Leviathan's Blood (26 page)

That was ultimately why they had that patience, Heast knew. When Lord Wagan had returned from Leera, his face a bloody ruin, his mind clearly lost, and his body held to the back of his horse
only by ropes, Heast’s nature had urged him to free the man: a simple thrust of his dagger, a human kindness, an end to the cruelty Lord Wagan had endured. He would not have regretted the
death: he had provided such kindness to other soldiers, to men and women who clung by a thread to a destroyed life.

Yet he had not done so. Quietly pushing up the flap of the tent he shared, he made his way beside a cold wind through the narrow lane of shadowed tents, unsure if his inaction had proved to be
the kindest choice. He had owed Muriel Wagan more than the knowledge that the ghost of her mad husband haunted the ruins of Mireea, yet she deserved better than the sad responsibility she had now.
Among the thousands of tents packed tightly across Wila, his sympathy was not isolated, and her plight not singular. Not one man or woman had left Mireea without a member of their family rising
from the ruins, without a friend returning whom they had already mourned. Not one person on Wila was spared the awful realization that, for all of them, such a fate awaited. For most, though, that
burden was shared. It was shared among themselves and in their families, if they still had them. They were not isolated by leadership and familial estrangement as Muriel was with her position and
her daughter.

At the soggy edge of Wila, Heast stared out across the dark ocean and urinated. Far out in it, he could see small dots of light. Navy ships out in the ocean, perhaps, or one of the keeps that
sat on islands around Nale and which doubled as lighthouses and barracks. But it was far enough that he could not be sure about either, which pleased him. He had worried originally that the navy
would set ships around the island after the mobs had appeared on the day the ghosts did; if he had been the Soldier, he might have done that for safety; and he might have done it because he feared
that Gaerl would arrive. But in the weeks that followed, nothing had happened beyond the extra postings of the guards. He learned also – through the few papers and pamphlets that fell to the
island, now that the deliberate dropping had ended – that curfews had been enacted on Yeflam and that Zaifyr’s trial was going ahead. None of it, though, had anything to do with the
Mireeans. It appeared that they had become much like the long ropes next to him, leading out into the water, where heavy bags of waste bobbed.

It was there that he heard the oar, the soft splash of it, and saw the outline of a boat a moment later.

It was a small boat, no more than a dinghy, and it held two figures, one large and one small, to judge by their silhouettes. They came directly from the northern shore, using the night’s
dark to hide their approach from the guards on the bridge above, and the screams of Lord Wagan had covered the sound of the oars – all except the last few strokes, which were done in nude
silence. As the two men became clearer, Heast made out the scarred serious face of Kal Essa from the smaller shadow, and a dust-stained man he did not know as the second.

Splashes echoed as he stepped into the fetid water, raising a hand to grab the edge of the boat and help guide it to the shore.

‘Turn it over, lift it,’ he whispered. ‘We cannot leave it on the beach.’

‘Aye,’ Essa responded quietly.

It would have looked ridiculous, had any guard glanced down onto Wila and seen an overturned boat moving quickly and quietly through the packed tents.

‘Captain Essa,’ he said softly, the front seat against his shoulders. ‘I trust that there is a good reason for this risk?’

‘The tribesman insisted. I held out against it, but he told us that there would be movement down the mountain. It’s been priests, mostly, though some look like soldiers.’ Essa
had thrust his arms up to the centre seat, unable to carry it on his shoulders. ‘The tribesman told us that the Leeran leaders would be with them. I held him until it sure looked like
that.’

Heast grunted, unsurprised. ‘Do you have a name, tribesman?’

The third man, who was both taller and heavier than Heast and Essa, looked like a brawler, a man who fought with his fists as well as an axe, though the Captain of the Ghosts knew that he did
neither. Stained in dirt, he wore heavy brown breeches, a long dark-green tunic and, in the folds around his neck, layers of a black-and-brown scarf that could be wound around his tanned face and
heavy brown-red beard and hair. He would do that when he stepped onto the empty plains of the plateau, against the strong winds that circulated the grasslands that the pacifist tribes had lived
upon since the War of the Gods.

