by Ben Peek
‘No.’
Ayae kicked the legs out from under the table, folding them beneath it. She lowered her end to the roof and took Eidan’s.
‘When I first met Aelyn, she could not read.’ The stout man took a step back from the map and, in doing so, he allowed the afternoon’s sun to highlight the broken mountains, the scratched Spine of Ger and the broken paint across it. ‘I offered to teach her, but she declined. She said that she would teach herself. It took her twice as long as it would have if she’d had a teacher. But she taught herself. After she learned how to read, she taught herself philosophy, law, history. No topic was denied to her. She took all of that learning and put it into her creation of Yeala. She did not allow me to help her there, either. She built a city of beautiful spires and taught the people in it how to fly. She showed men and women how to make gliders and kites and, in those early years, ensured that the city’s balloons rose and fell without any danger. When the first people brought a civil war against her, she took away their power of flight. When they resented that, she killed them. I was there, that day. I remember walking beside her through the near-empty streets, where the people who broke the law were forced to live. I offered to spare her the horror of killing her own citizens, but she said no. She said, I do not need another’s hand. I will never need another’s hand. I love you, but I will never be beholden to you, or to another. She all but rejected Yeflam when I made it for her, after she was forced to destroy her spires. But by then our love permitted gifts. It allowed for us to do things for one another. But to ride into Leera for her would be an insult.’
‘She saved us from dying after Nale fell,’ Xrie said. ‘I have tried to make that clear to Alahn and others since then, but few listen.’
‘Do you think they will listen when she is back?’
‘They will fall quiet. They will not be able to challenge her.’
‘But what if she destroyed Nale because she wanted to?’ Eidan asked. ‘You have decided that she could not have done that herself, but what if she did?’ He approached Xrie and, when he spoke next, his voice was quiet. ‘I love Aelyn. I have loved her for such a time that the time I have not is but a few scant years . . . but I know she is capable of this and more.’
‘You did not hear Kaqua’s voice,’ the Soldier said stubbornly. ‘It whispered in the Enclave. It was sweet and it was fearful. It made promises to you. It spoke to your dark desires. It spoke to your loves. For the longest time, I thought it a test between us, but now I know otherwise.’
‘Tinh Tu will tell you that he never made anyone do something that they did not wish,’ he said. ‘She will tell you his power came from Wehwe and he used only the truth.’
‘Perhaps she is describing herself.’
‘No. Tinh Tu does not have the kindness of the Pauper.’ He allowed himself a faint smile. ‘If it helps you, my brother believes there may be a time when Aelyn will need our help. I do not agree, but I tell you this so you know that we have not abandoned her. No matter what happens, I do know that she will return to Yeflam one day. She may not stay there, and indeed, she may not let it stand, but she will return.’
A tremor ran through the building, as if to emphasize Eidan’s point, and once it finished, Xrie did not pursue the topic.
Ayae could see his need for Aelyn, for the Enclave, for how Yeflam had once been. It was a starkly naked need and that surprised her. In Yeflam the Soldier had always been composed. But he had to be: as people accused him of being a traitor, of being weak, the security of those without a home had fallen to him. Here, on the Spine of Ger, he did not have that responsibility. Now he had been given a different task and, as he marched towards it, she realized it was not the choice he would have made. The knowledge uncurled in Ayae like a scroll as she watched him shake Eidan’s good hand, then her own. He wanted Aelyn Meah back. He wanted to stand beside her. Despite all that had happened, all that Eidan had said, he needed to believe he served someone with integrity. He was a soldier. He was at the front of battle. He was the will of a nation. Ayae saw that clearly as he walked to the edge of the roof. With a single glance behind, Xrie dropped carefully to the cobbled road. There, Ayae watched him walk to the market square, where the combined forces had pitched tents and lodged inside the remains of buildings. In the dying light of the afternoon’s sun, Ayae was suddenly struck by how abandoned Xrie was. She realized now that he was a man whose world had been ruined and who was desperately trying to repair it.
