Leviathan's Blood (11 page)

‘No god is everything.’ The cartographer turned to him angrily. ‘There were once seventy-eight gods in our world,
Baron
. It was not an arbitrary number. It was how
many bodies could hold the divinity of our world. Have you not stopped to think why there are so many powerful people in the world now when there were so few gods in comparison? Human bodies can
contain even less of that power. That is why we see so many tragic men and women. Humans such as you and I are not made for divinity.’

‘But a god is?’

‘Just not all of it.’

‘Until now.’

‘You’d best hope that that is not true.’

‘I don’t care, old man.’ Out in the marsh, the bird leapt into the air, huge and ugly. Bueralan tapped on the stone around his neck. ‘I’m going back
home.’

‘You were exiled from there!’

He turned, but Orlan continued to talk to him, his voice rising in a ragged shout that carried over the marshes. ‘She knows you were! Why is she sending you back there? Think! You are
god-touched now. She said it herself! She is building herself into a god and you are the newest god-touched soldier! This is not a coincidence! A god-touched man is the servant of a god! He is not
a priest! He is not a believer! He is not faithful! He is the mortal instrument of a god! Damn you! Don’t walk to Ooila in ignorance!’

They barely spoke another word until Jeil.

The port sat on the northern tip of the Kingdoms of Faaisha, its white stone walls lined with mould and cracks. A decade ago, its population had been decimated by a series of plagues that had
run up and down the dirt streets and wooden docks with abandon. In the years since, its leaders had rebuilt its population with people from around the word and, consequently, of all the Faaishan
ports, Jeil was the most multicultural. Along the streets, Bueralan and Orlan saw stalls with goods in a variety of languages, past cooking odours from the north, the west, the south and east, and
past men and women with dark black skin, dust brown, white, and the dark olive skin that was more prominent in those born in the country. Among them, Bueralan felt the lassitude that he had been
feeling since Leera began to give way, and his anger returned. He split it between himself and Orlan, for the deaths of Dark and for the role each of them had played. With half an ear, he listened
to the postscript of that last mission as men and women talked about the loss of Mireea, about the Lady of the Spine’s retreat to Yeflam, and General Waalstan’s push into Faaisha. Celp
had fallen, they said. That caught Bueralan’s professional attention with a touch of surprise. Marshal Faet Cohn held the east before the Plateau. He was an old fighter from an old family.
Yet he had been forced to limp back to Vaeasa with half his forces in tatters – how small the surviving army was changed as the story went from person to person – and that corner of
Faaisha was said to be in the hands of the Leerans.

But the war –
this
war – was over for Bueralan. He owed a little to Heast, he knew, but it was not more than what he owed to the memory of his own soldiers, and certainly
not more than what he owed his blood brother, Zean. In Ooila, he could hand the crystal to a witch and undo one of the wrongs that had happened in Ranan. A part of his mind nagged him when he
thought about that, repeated Orlan’s questions, and asked if indeed the Mother’s Gift was the right thing for Zean, but Bueralan ignored it. On the docks there was a ship that waited to
take him to Ooila, to another port and a series of roads that would wind their way through the First Queen’s Province. To roads that would end in Cynama, where he had been born, and from
where he had been exiled.

He would pay for that ship with the small pouch of gold that Orlan had obtained from a moneylender who owed him on one of the streets of Jeil. Maintaining the silence that he had treated
Bueralan to since the marshes, the cartographer found the pair two rooms and paid for a week outright. Half of what he had left he gave wordlessly to Bueralan, though the saboteur had had no plans
to ask for it. In fact, he considered tossing it back and walking out of the inn. But his own coin was long gone, lost in the fall of Mireea and in the cage where the Leerans had kept him. He knew
that if he wanted to return to Ooila, he needed the coin.

In a separate room, alone for the first time since Ranan, Bueralan also knew that the time to cut Samuel Orlan loose had come.

Zaifyr was sitting on the front steps of Aelyn’s house, enjoying the last warmth of the afternoon’s sun, when Ayae and her two friends arrived. He held a slim book
in his hand – a diary, he would tell her later – but he put it down as he rose to greet her.

‘I’m pleased to see you,’ he said.

She hugged him. ‘It’s as if you haven’t seen anyone for two months.’

‘Only Kaqua.’