‘My name is Kye Taaira,’ the man said. ‘And I have come to deliver you a message, Captain Heast.’

Ayae could not sleep.

In the last week, after she and Faise and Zineer had returned to their house, after they had left Zaifyr, her five hours of regular slumber had been drained from her, taken in fitful hours, in
twisted minutes, and in the counting of seconds. Now, for the third night in a row, she sat alone long after Faise and Zineer had gone to bed, her hands clasped around a cup and a heated copper
kettle beside her while she tried to read. The thin book before her was poetry, written by one of the women who had built the first City of Ger. It focused on the elements and described them as
wilful, childish, demure and stubborn. It was awful, but neither it, fatigue nor tea could free her from the strange sensation of teeth pulling at her skin, as if something was trying to consume
her.

‘It is the Leeran god. She approaches,’ Zaifyr had said to her on the day she left. ‘The sensation is different to what you will feel before the remains of the gods.’

She frowned. ‘Why would she be different?’

‘Because we have something she believes is her own.’ The two were standing on the right tower of Aelyn’s house, the afternoon’s sun high above the shifting mass of
Leviathan’s Blood and a cold wind she barely felt rising from it. The charms in Zaifyr’s hair and on his wrists caught the light. ‘In that way, she is like all the gods. She feels
entitled to the world.’

Ayae did not want to believe that, but after the haunts had filled the city, after she had seen the fear in the eyes of men and women, she had felt the seeds of doubts about Zaifyr’s plan
to return. When she had heard from Jae’le that, at the end of the trial, Zaifyr could be sent back to his prison, she had begun even to fear for him. What surprised her, however, was
Jae’le himself. Since the ghosts had filled the city, Zaifyr’s brother had sat in the rooms below, surrounded by books, helping with the research. His long thin fingers turned pages
slowly, carefully, as if he was dissecting an animal.

Pushing away the thought, she had said, ‘Why doesn’t the child have a name?’

‘A god’s name is chosen by mortals.’ Zaifyr shrugged, his charms glinting. ‘It is said that when the name is spoken, she will go to that man or woman and bestow on them a
gift. At least, that is what was always said.’

Before her, the ocean heaved, its black waves crashing against the pillars that held Yeflam. ‘What will happen when she gets here?’

‘We will be offered a chance to end this war without building armies and without slaughter.’ He did not hesitate in his reply.

‘What happens if they don’t see the threat you do?’

‘I will not go back to the tower.’ There was no give in his voice. ‘How are Faise and Zineer?’

‘It has been quiet since the ghosts,’ she said, allowing him to change the topic. ‘I think – well, I think everything changed. I haven’t seen anyone follow us for a
week now. The papers are full of stories about you, but there are a few stories about Illaan’s father and an internal fight within the Traders’ Union. Still, they have a passage to Zoum
at the end of the week that has been organized for them. They’re taking that, at least.’

‘Are you going with them?’

‘As far as the border,’ she said. ‘But there’s still so much work to be done.’

She had left the tower a short time later and walked down the stairs to where Faise and Zineer waited. They did not want to leave Yeflam. They had, in fact, tried to argue against going to Zoum,
but Ayae had reminded them of Bnid Gaerl. He would not forget them. Maybe he would not pursue them now, not with all the other things going on, but he would eventually. And, perhaps selfishly, Ayae
admitted, she also feared what would happen once the child arrived. She could not envisage a scenario in which no one was hurt. When she thought of the trial and its aftermath, she saw again Queila
Meina’s hand touching her, her skin sunken, her life stolen by Fo’s diseases as if she were of no consequence.

And it was because of that fear, that danger that she held above all others, that when in the last moments of the night a knock sounded on the door of Faise and Zineer’s house, Ayae opened
it.

Outside stood a priest.

He was a tall man, middle-aged, white-skinned. She had seen so many priests of late, but even so, there was something different about this one. He was clean-shaven, his salt-and-pepper hair cut
in a harsh military fashion. The last – registered briefly, and not analysed until much later – saved Ayae’s life. As she drew back from the door, the priest, his eyes widening,
cried out and leapt to his left to reveal a second man, smaller, stockier, and holding a heavy crossbow. The wooden levers let out a loud twang sound and pain ratcheted up Ayae’s arm as, in
that split second, her free hand – her left hand – snapped down, the fingers latching painfully around the bolt.

