The Eternal Kingdom (The Children Trilogy Book 3)

by Ben Peek

  ‘I can,’ he said.

  ‘Then don’t leave her here. The only way you can help her is to take her away. She will never have any hope while she is here with—’

  ‘Do not say her name,’ Bueralan interrupted, fighting the urge to reach for her, to close his hand around her mouth. ‘She can hear her name.’

  Aelyn tilted her head, surprised. Then she nodded and said, ‘Take Taela away from here.’

  ‘And where would she go? Where in the world will she be free if our new god continues to exist? Where will any of us be free? If you can name a place, do it, and I will take her there. I will take us all there.’ He paused and when Aelyn said nothing, he continued. ‘I don’t want to see her hurt. That’s all. That’s all I am asking you.’

  ‘I will watch her,’ she said, turning back to her bed. ‘But I cannot promise you that she won’t be hurt again. Not here.’

  He had left shortly after that. He had walked down the stairs and through the cathedral and out onto the streets of Ranan, where Se’Saera’s creatures were rising from their perches. When he had saddled the tall grey and joined the Innocent and his soldiers, the monsters were swarming to the cathedral, answering Se’Saera’s call. Whatever she wanted, Bueralan gave it no thought.

  A day’s ride ahead of him was an army. Orlan’s path had led Ren and his soldiers to it, a fact that surprised Bueralan a little, for he had suspected that the cartographer would hesitate to do that. Orlan knew, just as he did, that the army from Mireea and Yeflam would break against the god-touched men and women. They would fail against these men and women no matter what skill they had, because the shadows of men and women who lingered in the camp around him could not die. Their mortality was hidden, locked in a history that had never happened, or that had passed before they had been born. They were men and women removed from a fate in which they could die and they would slaughter all who stood before them.

  How, Bueralan asked himself, would he stop such people?

  3.

  The smoke thickened, the night became one of shadows, broken only by the violent red line that drew them onwards.

  Fat flakes of ash floated through the air. With each step, Heast’s horse kicked up more from the still warm ground and stained both it and him in the remains of the destruction that they rode through. Around them, the trees reached up with fragile nude branches, like tall, inhuman dancers that had been turned to stone and left as warning statues. On them, the dark shapes of soot-stained birds kept a gentle roost. In silence, they watched the Captain of Refuge and the First Queen’s Guard make their slow way across the land.

  They had been fortunate. The line of fire that had been heading towards the west, to where they had been riding from, had died in a ravine a few hundred yards back. The Kingdoms of Faaisha were dotted with its like, and many of the communities had stripped everything but dirt and rock in them to make a fire break. In the summer, the eastern side of the nation was periodically ignited by fires and for years, before the summer set in, many of the ravines were cleared of all but rocks and earth, to act as fire breaks. The ravine that they had ridden through had most likely been cleared by men and women from Celp a season ago, but they had done a good job. Not so much as a single sapling had grown to allow the fire to jump the gap. The lack of wind helped, as well. It meant that none of the cinders revealed beneath the steel shoes of the horses could be caught and thrown into live growth.

  In the other direction, though, where the ruins of Celp lay, it was different. There the fire burned strongly.

  Another ravine appeared, a camp’s charred remains within it. Silently, Heast indicated to four of the Queen’s Guard and, with Anemone beside him, rode down onto the ash-stained floor. He could have pushed ahead, he knew, put his heels into his horse and ridden for the ruins, but he was still bothered by the story of the fire, by what he would find there. The fact that Anemone had yet to find any of the Leerans only made him more intent not to rush ahead. He was sure that if he did, he would find himself arriving, not only with exhausted, smoke-stained mounts, but to take part in a battle he didn’t understand. That Heast did not want.

  The ravine’s walls loomed around him. The ground was warmer than that outside and sweat began to run down his forehead and spine. Ahead lay ash-covered dirt, rock and cloth.

