Leviathan's Blood (49 page)

‘But someone would ride after him, if he was gone for too long,’ Heast guessed. ‘That is our problem, is it not?’

‘His brother is named Nsyan. He is by far the crueller man.’

When the morning’s sun rose, there was no sign of Nsyan, and neither Taaira nor Heast saw any over the following week. In truth, they had seen little beside birds and animals and each
other. Even the ghosts of Mireea could no longer be felt.

The trail the two men followed had twisted along the Mountains of Ger on paths Heast had not expected to take. It rose where he thought it should have dropped and turned south when it should
turn north. He had not been worried, for the breaks in land had been the clear reason for the change in direction and, ultimately, the paths had taken them towards the border of Mireea without
incident until the last day.

As they had broken camp that morning, both Heast and Taaira had heard a loud, shuddering sound a moment before a serious earthquake shook the ground beneath them. The sound of stone being torn
open roared in the sky around them, joining the birds that had lifted up like a flood, but it had not lasted long. Despite the sounds, very little had changed around the two men and their horses
and it was not until the afternoon’s sun had risen that they saw anything that had altered. There, the trail they had followed dropped away suddenly and Heast found himself standing before a
sight unlike any he had seen before.

The earth had been torn apart, as if a pair of hands had thrust into a wound, and then pulled it back to reveal the ruins of a City of Ger.

It was not a large city. It consisted of nearly two dozen large stone buildings, the edges of each long worn away, leaving them with a rounded appearance. Lichen and moss covered the great
majority of the buildings, and a myriad of green and blue and white and grey blended together to give the city a luminescent quality, an unearthly sheen that suggested the buildings had never been
designed for human habitation. Yet, Heast knew as he rode his horse around the edge of the broken earth, they had. The windows still held rotting frames and curtains, while the remains of doors
were blackened so very similarly to the houses that Heast had seen throughout the world. A mother or a father would push it open. A child could emerge.

It was the first time he had seen a City of Ger. When his men had dived into a flooded mineshaft in search of Leeran bandits, he had left the work to others. His leg would have made it
difficult, but it was not the work of a captain anyway. Instead, he had read the reports that had been written, but none of them had captured the strangeness before him, none of them gave voice to
the unsettling realization that here were the remains of a society that had, for generations, lived beneath a stone sky.

Silently, he nudged his horse off the trail and, with the tribesman behind him, rode along the broken expanse of the land, his gaze on the ruined trail of the city.

Then—

Then the ground had opened.

The wounded fissure that ran through the ground became a huge empty space. It was of such size, such magnitude that, as he first gazed into it, a sense of vertigo assailed Heast. The City of Ger
ended suddenly at it, half a stone house still present on the edge of the hole, while another leant at an odd angle into it, as if it were falling, piece by slow piece, into the emptiness below it.
If Heast had been riding in an earlier part of the day, the sight of the two buildings over the vast blackness of the mountain’s wound would have been all he saw; but he came to it when the
afternoon’s sun was at its peak and its light reached down into the dark and left it dappled.

In the depths of it, the very, very depths, Heast could make out an outline. It was but a curve at first, a dark shadow, a sight that could easily be mistaken for a part of the mountain until
the eye made out another outline. It traced from the edge of the first, further into the splotched shadows, to the centre of the great expanse. There a monstrous shape could be made out and he saw
not the broken stone of a fallen building, but rather a splintered bone, a forearm, he thought by its shape, but a forearm of no creature he had known, a forearm so thick and heavy that it could
only have belonged to a being that had been so large that, once standing, its head would have risen beyond the clouds.

‘Only in devastation is truth shown clearly to us,’ Kye Taaira said in a hushed voice. ‘Only here is the artifice of belief and intent stripped bare. Only here is what binds us
together revealed.’

In the darkness of the camp, Heast continued to gaze at the dark shape of the mountains. If it revealed a truth to him, he did not speak it.