The Pauper came once a week. He claimed other responsibilities limited the time he could spend with Zaifyr, but mostly he was drawing out the formation of a trial as long as he could. Each time
he visited, he did so with another detail to debate. He struggled with Zaifyr’s insistence that he was not on trial for the murder of Fo and Bau and, no doubt, the Enclave’s belief that
he was. Zaifyr figured that Kaqua and Aelyn were chiefly hoping to frustrate him, to push him into action of his own accord, or simply to force him out of Yeflam. With that in mind, Zaifyr had
listened patiently to Kaqua’s idea of drawing a jury from the population of the Floating Cities. ‘We cannot have everyone on Nale,’ he said. ‘But five hundred, a thousand
people. We could manage that. It would be quite a sight, actually.

We have yet to figure out a way for them to vote once everyone has spoken, but assuming we could do that, it is the way we should proceed. Unless, that is, you have a problem with it.’ He
promised that next week he would bring over one of the ideas they had for registering guilty and innocent votes.

For his part, Zaifyr was untroubled by any of the delays. He had written to the remaining three members of his family – to Jae’le, Tinh Tu and Eidan – to request their
presence. He sent the letters in the claws of small haunts. He gave each of the birds’ spirits enough power to make the journey across Leviathan’s Blood to his siblings’ homes.
For Jae’le, that was a house in the dense forested edges of Gogair; for Tinh Tu, it was in the swamps of Faer; but for his last sibling, for Eidan, Zaifyr admitted that he did not know where
his brother was. He had placed in the mind of the dead bird an image of him, of his stout body, his plain features, his strength, then sent it off. Eidan’s home, Zaifyr suspected, was Yeflam,
but that was when his brother had a home. Eidan liked nothing more than to find ruins, to find pieces of the world that were thought to be lost, and rebuild them. If it took him thirty years, if it
took him a hundred, he did not mind. He would live in those ruins until he was finished. If the bird could not find him, Aelyn would know where he was and, once Jae’le and Tinh Tu arrived,
she would have little choice but to contact him.

That left Zaifyr with only one thing to do while he waited for his family.

‘The diary belonged to an old pirate,’ he said to Ayae, after she asked. The four of them were inside, then. They had walked through the dusty rooms, to the back room where piles of
books had begun to form. ‘Captain Dlar was his name. He lived in the middle era of the Five Kingdoms, but what I remember about him mostly was that he claimed to be descended from priests of
the Leviathan. He wanted to be a king of the sea and his lineage was the claim to it. The Leviathan’s priests lived in giant ships as big as small nations. I was hoping – if it was true
– that he named some of the priests in the War of the Gods.’

‘Was it true?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Like so many others, he lied about where he had come from.’

‘But you’re searching for dead people to speak for you?’ The idea made Ayae uncomfortable, he knew. ‘Is there no other way?’

‘I could always rely upon my sister, I suppose,’ he said blandly. ‘It’s her law, after all. I’m sure she’ll defend me with it.’

‘Why do you need a name?’ Ayae’s two friends were a couple, Zineer and Faise. It was the former who asked the question. He was flipping through a heavy book, looking at the old
black and white drawings. ‘I mean, I thought you could just see the dead.’

‘I don’t want to see all of them,’ Zaifyr said, his hand falling to the charm beneath his left wrist. ‘They stop being distinct if you look at them all. They’re
just a huge mass: generations upon generations pushed against each other, fallen in on each other, until you cannot see where it begins and ends. It is not just people, either. Everything that has
lived and died since the War of the Gods is still here. Birds, whales, dogs. If it has been alive, it is there, trapped in the afterlife. If I want to navigate that, I need a name to focus on.
Less-common names are better. You’d be surprised how many Zineers are out there.’

‘It was my father’s name.’

‘And your father’s father’s name?’

He smiled ruefully. ‘I’m afraid so.’ Zaifyr liked both Faise and Zineer, but it was only later, after Ayae had told him why they were with her, that he had reservations about
their presence. ‘They are my friends,’ she said, when Faise and Zineer had gone upstairs to sleep. ‘My oldest friends. It does not matter what they are doing; I would stand by
them. I would not let them be hurt.’

‘Muriel Wagan is not a foolish woman,’ he said. ‘She uses them to bind you to her as well. If not them, she’ll find someone else.’

‘Mireea is still my home.’

He did not push it. With a shrug, he said, ‘I am too old for homes.’

