Leviathan's Blood (16 page)

‘There are places I have not been.’ At the mention of
final
, he rested his hands on the top of the table, above the ugly dagger he had hidden beneath. ‘They are not
many, though.’

‘Sooia?’

‘No, I have been there.’

An honest curiosity – the first honest expression Heast had seen on Menan’s broad face – saw him lean forward. ‘What is it like?’

‘Awful.’

‘That is all you will say?’

‘The land is both drowned and burnt, the soil sown with bones and salt.’ Through the door, he watched the dark-blue armoured soldiers spread out, watched them begin to search the
farmhouse and the empty fields. ‘The things that Aela Ren and his army have done will not be easily undone.’

Menan’s fingers touched the hilt of his sword. ‘It will require cooperation. As you and Muriel Wagan have been cooperating with the Traders’ Union for the last three months.
Helping each other send food and clothing to Wila. Keeping your people safe. Standing up not just to the Leerans, but to the animosity in Yeflam. An increasingly difficult task now that the priests
have begun to arrive in the cities and give sermons on the very topic. Sometimes it feels as if not a day goes by without a new fear expressed about Leera and Mireea. Yet we have stood beside you.
We have maintained our defence of you. Even as you and Lady Wagan have been purchasing Yeflam land.’ Outside, Heast heard the sharp stamp of a horse’s hoof, the snort of another. The
low voices of the Empty Sky grew as they returned to the front of the building empty-handed.

‘I must admit, it took the Traders’ Union a long time to uncover your deception,’ Menan continued. ‘From what I understand, they were aware of the purchases two months
ago. It was the two hundred acres from the Galan family that tipped them off. Galan was unable to keep secret the sum that was offered. The banker from Zoum revealed little, and you cannot harm
those bastards, not if you want to keep your accounts. But the trail could be followed. And it was, across Leviathan’s Blood and back.’ Menan smiled sourly. ‘Zineer and Faise
Kanar. Benan Le’ta had a fit when he heard, but not enough of one to do as I suggested, and cut both their throats and toss them into the ocean.’

‘A sound plan,’ said Heast, turning his focus back to the soldier. ‘What stopped Le’ta?’

‘The two live with another woman.’ His hand tapped the straight blade of the sword in front of him. ‘A cursed girl.’

The Captain of the Ghost’s hands remained on the table, above the hidden dagger. ‘Are forty soldiers not enough to kill her?’

‘A cold suggestion.’

‘You did not answer my question.’

‘You can never tell.’ Menan flashed his dishonest smile. ‘Cursed – they’re always a problem. But she’s not a soldier. She can be made to run. She can be made
to take her friends into hiding. To force them to give up everything.’

‘So you kill me, instead?’

‘I do admire how casually you are approaching it.’

Outside, far out on the vacant fields, a member of the Empty Sky toppled to the ground, the first in a violent ripple.

‘I think you misunderstand the situation,’ Heast said.

‘I am not a fool,’ Menan replied evenly. ‘It won’t be easy. Even Benan Le’ta knows that. He knows that what has been taken won’t fall back into his hands
straight away. He knows he’ll have to kill Muriel Wagan as well.’

‘Greed is always very reliable, isn’t it? Muriel told me that years ago and I have not doubted it since. She told me because I asked why she was not wealthier.’ Heast had sat
in her disorganized office after he had returned with Lord Wagan from Balana. His report had been short and simple, the trip uneventful. The only note of interest was his opinion that Elan Wagan
had left a number of financial opportunities on the floor, discarded for no reason other than lack of interest. ‘She said to me that a fortune is an empty goal. Wealth is much like a sword,
she said. It is a tool to be used for an end, nothing more. The moment you begin to value it for itself, it becomes blunt and can hurt no one. I think those words will mean something to you very
shortly.’

‘They won’t.’ Menan rose from the chair, his sword in his grasp. ‘Wealth is power, Captain. You and my father and Muriel Wagan, you are all the same. You all refuse to
see that our world is made by wealth.’

Behind him, through the door, a short, stocky man in plate and chain mail appeared on the field. In his hand he held an ugly spiked mace, a weapon that might well have torn open the side of his
face, if he had been struck with it then, if the blood that stained it was his.

