by Ben Peek
Taela lay down on one of the beds without a word once he shut the door behind them. Her injured hands curled against her swollen stomach and Bueralan laid the other blanket over her. She was asleep by the time he left the room.
He went in search of Kaze, but could not find her in any of the rooms around him. In fact, he was surprised to see that the floor he was on was largely empty. The only other room occupied was the one Aelyn Meah rested in. She sat on the bed, alone, her legs crossed beneath her, her gaze on the wall across from her. He was surprised, but the emotion was part of a larger surprise, one that had begun in Gtara when she had accepted Se’Saera’s order that she ride by the god’s side. He did not know if the two spoke, or if Se’Saera had threatened her, but he recognized in her the emptiness that was consuming Taela. Perhaps, he thought, as he passed the room and continued to search for Kaze, that was explanation enough.
An eerie silence followed him up the next stairway, onto the next floor. There he found an empty library.
The shelves were bare, like limbs stripped of flesh. The sense of disquiet that filled Bueralan in the halls only grew as he walked among the shelves. There were dozens and dozens of shelves, each of them with an air of expectation, as if they were waiting not for the already written histories, philosophies or fictions to be placed there, but for those that would be made. There was no place for the world as it was to be recorded on these shelves. He had never before experienced that within a library, and he found that the more waiting shelves he passed, the more his disquiet turned into an open revulsion.
At the end of the room large windows allowed the orange light of the afternoon’s sun to drift in. From here, Bueralan could gaze out on Ranan, at the flat roofs and towers, and at the monsters that stood like sentries, staring out into Leera, where the enemies of their god would surely come, to fail in the first chapters of her new world.
‘Are you lost, by any chance?’ Aela Ren asked from his left. Startled, Bueralan turned and found a series of desks and chairs, neatly arranged. The Innocent sat in the centre, a single book on the table before him. ‘If you are looking for the others, they will be in their own spaces,’ he continued, not looking up from the book. ‘We are solitary men and women when we are able to be. We like to be alone.’
It was a gentle admonishment, one Bueralan ignored. ‘Have you asked yourself why that is?’
‘You can surely be more subtle.’ The scarred man rose his head and sighed. ‘A mortal life is one that defines itself by death. Because of that, it rushes along, and meaning is taken from the acts that one makes, rather than its meaning guiding the acts. But for the immortal, for those of us who served the gods, the meaning is everything. Such a search is even more important now that we stand beside Se’Saera. We must ask ourselves once again, who are we? How do we define ourselves? The answers are ones that will be found in solitude.’
The book, Bueralan saw as Ren closed it, was titled The Eternal Kingdom. ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Do you know yourself?’
‘It is a question that I ask.’
‘That is not an answer.’
‘No.’ He was silent for a moment, his scarred hand resting on the cover of the only book in the cathedral’s library. ‘What is in this book changes,’ Ren said, finally. ‘You pick it up and you open it and the words alter. A history where the gods killed each other for their child becomes the history of a new god, one made from the wreckage of the old gods. It is like when Se’Saera talks about her creations. Her first she distances herself from. She calls it a deception, says that it is not her first creation. The child within Taela is her first, true creation, now. As our god becomes more powerful, she rebuilds her understanding of the world and, as she does that, she rebuilds our place in it. Eventually, I think she will rebuild the world without figures like me.’ He offered a faint smile. ‘It is a relief.’
The admission surprised Bueralan, more than anything else he had seen, more than Ranan, or Aelyn Meah, or Zilt’s monsters throughout the city. But before he could say anything, one of Aela Ren’s soldiers rushed into the room.
‘Ai Sela is here,’ Joqan said before Bueralan or Ren could speak. ‘She says that Glafanr has disappeared!’
3.
The Wanderer’s message repeated. ‘Child,’ he said, after he had finished. ‘Child,’ she said without pause. ‘I do not know your name, child.’
The words followed Zaifyr out of the market square as he put distance between himself and the god. Outside the market, by the remains of a burned shop, he stopped and tried to close himself off to everything around him. Asila, he thought. The Wanderer had left that message, having seen what would happen in Asila thousands of years before it had happened. He had seen Zaifyr struck down. The Wanderer said I died. Zaifyr could not recall that. He could recall Aelyn stepping forwards. The dead were around her. She could not see them. She thought she was safe, but she wasn’t. Then the ground was breaking as Eidan’s stone giant began to emerge. I remember Jae’le striking me. I can remember – but there was blankness after that. He could remember waking in the tower. It was like when he had awoken beneath Leviathan’s Blood. He had lost time. He could not remember what happened after he fell. After Yeflam, he had awoken to the sight of himself floating in the water. After Asila, he had awoken in a small, crooked tower. The floor was made from earth. The walls ugly bare brick. He had enough space to lie down and enough to stand up. When the door cracked open, a thousand years later, the sun hurt his eyes.
