by Ben Peek
‘It could all be yours.’ She rolled the paper up tightly and rose from the chair. ‘I do not think the people who lived here will return, if it helps. But you should not be afraid to take what it is that you want. You need not be trapped by who you are. You need not put aside all of who you once were in the world. You can still have your dreams and your futures.’ In the broken window, the white raven settled itself with a flutter of wings. ‘To be who you wish to be is the greatest struggle for men and women like us,’ Tinh Tu said, the roughness of her voice slipping momentarily into something gentler, but not yet kind. ‘We lose all that defined us when our power emerges and, over our lives, we are threatened with our loss again and again, as if we were the tree that bore the blooms of the season. But unlike the tree, we are not planted by another. We are not stationary. We decide where it is that we set our roots. We decide how we weather the seasons.’
In the doorway, Tinh Tu paused and looked out into the broken sun, into the regrowing trees. After a moment, she tapped her staff down. The move called the white raven to her. With it on her staff, she began to make her way back to where her dead brother waited.
5.
Zaifyr did not know how to answer Queila Meina’s question. Like her, he did not know how to react to the rich colours of the world, did not know how to explain how they had come to pass, but in that confusion, he could offer her the name of one who might.
‘Jix,’ he said.
‘You’re guessing,’ Meina retorted.
He was, but he left the stream he stood in without admitting it. He splashed the remains of the god’s stone messenger and water onto the cobbled roads of Mireea where he paused, surprised at the sight around him.
Mireea was undamaged.
Buildings stood solidly beneath thick canopies which gave the city a pleasant, shadowed feel. Zaifyr felt the urge to take a breath, to taste what he knew would be clean air, but he could not. Like a dim echo, the sensation of drowning returned to him, as if his body was filled with water it could not void.
He found the Captain of Wayfair on a wooden bench outside the market square. Any thought Zaifyr had that Jix might be able to explain what had happened was tempered by the sight of him staring at his black-skinned hands. ‘How long has it been?’ Jix asked as he approached. ‘I honestly cannot tell you. I have lost track of all the years that I waited in the wreckage of my ship.’ The dead man’s awful, drowned voice was gone, replaced now with a voice that was ruined by his emotions. ‘I had not thought that I would be so moved by the sight of myself.’
‘You knew this would happen,’ Zaifyr said, while Meina and her soldiers fell in behind him. ‘You knew the gods left messages here. You knew they had plans for us.’
Jix lifted his head, revealing only one eye, the right. The left, in opposition to how it appeared before, was empty. ‘I only suspected.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘I am just a soldier, godling. I am told little. I piece together what I do not know.’
‘Then what has happened to us?’ Zaifyr raised the staff and swung it over the reconstructed Mireea. ‘What has happened here?’
‘I believe we are in a different time, a different fate,’ Jix said. ‘Did you not hear what the Wanderer said? The gods have constructed a series of events that are tied to the fates the gods have built. Each of our acts sends us down the path of one or another. They cannot control us, so they gamble on outcomes. It is why the Leviathan told me to ensure that you and I killed the abomination before it was named.’ He looked down at his hands again, at his faded uniform of blue and red. ‘I would be bound differently if we failed, she told me, but I did not understand it fully then.’
‘But you do now?’ Meina asked, moving next to Zaifyr.
‘Both of you asked about my crew,’ he said. ‘Look at the staff.’
At first, Zaifyr saw nothing. It was made from dark wood and looked like other staffs he had seen, as if it had been carved from a single piece; but then, in the whirls and slivers of cracks in its length, he saw a vague shimmer and felt a faint coldness against his hand, a chill similar to that of a haunt. With a growing sense of horror, Zaifyr realized that the shimmers moving throughout the length of wood were spirits. Dozens and dozens.
‘My faith is strong, but yet . . .’ Lor Jix said, a true sadness in his voice. ‘Yet I would trade my place here beside you with any one of my crew.’
‘You made a deal with a god,’ a new voice said, a voice that sounded strange and deep from the small, inky black figure that appeared on the road, as if it had been plucked from the air. ‘You are a vein in a life you do not understand,’ Anguish said. ‘Faith is but a seductive delusion here.’