A shout erupted from the soldiers who stood around the farmhouse. The cry forced Menan to turn and, as he did, men and women in heavy armour and weapons began to surge around the house, as if a
dam had broken.

‘What is happening to my men?’ he demanded.

‘They’re dying.’ Heast’s hand reached beneath the table, grabbed the hilt of the dagger.

An anguished cry drew Menan to the open door of the farmhouse, ready to give an order. But it was useless. More and more Brotherhood soldiers appeared before him, each of them holding heavy
crossbows that began and ended a short and ugly battle. Already, the forty soldiers who had arrived had been cut down to a dozen. The survivors were throwing down their weapons to the ground and
surrendering with loud shouts.

The sword slipped from Menan’s fingers. ‘I do not wish to die,’ he said. ‘I surrender, we all su—’

His words cut off wetly as Heast’s dagger cut deep and hard across his neck.

There would be no prisoners. The Captain of the Ghosts could afford none, and did not, in truth, wish for any.

‘A lot of bodies today.’ Essa used a rag to wipe his mace clean as he climbed the two steps. ‘Be hard to keep them buried for long.’

‘I know.’ Heast cleaned his dagger against his leg. ‘We’ll have to prepare for when they are dug up.’

No one knows where the first copies of
The Eternal Kingdom
were printed, but in Gogair there is a story told by the locals in Xanoure. They tell of a small house,
which if you were to visit now, you would find barren. They say that once it had been filled with print machines, filled with ink, filled with paper and leather and stitching. Then, one morning, it
was empty.

The story goes that a ship left Xanoure that night. A ship, the locals said, that went to a port in Leera, a port that was slowly becoming infamous for its misery and sadness. It is not an
uncommon story – it is simply a story of theft and there are other thefts in Xanoure – but it is a story, nonetheless. What commends it to memory is that the locals will tell you that
the theft was not of the printing presses, or of the inks, or the papers, but of the ship. And that it was the printer and his family who stole the ship.

—Tinh Tu,
Private Diary

On the slick deck of
Bounty
, Bueralan Le watched the port of Dyanos approach, a rain-dark shape lit by flickering lanterns. The small town stood on the eastern edge of
Ooila, protected by jagged rocks and steep ash-stained cliffs, both partly obscured in the drizzling night. The crew of
Bounty
navigated the choppy black water that led to it by standing
at the bow with long poles to gauge the depth. They did so because stone riddled this part of the ocean’s floor and it had torn through the bottom of more than one ship. In fact, a long
history of wrecks had ensured that Dyanos remained not just a small port, but a stop for desperate men and women, for merchants who ran contraband, for poor families wanting cheap fares, for
runaway slaves, for hard-luck mercenaries and, of course, for exiled barons.

Bueralan was not ready to return home. The reluctance did not surprise him as the wet docks drew closer. He had never considered himself a man of nationalist identification: the hereditary title
of baron had stuck to him after his exile as half an insult, and though he had embraced it, he had kept nothing of the Ooilan traditions implied with it. He had not sought out the clothes that he
had once worn, nor the meals he had once eaten. He had not contacted old friends, had not tried to re-establish old relationships. Few knew just how much he had distanced himself from his former
life in exile, and of those who did appreciate the length, only Zean had known the exact distance. The other man had never made mention of it, however. To do so would have been to discuss how much
he himself had left behind. To do so would have been to remind each other of Zean’s blood-bonded slavery, of the long hard road that had delivered him independence, but only after he had left
Ooila.

Bueralan had spent most of the journey on
Bounty
running through what would happen once he stepped ashore in Ooila. He knew that he would not be able to stay hidden. He was too distinct
a man for that: with his smooth, shaved head and his white tattoos he would not be able to hide for long. The point had been made to him halfway through the journey, in fact.
Bounty
had
just passed between Gogair and Kakar when the captain asked him if he was the exiled baron his first mate said he was. He had been in his cabin when the young man had asked, the afternoon’s
sun illuminating the room as if it were the inside of a jewel.

‘I am,’ Bueralan said.

‘You don’t want no trouble. I know that.’ The captain of
Bounty
, Po Danal, had inherited his ship from his father, and he was intent on returning it to its glory.
‘And I don’t want no trouble,’ he said bluntly. ‘I have cargo I don’t want looked at too hard.’

‘That’s why we’re going to Dyanos, both of us.’

