was defined by greys and whites and chaos. There was a camp on the edges of Yeflam, and for a moment, Zaifyr could not understand why it was there. He thought he was in a different time and a different place – a place in the far, far future, or one in the very past, after the War of the Gods – until he turned and saw the wreckage of Yeflam.

  Eidan had caused that, he reminded himself. Eidan had broken the pylon that held Nale and, in doing so, had destroyed the balance of the Floating Cities. His confusion gave way to a sense of relief. Only a short amount of time had passed.

  Zaifyr followed Lor Jix through the camp. The Captain of Wayfair did not pause, did not talk or show any interest in what was around him. He strode through colourless fires and grey-skinned men and women. For his part, Zaifyr wondered if his brothers were in the camp. And Ayae? But Lor Jix gave him no time to stop.

  Instead, the ancient dead led him beyond the camp and into the Mountains of Ger. Once they left the camp, Zaifyr asked again where they were going, and again, Jix ignored him.

  The road they followed led up into Mireea and, soon, the ruined city appeared, defined in the greys and whites of the colourless daylight world Zaifyr inhabited. Its buildings were broken and sunken, and the roads – the once-renowned cobbled roads – were shattered, but it was not this that unsettled Zaifyr. No, the growing sense of apprehension that emerged within him came from the haunts on the walls of the city, in the ruined buildings, broken wooden walls and gaps in the roads. There were hundreds. Each of them watched him, as no other dead had, and each of them, he realized, was armed. They had swords and shields, and they looked, he thought, very much like an army.

  Jix led him to the centre of Mireea, to where the markets were once held. It was there that two spirits waited.

  The first was Queila Meina, the Captain of Steel, who had died fighting the two Keepers, Fo and Bau. She looked much as she had in life, tall, with short, dark hair and, as on the few times Zaifyr had seen her, she wore leather armour and a long sword at her side. She did not carry a shield like the other dead, but upon seeing her, Zaifyr was reminded of how the shields the haunts carried were similar to those that the mercenary group Steel had used to much success, and he found that his apprehension gave way to a stronger sense of disquiet. It was an unease that grew when Meina turned to him and inclined her head slightly, as if greeting a commander, or a lord, and in doing so revealed the second figure in the square.

  The Wanderer.

  Cannibal Messages

  ‘Se’Saera killed Kaqua. She then gave the order to her generals, to Aela Ren and Zilt, to kill the remaining Keepers of the Divine.’ Aelyn’s hands tightened visibly around each other. ‘She ordered them to kill the people who had been my friends for over a thousand years. She did it as if they were bugs, as if they were so beneath her notice that she did not need to watch while they died. Instead, she talked to me. She talked casually, as if we were friends.’

  The memory clearly bothered Aelyn Meah. She shifted in her seat, the silence almost thick enough to pull over her shoulders. I understood: the other Keepers were as much victims of Kaqua’s manipulations as she was. Free of him, they might have made different choices. Or, they might not have. Regardless of what they might have done, Aelyn was left with the memory of her inability to defend her friends and, later, her failure to show adequate remorse. She has been accused of both in the years since the Massacre of Gtara took place. It has been a story that has followed her around as if it explained her failure not to those she ruled beside – not the Keepers who died – but to all of us.

  Eventually, I was able to draw out of her what Se’Saera said:

  ‘She told me that I would never be a god,’ Aelyn said. ‘They were her first words to me while the Keepers died. It was not very surprising, in truth. Se’Saera was no different to Kaqua in that regard. Being divine was all she thought about. But what did surprise me was when she said I was part of her future. She said that in all the fates she could see, I was alive, and while I lived, she would be a god. She then told me that I should rejoice, for when she was whole, the world would be healed.’

  —Onaedo, Histories, Year 1029

  1.

  The Wanderer was a tall figure, but not so much so that he was inhuman in his height. Next to him, Zaifyr was but a head shorter.

  The god looked much as he had in the stories Zaifyr had been told as a child: tall, gaunt and dressed in a long, flowing robe with the hood pulled low over his head. Beneath the hood was darkness, but Zaifyr did not expect anything different. The Wanderer’s face only appeared when he pulled back his cowl. When he did that, he took on the appearance of someone the dead knew. As a child, Zaifyr’s parents told him that the Wanderer did this as a comfort, and he had been surprised when he came upon his first depiction of the Wanderer’s face as a smooth, fleshless skull years after they had died. The painting had been made after the War of the Gods, in the centuries where churches failed, governments fell and people tried to make sense of what had happened. The Wanderer’s skull face had been part of a sequence in which all the gods appeared half alive and half dead, their divine bodies giving way to skeletons that weighed down the world. But the Wanderer who appeared before him now was the one from his childhood. The only difference was the staff he held in his gloved hands. It was made from wood and came up to the Wanderer’s chin. The god’s hands were folded around the middle, the end firmly planted in the ground.

  ‘He does not move and he does not speak,’ Queila Meina said. ‘He appeared after the new god was given her name.’