Two days later, Zaifyr’s body was stolen.
6.
Glafanr was its own world, a ship of islands, of nations, of cities. It was not like any other ship that Zaifyr had stood upon before. He believed that it was alive, but not in a conscious way. It carried a life similar to the one that soil held: a life that was part of a system, that allowed for grass and trees to grow. It was a life that remained in the wood of the ship’s frame, as if it had been trapped there by design. It was this quality, he thought, that allowed it to travel down the still River of the Dead.
After Zaifyr and the others had climbed the plank onto Glafanr’s deck, the ship left the strange dock it had nestled against. Lor Jix had rounded on them and demanded to know who had released it, but they had all still stood beneath its five masts equally confused, and his anger died as suddenly as it had emerged. Still holding the staff, Zaifyr approached the great empty wheel. At the back of the ship, he leant over the rail and gazed down into the River of the Dead. For a moment, he thought he could see haunts within the water: they rose and fell, slippery and silver, like fish. But each time he thought he saw one, he was suddenly unsure if he saw anything. He tried to reach out with his power and found that he had neither the experience of it uncoiling from him, nor the sensation of touching the dead. For a brief, surprised moment, Zaifyr thought that his power had deserted him, that it was gone, but the panic he felt did not last. It was not gone. It was still there. He had lived so long with it that, even in death, had it been gone, he would have known. He would have felt the absence.
Beneath the deck of Glafanr, Zaifyr entered a narrow corridor with rooms on either side. He found Meina and her soldiers examining them. Since Mireea, Zaifyr had come to the realization that the soldiers who followed Meina’s commands were not all members of Steel. Some were from the Mireean Guard, others from the Brotherhood, the other mercenary group who had fought in the siege. Each of them, though, carried shields on their backs, and swords by their sides, and they answered to the tall, dark-haired mercenary, and not to him.
‘This is the Innocent’s ship,’ Meina said to him, later. They were in the captain’s cabin and she sat in one of the old chairs around the table. Anguish was perched on her shoulder like a dark, forbidden pet. ‘It sat in a harbour in Sooia for hundreds of years. It was said that no one could get onto it. That anyone who did was killed by a guard of such horror that it devoured their body after it killed them. Or during.’
Zaifyr sat opposite her, behind the captain’s desk. He had been drawn to it by the book that lay in the centre, a book that was chained to the table.
‘He isn’t listening,’ Anguish muttered to her.
‘The Innocent is not here. Neither is Ai Sela.’ He ran his hand along the book, his fingers trying to lift the leather cover. ‘It won’t move,’ he said. ‘What’s the point of a chain?’
‘What do the pages say?’ Meina asked.
‘It is lists of names.’
‘Whose names?’
Zaifyr met her gaze. ‘Our names,’ he said, simply.
‘My name?’ Anguish asked. ‘Is that there as well?’
He turned the pages forwards and back, and told the creature no. ‘But the pages are blank for so long,’ he said, turning over more and more of the white sheets than the book could possibly hold. ‘They keep going and going, as if no one—’
‘Has been to Heüala since the War of the Gods,’ Lor Jix finished, entering the cabin.
For the ancient dead, Glafanr was a divine artefact. His abil
ity to stand upon it was a sacred, impossible realization after so many years at the bottom of Leviathan’s Blood. After his anger had left him, he had become lost in the details of the ship. He had watched the faded red sails unroll and fill with air that none could feel or see with an almost childlike innocence about him. He had run his hands along the wooden rails, and as he did, it seemed to Zaifyr that he forgot those around him.
‘There are no dates,’ he said to Jix as he sat in the old chair next to Meina. ‘But I imagine you are right.’
‘Yet another sign that we were expected,’ Meina said, distaste clear in her voice. ‘It does not please me to think that what I thought of as my choices were, in fact, another’s.’
