by Ben Peek
It was a simple, if brutal, battle plan, one that would be won through bodies, blood and sheer numbers. Heast would not have thought the Faaishans had the numbers for such a push, but the map had a small note pinned to the back of it, which explained that a combined force from Mireea and Yeflam were marching with the Saan over the Spine of Ger.
The Saan.
Surely Muriel had not hired them?
‘The Innocent killed the war scout of the Dvir in Cynama,’ Lehana told him, after they had left Vaeasa, after the torchlit walls that defined the world behind them had fallen away. She drove the fourth of the eight carts along the road, the reins loose in her hands, and a finely made bastard sword at her feet. ‘It happened at a party that the Queen’s youngest daughter gave. Yoala announced her engagement to a Saan prince moments before the Innocent arrived. He killed her, and he killed a number of Saan warriors after that.’ She tightened the reins as the trail they followed wound through thick trees. ‘He did not kill the Saan prince. He escaped, and the Queen sent him back to his father.’
Heast stretched his steel leg out to ease the muscles on his hip. ‘I would not want the Saan as my enemies,’ he said, ‘but they are not the boon that you would think them to be on the battlefield.’
‘Are they undisciplined?’
‘No. They fight well with each other, but poorly alongside others. Most experienced captains will not sign on to fight beside them.’
‘Does that mean we’ll leave, then?’ Lehana had, Heast was discovering, a dry, quick humour. ‘I can go back to my bed, my husband, my gardens and my gold.’
‘You would miss the excitement of using Tinalan fire lances,’ he said. ‘I was surprised to learn that the First Queen had access to them.’
‘She didn’t. Truthfully, the Queen did little of the work for what is in the carts. The majority of it was done by a representative of Leviathan’s End.’
Heast was surprised.
‘I didn’t think you knew,’ Lehana said, after she saw his face. ‘It was a woman who arrived. What I remember most was her neatness, how all her clothes were tailored to fit her exactly. She had a very precise way of speaking Ooilan, as well. There was nothing wrong with how she spoke it, and in fact, it was its perfection that set it aside. No slang, no slips in pronunciation, nothing. Her name was Zlyv. She offered nothing in the way of a last name. When she did speak, she spoke to the Queen. She said that she had been sent on behalf of Leviathan’s End, to provide for Captain Heast and Refuge. I could barely believe what I heard.’
Heast shared her feeling, even now. He could not remember any battle in which Onaedo had used her own considerable power to influence a conflict.
‘The Queen had begun to stockpile weapons and armour,’ Lehana continued, while one hand reached back, into the back of the cart. ‘We had not arrived in Vaeasa unarmed, but the Queen and I had always believed that we would need more, but because of the war, it was hard to get much from within Faaisha to put aside. The warehouse you saw wasn’t even a quarter full before Zlyv arrived. But by the end of the week it was as we saw it. The Queen sent me to oversee the deliveries. Leviathan’s End did not name a price for what was delivered, and for a while we all thought that it was not what it seemed.’ She pulled out a package wrapped in brown paper. ‘But it was,’ she said, handing the parcel to Heast. ‘It was everything, and more.’
The paper slit easily. A square cloth badge fell out, followed by others. On each of them was an empty image of the world over a red and black background.
There was no letter.
Heast picked up one of the insignias of Refuge and turned it over in his hand. ‘Newly made,’ he said.
‘What does that mean?’
He shrugged and changed the topic. ‘I was told,’ he said, ‘that you cannot go home. That none of you can.’
If Lehana was surprised, she hid it well. ‘A Queen’s Guard lives and dies with her Queen. At least, that is the tradition. None of us here was ever a guard for the Queen before. In a previous life, I mean. Pueral made it clear to all of us when we were given the posting that we were being given it based on our actions, our reputations and our dedication. It was not a secret by the time I was given my post, but it was still controversial. The Queen’s daughters were quite open in their belief that we would still die with the Queen, as the guards before had.’