It startled Zaifyr to see him, just as it did to realize that the creature stared at Jix and the others with large, open eyes. They were completely black and nearly indistinguishable from the closed lids that Zaifyr had seen before.
‘Your family brought me here,’ the creature said. ‘I led them here in search of you.’
‘The red that we saw,’ Meina murmured. ‘Jix said it was life. It was your life, Zaifyr.’
‘You have only to let it find you.’ Anguish offered an inky smile. ‘But it seems you have other plans.’
‘We are to go to Heüala,’ Zaifyr said.
‘The name means nothing to me.’
‘It was where the gates of paradise were built,’ Lor Jix said. He still sat on the bench, but he stared at the small figure before him intently. ‘I remember you. You were at the abomination’s trial. You are her creation.’
‘I was her eyes,’ Anguish said.
The ancient dead’s hand shot out, grabbing him. ‘Then she sees us!’ he howled as Anguish squirmed in his fist, trying to escape his grasp, but unable to. ‘She knows what the gods plan!’
Meina’s sword fell lightly, edge first, on Jix’s arm. ‘Let him go,’ she said softly. ‘If you don’t, I’ll see if you bleed, or if you simply break apart, like the dead I’ve killed before.’ There was no give in her voice, but Zaifyr did not know why she wanted to save Anguish.
He asked her that while the small, inky-black creature scurried along the edge of her sword, to her shoulder.
‘Close your eyes,’ she said to Anguish, before she answered him. ‘Because he is here,’ she said to Zaifyr. ‘Is that that not enough? That old piece of death just told us that the gods had plans. He doesn’t know how many, but he knows that when one fails, another begins. He said that right before this creature appeared. Is that not coincidence enough to keep him alive?’ She slipped her sword into its scabbard. ‘Perhaps even my words are part of their plan. Maybe they push fate in a way that the gods want, or need. Who are we to say? After all, we’re all being used like tools. We’re no more than that staff you hold.’
‘Se’Saera will know where we go,’ he said, not disagreeing with her.
‘If she is in this city of the dead, she already knows.’
There was little else for him to say, after that. Jix, Zaifyr could see, was not happy, but the sense that he, along with the rest of them, was part of something they did not control was not one that he was prepared to argue against. In that logic, each action they took, each choice they made, placed them in a fate that the gods had made. It was possible that not killing Anguish would be terrible for all of them, but it was just as possible that it would not. They would not know until they reached Heüala.
Unconsciously, because he knew that it would not be there, Zaifyr’s left hand felt for a thin copper charm on the wrist of his right. Yet, when his fingers touched the bent metal, he did not feel surprise, but rather a sense of ease. With each charm that appeared on him, wrapped on chains around his wrists and in his hair, he felt more and more himself. He felt a sense of agency return to him, as well. This he doubted: he had returned to the shallow stream the Wanderer had stood in with no conscious thought of his own.
His boot was flooded with water and, despite himself, he laughed. Of all the th
ings that would follow him into death, a pair of boots with holes in the soles seemed oddly fitting, in a small, darkly humorous way.
‘It is no joke where we go,’ Jix said from behind him. He had stepped into the stream as well, and shouldered past Zaifyr. ‘Heüala is the most divine of cities,’ the Captain of Wayfair continued. ‘It is where we are all judged.’
‘We should be so lucky,’ Meina said, as she too stepped into the river, her soldiers following her. ‘Lead the way, Zaifyr.’
‘I am just going to follow,’ he said.
‘That will be fine as well.’
The shallow water ran out of Mireea, but when Zaifyr stepped beneath the Spine of Ger, the clear sky and whole sun disappeared. It was replaced by a sky of empty darkness and fields of dead, brown grass. Zaifyr would have said that the fields, which ran as if they were straight, and not part of a mountain, had been burned. But the ground around the stream was muddy, and the trees that grew further out drooped with half-dead yellow foliage above exposed roots.
He turned back in the direction he had come: but the soggy, burned-looking fields stretched as far as he could see and offered him no sight of either the Mountains of Ger or Mireea.
‘It was as Jix said, a different world,’ Meina said. ‘A world where the gods felt it was safe to leave us messages.’