  Fenna handed the last to him. She leant out of her saddle and speared the fabric with her sword. It broke apart in Heast’s grasp, but the fragment he held did not seem familiar. Nor did the tents that appeared shortly after. They were the remains of frames now, broken and barely holding onto their shape. The cloth that had been burned away and the remains of blackened rolls and backpacks lay beneath, vague shapes barely suggestive of the forms they once had.

  There were no bodies in any of them.

  A dead campfire appeared next. The stones revealed its shape, yet it was not from here that the fire had started, nor was it from the next one Heast saw, further along, where a large cooking pot still sat, held by its blackened steel stand. The Captain of Refuge did not pause to examine it. After the tents, the packs, the campfires and now the pot, he knew it was a Leeran camp.

  He had not seen any sign of mounts and, outside the ravine, asked Fenna if she had.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not here.’

  Shortly after, against the charred husk of a tree, the origin of the fire was found.

  Lehana found the remains of the first barrel. She had been drawn from their path by the odd set of burns on the blackened tree: one side of it was so cindered it looked as if the flames had been poured over it. At the base, she found metal hoops that had held the barrel together. In the tree, a soot-covered bird watched her stand in her stirrups and run her mailed hand to a scorched elbow of the tree, where an axe had further sharpened it to wedge a barrel into place. A barrel that had poured out oil as if it was water.

  A short while later, Anemone found another.

  When they found the third and fourth, the flames on the horizon began to intensify and the ruins of Celp began to make themselves known in a series of suggestive dark shadows. Like the first and second, both barrels had been wedged into a tree by someone cutting into the arm of a branch first, and then set there to pour out over the tree and ground.

  It had been done by the Leerans, but Heast did not know why. It was not the most effective way to start a fire, but more disturbing was the fact that they had lit the barrels of oil behind them. In doing that, they had allowed the fire to box them in, allowed it to consume their camps, their supplies, their clothes.

  It was suicidal. That was what it was. Heast could only imagine that they had done it because they were not confident they could defeat Refuge. It was flattering, but based on the number of Leerans they suspected, unrealistic. Even with Kye Taaira before them, Refuge was still green, especially in comparison to a force that had been in battle for a year now. The Leerans would have every right to feel confident that they would win a fight. It was clear also that they knew where Refuge was. That they had found his soldiers. With the element of surprise on their side, why would they create a battlefield that was as deadly to them as to Refuge?

  One of the First Queen’s Guard found the first body. She dismounted beside it and turned it over. A face, burned beyond recognition, greeted him.

  ‘Leeran,’ he said, pointing to the white teeth, to the filed ends that showed through the charred flesh. ‘Must have been one to set the barrels. Splashed oil over himself and lit it anyway.’

  ‘This is pretty fucked-up,’ the soldier, Oya, said. ‘In my professional opinion, sir.’

  Heast did not disagree.

  Ahead, the ruins of Celp became clearer, and the flames could be seen there, holding to the edges of the buildings, but of people – of anyone – there was no sign.

  4.

  Eilona entered the Spires of Alati in the chill company of Caeli and Lian Alahn’s son, Nymar. Olcea remained on The Frozen Shackle. She sat in the middle of the bloodstained deck, her bag before her, h
er eyes closed. When Eilona asked if she would come, the witch had shaken her head. ‘It is better if I stay here,’ she said, without opening her eyes. ‘That way no one will try and sink our ship. Or take it.’

  The tall, narrow-faced Nymar had been waiting for them on the long dock that ran like a broken stone finger into Leviathan’s Blood. He was well dressed, in a grey silk shirt and black linen pants but, as the dinghy drifted away from The Frozen Shackle and towards the docks, Eilona watched him shift and fidget. He continually turned to gaze at the carriage behind him, as if being outside its protective wooden sides caused him a huge amount of distress. When Eilona and Caeli walked up the dock to him, Nymar greeted them with a vague nod and distracted introduction, and she believed that the two of them would be returning to The Frozen Shackle before the night set the next day.