Heast handed her one of the insignias. ‘After we are done here, you and your soldiers will be given a choice. You can stay, or you can go.’
‘After?’ She smiled and there was, in her smile, a gentleness. ‘Captain, we’re all going to die here.’
‘After,’ he repeated. ‘But first, who is your best sergeant? The one who trains your recruits and runs soldiers hard.’
‘Ko Dtnaa,’ she said without hesitation.
‘When we camp, I’ll show her how to use the fire lance. She’ll have the responsibility of training the rest of you. When we reach Celp, she’ll also have new soldiers to break in. She’ll find them dedicated and hungry, but inexperienced.’
Lehana nodded. ‘And me, sir? Refuge cannot have two captains.’
‘You’ll be my second,’ he told the soldier who, until recently, had been Captain to the First Queen. ‘If I die, Refuge is yours to command.’
8.
What surprised Ayae most about Anguish’s disappearance was how calmly Eidan took it. When she returned to the market square with Tinh Tu, she expected to find him anxious, pacing the broken cobbled road, having failed to find the creature in his search of Mireea. It was how Eidan had reacted in Yeflam after Se’Saera’s trial, and Ayae knew that he felt a responsibility for the other, a responsibility that had been born in Ranan, when he had stood beside the new god.
She was surprised, then, when she entered the square and found both Eidan and Jae’le sitting on a pair of empty barrels, talking among themselves. The afternoon’s sun had set and, if Ayae had not known otherwise, if she had come across the pair on the streets of Mireea before it had been destroyed, she would have thought that the two were nothing more than two poor men who worked in the markets. She would have thought that they had come to the end of their day’s work. It was a surprising thought for her: she had not, before then, viewed Eidan or Jae’le as anything but beings of immense power. But here, in their old clothes, patterned by scars and thinness, they looked as far from that as they could be.
‘I do not think Anguish will be back,’ Eidan said to her. ‘I think the events that gave birth to him have seen him taken elsewhere. My sister’s suggestion is most likely correct.’
‘Events?’ They meant fate, she knew. ‘You cannot keep trusting things you cannot see.’
‘It is not simply belief I have. I was there when Se’Saera made Anguish. I remember how she was at first pleased, but soon bothered by him, in some manner. She called him Anguish because of the pain he was in, but I do not think she was pleased by that. I wondered about that until she told me that some days he felt as if he was hers and on others as if he was someone else’s. I have a similar feeling here in Mireea. It is in the stones and the buildings. It is familiar but not. Close but distant. Wherever the ghosts have gone, Anguish has gone as well.’
‘You think the ghosts are gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Zaifyr remains the same,’ Jae’le said beside him. ‘But without our guide, it leaves us in a very strange position.’
‘It leaves us paralysed,’ Tinh Tu told him sourly.
‘It certainly leaves us waiting.’
‘For the army that follows us?’
It would be another three days before the combined forces of Yeflam, Mireea and the Saan entered Mireea. Once Ayae had climbed into the back of the cart in the camp, Jae’le had urged the horses into a steady pace to put distance between them and the forces. She had expected to still be in Mireea when they arrived, and the easy nature of Jae’le’s shrug suggested that he had always thought the same.
‘They are of no concern to us,’ he sai
d. ‘Let them come and go.’
The night deepened around them and they continued to talk. Past midnight, Ayae found herself starting to drift to sleep, and to stave it off, she rose and walked over to the cart. There, she lifted the edge of the blanket that lay across Zaifyr. The moon and the stars lit him well enough that she could see the clothes his brothers and sister had dressed him in before they left the camp. They had done it carefully: they had acquired new clothes, well made and expensive, a contrast to what they themselves wore. They had combed his hair and, where they could, refastened the charms that had still been on him. More than a few were missing, but it was this attention to detail that, each time she looked at him, touched her deeply. As much as Zaifyr could not let go of life, his family could not let go of him—
‘Ayae,’ Jae’le said quietly.