‘A world we cannot return to,’ Zaifyr added.
The stream continued, but the world around them did not change, not for a long time. Again, Zaifyr felt that the ability to tell time was taken from him. The sensation was heightened by the parts of scorched grass and sickly trees that could have been endless reproductions of the first ones that he had seen. Zaifyr found himself expecting to see a spirit in the fields, one of the long dead that the gods had sent to purgatory, for he was sure that that was what ran beside the shallow water that he and the others walked through. But he could see none, and had no sense of anything in the fields. Could it be, he asked himself, that all the dead are truly trapped in the world?
Ahead, a shape began to emerge, accompanied by the sound of a large, moving body of water. Within moments, a ship appeared as the lamps on its deck began to ignite, as if whoever was on board wanted it to be a beacon for them – though Zaifyr could not see anyone lighting the lamps.
The ship was unlike any he had seen before. It was huge and old, its folded sails a faded red. It appeared, Zaifyr thought, as he and the others approached, that the river had been designed for it, rather than the river dictating its design, though he could not explain what it was about the ship or the lonely dock that it sat against that allowed him to think that.
‘The ship of the dead,’ Lor Jix said in awe. ‘Glafanr.’
6.
Ai Sela sat on the wooden pews at the back of the cathedral. Despite what Ren had said to Bueralan earlier about the god-touched being solitary, they gathered around Sela in such a tight circle that at first the saboteur felt as if he was an intruder. It was not until Aela Ren broke through the ring that Bueralan saw the exhaustion and grief upon Sela that caused such concern in her fellow immortals.
Sela had run from Gtara to Ranan. She had been left in Gtara to watch Glafanr and, because she was not expected join them in Ranan, they had not left her a mount. He could still recall the sight of her when they left the town: she had stood in the centre of the town with a look of relief on her face that he envied. Sela had had a terrible job: she had the blind slaves to care for, and the bodies of the Keepers and the slavers to dispose of, but Bueralan understood why she would prefer to stay.
‘It happened two days after you left,’ Ai Sela said to the Innocent, pushing herself to her feet as he approached. ‘I left Glafanr in the morning to check on the slaves. I had put them in the hulls of the other ships. It was not a long walk, but I did not think that the ship was under threat. What could threaten Glafanr?’ She ran her hand through her dark hair, grabbing at it as she did. ‘It happened once I stepped onto the dock. I felt the air behind me change, as if the wind blowing in off Leviathan’s Blood had suddenly picked up because of a storm. But when I turned around, Glafanr was simply gone. There was a ripple in the water, and I thought – I thought that it had sunk. I dived in after it, but Glafanr wasn’t there. Of course it hadn’t sunk. Of course.’
It could not sink, Bueralan finished to himself. A swell of panic ran through the god-touched men and women around Sela as they whispered and talked to each other. Only he and Orlan – who had pushed through the crowd towards the end of her story – did not share it. Instead, the old man’s blue-eyed gaze met his with a cool curiosity. Something, he knew, just as Bueralan knew, important had happened.
‘I can tell you what befell Glafanr,’ Se’Saera said from behind them. She stood at the podium and looked, Bueralan thought, to have aged since she had arrived in Ranan. She was still young, and still beautiful, but she had cast off the last of her childhood youth and now looked like a young woman. ‘But truly, you should not look for answers among yourselves. I offer this only as advice to you all. Do not look into yourself. Look to me. I have answers for you.’
‘I did not mean to offend,’ Ai Sela said respectfully.
‘You have not.’ The god left the podium and walked towards them. ‘Glafanr has returned to the River of the Dead. It takes Zaifyr to Heüala.’
Bueralan felt a jolt of recognition at the first name – he remembered the charm-laced man standing next to him beneath Mireea – but was confused by the second. The murmurs around him did not help. He did know of a River of the Dead, but it was in Yeala and was named because of sealife that came up it to die. At its end rested a huge lake filled with bones, but he was sure that the long, twisting river was not the one that Se’Saera meant. ‘I can feel him approaching,’ the god continued. ‘The river has no defined length, but it will take Glafanr a long time to reach the gates of Heüala with him upon it. He is accompanied by the ancient dead who threatened me in Yeflam, and by others, of which only one I know intimately. He is my eyes. My first creation and part of my first betrayal.’ She paused, as if she could see the great ship now, travelling the waters of another world. Perhaps, Bueralan realized, she could. ‘What you see here before you is but a small part of me. My parents carried me to Heüala before they began to sacrifice themselves in this world. I can be threatened there, but I am not afraid. I have seen Zaifyr’s arrival. I have seen the staff that he will use to open the gates. My general will fall at the same time and you, Aela, will go to retrieve his body for me.
