Leviathan's Blood (31 page)

‘And now?’

‘Beautiful young women have never been in my dreams, Aned.’

He smiled, but his humour was short-lived. ‘You know what has been asked of me, don’t you?’ he said, after a moment.

‘Lord Tuael is in a state of desperation and has reached out for you,’ she said. ‘He wants you to fight for him, even though you have no soldiers.’

‘Baeh Lok agreed with him.’

‘That is why you will go.’ The Lady of the Ghosts stepped out of the doorway. Her feet were pale and bare and the crumpled edge of her red dress trailed in the dirty sand behind her,
obscuring the prints that she left. ‘You would stay if I asked, I imagine, but it would sit sourly inside you. Soon enough you would hold it against me, and rightly so. That is not who we
are,’ she said, as he followed her. ‘You have done more than enough for Mireea in Yeflam. You have been more than the Captain of the Spine. But what happens now is my responsibility.
The trial of Zaifyr is going ahead and Lian Alahn has begun to push for my release for that. He has assured me that within the week I could find myself in the Floating Cities.’

‘Le’ta will not easily stand for that. Nor will Gaerl,’ Heast said. ‘If they find out I am no longer here, they might—’

‘—do the same thing they would do if you were here,’ she finished. ‘I have Caeli to deal with those moments. You have said that more than once to me. But I suspect that
our friend Benan Le’ta will be more interested in what Lian Alahn is doing than in what I am. In fact, I am planning on it. While those two push and pull on each other, I plan to see how well
aligned Aelyn Meah and I are in terms of the Leerans and their political foothold in the area.’

‘You think to turn her to war?’ he asked.

‘No, that is beyond me.’ At the edge of the beach, she stopped. Above her was the length of the stone bridge, solid and immovable, the four children in the middle of it. ‘There
is no reason for you to stay, Aned,’ she said. ‘Not after a soldier of Refuge has made a request to his captain. Not after he has died to make it.’

Above, the chant continued without interruption. The first child halted on the bridge, his arms outstretched as he turned his head into the crowd. A voice had called out to him. Heast had not
heard it, but the body language of the boy, and of those behind him, was that of guilt, of being caught in the middle of an act that they knew to be dangerous and forbidden.

‘The Lords of Faaisha will be reluctant to listen to me,’ he said. ‘I will have nothing to offer them but myself.’

‘You are not there to be a marshal,’ Muriel replied.

On the bridge, a pair of blue-armoured guards were emerging from the crowd. They were hidden behind the children and Heast could not make out their features, could not see if they were male or
female, but the morning’s sun glinted off their armour as they reached up for the children, to lift them down onto the safe path of the bridge.

‘Do you hear that?’ she asked.

The chanting had begun to fade, the words disappearing into a silence that was soon across Wila as well.

‘She is here,’ Heast said.

She grabbed the bridle of the first horse to reach her, its rider already raised in the saddle to slash down—

Ayae’s weight dropped heavily and, dragging down on the leather reins, she skidded under the horse. Unprepared, the beast rolled and the rider crashed down behind her, the following men
and women and horses colliding with the pair. Ayae twisted through the failing legs, her hands and feet finding brief purchase in each turn and tumble, using pieces of metal, skin and fur to push
herself through, to fall out into the empty space at the end of the tangle of flesh, her left foot twisting as she landed. The leg of her trousers tore open against the stone before she came to a
stop, before she could rise.

Ahead of her was the open gate of a large estate: the carriage that she had seen leaving Mesi with Faise and Zineer was within, its doors open.

Behind her—

‘
You
.’

The word was a hard spit of a curse behind her. With flames spluttering to life on her stolen blade, she turned.

She supposed that ten riders had charged her from the gate, though it was hard to be sure by the mess of horse and dark-blue armour that had collapsed into each other and was still pulling
itself apart. The man who stood before her was the rider of the first horse, a tall white-skinned man with short brown hair and a heavy gash down his forehead from where he had landed on the road.
He spat out ‘
You
’ again and again, as if by each utterance the word became an insult and an indictment, rather than the violent announcement of his rage.

