Leviathan's Blood (10 page)

I am glad I have left my youth long behind. It was unmarked by failure, tragedy, and debt. It was, in a word, shallow.

—Tinh Tu,
Private Diary

When the priests appeared in Yeflam, Heast had moved to Zanan, to a small room above a modest bar inappropriately called The Engorged Whale.

He saw the first priest on the night Benan Le’ta visited. The merchant was not happy that Heast had moved again – the fourth time in two months – and he was not pleased that it
had taken members of the Empty Sky a week to find him. He was frustrated by Heast’s ability to drop the watchers Bnid Gaerl had set on him and the conversation the two would soon have, where
the merchant delivered a series of thinly veiled threats, was partly fuelled by that. But before Heast pushed open the door to The Engorged Whale, before he sat across from Le’ta, he saw the
Leeran priest.

He was handsome, darkly bearded, tanned, and no older than twenty. He wore a brown robe and stood in the street before the bar on a wooden crate, calling out to people, and reading from a book
in his hand. Zanan had a healthy crowd for him to work: it was a small city in the arc that circled Nale on the south-eastern side and was defined by blocks of bars, brothels, bedsits, cheap halls,
and trade shops worked by men and women who sweated long days. It was one of three cities in Yeflam where gambling was legal, and the purses of mercenaries, merchants and other travellers there
became slimmer each day. Because of that, Heast was surprised that he had not seen the priest before. Surely, among the transients who had lost their wealth, ‘open’ minds would be
found, but no, just as the priests in Mesi, Ghaam, Fiys and Maala had failed to find an audience, so was the priest in Zanan struggling. The young man could not convince a single person to stop and
listen. It did not matter if he spoke of healing the body or the soul; it did not matter if he lifted his hands to the sky and claimed that the remains of the afternoon’s sun could be fixed
as well. No one stopped. No one but Heast, who stood at the corner of the inn, out of the priest’s sight. One woman, upon passing him, said drily, ‘Get enough of that shit from
Keepers,’ before she walked up the stairs of The Engorged Whale. Heast had seen her running card games and roulette. Once the door closed behind her, a pair of bouncers crossed the road and
moved the priest on. His reaction to the two surprised Heast more than anything else did: the young man smiled and thanked the guards for their time. Then he picked up his small wooden stool and
left calmly.

Inside the smoky stomach of The Engorged Whale, Heast made his way to Benan Le’ta. The merchant was watching a card game across from him and, after Heast had sat, Le’ta said,
‘I spent a lot of time in places like this.’ He had a tall glass of beer next to him, half full. ‘You could lose a fortune here. I did, in fact. More than once.’

‘Have you waited long?’ he asked.

‘Enough to count the cards.’ The merchant picked up his beer. ‘A message arrived from Lian Alahn today. He has returned to Yeflam and is in Enir at the moment. He has agreed to
meet you, if you still wish to do so.’ When Heast extended his hand for the note, the merchant shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I left it in the office. His home is on Burata. You
should be able to find him there within a few days.’

‘Thanks.’

‘In his letter,’ Le’ta continued, ‘he mentions a girl by the name of Ayae. She was his son’s partner, if I am to believe right?’

‘She’s in Yeflam,’ Heast said, the sound of the crowd allowing him to keep the surprise from his voice easily. ‘I’m not sure where. She was on Wila
briefly.’

‘Ah, so she
is
the one the Keepers have taken interest in. It is said that she cannot be burnt. An interesting talent for a cursed woman.’ He finished his beer in one long
gulp and rose, his clothes shifting around him like the feathers of a giant preening animal. ‘Just a short visit, Captain,’ he said, before he left. ‘I thought I would deliver
Alahn’s message personally. You should know that it arrived three days ago. I could have given it to you earlier if I had known where you were staying. If you move again, please let me know.
I would hate to send Commander Gaerl to find you next time.’ An open threat, then, after a series of veiled ones.