‘But first,’ she said, her attention returning to those before her in the cathedral. ‘First you and your soldiers will ride to the south. You will find a force there made from the remnants of Mireea and Yeflam. They have been welded together by the Saan, who have come here because of what happened in Ooila.’
‘They will be dealt with,’ the Innocent said calmly.
‘You should know that Eidan is with them,’ she said. ‘He is in the company of both Jae’le and Tinh Tu.’
He nodded, but there was a hint, Bueralan saw, of pleasure and violence in his gaze.
Se’Saera began to leave, but in mid-stride she stopped. ‘Fate is not whole yet,’ she said, not just to Ren, but to all the god-touched. She did not face them, but rather stared at the empty walls of her cathedral. ‘I know some of you thought I would have been better served to find the remains of my parents throughout the world, but the pull to Ranan is too strong, too prevalent in all the futures I see. Here, our victory will be won, and you will all stand beside me after it. None of you will die. You will all be part of my world. You will be the faces of myself in the world. You will define me to both the Faithful and the faithless.’ She turned to them, to all of them, including Bueralan and Orlan. ‘But we should not be complacent. There are dangers. We are not under threat, but the shape of the world I will create is. We cannot allow for that to be subverted.’
After she left, the Innocent turned to those around him and issued a short order to prepare to ride in the next few da
ys. ‘And you,’ he said to Samuel Orlan, after he had given it, ‘I will need you. I do not know the land that lies between here and Mireea well.’
The cartographer met the other man’s gaze without flinching. ‘If I’d rather stay?’
‘Bueralan will stay to care for the girl,’ he said.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ he began, but before he could say more, Bueralan interrupted. ‘Let Kaze stay to care for Taela,’ he said.
It was not just Orlan who looked at him in surprise. ‘Why would you want to come?’ Ren asked.
He could lie, but the saboteur knew it would do him no good against this man. ‘It isn’t about me,’ he said. ‘Taela needs care that I can’t give her. Kaze can do that. I’ll fill her place in your little army while she does that.’
The Innocent had questions, but so did Orlan, and the other men and women in the cathedral. He could see Kaze at the back of the ground, the last of the light caught on her glasses, and he knew that she had questions as well. And they should: Bueralan had told the truth, but it was half a truth, one that hid another, and that other truth was that he had a plan. A sudden, desperate plan, one first born in the conversation he and Ren had had about Onaedo. One that – if he wanted to help Taela – he could not wait to begin.
After what seemed like an eternity, Aela Ren nodded, and the exchange was accepted without further comment.
7.
In the early hours of the morning, the Captain of Refuge left Vaeasa. Beneath a smoke-stained night sky, a line of heavy wagons and soldiers made their way out of the gates and headed east, towards the ruins of Celp.
Heast did not see the Lord of Faaisha again before he left, but after Lehana and her soldiers had arrived, before the wagons were pulled out of the warehouse, before the horses were placed into harnesses, Tuael sent a messenger. The young man arrived with a rolled map, one drawn in sketches of ink that would have made Samuel Orlan shudder for its simplicity. It marked out positions stretching from the north of Faaisha down to the south. The first was the Faaishan force that the marshals had brought together, the second the positions of the Leerans. They were marked in white and red, respectively, while a single black dot in the east marked Refuge. The position marked was the outpost Refuge had destroyed before Heast and Anemone had come to Vaeasa, and he took from that a small pleasure, for it meant that Bliq and Qiyala had managed to evade whatever trackers the marshals had left there while they made their way to Celp. Beyond that, however, the message was simple: the Lord of Faaisha and his marshals were going to push down into the collection of Leeran forces, and they wanted Refuge to push up, into them.