‘If that is what you think, then you misunderstand the relationship that mortals and gods have with each other,’ Jix said. ‘The gods do not control us. They do not now, and they did not when they stood among us. Otherwise, they would not have had the relationship that they do with us. They would never have sought our faith.’ He paused and, in his silence, the Captain of Wayfair appeared to be reaching inside himself, searching for the thoughts he had held in life. ‘All captains pledged their loyalty to the Leviathan when I was alive. They all entered her service. They heard her voice and understood her desires. They took her rewards and they feared her anger. It was a relationship that they entered with her. I was no different. I paid my dues. I said my prayers. But I was always aware that my decisions were my own, never more than when she asked me to take on the task that led me here. I knew I would be part of a thousand other choices that would lead to one fate being chosen over another.’
‘That is what happened in Yeflam, isn’t it?’ Zaifyr asked. ‘You and I made choices that saw a new god be named.’
‘Why would they create that fate?’ Meina asked.
‘I would have thought that Se’Saera created it.’
‘I could not tell you,’ Jix said. ‘But what I do know is that we are all the creations of fate. Be it god, be it mortal, we are all part of this world, we all share it. One of us may create the futures, the pasts and the presents, but only one of us can realize it.’
‘Because fate is not linear.’ Zaifyr glanced at the book before him, at the slim pages he could see, and the countless thousands that he could not. ‘Where does that leave us?’
‘Drifting down a river,’ Meina said sourly. ‘We go where it takes us.’
‘We must trust in our faith,’ Jix said, ‘and in our fates.’
Anguish laughed. ‘You trust what has done this? After what has already been done to you? You are a fool. I would prefer to trust myself.’
‘Fate is primal. It can neither hear you, nor see you.’
‘But it made the gods. It made Se’Saera.’
‘And us,’ Meina added. ‘You said that yourself.’
‘You look for reason where there is none. You look for a start where there is no end.’ With a resigned look, Lor Jix glanced at all three of them. ‘You have all lived for too long in a world where the gods lie at your feet. You think it gives you knowledge. You think it makes the world knowable. You have never known what it is like not to know. What it is like to trust and to believe. When we are in the holy city, you will understand this.’
Zaifyr let his hand run along the smooth pages. There were no quill marks, and he thought it strangely appropriate, given all that had happened. But when he reached Heüala, he would not be satisfied by that. He would want to know who had written on the page, and with what. He would want, he realized, simply to know. To know everything. To know what had been done and why. He would have no time for faith in the holy city.
7.
Jae’le’s hand shook Ayae gently.
She had been dreaming of Sooia. She remembered standing on an empty, dusty street of the town she first remembered. She was not the child she had been, but the adult she was now, and her boots walked over stones her bare feet had. She could see no one: not on the street, nor in the rough huts, where the cloth doors had been pulled back. She could see the rough chairs and the darkened pans, signs of life, of culture. She wanted to walk up to them, to rest her hand on the frame and call inside. Surely someone would answer. She would speak in Jafila, though she had not spoken that language for well over fifteen years and had forgotten most of it. But there, in her dream, she knew it, knew it intimately. If she could just move, Ayae knew she would be able to speak. But she did not move. She remained in the street and the dirt began to shift around her feet and the walls of the town began to shake and—
Jae’le’s hand was on her shoulder. ‘He is gone,’ he said softly into her ear. ‘Zaifyr is gone.’
From where she lay, Ayae could stare directly at the empty mattresses where the ghosts had laid Zaifyr’s body. It was empty and the ghosts had vanished.
‘An old man took him,’ he continued, his hand still on her shoulder, his voice still soft, as if he told her a secret. ‘He came up through a break in the floor. The ghosts parted for him. He picked up Zaifyr and returned the way he had come.’
‘You saw this?’ she asked as Eidan and Tinh Tu walked around the mattresses. Had they seen it as well? Was she the only one who slept? ‘You didn’t try to stop him?’ she asked, but she knew the answer.
‘What could anyone do with him?’ Jae’le’s hands knitted together before him. ‘A dead man cannot die again.’
‘They could burn him.’ She could not believe she said it. ‘They could dismember him. They could—’
‘Do nothing,’ he finished. ‘If the ocean did not destroy his flesh, he is as safe as he can be.’
