Leviathan's Blood (43 page)

‘We made the tower with our hands,’ Jae’le said now. ‘We made the bricks from poisoned water and tainted dirt in the Broken Mountains. We shaped them as best we could,
but it was Aelyn and Tinh Tu and I who laid them, not Eidan. He held you while we built. But even had his hands been free, he could not have built a door strong enough to hold you. He would not
have built a wall that you could not pull apart. No, brother, we could never leave you in an ordinary tower. It had to live and breathe, it had to be able to combat both you and the
dead.’

‘You went back to give it life, didn’t you?’ Eidan said. He crossed the stones that separated the three of them, Anguish perched on his shoulder. ‘That is why I did not
feel it at the time.’

Jae’le nodded once.

‘You took a great risk.’ Aelyn left her Keepers a handful of paces behind as she drew next to them. ‘He could have awoken.’

‘He could have,’ Jae’le agreed.

‘How do you give a tower life?’ Ayae said from beside Zaifyr. ‘I was told that only a god can create life.’

‘There is life in the soil and in the water,’ Jae’le said. ‘It had only to be woven together and bound again, piece by piece.’

‘How long did that take?’

‘A decade.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe a year more.’

‘How is it that no one noticed?’

Zaifyr felt a sudden deep and profound sense of shame before his brother spoke. ‘We did not look,’ he said.

‘Yes, though I hid myself as well,’ Jae’le said. ‘I am not the beacon our sister is in the land she made. Nor am I like others.’ His free arm waved across the
Keepers and the Enclave. ‘I do not reek of the cold, I do not feel like steel, I do not have the earth in my voice. When my power awoke in me, the gods walked the earth still, and their
servants were everywhere. I learned to hide who I was long before I celebrated it. When I gave up a portion of my power, I gave up little anyone would notice.’

‘But someone did,’ Aelyn said, the bitterness unhidden in her voice.

‘Aelyn,’ Zaifyr began.

‘
No
,’ she said, and in the word he heard a finality, an end that she had been driven to. ‘Look what you have done, Qian. Look what both of you have done. If you had
both listened to me and not pushed this trial, we would have more time to deal with this child god.’

‘Where is my sister?’ Jae’le said. ‘She would not be this weak figure before me. She would be cruel and hard. She would advocate that we must strike before the child is
named.’

‘Her name does not matter. We have known about the child for a long time, brother. We have had our plans for many years.’ A frustrated sigh escaped her. ‘Do you think I do not
feel those teeth on me? She wishes to devour us to rebuild herself. It could not be tolerated – but it could not be fought as you and Qian once fought, brother. You could not grab this
creature by the neck and wring it like a poor animal. She is much more than that. That is why we sent Fo and Bau to Mireea. They were to watch. They were to learn.’

‘Mireea was a test.’ Kaqua’s usually calm and measured voice mirrored the bitterness in Aelyn’s. ‘Lady Wagan is a capable ruler of the Spine, and Aned Heast’s
reputation precedes him. We had an agreement that no force from Leera would come to Yeflam, an agreement that meant Yeflam would not contest the body of Ger once Mireea fell. But it was more than
that. It was a chance for us to study. For us to learn of the child’s general, to learn of her soldiers, her priests, and her. Let us not be hypocritical here, Qian. You and your brothers and
sisters conquered most of the world. I am one of the few people here who remember enough of it to know the blood that was spilt. Mireea was a small price to pay to learn what we needed.’

‘But you couldn’t pay it,’ Ayae said.

‘No, we could not,’ Aelyn said. ‘None of us knew that Qian would be there. If we had, we would not have sent Fo.’

‘You’ll pay a different price now,’ she said, her voice hard. ‘How does it feel?’

Aelyn ignored her, deciding, instead, to turn, to join Kaqua and the Keepers. With them, she began to walk towards the Enclave as a united force.

Zaifyr wanted to tell her that she was not being asked to sacrifice Yeflam. He wanted to tell her that she was being given a chance to defend her home, to defend the people in it, but he did not
raise his voice. Instead, he watched them leave.
If you could only see the dead,
he thought.
If only you could see their suffering and live with it for a thousand years. You would know
that to stop the child would be the greatest thing you could do, and you would pay any price for it.
But none of them could see the dead as he did. None of them could see the world that Zaifyr
did.

Ayae’s office in the Enclave was small and bare. When she pushed open the door to allow Zaifyr, Jae’le and Eidan to enter, the contents were revealed in three
shadows. A table and chair sat on the right, the two pieces barely distinguishable from each other, while a quarter-filled bookshelf stood to the left. Between the two was a small window. What
little pale light that was in the room came from it and the darkening night sky outside. She had a light beside the door, a copper lantern, but after she had bent to pick it up, she realized that
she could not light it.

‘Sorry,’ she said, putting it back down. ‘I never kept matches.’

‘It’s okay,’ Zaifyr said. ‘We won’t be here long.’