Heast watched the merchant leave, unsurprised. The relationship with the Traders’ Union had deteriorated more quickly than he had expected, but he was not particularly concerned. For his
next move, he had already decided to slip out of Yeflam and drop Gaerl’s men cold. He had reached the conclusion after reading the seventh – or was it eighth? – article that
promised to expose the failures of the Captain of the Spine and how they made Mireea’s defeat inevitable. Like the other pieces, it had spent most of its time exploring Refuge’s defeat
in Ilatte. Bnid Gaerl was quoted in this one as well. There were another two sources that Heast did not know the names of, but he suspected that they were Gaerl himself. What separated this last
article from the others was the suggestion that the Leeran priests were here because of the Mireeans. It was a small postscript, not much, but he suspected there would be more later. It was the
final push by Gaerl to have him moved to Wila, his attempt – short of killing Heast – to have revenge for the slight he had suffered in Leviathan’s End.

It had happened over a decade ago. Heast had finished a month of uninspired work in Wisal when Onaedo’s letter summoning him arrived. He remembered that on the day it was brought to him,
he had been standing on the docks, ready to leave for Gogair. He had not considered ignoring it – no mercenary denied a summons to Leviathan’s End.

It sat in the warm, dark waters of the north, past Kakar, a town built into the exposed bone of the Leviathan’s skull. Like an iceberg, Leviathan’s End showed but the smallest
fraction of itself to any who approached. The Leviathan’s great skull revealed itself first in the splintered front of her great jaw, where a ship passed to enter the town, and then again in
the two great, cavernous eye sockets that were stripped of flesh and vein on the top of her skull. It was through those holes that the light was allowed to shine over the town of Leviathan’s
End, for it was in there, held high off the black water, that it had been built and linked together by rope bridges that swayed dangerously in the wind.

Heast had struggled along the bridges. He could still remember the men and women, most of them young mercenaries, who watched him after he had been hauled up from the docks in one of the
pulleys. They observed him not with sympathy, or revulsion, but with a cold patience. Onaedo had built Leviathan’s End and she had built it for soldiers. It was where business was done, where
no nation ruled, and where no man or woman was subject to any rule but her own.

Onaedo’s house was in the centre of Leviathan’s End. Rumour had it that it was the central piece of the town and that all structures were inevitably tied to it. Heast had always
believed that to be true, and years later, as he climbed the stairs to his room in The Engorged Whale, he thought how the construction of Leviathan’s End was echoed in Nale and Yeflam. Yet,
unlike Nale, the centre of Leviathan’s End was not something that had been built at the same time as the city: rather, it was a great ship, the biggest Heast had ever seen. Raised from the
floor of Leviathan’s Blood, the ship was suspended in the centre of Leviathan’s End like the carcass of a great animal that had been hunted and killed.

Only one person lived on it, however, and it was across the vast deck, beyond the door of the captain’s cabin that Heast found Onaedo. The cabin was unchanged from when he had seen it
last: the walls were lined with weapons and tapestries of war, while before them was armour on stands, the insignias of mercenary units that had risen to prominence laid across the front of
each.

Onaedo was a tall muscular woman whose skin was a solid brown. Her hair was cut short, black with no hint of grey, and she wore a series of silver studs in her right ear and nose. When she
greeted him, she was unarmed, but she was always so in Leviathan’s End. On that day, she had worn dark leather trousers, thick black boots and a simple shirt of red.

‘Captain.’ She shook his hand. ‘It is a pleasure.’

‘Is he still here?’ Heast asked, after he had shaken her hand, after he had greeted her.

‘Bnid Gaerl has waited the entire four months.’ Onaedo did not offer him a seat and did not take one for herself. ‘As I said in my letter, he is making claim for the name
Refuge. It is a claim that the Captain must answer.’

‘He cannot have it.’

‘He makes an argument that because it is no longer in use, it should be free to whoever wishes to use it.’

‘It is still in use.’

‘Is it?’ she said. ‘Your leg has begun to bleed, by the by.’

He did not turn away from her dark gaze. ‘The name is still in use,’ he repeated. ‘It has not fallen back to you.’

‘On that, we can both agree. However, Bnid Gaerl has said that if it is only Anemone who stands in the way of his ownership of the name, then he will gladly offer her a place in the new
Refuge.’ To gaze into her eyes for a long time was to see scenes of battle, to see swords, pikes and axes, to see muddy fields and bloody rivers. Very few could hold her gaze for an entire
conversation. ‘You and I both know that it would make his new Refuge a legitimate group if she was with it,’ Onaedo finished.

‘You should ask Anemone, then,’ he said. ‘She has never been one to hide her opinion.’