  ‘I do not know what it is that Muriel Wagan told you before you left,’ he said, after she had shaken his hand, after he turned to lead them to the waiting carriage. ‘But you should forget it all now that you are here.’

  Another person would respond quickly, and with humour, but she only said, ‘My mother told me that we are to negotiate for the people in the camp.’

  ‘There won’t be much of that,’ he said and opened the carriage door.

  It was not until they entered the streets of Burata that Nymar’s comment made sense. Eilona sat in the small, but plush carriage and gazed through the barred window at the families and tents that lined the streets. Burata was largely a commercial city – its placement at the western edge of Yeflam, where it was the first port of call for trade ships, ensured that – but the people who sat on the ground in front of the temporary shelters, or who stood on the stone streets, were not merchants. They were families, by and large, and they gazed at her with a hint of despair and pleading in their eyes. Eilona’s mother had prepared her for the sight, but her description of it as a housing crisis barely touched what she saw now.

  Caeli sat beside Eilona, her sheathed sword laid across her lap, the end of it pointed towards her. ‘Are these survivors from the fallen cities?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Nymar replied. ‘Just under half of Yeflam was lost three months ago. It has been a struggle to deal with the refugees.’

  ‘Refugees?’ the guard repeated blandly. ‘How can you be a refugee in Yeflam if you are from the nation itself?’

  ‘Without the Keepers of the Enclave, there is no Yeflam. What we are now we define by our cities.’

  ‘Burata is a Traders’ Union city, isn’t it?’ Eilona said. ‘A least six of the cities on the western side of Yeflam are controlled by your father.’

  ‘I told you: you should forget what Muriel Wagan has said.’ Nymar leant back, frustrated. ‘My father has very little control over these cities. Benan Le’ta’s running of the Traders’ Union left it in a poor financial state, and after Nale my father found that the organization did not have the capital to consolidate his power. What parts of Yeflam we did control were due to the debts he was able to call in. Perhaps if your mother’s considerable debts had been paid, it would be different, but I doubt it. He is simply too far away to have much pull here. Take for example the farmlands to the south. They had a strong harvest this year, and because of that, they are strong cities. Without Enilr and Toake we would have all starved.’

  Eilona let his words float in the carriage, then fade.

  Outside the barred window of the carriage, the Spires of Alati appeared. In the night’s dark, the thousands of spires that gave the city its name looked like the pointed ends on the old helms of soldiers. When the sun rose, Eilona knew that the resemblance would not remain: the light would break away the shadows that lingered around the spires and the straight lines that saw the largest outreach the smallest would become more apparent. But as she approached, it was different. In the dark, it looked as if the soldiers would rise and begin to ransack the cities around it.

  In the University of Zanebien, Eilona had read a diary that recorded Yeflam’s construction. The author and artist was a woman by the name of Yelna Nysyl, and she had sat on the banks of what would be Yeflam’s southern shore on the first days. She had been drawn to it because of the sight of a pair of stone giants in the ocean. Like others who had lived on the shoreline, she had come down to the water’s black edge to watch them sink the heavy pylons of Yeflam into the seabed. Her first picture was of that and a small boat in the middle of the ocean, floating calmly beside the two. It was there that she believed the Keepers of the Enclave had first sat.

  Thousands of people were displaced in the construction of Yeflam, Eilona knew. In Nysyl’s book there were accounts and images of families fleeing the islands that lay beneath the soon to be built artificial nation. She wrote about how they came to the shores with very little. How they came into conflict with other communities. At the end of the first year of the islanders leaving their homes, the conflict between the two communities almost came to bloodshed. It had been stopped by the presence of the Keeper Kaqua, who had come to the shoreline alone, and who had spoken to all the communities, mediating a truce between them. He promised them all that they would have a new home, soon enough.

  In the streets that the carriage passed, Eilona saw men and women in brown robes attending the people on the sides of the road. They came with food and clothing. She saw a number of them sitting before small grounds, and talking in what she thought was a reassuring manner. Idly, aware that the silence in the carriage had stretched since Nymar mentioned her mother’s failure to pay her debts, Eilona mentioned what she saw to him.