She saw the ghost immediately: it walked down the road, a middle-aged bearded man in a robe.
‘Is he . . . ?’
‘No,’ Ayae said to him. ‘He is not a ghost of Mireea.’
She knew that with certainty. She did not know all the people who had died in the siege a year ago, but the robe the ghost wore was not one that anyone in Mireea would have worn. It reminded her of Se’Saera’s priests in Yeflam, the ones who had stood on the wooden crates and spoken to crowds who did not care for them.
When the ghost reached for Zaifyr, Ayae’s hand dropped to her sword – only to feel Jae’le’s grip stop her from drawing it. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘Let us watch, first. Let us follow.’
The ghost picked up Zaifyr and cradled him in his arms like a child. He did not appear to notice the four of them. Soon, he began to walk along the damaged road.
Ayae believed he was heading towards the sunken remains of The Pale House, but she did not say anything to the others. She feared that she would be wrong if she said it, that they would skip ahead and the ghost would drop into one of the gaps in the road and disappear into the caverns beneath Mireea. If he did that, they would struggle to find him, she was sure. But despite her thoughts, the ghost continued towards The Pale House. Its front doors were half submerged beneath the cobbled road.
‘Do you think he is a priest?’ Eidan asked. ‘He looks like one of Se’Saera’s. Perhaps he is one she left behind.’
‘Look at the robe closely,’ Tinh Tu said. ‘There is a pattern in it.’
Ayae could not immediately see it. The white lines of the ghost, the lack of colour in its body, kept anything but the shape of its body from her, until, as the ghost climbed through a broken window, she saw the vaguest suggestion of chains woven into a long-lost fabric.
‘Ger,’ Jae’le said, as if he had been waiting for her to see it. ‘He is a priest who served the Warden of the Elements. Much like Lor Jix served the Leviathan, I would imagine.’
An ancient dead, then. A soul cursed by its god never to enter paradise. Ayae followed Jae’le and Eidan through the window into the remains of a once well-furnished office. There, on the sloped floor, she turned to offer her aid to Tinh Tu, but the old woman, who was climbing through the window, saw her offered hand and gave it such a withering look that Ayae mumbled an apology before turning away. She slid past the overturned table, the scattered papers and quills and out of the door into the office. If Tinh Tu’s two brothers had not already left the room, Ayae was sure that they would have laughed at her.
The two were already at the end of the hall, half a dozen steps behind the ghost. A spiral staircase led them downstairs into the lobby. There, split tiles and broken plaster defined the floor, but in the far corner was a collection of blankets and pillows. It looked to be recently made, the items taken from the rooms of The Pale House, rooms that had once cost a fortune for a night’s stay.
It was to that makeshift bed that the ghost took Zaifyr’s body and laid it down.
Once he had done that, he turned to face Ayae, Jae’le, Eidan and Tinh Tu, and this time, she could tell that the ghost saw each of them. In slender, flashing lights, other ghosts began to appear around the priest, some men, some women, each of them wearing similar robes. After a few moments, over two dozen ghosts stood there, each of them surrounding Zaifyr, as if to protect him from the men and women he called his family.
9.
Eilona approached the Spires of Alati on the old, creaking deck of the ship on which she and Olcea had come to Yeflam. Tinh Tu had called it The Frozen Shackle, but Eilona could find no mention of the ship’s name, either on the hull, or in the closed ledger in the captain’s cabin.
She had returned to the vessel on the dinghy that had delivered her to the camp. As it had done on that day, a ghost rowed the small boat out to the ship, and as before, Eilona’s mind was unable to picture a man between the two oars, rowing steadily at the command of Olcea. She wondered if Caeli, sitting beside her, could see it. She tried not to stare at the guard and found herself, instead, gazing out over the black ocean. Once on deck, the memories of Eilona’s silent journey on The Frozen Shackle with Tinh Tu returned. Olcea had almost died piloting the ship down the coast and, at the helm, the old wheel was still covered in dried blood.