The storm that struck the Floating Cities of Yeflam the morning after the trial lasted three days. In the morning, the darkness of the night failed to lift completely and, from
within the bruised sky, an ugly, late-season storm came. The streets emptied, the bridges closed, and the ocean rose in black waves to crash against the pillars as if the angry hands of the dead
had begun to beat against the stone. Zaifyr was restless at that thought – he imagined Lor Jix standing on the shattered deck of
Wayfair
, leading the procession – but on the
fourth day, the sky was empty and the ocean flat and still.

At the end of that week, the calm had given way to restless, erratic air as Yeflam waited for the Enclave to begin the march of war.

The papers, be they run by the Enclave, the Traders’ Union or independents, made no secret of the fact that the Enclave would issue a statement declaring war soon. The presses reported
that the Keepers were embarrassed and outraged, and the Traders’ Union littered its papers with images of a giant, misshapen leviathan in a variety of poses. In some, it crushed the Keepers.
In others, the Floating Cities were covered in its corpse. Yet, no matter what Zaifyr saw or read, he did not disagree that Yeflam was preparing for war. He watched the slow militarization of
Yeflam from the tower ledge. From there, he saw the increased presence of armoured soldiers on the streets. He saw them begin during the storm at the bridges, and he saw patrols and small corner
outposts spring up beneath the rain. After the storm stopped, he saw for the first time the Yeflam navy patrolling Leviathan’s Blood. The beating of the drums in the long vessels took the
place of the noise the waves had made against the stone, as if nature had given way to the demands of humanity.

On the day of the trial, he, Jae’le and Eidan had entered the meeting room in the centre of the Enclave and found the room united.

‘We will find this child of the gods,’ said Kaqua, the Pauper. ‘We will find her and bring her to justice.’ He had folded his arms in the faded sleeves of his robe and
spoke with a serenity that Aelyn, who stood beside him, did not have. Her fury spread over the Keepers behind her. ‘However, all three of you must understand that the Enclave has
responsibilities to Yeflam,’ Kaqua continued. ‘It cannot abandon these responsibilities in search of revenge. If you cannot agree to that, then you will be at an impasse with us. Worse,
you will be in conflict.’

‘Anguish believes that she is still here.’ Zaifyr directed his reply to his sister. ‘Millions will die if you allow her to leave Yeflam. To kill her here is to end the war in a
day.’

‘Do you truly believe that?’ she asked in a hard voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Then you are a fool, brother,’ Aelyn said bluntly. ‘The Faithful will not awake the moment she is dead. They are not under a spell. They believe. They will not stop because
she is dead. We do not even know how long it will take her to die. It could be another ten thousand years, in which case her Faithful will claim she is alive. They will even make up a name for her
if she falls without one. They will keep marching. You cannot stop what is happening here, and over the mountain, by destroying her.’

Zaifyr sensed that his sister was afraid. Everything she had done – from a treaty with Leera, to sending Fo and Bau to Mireea, and her reluctance to begin a trial – had been a
manifestation of that. She had been more damaged by Asila and by the fallout in her home than he had realized. For a moment, Zaifyr thought that he could see her memories, that he could see the
crumbling spirals of Maewe, the riots in the streets and her deep despair at it. But he also believed that a moment had been presented to them
now
. Lor Jix might not have risen on the
waves during the storm, but Zaifyr could still sense him beneath the stone of Nale, a presence entwined with the sensation of the child, a chill against her sharpness on his skin. In his mind the
two had combined with the cold of the dead and the whispers of the haunts, but, as he had begun to speak, to explain that to Aelyn and to the Keepers, Eidan had interrupted.

‘She is right,’ he said. ‘When the child falls, she will remain a figurehead to them. It may be that some will leave upon her death, but not all. They will cross the ruins of
Ger’s mountains to reclaim her. They will not easily believe that she is dead, and perhaps rightly. Look at our world. Will she become yet another dead god? We do not know the answer to that,
just as we are missing so many other answers. We do not know what defences she can call upon, what creatures will answer her. I have seen what does answer in Leera, and if it is but a fraction of
what responds to her here, then the stones of Yeflam will be a new colour come the morning if we strike against her.’