‘Yeah, but the Eyes of the Queen are known to be there as well. I don’t need them on me when we dock.’

‘Pueral?’ He remembered the last time he had seen her, the ease with which she had found him. ‘I’ll be careful,’ he said.

‘Maybe you’ll be lucky,’ the captain said, before he left. ‘Maybe she’ll be too busy with the Innocent.’

Bueralan did not think he could bank on that, but it was true enough that Aela Ren had stopped the men and women on
Bounty
talking about him. There was no time for an exiled baron, not
when they could be drifting into a nation at war with the feared warlord. Not that what they said was new to Bueralan: he had heard stories of the Innocent regularly when he had lived in Ooila. But
the crew spoke as if it was the first time they had heard them, despite being natives themselves. They talked about the Innocent at dinner and at breakfast; they talked about him on the deck and
below it; they even talked about him in storms. They speculated about him as a person. About his martial ability. About his swords. And about his army. About the size of it and its capabilities.
Bueralan listened with half an ear because there was little else to do. The only consistent thing the crew of
Bounty
could agree upon was that a man named Aela Ren existed. That the man
that existed had an army and a ship – a huge, hulking beast with red sails that could carry all his army, no matter its number.
Glafanr
, they said.

For all that Bueralan gave the words no credence, it was one of the few topics that Samuel Orlan felt he had to discuss with him. At first, Bueralan had shrugged him off, had told him that he
did not care, but the child’s words –
call only when what is at stake is innocence
– kept returning to him. It could mean anything, he knew. It could refer to a
threatened person. A child, even. It did not have to refer to Aela Ren.

‘He calls himself the Innocent,’ Orlan said, after Bueralan finally asked, after the fever that gripped
Bounty
finally rubbed off on him. ‘He calls himself that
because there are no gods. He says that there is nothing to judge him, no rules for him to obey. In this world we live in, he believes that he cannot be guilty of any sin.’

He had said this when the two of them were standing on the deck, weeks before the sight of rain-slicked Dyanos appeared before Bueralan. Yet the words and the empty, dark night mingled in the
saboteur’s mind as
Bounty
made its slow way through the dangerous waters.

‘His army is the same,’ the cartographer had continued, a memory’s ghost beside him. ‘They don’t wear the name that he does, but they might as well. They are all
like him. They are all god-touched. They all stood beside a god, once. They heard the words of their god and it was bliss, I imagine. After all, of all the mortals in the world, they were the most
beloved. They were the mortal hand of their god, even if their mortality was a thousand years away. I cannot imagine how they felt after the War of the Gods, when all of that was taken
away.’

‘You said that each god had a servant,’ Bueralan said. ‘That they were each only allowed one. That would mean that the Innocent’s army has only seventy-eight
soldiers.’

‘Seventy-four, including him.’

‘Are some dead?’

‘No.’

‘Then where are the others?’

‘Not with him.’

‘Does that include you, old man?’

Orlan sighed. ‘I keep telling you,’ he said, ‘I am not god-touched. I die like most people in our world die.’

Painfully, stupidly, quickly and, upon occasion, happily.
Bueralan finished the line internally. His mother had first said it to him, when he had been a child. He had not known it then,
but she had been quoting from a famous play that criticized the Mother’s Gift. When he saw it performed, years later in Yeflam, he had not laughed, as most of the audience did; he had nodded.
In his life he had seen more than his share of people die, and they had, in one way or another, died as the playwright said.

‘
Glafanr
was once the ship of the dead,’ Samuel Orlan continued. ‘It was said that it drifted on the rivers of fate, that it took men and women to the City of the
Dead. After the Wanderer died, Ai Sela, his servant, found the ship in the ocean. She was in nearly a wreck herself. Great cyclones and tsunamis had been throughout the ocean during the War of the
Gods and Ai Sela was caught in one. She thought that her time to die had come, but instead,
Glafanr
appeared before her. She did not know why. She had never stepped on it. Some said it was
sentient, but no one knows for sure. All that is known is that Ai found herself the captain of it. She found in it a new home and offered it to all who were like her. For thousands of years, the
servants of the gods lived in it. They let
Glafanr
drift in the oceans with them. They did not care where it went. They did not believe they had a place, or a purpose, until Aela Ren found
them. That was seven hundred years ago, before they began their horror in Sooia.’