  ‘The priests of Se’Saera,’ he said. ‘The Faithful are one of the few groups we’ve been able to rely upon.’

  5.

  Two days before Zaifyr’s body was stolen, Xrie visited Ayae.

  The Soldier found her in The Pale House after the combined forces of Yeflam, Mireea and the Saan entered the ruins of Mireea and set up camp for the night. Ayae had not gone out to greet him, but Xrie, as if he had known where they were all the time, climbed through the window of The Pale House, walked through the slanted rooms and made his way down the spiral stairs to where she and Jae’le were with Zaifyr’s body, where he had been laid by the ghosts. Yet, when Xrie stepped into the room he was surprised to see the back of the other man, not as if he was unexpected, but as if he had not sensed him at all.

  ‘Aela Ren would have killed you by now,’ Jae’le said, when the other did not speak.

  ‘He is not here,’ Xrie said, leaving the stairs. ‘But thank you for your concern.’

  The sitting man did not turn from the ghosts before him. ‘He cannot die,’ he said. ‘You must not doubt that. You will not be able to defeat him as you have others.’

  ‘May I ask how you know this?’

  ‘Aela is a scarred man,’ Jae’le continued, as if he had not heard the other man’s question. ‘It is how you will recognize him. Whenever someone has said, in the past, that they have seen him, the truth has always been evident in their descriptions. He is a man defined by wounds.’

  Standing against the wall, Ayae felt her breath catch. Briefly, she felt as if she stood behind the battered, marked walls of her earliest memories.

  ‘You speak as if you were friends with him,’ Xrie said.

  ‘I did not understand friendship when I knew him,’ Jae’le said, his gaze on the figure the ghosts surrounded. ‘But I knew him.’

  ‘Did you try to kill him?’

  ‘No. I knew he could not die.’

  ‘How did you learn that?’

  ‘Hide who you are from him,’ the sitting man said. ‘Hide it for as long as you can. Hide it so you can cripple him before he knows you. It is the only way.’

  Xrie turned to Ayae, but she held up her hand. ‘I have no advice about him, if you mean to ask,’ she said.

  The Soldier was shaking his head before she finished. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I came here to see Eidan. I thought he was down here with you.’

  He’s on the roof, she said an
d led him out of the room. Eidan stood in the centre of the roof. The afternoon’s sun highlighted the black scars on his face and arms. The more they healed, the more the scars began to resemble an elaborate form of scarification.

  ‘It is a small force you bring,’ Eidan said, gazing at the people spread out through the broken streets before him. Like his brother, he did not turn as Xrie and Ayae approached. ‘Will it be enough to destroy a god?’

  ‘There are more,’ the Soldier said. ‘But if you wish to help, we will not turn you away.’

  At the edge of the building was one of Samuel Orlan’s maps. Ayae remembered that she had seen it here with Captain Heast, nearly a year ago.

  ‘Ayae answered for us,’ Eidan said.

  ‘I answered for myself.’ The map had fallen on its side, before rolling over. The miniatures had been damaged, she saw. ‘If you wish to answer differently, you should.’

  ‘I do not have a different answer.’ The stout man took the opposite edge of the table and, when she was ready, lifted the map. ‘We have other duties.’

  ‘To Zaifyr?’ Xrie asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not to Aelyn?’

  ‘I do not have duties to Aelyn.’

  ‘Do you not plan to help her, then?

  ‘Is that why you have come to speak with me?’ Eidan did not set the table down, but held it easily while Ayae examined it. She did not realize straight away that he held it in his crippled hand, but when she did, she saw how much it had healed since she had seen it last. ‘You have surely spent enough time with Aelyn to know that she would only resent any attempt I made to help her.’

  ‘She taught me that we have responsibilities,’ he said. ‘We hold the world in our hands, she said. We have the power to reshape it. We have a responsibility to it.’

  ‘Did you ever hear her say we had a responsibility to her?’