The idea that he had died sat strangely. He was dead now and he could not recall being separated from his body. Would it not be more of a truth to say not that he died, but that he had been killed? Yes, Zaifyr realized, that felt true to him. Jae’le would have struck to kill. His brother would not pull his blow. He would not risk the others in his family. To mirror the dash of red in his chest – the dash that was now joined by dozens more, as if his organs were beginning to emerge bloodily – Zaifyr felt a streak of shame. He had seen the intent in Aelyn to kill him, and he had allowed, over the centuries, for that to fall to her alone. He had allowed his resentment to focus on her. It was no wonder she did not want to meet him, no wonder she had wanted to drive him from Yeflam.
Lor Jix approached with a look of command similar to his expression when he had found Zaifyr in Leviathan’s Blood. ‘It lies now where it was spawned, in Heüala,’ he said, his voice not his own, but the dual-gendered voice of the Wanderer. Shocked, the ancient dead stopped. His surprise was so real, so unfeigned, that he tried to stop speaking. ‘It lies there against the walls that were constructed long, long ago,’ he said, speaking through the ghostly hand he had raised, ‘when fate first made us. In the holiest of places, in the most sanctified of existence, it survives behind closed doors, while its vessel – its one finger in the world – seeks to gather our remains to complete itself. But destroy the vessel and you destroy nothing, child. The abomination must be struck down by you in Heüala.’
Heüala.
The City of the Dead.
In his youth, Zaifyr had seen dozens of depictions, each altering and changing to reflect the belief of the culture it was in. He saw paintings of Heüala as a simple square house, others where it was a huge, beautiful city of spires and domed buildings, and some where it was defined by the long, twisting lanes of water around it. Every culture had its own version, but what did not change was the idea that in this city the gods would grant you access to paradise, or punish you in purgatory, or send you back to relive your life. Here, your life was weighed – by scale, by judge, by animal, by whatever method each god decided upon – and here you were found worthy of a god’s favour, or not.
Zaifyr had not heard the name Heüala for thousands of years. One of his first acts when he established Asila had been to redefine it as the City of the Dead. He did it at the suggestion of Tinh Tu. She told him and the others that if they wanted to take the place of the gods, they had to take their language as well. They had to own all that their parents had owned, she once said, befo
re the five of them realized that the gods were not their parents, and they were not gods. She warned them that the change would not be instantaneous, but slow. It would take place over generations. As long as they were careful, as long as they managed what was kept in books, in language and in memory, they could make the words of the gods their own. They would take the mantle of a god in the eyes of those around them.
‘Child.’ Lor Jix continued to speak, unable to stop the voice of the Wanderer emerging from him. ‘Child. I do not know your name, child. 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?’
From behind him, from within the remains of the burned-out shop – Orlan’s shop, Zaifyr was startled to realize – another ghost appeared. ‘Or another?’ she said. ‘The parts of me in you will persist. They will bring you to this moment, but what, exactly, is this moment?’ The ghost left the shell of the building and stood next to Jix, her words joining his in perfect unison as they repeated the Wanderer’s message to him again. ‘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. That 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?’
Would the Wanderer not stop? Zaifyr’s chest laboured, as if it were struggling to take a very real breath, and he saw that the red streaks covered his chest. Would he soon see the tether that he had seen before, after Fo poisoned him? Would he have to follow it back into Leviathan’s Blood, only to drown again? In frustration, he began to tell the Wanderer that he did not care, but instead, he said, ‘It does not matter, child. I leave this message for you. My task for you.’
The words felt alien, ugly in his throat, but Zaifyr was not able to stop himself from saying more. Furious, his legs aching, Zaifyr made his way back to the market square, where the voice of the Wanderer had only grown, his and her words emerging from all of the dead that waited there, as if they were but puppets for the god’s use. With the message turning into a chant, he strode towards the Wanderer, towards the staff that he held—
Then it was in his hand and, around him, the world was silent.
He felt a weight lifted from his chest, as if he had surfaced from the ocean, while before him, the Wanderer began to crumble. Small cracks appeared quickly across the god’s figure, as if it were made from stone, and the black robe began to break – the black robe, he realized, seeing the colour of it for the first time. A moment later, he felt water running over his feet.
The stream he stood in ran ahead of him, twisting through the ruins of Mireea, past the white brick walls of The Pale House, over the yellow-brown cobblestones, past the grey stones that had been used to make the Spine of Ger. It flowed into the green and brown trees and continued down the mountains, leaving him with a view of a sun that was not splintered, but whole.
‘What have you done?’ Zaifyr turned to Queila Meina. She and her soldiers stood in the river as well. Each of them looked very much as they had in life, with their skin white, black, brown, and more. ‘Zaifyr,’ she said, her words emerging from her mouth, as if she had air to breathe and lungs to use. ‘What has happened?’
4.
Ayae approached the ruins of Mireea on foot.
Half an hour before, as the afternoon’s sun reached its zenith, as the shape of the city began to take shape, she had climbed out of the cart Jae’le drove. He said nothing, only offered her a glance, before returning to his own silent contemplations. In the back of the cart Tinh Tu, Eidan and Anguish said nothing to her, either, but it was the latter who continued to stare at her while the cart pulled ahead, his blind eyes unconcerned with what lay before him. Ayae had asked Anguish, two nights before, if he planned to open his eyes to search for Zaifyr’s spirit, and he had chuckled, his laughter strange and not quite human. He had told her they had been open since they left the shore of Yeflam. More and more lines were appearing, he said, but if he was happy about this, Ayae could not tell. She could not tell if anyone was pleased to be drawing close to Mireea, in truth.