His heavy sword crashed forward. Easily, Ayae stepped to her right and the soldier swung his blade back in a hard cut that she was forced to catch in a block. He followed, pushing against her,
using his weight and anger. She took another step back and flicked her gaze over his shoulder to where the others were rising with swords drawn.

The pressure on her lessened and the soldier drew back his sword in a heavy arc – but Ayae pushed forward, pushed past him, and thrust her sword down through the back of his calf to crack
leather and skin and shatter bone.

The others charged as the man screamed. She let them push her back, let the fallen man find protection in his comrades while her burning sword quickly blocked and parried their attacks. The ease
with which she fell backwards caught them by surprise. Whether they thought it a ploy, or hurt, or without confidence, it gave them heart and they spread out, thinking to herd her, to push her to
the compound.

She offered a faint smile to the one directly before her and then turned her back to them.

Her feet protested against the suddenness of the move, the strain on her ankles resonating up her legs as she sprinted to the compound.

She heard the solid twang of a crossbow from high on the stone, steel-capped walls after she saw the bolt. Her body angled to let it slide past, the trajectory of it slow, a fat length of steel
faster only than the dark-blue-armoured soldiers who followed it. For them, however, Ayae did pause. She met the soldiers, her joints burning as she thrust her sword, afraid that her forearms would
break on contact, the bones splitting to reveal a hollow, liquid centre; but her sword sank through steel chain and flesh and when she drew her swords back, the aches in her bones had disappeared.
She could no longer sense any part of her mortal flesh. She felt as if she had been turned into liquid, as if oil inside her had broken out and ignited beneath her skin. ‘When I want to
change the air, when I want to alter its currents,’ Aelyn had said, before the Million Ghosts, before she had seen her that last time, standing next to Zaifyr, ‘I reach for it, I take
hold of it.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘No, you are different. You are Ger’s child.’ Above her, the ash-white limbs of a tree twisted, thick and ancient and bare. ‘For you, it is internal. Since you have
walked into my office, there has been a fire inside you, a sense of warmth that emanates from inside you. It rises and falls as a heartbeat does, overwhelming all other elements.’

Her warm fingers had curled against her palm. ‘I cannot feel anything else.’

‘All four are there,’ Aelyn said. ‘Perhaps they are not as strong, perhaps the balance inside you is imperfect, but I do not think so. We should not hope that such is the case,
at any rate. Without balance, you will be consumed, eaten by the fire inside you, for it was the task for the Warden of the Elements to maintain harmony, not offer allegiances.’

The air around her began to burn now.

It was as if the oil beneath her skin had soaked into the sky and lodged in pockets, secreting itself in hideaways to wait for her fury, to await the fire inside her to flicker not just off her
sword, but her clothes, her hair, her skin. Flames popped and burst into the air, living creatures. From her, they found the invisible purchases, the hidden reserves. It was not oil. As she stepped
forward, her sword blocking, then thrusting, Ayae admitted that it was she who allowed the fire to leap into the sky. It was
she
who found purchase in the air for her fire to climb high
beneath the morning’s sun without any physical purchase. She could feel the air cupping flames, nursing it, feeding it to scale higher and higher, until the small flames bursting from her
skin had turned into a huge dome that covered, for a brief moment, the entire compound of Commander Bnid Gaerl.

It hung there, a perfect creation of such pure terror that in its wake, only silence remained.

Then it fell.

In tiny slivered droplets, in droplets that fattened and plumped, the fire began to rain from the air as her burning sword led her through it.

The burning rain seared the dirt of the compound, leaving behind pitted holes. It fell onto the wood of the wagon, splattering off the lacquered roof and onto the horses that reared up in fear.
It fell on the men and women in dark-blue armour, their screams at times cut short by her sword, at times left to announce their long, inarticulate cries of pain, their hair caught alight, their
skin burned, and their armour melted. Beneath it, the line of men and women who had sought to stop her from gaining entry could not remain, and their defence shattered as the soldiers fled and left
the door to the estate empty.

The door that would lead Ayae to Commander Bnid Gaerl.

She approached quietly, as if Bueralan had not heard her and her horse, as if the water that spilled from the broken gutters to the ground hid not just her approach, but her as
well.