  ‘Se’Saera,’ Zaifyr murmured as he walked around the god. The robes did not rustle or shift. ‘Her name is Se’Saera.’

  ‘I heard it. We all heard it,’ the ghost of the Captain of Steel said. ‘But I will not say it. It has the feel of—’

  ‘Being tainted,’ Lor Jix finished.

  Zaifyr paused, glanced at the two of them. Neither had approached the god with him, but instead remained a dozen steps away, at the entrance of the square. Upon his approach, Meina had not said a word to him, but merely stepped aside, as if she had been waiting his arrival. Since then, both she and Jix had been joined by other ghosts. They reminded Zaifyr of Lor Jix’s crew, who had appeared over Yeflam as a replica of Wayfair, a replica that had broken apart as they fell upon Se’Saera in an attempt to kill her.

  ‘Is this where you were taken after she was named?’ he asked Jix. ‘When you disappeared from Yeflam?’

  ‘Aye,’ he said.

  ‘Is your crew here as well?’

  ‘No.’ For the first time Zaifyr saw the ancient dead hesitate. ‘They are gone,’ he said, eventually. ‘But not gone, as well.’

  ‘He is lying,’ Meina said, a note of disgust
in her voice. ‘If you trust him, you’re a fool. This old bit of death is nothing but another’s tool.’ Beside her, Jix snarled and began to speak, but the Captain of Steel met his gaze, and he fell silent. ‘We almost killed him when he appeared here,’ she said. ‘He roared at us, threatened us, and tried to command us, but I would not have that in life, and I will not have that in death.’

  The last surprised Zaifyr. ‘How could you kill what is already dead?’

  ‘Whatever you did to us made us different.’ There were nods from the ghosts behind her, a murmur of agreement. ‘It was not apparent to us immediately, not until creatures like Jix began to enter the mountains. A soldier of mine followed one of them into the mountains and attacked it. We do not know where it went after it was killed. It was not here, surely, but where else can the dead go?’

  ‘The afterlife? The gods created paradises and punishments,’ Zaifyr began, thinking that, if the dead were ‘killed’, then they would enter the realms that the gods had made as a reward for those who had been loyal . . . but as he began to say that, a deep pain struck him. It began in his chest, as if his heart had stuttered back to life. He stumbled forwards, away from the still form of the Wanderer. The sensation of drowning returned to him suddenly, acutely, and he desperately wanted to take a breath: but he had no breath to take, no nose or mouth to draw in the air he needed, and no lungs to fill.

  ‘Your chest,’ Meina said, forcing him to look down, to see the greyness of his body, and to see, in it, a small line of red. ‘What is that?’ she asked.

  ‘Life,’ Lor Jix said.

  As suddenly as it came upon him, the pain began to recede. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You cannot—’

  ‘Child.’ The word came from the Wanderer, from a voice that echoed, as if there were both a male and a female voice speaking. ‘Child.’ The male spoke first, then the female, but when the Wanderer spoke next, the genders were reversed. ‘I do not know your name, child,’ the Wanderer said. ‘I cannot see you clearly. You are so far along the lines of fate that I can see only glimpses of you. Are you the man from the mountains of Kakar? Or another? The parts of me in you will persist. They will bring you to this moment. But what, exactly, is this moment? The threads of fate are breaking down. I see death. I see life. You have been struck down in a city surrounded by the dead. Men and women surrounded you. They are your friends, your family. I am trying to leave this message for you, but the time is not right. Fate has been broken. You must be imprisoned. The abomination must rise. It must be later that I see you. It must be when you next die. When you fall into the black ocean. But is that you? Or is it another that I see?

  ‘It does not matter, child. I leave this message for you. My task for you.

  ‘Fate has begun to reassemble itself. It is trying to join, to become whole, to destroy all its possibilities and all its variety. It yearns to be singular, as it once was, before we first found it. It has forgotten how bleak it was. How poor the world it created was. But then, we should expect no less from fate. It is mindless. It is without sentience, intelligence or moral. It seeks to return us to a dark future, a time of despair, for no other reason than it must. It cannot recognize the path of nothingness it creates. It does not see the world defined by soot and grime that leads to destruction. It does not see that the abomination it has created is but a tool towards this end. It does not know the oblivion that awaits us all should it succeed.

  ‘We, your gods – child, we who created you and nurtured you – have done all that we can to stop fate. We have spilled ourselves into the world to deprive the abomination’s completion. We have been forced to destroy ourselves. But it must be done. The abomination must not be allowed to become whole. It lies now where it was spawned, in Heüala. It lies there against the walls that were constructed long, long ago, when fate first made us. In the holiest of places, in the most sanctified of existence, the abomination survives behind closed doors, while its vessel – its one finger in the world – seeks to gather our remains to complete itself. Destroy the vessel there and you destroy nothing, child. It must be struck down by you in Heüala.

  ‘Yes, you, child, must strike it down. You must do it with this staff. You must break the gates to Heüala down and slay the horror that it is within.’

  2.

  Ranan was a city without walls.