She was not. There was, she thought, as she stepped through the broken gates and onto the cobbled streets, an infinite sadness in what lay before her. She had heard it said that you could not return to the places of your childhood once you left them, or at least not return to them in the same way, and while a part of her could accept that, she struggled with the destruction. Alone, she made her way along a splintered road covered in the debris of fallen buildings and wooden walls, the latter part of the defence that Captain Heast had built in preparation for the Leeran siege. But it was not the debris that bothered her the most: it was the sense of neglect and abandonment, as if it had all been meaningless, as if what had been invested in it did not truly matter. But wasn’t that true? After all, the buildings that sank into the ground fell into the caverns that held the ancient Cities of Ger, and all that had been held within them was now gone. The loss of culture was not unique, the death of cities, of nations, was cyclical, as if the world was forever devouring itself to create new permutations.
A tremor ran through the ground, but it was not the first Ayae had felt. Around her, the buildings shook a little and, after they had fallen silent, she decided to head not to the market square, where she assumed Jae’le and the others had headed, but down the broken paths to her house.
The trees that Captain Heast had cut back in preparation for the siege had, over the last year, begun to grow back. It would be years – decades, perhaps – before they took on the thick canopy that had once been over Mireea and had provided shade during the hottest days of the summer, but the sight of the slim branches and new foliage pleased Ayae. She thought that, even if no one else came to fill Mireea, then the trees and wildlife of the area would. They could join the ghosts she had not seen yet.
Ayae’s house, indeed her neighbourhood, had suffered little in the quakes that had ravaged the Mountains of Ger. It appeared before her much as it had when she last saw it: square and simple, but with an overgrown garden and broken windows. At the door, she fished the key out of a pocket, and unlocked it.
Inside, she could smell rotten fruit, and there were seeds and animal faeces, though nothing overly large of the latter, thankfully. Just black pellets from small creatures that had slipped through the broken glass with their food. She could see tiny prints in dust across the counter and in the fireplace where she had cooked. Gently, she ran a finger along the back of her couch, and along the wall to her bedroom, where the unmade bed looked the same as when she had left it. What remained of her clothes hung in the wardrobe, and for a moment, she stood there and stared at them, her current leathers and heavy cloth a contrast to the linens, shirts, pants and dresses kept in there. It was another life, Ayae told herself, reaching for a black shirt she had once loved. She could not imagine a point in her life where she might wear it again.
A sound came from the living room and she released the shirt, closed the wardrobe door. Half a dozen steps later, she saw Tinh Tu easing herself onto one of her couches, a roll of paper in her lap. Her long staff leant across the arm and, as Ayae approached, she saw that the old woman was staring at a collection of drawings, nearly two years old. The first was of her ex-partner, Illaan.
‘I did not know you were an artist,’ Tinh Tu said. ‘You have a good hand. You could have made a living out of it.’
‘I was a cartographer,’ she said. ‘I was apprenticed to Samuel Orlan.’
Tinh Tu unrolled a second, revealing Zineer. ‘Could you have been the next Samuel Orlan?’
‘No, I would have just been . . .’ her voice trailed off. ‘Just myself,’ she finished with a shrug. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be gone for so long.’
‘You do not need to explain yourself.’ The old woman unrolled a third scroll and Faise stared over her shoulder at Ayae. ‘I certainly wouldn’t.’ Tinh Tu offered half a self-deprecating smile. ‘Still, my brothers did send me to find you. Anguish has disappeared.’
She imagined Eidan’s concern and felt in herself a sudden apprehension, but could not find it replicated in any fashion in his sister. ‘He ran away?’
‘No, he disappeared. It happened when we entered the market square. Eidan said that he was there one moment, but gone the next.’
‘As simple as that?’
‘Interesting, is it not?’
‘Do you think there is more to it?’ That he was a deceit for us, she wanted to say.
‘I think he is where our brother is, myself. When Anguish returns, Zaifyr will likely be with him.’
For Tinh Tu, Ayae knew, the prospect of her brother’s return was not a cause for celebration. What she had shown Ayae in Asila left the latter with no doubt that Tinh Tu viewed Zaifyr’s return as one that would be difficult. Ayae suspected that the other woman believed he would be mad, and that because of that, they would be required to take him, as they had done a thousand years ago, to the tower in Eakar.
‘Eidan would say that this house felt very much of you,’ Tinh Tu said. ‘My brother has long said that stone and wood hold memories, that they remember who has lived inside them. Perhaps it is why he goes around the world, rebuilding what has been broken, keeping the memories of history alive. Personally, I think he makes the mistake of believing that his own memories and his own relationships with cities are shared throughout the world. Life is much more temporary, like blooms of flowers in spring. Still, for those who live as long as we do, his words are worth listening to. After we have finished, I am sure he would help you rebuild this city, if you asked him.’
‘Mireea?’ Ayae was shocked. ‘I just had a home here, nothing more,’ she said. ‘It is not mine.’