It had been the tall grey who had warned him, the horse’s hooves stamping hard on the stone floor of the shelter where he was stabled: once, twice, then silent. In the echo, Bueralan had
risen from his place by the fire, his memories the smouldering wood, a fading set of scenes leaving him cold. For that alone, he was glad of the grey’s sound and for the approach of the
rider. At the door, he looked along the path down the overgrown gardens – bowing beneath the heavy rain – and watched the approach of the two, horse and owner. For a moment, he thought
it was Samuel Orlan. The cartographer must have grown tired of his office and set out into the evening to discuss gods and their touch, to once again push Bueralan on the topic, but as the rider
drew closer, the saboteur realized that the horse was too tall, too dark and, ultimately, the rider too female.

He remained in the shadows of the doorway as she led her horse beneath the roof where the grey stood, then made her way to the door.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said as she reached him, ‘you pay rent.’

‘I don’t even live here.’

She wore a dark-green cloak, soaked black by the rain, and she pushed it back to reveal a young, beautiful face.

A face he knew.

‘Could we continue to stand in the rain and talk?’ The Queen’s Voice held little tolerance in its dry sarcasm. ‘I do
so
prefer to admire warmth from a
distance.’

He stepped aside.

Like much of the court since his return, the Queen’s Voice had been created during his exile, another part of the First Queen’s reclamation of her body from her illness. Bueralan had
first heard of the appointment over a decade ago, sitting in on a bar conversation between two other men who discussed the First Queen’s decline, her children, and the woman who walked before
him now. She had been little more than a child then, just ten full seasons old, beautiful and beautifully voiced, a girl destined for the operas.

‘You’ll have to forgive me, I don’t usually do this.’ Before the fire, she slipped the wet cloak from her shoulders. Beneath it she wore dark-orange leather trousers and
matching riding boots, and a light shirt of red-and-yellow silk that left her slender arms free. ‘Late-night meetings are usually the work of the Eyes of the Queen.’

‘And for a moment I thought it was a social call.’

‘Still looking for a mother, I take it?’ She lay her cloak on the stones before facing him. ‘Will I be wined and dined in the ruins of your youth?’

‘Are the ruins of yours better?’ He approached the fire. ‘Do you have a name?’

‘Yes.’ Her hands were long-fingered, with a single gold ring on her right pinky from where a chain ran to her wrist. The low flames reflected off them as she leant towards the
fire’s warmth. ‘But to you, I am the Queen’s Voice.’

‘What does the Queen say, then?’

‘She would like you to accompany her to a party a fortnight from now.’

‘You rode out here for that?’

‘Your control is most admirable, Bueralan.’ The Queen’s Voice was unchanged in its dryness, but the chill beneath it was a disdain not disguised. ‘I did not do nearly as
well at controlling my face when the First Queen informed me I would make the journey out here tonight. She told me that her guards were instructed to wait at the front gate while I rode up to
deliver you your invitation. She even told me that the guards would expect me back within half an hour.’

In his youth, well-placed mothers had kept spiralled candle holders to watch the time that he was allowed to spend privately with their daughters. A stone was placed into the spirals, and it was
wound up and down beneath a candle, each spiral worth ten minutes of time. He wondered if the guards of the Voice had found a shelter beneath the rain for such a candle. ‘Whose party?’
he asked.

‘The Queen’s youngest daughter, Yoala.’

Bueralan grunted sourly.

‘I see you know of her,’ the Queen’s Voice said. ‘I do not envy either of us this night. You are also to know that the Queen has not been invited to this
party.’

‘Could I say no?’

She raised a fine eyebrow at that.

‘Yeah.’ He walked around the fire, picking up some of the branches he had brought in and began to feed them into the simmering flames. ‘How have Yoala’s ambitions been of
late?’

‘She still has two sisters.’

‘Because she still has a mother.’ The First Queen’s daughters had, in the opinion of much of Ooila, been born in the wrong order, the spirits of the Queen’s aunts and
mother swallowed on the wrong nights, the wombs of the right children given the wrong lineage. Safeen Re, the witch who had performed the Gifts, had denied it strongly, and there was some
suggestion, in the darkest part of the court, that the bottles had not been used at all. ‘Tell me, what is this party for?’