A faint smile broke across her face and she turned her gaze away from him. ‘I already have,’ she said. ‘Both she and Baeh Lok have been here for two weeks.’

‘Then you already know the answer.’

‘It was upon my honour to ask.’ She shrugged, as if all the ceremony that she created, all the formalities she maintained, were pointless. ‘Besides, you are right. Gaerl cannot
have the name Refuge. Even if it was not in use, even if it was on a piece of armour around me and it was mine to bestow on another, he would not be allowed it. He does not understand what the name
is. He only wishes to use its fame to gain the interest of readers in the new fictions that are being written.’

Until then, Heast had not seen much of the cheaply printed mercenary novels that had begun to emerge. But when Onaedo turned from him and revealed the shelves that lined the back of her cabin,
he saw the stacks that she had piled at the front. She told him that mercenary captains from around the world had begun to send them to her after Wayan Meina, the Captain of Steel, had sent her
his. ‘At least,’ the ruler of Leviathan’s End said, ‘Meina has a sense of humour about it. He knows that I hate them, so he sends them with flowers that have died by the
time they reach me. But the others wish for quotes for book jackets – endorsements that no one but a mercenary would care to read.’ She had stared at them as if they were a bug she
could squash. ‘Such a fate is not for Refuge, Captain. You and I are in agreement that Bnid Gaerl cannot have the title.’

When Bueralan Le and Samuel Orlan entered the port of Jeil, they had not eaten for two days.

The food had run out two days after they crossed into the Kingdoms of Faaisha. On the day that it did, a score of Faaishan soldiers on patrol caught them. After Orlan identified himself and his
fame had won the soldiers’ trust and loosened their tongues, they had been warned that the towns up to Jeil had been evacuated. The Leeran army had invaded and the Lords of Faaisha, the
soldiers said, had cleared out the small towns. If that had not been the case, Bueralan and Orlan would have been able to buy a meal, a bath, a shave and a bed; but instead they walked along the
empty streets hungry, past the taverns and shops with boards across the windows and doors, and out onto the flat, empty roads without seeing a single person. Orlan muttered complaints, but Bueralan
was less bothered. If Orlan had asked, Bueralan would have told him that he did not feel the hunger. He would have said that grief had stolen his appetite. Orlan did not ask. He did not say much
and what he did say was not to Bueralan. Even when he had detoured towards the north three days before they crossed the border into the Kingdoms of Faaisha, he did it without a word of warning.
Bueralan had considered continuing on without him, but he was emotionally exhausted and thought it easier to follow the old man until he stopped before a long, empty run of marshland.

‘He is not here,’ Orlan said, after a while.

‘No one is here.’ Ahead, the faint, dark outline of Leviathan’s Blood marked the horizon. ‘You keep going this way and you end up on the Mad Coast.’

‘It is not the coast that interests me,’ Orlan said, speaking in short sentences, his throat not yet completely healed. ‘It is here. Here, where the god Maika fell to the
ground. Where the goddess Taane killed him. Since then, he has lain beneath the water, flickering. As if he were caught between two worlds. Which, of course, he was. It was he who ruled the City of
the Dead with his—’

‘—with his sisters Maita and Maiza,’ Bueralan finished. ‘I know the lineage. I didn’t realize he was here. I thought he was further out in the marsh.’

‘No.’

‘But now he is gone?’

‘Now he is dead.’ Orlan’s words were raw and guttural. ‘But for how long has he been dead? Fifty, sixty years? Did she bleed his life from him in those first days, or
later?’

He meant the child. Bueralan ran his hand through the growing hair on his head. ‘What do you care, old man?’

‘You have a dead man around your neck.’ On the marsh, a long-legged bird with white-and-grey feathers rose suddenly from the water, as if startled. ‘How do you think she did
that? Do you think that all the gods can grab a man’s soul?’ he asked. ‘No, only the Wanderer and the gods that were taken from his body could do that. But the child is not the
Wanderer. Nor the others. She is incomplete. I do not say that because she is not yet fully grown. How she looks is meaningless. But how she identifies herself is not – and she does not yet
identify herself at all.’

Bueralan could feel the cold crystal on his skin. ‘You’re such an expert on the gods – you tell me why it is so important.’