Ayae quelled the panic she felt and pushed herself to her feet. She picked up her sheathed sword as she rose and, as she approached the mattresses, belted it around her waist. Behind the three mattresses, she could smell water. It came from the gap in the floor that the old man had climbed out of. Staring into it, she could make out the faint, broken hint of rubble, a dangerously sloped path that led into the caverns below Mireea.
‘Was the old man like us?’ Ayae asked.
‘There are worse than us,’ Tinh Tu said. ‘He was one of the god-touched.’
‘He is the man who told me Lor Jix’s name,’ Eidan added. ‘He follows the river to the east.’
Towards the Black Lake. ‘Assuming the rivers have not been diverted greatly,’ Ayae said, ‘he can follow that towards Leera.’
It was Eidan who descended into the hole first. He used both his hands, though she could see that the scarred one was still weak, and it gripped the edges harder in compensation. When he let go and dropped the few feet to the cave floor, his fingers left indentations. Ayae’s gaze did not linger on the breaks in the tiles, however, for after he landed, the floor began to glow with phosphorescent light. A single set of footprints glowed on the ground. In that light, Tinh Tu followed. She dropped her staff down to Eidan first, then lowered herself as a woman much younger in physique might. Ayae half expected her white raven to follow, but it had not liked the inside of the foyer and had taken to roosting on the roof of The Pale House. It had made no appearance by the time that Ayae and Jae’le had dropped to the stone floor.
Lit by the phosphorescent footprints, Ayae gazed at the broken remains of stone buildings and streets that she stood in. A City of Ger, she realized. She walked along the streets that had long ago lost their distinction from the stone around it. The buildings looked like old heads, the skin shrunken to reveal the shape of the skull, and little else. In some, roofs had caved in and doors had broken. Among the broken stalagmites, Ayae could see some faint lights, lost beneath two slabs of rock that had collided with each other. The lights she could see, Ayae knew, had been used by the men and women who had lived in the caverns after the War of the Gods. The people had been faithful to Ger and had shunned the outside world to be near him.
The Cities of Ger had attracted treasure hunters and miners. Many were lost to the rivers that ran throughout the mountains and which were prone to flooding. Mireea drew its wate
r from two of the largest rivers that ran through the mountain, but there were others, as well. Each one of them ran the length of the mountains until they burst out in a series of waterfalls over the Black Lake in Leera. The lake was so named because it drew its water from Leviathan’s Blood and was the cause of the continual growth of swamps and bogs that plagued much of Leera and left it poorly suited for farmland.
Samuel Orlan had taken Ayae to the end of the Spine of Ger – to where the stone wall ended abruptly – to show her the Black Lake shortly after he took her on as an apprentice. She could still remember listening to him tell her about the poisoned water while staring in awe at the waterfalls pouring into the huge, still Black Lake. The horizon had been one long dark smudge where the ocean and sky met in the smell of copper and salt.
The footsteps of the man who had stolen Zaifyr led them through a second and third City of Ger. In the second, the crumbling, stone faces of the city were exposed to the clear night sky and looked to be gazing up at the stars in awe. Xrie and the combined forces had left the morning after he had spoken to Eidan, leaving Mireea quiet. Beyond it, the third city began, and there the lower halves of buildings from Mireea, of houses and factories, speared through breaks in the rock as if they had fallen from a great height. Ayae made her way past both silently, feeling as if she had entered a world that she did not recognize, one that had taken what she had known and loved and left only a world of sadness in its place.
After the third City of Ger, the path of the body-snatcher went deeper into the Mountains of Ger. He left the rivers, which surprised Ayae, but she did not say anything to the others. Instead, she followed the lighted prints as they made their way through narrow splits in the stone, across a wide bridge that had once spanned an empty expanse, but which now provided a smooth road over the jagged debris from a cave-in. The prints wound down narrow and wide tunnels. Paths split frequently and the steps went left, then right, then up a small incline, before going down a steep wall that the four had to climb down.