  The road to the capital of Leera turned into a gentle slope long before the city appeared, long before the marshland, the swamp crows and the ugly light-blocking trees of the Leeran marshes and bogs slipped away. Bueralan, who had come to Ranan twice before – once ten years earlier and once in what felt increasingly like a lifetime ago – did not notice the change until walls of stone began to appear around him. Such was the gentleness of the decline, the natural feeling of it that, even then, he was barely aware that he travelled into the earth. He thought the walls had been built and were part of a defensive structure. The revelation that the earth itself was the wall that an invader must breach occurred to him shortly before Ranan became clear. Before he saw the smooth stone towers, the square houses that sat in rows like tombs, and the cathedral that rose above them all: before then, Bueralan realized that he rode into deep fissures gouged into the earth. From their base, he rode up narrow tunnels into the city proper. He entered the streets in the dying light of the afternoon’s sun, the last to do so, the reins of the grey looped around Taela, who sat before him, unable to ride a horse herself. Ahead, Se’Saera, the Innocent and the god-touched soldiers were a slow-moving broken line working towards the huge shape of the Ranan’s cathedral. Zilt’s monsters were fanned out in front of them like a pack of dogs who had returned home. They ran on legs and arms through the city, leaping on stone roofs and climbing towers, letting out cries that bordered on howls.

  The cathedral lay in the centre of Ranan and was separated from the city by deep fissures. It gave the land it was built on the appearance that it sat on a mountain that had sunk into the ground, but which had weathered both time and the elements, and was now reasserting itself.

  ‘When I was here last, I saw a single man rebuilding Ranan,’ he said to Taela, as the grey’s hooves struck the black stone road in rhythm. ‘It is hard to believe that he did all of this.’

  ‘It looks as if it has been forced upon the world,’ she said softly.

  ‘Ranan was originally a wooden city. The ground was flat and whole and it looked as if it had been drawn from the soil, as if it had grown from its depths. People used to say that the Leerans had found it when they settled the land.’

  Taela said nothing and Bueralan did not tell her that he had last come to Ranan in search of his mercenary group, Dark. He did not say that, when he had entered the cathedral, he had found his friends dead. He did not explain how he found Orlan in the grasp of a creature he could not see. The grey made its way to the bridge that rose over the fissure and allowed him to enter the streets that led to the cathedral. If he had begun that story, he would have ended up telling her how Se’Saera had given him Zean’s soul. How, from here, he had gone to Ooila.

  A part of Taela had not left Gtara, Bueralan believed. Her bandaged hands did not allow her to grasp the reins of a horse, and so she had ridden with him, and with Samuel Orlan. Se’Saera had made it clear that no one was to heal her injuries and, in the first few days, they had had to help her eat, drink and with other bodily matters. Each day, Bueralan had felt an emptiness consume her and it had not subsided even when a small amount of use returned to her hands. He wanted to believe that it was passing, however, and he would occasionally catch her staring at the front of the line, where Se’Saera rode. Zilt and Ren rode beside her, and behind them, the Breath of Yeflam, Aelyn Meah followed. He wanted to glimpse in those stares the anger he had seen earlier, the emotion that had led her to stab the god, but any hope he had that she was returning, if not to normal, then to a sense of herself, was broken the night before they entered the fissures surrounding Ranan.

  ‘Bueralan,’ Taela whispered to him. She lay next
to him, covered by a blanket he had laid across her. ‘Bueralan,’ she repeated.

  He had not been asleep. ‘Yes?’

  She shifted closer to him and, without thinking, he opened his arms, and allowed her to draw against him. ‘You should kill me.’

  He tightened his arm around her.

  ‘I can’t stop this,’ Taela continued in her soft voice. Her emotions were tiny and desperate in each word she spoke. ‘I can’t stop her. I can’t – I tried but I just can’t. I can’t do anything, Bueralan. We could stop her, though. You could. You’re like them. You could just – you could stop it.’

  His hand stroked the back of her head, the white tattoos a pale netting over her. He could see again the figure in Ranan, the figure he knew that was Se’Saera, and he could see the darkness of it, the incomplete nature of its skin, the surety of its musculature, and he asked himself again what she could have been, what—

  ‘Bueralan?’ Taela whispered again.

  ‘She wouldn’t let you go,’ he said, finally. ‘She’d only find another way to hurt you.’

  Taela did not move away. She stayed in his grasp until the morning’s sun began to rise, until the camp began to move. He helped her onto the grey and sat quietly until they were on the streets of Ranan.

  The cathedral had changed since he was last in it. The ground floor still opened up into a huge area where the Faithful could gather. Wooden pews sat in neat lines before an empty podium at the far end. The afternoon’s light came through the windows that lined the room and flooded it in a dark burned orange. If it was a portent, Bueralan could not see one, and he led Taela to the stairs that went both up and down. It was on the next floor up that he found a room for him and Taela. Bueralan had considering taking one of the square houses in Ranan, outside the cathedral, but Zilt’s monsters had strung themselves out across the roofs and he thought better of it.