Earlier, when Zaifyr had rejoined Jae’le and Eidan, he had found them on the third floor of the Enclave. The former stood alone in the hallway while the latter stood in a dark empty office
before an open window.

‘The creature with him,’ Jae’le answered his unspoken question quietly. ‘He says that he has seen her.’

‘In the Enclave?’ he said.

‘Outside.’ Eidan emerged from the office alone, the darkness falling behind him while his body was reformed by the light. ‘He says that he saw her, falling through the sky.
That she was held in that giant creature she summoned. When we looked out of the window, we could not see her.’

‘So he left?’ Jae’le asked.

‘He said that he wished to climb to the top of the Enclave. To look for her again.’

Zaifyr shared the surprise of his other brother who, the hilt of his sword concealed beneath his green-feathered cloak, did not hide his expression. With a sigh, Eidan continued along the
hallway. ‘It would be better to kill him, yes,’ he said. ‘It is the more intelligent thing to do, I know, and in the past I would not have hesitated. Anguish would even welcome
such a thing, I believe. But all of us know that death is no mercy.’

It was those final words that returned to Zaifyr as he stood before Aelyn. He still believed that
this
was the moment, that all of them should strike – now, before the night was
over. He could visualize the violence in his mind with a startling clarity that would linger with him through the storm and in the days after. But he took warning from the vision, and allowed that
it was no longer a sign that he should rush towards the idea of destroying the child, no matter the outcome.

Zaifyr’s right hand touched the bronze charm beneath his wrist, the simple, worn piece of metal his father had instructed him to tie upon himself first. ‘Perhaps,’ he said to
Aelyn, ‘you are right in this.’

The storm had threatened to flood a part of Faise and Zineer’s house. When it had reached its worst on the first day, the rain had poured through the broken second-storey
window, and Ayae, desperate to stop the floor from being warped, had nailed a sheet of wood over the frame. She had pulled the wood from the back door where someone – Zaifyr or Jae’le,
perhaps – had put it over the broken entrance after clearing away the men and women she had killed weeks before. Now the stone floor downstairs was awash from the rain that flooded in from
the backyard. When the storm stopped, she organized a replacement of the window and door.

It arrived on the day that Aelyn Meah knocked on the door.

Ayae had left the Enclave shortly after Eira’s final words. Outside, the darkness stretched across Nale and had slowly embraced her as the hours wore on.

She could have returned to Aelyn’s false home, to the room where she had slept heavily after she killed Faise and Zineer, but Ayae knew that she could not. To go back there meant to be
drawn into Zaifyr and Jae’le’s war, into their plans to attack the child, and she did not want that. She wanted space to think and to breathe. She knew that she had lost control on Xeq,
but it had been harder for her to acknowledge that she had not regained control of herself afterward, and it was why her step left faint webs of cracks along the stone. In the long walk back to
Faise and Zineer’s – a walk that saw carriages pass her, carriages she was afraid to step into – Ayae admitted that there was a chance that the solidification of her body would
continue, that it would start to turn her very organs to stone. There was, as Jae’le said, a very real danger that she could be consumed by grief.

It had not happened by the time Ayae opened the door to Aelyn Meah, but neither had her body returned to itself.

‘I thought it would be best for us to talk,’ the Keeper said. Ayae’s anger at the woman for her betrayal of Mireea was difficult to find, in part because Aelyn had forsaken the
blue that she was commonly associated with and looked nothing more than a tired woman in her plain leather trousers and linen shirt. ‘An official statement will be given tomorrow. It is the
statement of war. We will be issuing it from the Enclave.’

No one had visited the house since she had arrived, not even neighbours, and for a moment Ayae had not thought to respond to Aelyn. Finally, she said, ‘What do you plan to say?’

‘That we must do this, of course.’ The other woman offered a smile that was brief and hollow. ‘Is that not what we always say before we march our citizens off to
death?’

Ayae held the door open for the Keeper to enter the house. ‘People still talk about her being in Yeflam.’ A number of papers had, in the wake of the trial, become free. They piled up
outside the house. ‘People see her – a shadow of her, they say. And they see her priests.’