A part of Eilona did not believe she should have agreed to her mother’s plan. Earlier, she had watched the combined forces of the Mireean, Yeflam and Saan people march up the Mountains of Ger. She had planned to stand beside her mother in support while the soldiers left the camp, and she had even woken in the early hours of the morning to ensure that she was there. But, as she stood in front of her tent beneath the grey sky, she began to second-guess herself. She was sure the soldiers would not be happy to see her. At the entrance to the tent she told herself that it would be best to remain away. Besides, her mother did not need her. Eilona said that to herself at least half a dozen times that morning, but she did not believe it. Her mother was no longer the indomitable figure of her childhood.
‘Ah, the prospect of battle,’ Sinae Al’tor said, approaching her. He was neatly dressed in fine black, as if he were going to a funeral. A step behind him followed his beautiful blonde shadow. ‘It is meant to fire the heart, inspire the mind, and seal all your doubts inside you, where they will not be allowed to find voice. Unless you are a cynic, of course, and then you wonder how many can return from war with the Innocent.’
‘In Sooia, he was once buried beneath a mountain,’ Eilona said. ‘It was five hundred years ago. The desert still had its oasis then. The southern side of the country was flooded with refugees. There are old sketches of them. They carry everything they own on their backs. I remember reading about it in my first year at the University of Zanebien. For some reason, I had always thought that the Innocent’s conquest was done in a day, or a week, not in centuries. But he was defeated. It was his first real loss, and for a decade afterwards the people of Sooia thought that he and his soldiers had been killed. But he wasn’t dead. He crawled from the mountain that had buried him. He and all his soldiers emerged as if they had been asleep and returned to their war.’
‘Your answer, then, is none?’ He smiled, and she supposed that there was, in it, something sad. ‘Then the question for us is, what will we do, after?’
‘I’ll return to Pitak. To my house, to my research, to Laena. Maybe I will help her. She will have a lot of writing about the god Ain to complete.’
‘But that will be temporary, won’t it? Se’Saera will continue to spread herself further and further through the world forced upon us by the Innocent. He will demand that we bow to her.’
‘I don’t imagine you bowing.’
He shrugged. ‘If it was the choice between death and life, I would bow. I have seen the dead. I have seen them in ways that have frightened me like nothing else. Who would wish to court that? I ask you.’
Not her.
But more tellingly, Eilona thought that Sinae’s words mirrored a realization she had about her mother.
Muriel Wagan had very little. Olcea had tried to tell her that when she had delivered the letter to her home, but it was not until Eilona arrived
on the shore of Yeflam that she finally understood it. Her mother was the Lady of the Ghosts because she could no longer be the Lady of the Spine. She was a wealthy woman but if her debts to Lian Alahn were paid, she would no longer be that. Stripped of title and wealth, her mother would be a middle-aged woman kept by the few people who had faith in her. Oh, Eilona knew that she would carve out a life for herself within that. Muriel Wagan had not been the ruler of Mireea through a trick of birth. She had built up her fortunes and political alliances while the lord before her declined. When she had taken control, she had done so because she had been intelligent, canny and fearless. With time, those attributes would allow her mother to regain the money she had lost, but without Mireea, would it matter?
Her mother did not define herself through her child, her marriages, or even her friendships. Eilona was keenly aware – and had been since she was a child – that her mother defined herself through Mireea. Ultimately, that was why Eilona had agreed to go to the Spires of Alati, to be her mother’s envoy. On the deck of The Frozen Shackle, invisible hands drew up the anchor. Leviathan’s Blood shifted and rocked the boat, as if the first of an acidic humour had awoken, courtesy of Eilona’s thoughts. The ocean had the right to laugh at her acting as a political envoy. She lacked the political cunning to deal with Lian Alahn’s son, to negotiate with the men and women she met in the remains of Yeflam. She was simply an academic.