She hurled it back, following the poor trajectory with her body, her right hand ripping the spent crossbow from the shorter man’s hands while her left, palm up, crashed the heel heavily
into the man’s forehead.

The man crumpled, his head snapping back at a painful angle. As if in response, she heard the door at the back of the house crack, as it was kicked in. The priest – false, she knew, to
judge by the dark-blue armour that the other man wore – leapt at her, crying out wordlessly, but she shifted her weight and turned to use the man’s momentum to throw him across the
pavers and into the wooden table she had used to hold the soggy, broken apples she had tried to juggle. She heard it crack, heard him land, but in front of her she saw figures, half a dozen, maybe
more, flooding through the back door, and she heard a cry from upstairs.

Her first steps took her through the doorway, her next onto the kitchen table, the hot kettle coming to her grasp as she skidded across it.

Her first hit caught a man across the face, the now-boiling water splashing across him. She struck a woman next, her foot cracking down, a spark flying as her bare foot broke the heavy boot,
shattered the bone beneath the leather. The woman grunted. Her short sword thrust forward and her free hand tried to grasp Ayae, but the kettle hit her in the jaw. Bone cracked – and Ayae
turned, her hand trapping a thrust sword against her side, feeling the blade cutting as it did, while using the straightened arm of the attacker to lean back and wield her scalding kettle against
another in heavy red lines. In a hard arc, the kettle came back round and slammed into the head of the man whose arm she held, sending him to the ground and leaving his sword in her grasp.

The shining copper cast a dull light around the room, illuminating four people still standing, one of them the woman with the broken jaw.

‘Zineer!’

No reply to her shout.

Louder, she cried, ‘
Faise!
’

One of the men in front of her smirked.

Ayae’s kettle lashed out, catching him in the face, her stolen sword following. It plunged into his belly and she let go of the handle, stepping back as a pair of swords thrust forward at
her. Her kettle came up, heavy and dented, and before the two men knew it, she was on them, her feet striking up sparks as she hammered down on heavy boots, as her free hand slammed against mail,
feeling it give soggily into a scream while her kettle lashed out, bashing aside a sword and then cracking the bone in another’s arm.

The woman with the broken jaw came last, giving an unsure thrust that Ayae stepped from easily, so slow that her hand could close around the woman’s wrist and twist—

The sword dropped and the kettle crashed again into her jaw, its copper form finally giving in against its punishment, caving in against the broken bone as it struck.

Scooping the blade up, Ayae took the stairs two at a time, knowing,
knowing
as she came to the last and felt the ocean’s breeze through the shattered window illuminated by the
first rays of the morning’s sun, that she was much too late.

Both Faise and Zineer were gone.

Zaifyr gently closed the frail covers of
Fallen Pyrates
when the white raven arrived. The bird’s blue eyes scanned the room from the open window, looking first
at him, then at Jae’le.

It was he, the man who had once been the Animal Lord, who rose to approach it, whose left hand stroked its head, and whose right untied the message attached to its leg. The bird was calm,
pleased with the attention, its pleasure one of adoration. The bird’s ancestor, a large, heavy and shaggy creature, a monster of a bird, in truth, had been a gift from Jae’le to his
sister, Tinh Tu. In Salar, the offspring of the first white raven, the immortal bird, had roosted in the country’s fabled libraries, neither male nor female until spring, and then only one
gender or the other for two weeks. After the Five Kingdoms, the hunting of the white ravens had begun and those that remained now lived around the fortress Tinh Tu had named after her lost country.
The birds were now seen solely when she wished to communicate with family, an event, Zaifyr knew, that was as rare as the birds themselves.

‘You do not need to read it.’ He rose, hoping that he was wrong, but knowing –
knowing –
that he was not. ‘She is not coming to Yeflam.’

‘No,’ his brother replied. ‘She is not.’

The note, a rolled piece of thin paper, was passed to him.