‘For new shoes as well.’ She sat across from him, her slim face lit by the candles. When she smiled, he was struck by her youth, by the things she had not seen. ‘Do you think
Aelyn will treat me well when I see her tomorrow?’ she asked, as if she sensed his moment of introspection. ‘The people of Mireea don’t deserve to be on Wila.’ He hoped so,
he told her.

In the morning, with Faise and Zineer, he walked with Ayae to the Enclave, but did not go in with her. She had protested at his company, but after he had pulled on his burnt-soled boots, he told
her that no one noticed him in the streets. The Enclave had done its best to keep information about him out of the public eye. He was not sure that she believed him, but not a single person stopped
and stared at him, or asked him a question as they walked through the streets. Nor did they when he, Faise and Zineer continued on afterwards. He did, however, see two men in dark-blue cloaks
obviously shadowing their steps. He was thinking about pointing them out to Faise, when he saw his first Leeran priest.

She was a young white woman, tall and long-limbed, with dark hair and dark, serious eyes that searched across the faces of the people who passed her. She held a book in her left hand and she
used it like a pointer when she indicated to the crowd, when she asked if ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ had any desire to see the world fixed. She had little luck with either sex,
but that did not stop her from preaching to the people around her.

‘The Faithful,’ Faise said, standing beside him. ‘It’s the name of the Leeran army, the name of the Leeran priests.’

‘This is allowed?’ he asked.

‘You hear of some being picked up by the Yeflam Guard, but most are polite. They move when you ask them to do so. I don’t think the Keepers are too happy about it, but rumour has it
that this was a deal struck with the Leerans after the Mireeans were offered sanctuary.’

Zaifyr was genuinely surprised. He could not imagine Aelyn agreeing to that. ‘The book in her hand?’

‘It’s called
The Eternal Kingdom
,’ Zineer said. ‘At least that’s what they say.’

‘No one has read it?’

He shook his head. ‘Each one of them says that they would rather die than let a faithless man or woman read it. If you ask, they will read out excerpts, however.’

Zaifyr had another question, but it was then that the Faithful saw him. She stared at him for a moment, then scooped up her stool and quickly disappeared into the crowd.

‘I think she likes you,’ Faise said.

From the window in Aelyn Meah’s office, Ayae watched Faje lead a small group of workers into the garden beside the Enclave, where long-branched white trees grew. The
workers carried shovels, axes and long-bladed saws, and behind them, as if aware of the weight it would soon carry out, a brown ox pulled an empty cart at a slow, steady pace.

‘There are twenty-five trees in the garden,’ Aelyn Meah said. After she had greeted Ayae at the door, she had led her to the window in silence, much as Faje led the men below.
‘They grow from the bones of the Leviathan. Most grow in Leviathan’s End, but there are others throughout the world. If you have ever heard sailors talking about islands of bone, that
is where they come from. Some sailors will tell you that they move, but they don’t. When a man or woman like you and me becomes a Keeper of the Divine, they are required to travel to one of
these islands and bring back a tree for themselves. It is a test of endurance, more than anything else. To stand on a part of the Leviathan is to feel a pain you have never felt before.’ She
was silent for a moment, then: ‘Today Faje is having the two that belonged to Fo and Bau dug up.’

The workers and ox continued into the heart of the garden. ‘Do they ever have leaves?’ Ayae asked. ‘Do they ever have flowers?’

‘They will bloom when we are gods.’

No, then.

Since her release from Wila, Ayae had requested to see Aelyn and the Enclave, but until now, her requests had been denied. Xrie had told her, when she asked him, that she simply had to wait.
‘Fo and Bau were family,’ he said. ‘You will have to respect the time it takes for our grief to wane.’

A part of her did not believe that there was any real grief. She had heard no love for either Fo or Bau from the people she spoke with. Indeed, the funeral for the two had been a private affair.
But no matter what Ayae thought, it remained true that she could not gain an audience with Aelyn Meah, not until today.
Today
she had been led through the twisting halls of the Enclave and
given a private audience. It did not surprise her that on the same day Fo and Bau’s barren trees were to be torn out of the ground. Over the last two months, she had come to believe that
every act of the Enclave was one that also had to be an act of symbolism. The scene she was witness to now was like the pillar of white stone that Nale rested upon. Eight times the size of any of
the pillars that descended into the black ocean, it was a singular, unnatural presence, and the Keepers said that, should the pillar begin to crack, then the end of the nation would begin.