They left the door open and the light from the hall slanted in. Ayae moved to the window, afraid to take the chair or table, sure that they would crack beneath her weight, much as the stone in
Yeflam had. She stood at the window because it put all three brothers in her field of vision and allowed her to retain a sense of distance. Zaifyr was the closest to her, sitting on the edge of the
table. He would turn occasionally in the conversation that followed and attempt to draw her into what was being said. Jae’le had taken the chair and placed it near the door. He had thrown his
cloak of green feathers over the back and its colour was a stark splash in the room. He kept glancing at her as they spoke, but half his face was shadowed and unreadable. Only Eidan, who stood
beside the open door, paid her no attention – his focus was on his two brothers and the dark figure on his shoulder, much like a bird.

It was Eidan who spoke the most of the three. His voice was deep, and each word felt as if he had chosen it carefully. ‘I am glad you heeded my advice,’ he said to Zaifyr. ‘I
found
Wayfair
many years ago when I built Yeflam. I almost dragged its wreckage from the depths on more than one occasion, but a part of me held back. I have wondered about that, of late
– wondered since a man searched for me in Ranan and told me Lor Jix’s name. He told me that he was god-touched, but I felt nothing of him.’

‘You do not,’ Jae’le said. ‘The god-touched are not like us.’

‘You have met them before?’

‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘when the War of the Gods raged around me. One came to me in the final years of the war because he had heard stories of my power and he thought I
might be a return of his master. I was not, but what I learned about the gods, I learned from him. He and his kin were who defined the gods to mortals. It was he who told me that they were but
strands of fate given form. He believed that the gods’ war was an act of rebellion against other strands. He said that in fighting it, they had destroyed any notion of truth. I gave him
little thought after he left me, for he was mad, truly mad. That was what the War of the Gods had done to him. But the words he spoke to me were the same as the words of Lor Jix.’

‘The man I spoke with was mad as well,’ Eidan said. ‘Perhaps they were the same man? The one I met was old and scrawny and white.’

‘No, the one I knew was different,’ Jae’le said. ‘But it could be that they are all simply mad. I would not struggle to believe that.’

Against the wall, Ayae’s hand curled into a fist, but it was Eidan who spoke again. ‘It would be easy to become mad in the shadow of a god. In the shadow of this child, many things
that I had prided myself on have been betrayed.’ The dark shadow slid down his arm, and onto the back of Jae’le’s chair. ‘I had my reasons, but I have questioned them.
Often.’

‘Perhaps,’ Zaifyr said quietly, ‘fate and the gods are in collusion.’

‘Or conflict,’ Jae’le said.

‘If we believe Lor Jix, that is,’ Ayae finished. ‘No offence, Eidan.’

‘I have thought it myself,’ he admitted. ‘On the Mountains of Ger she ordered the land to be ripped apart and torn up, to limit travel across it. It gave me pause to think
about what might befall here, for the child can see a fate. It is a single strand, but it appears to be her own, though she has no control over it yet, and cannot see the others that surround it. I
have heard her talk about the fate she sees often, and I believe that it is very incomplete. She can see an event two years into the future, then another in ten. But she cannot see consistently a
whole year, or a month. She is frustrated by it, but she has used it well. That sight allowed her to find me five years ago. I had been working on the southern edge of Leera, rebuilding a series of
smuggler hideouts that had sunk into a bog. Beautiful buildings: they had been made with fired stones that were lined with holes for their riches. The traps still functioned, and one almost took my
hand off, a fact that she related to me in our first meeting.’

‘Has she seen what will happen here?’ Jae’le asked.

‘I do not think so,’ he said. ‘She is not complete. Her lack of a name is but an easy part for us to identify, but there are others. She has relied upon mortals to do her work
for her, men and women she called her beloved. Mother Estalia was one. General Waalstan is another. Both are her voices to the Faithful, and she has long told the General about his death; but the
old woman’s was not one she foresaw. The child cried out when she died – it was a scream that tore through all of Ranan. When I found her in the cathedral she was a statue in the middle
of the floor. She had projected herself to Mireea, in search for the soul of the woman she had named Mother. That was when you encountered her, Qian. She had not expected that – not in the
realm of the dead. It frightened her and in her fear, she made Anguish.’

‘Her fear?’ Zaifyr turned to the creature who stood on the green feathers, rubbing his feet. ‘I did not hear that.’

The creature’s blind face turned up to him. ‘I was a deceit from the start.’

Ayae frowned. She began to speak, but Eidan interrupted her. ‘He does not mean it how it sounds, I assure you,’ he said. ‘He does not want to harm us.’

‘Unless he opens his eyes,’ Zaifyr said.

‘But they’re closed.’

‘Is she still here in Yeflam?’

‘In a way, I suspect.’ Anguish dropped from the cloak, slipping into the shadow of the room. ‘But you should be more concerned if she sees herself here.’

‘He is right,’ Eidan said bluntly. ‘On the edge of the bog where I met her, she told me that I would betray her before a century had passed. I could feel her power – the
way we all feel it, I believe – and I remember that I held a long steel pipe that I had pulled from the water.’ He held out his large hands to show the girth, but in the dark, Ayae
could only see the edges of his knuckles, huge and blunt. ‘I have often thought back to that moment, for she was unsure how I would react. I could have thrust the pipe through that small form
she wore. She was afraid of me, then, but that fear of me never returned after I followed her into Ranan.’

‘We will have to find her,’ Zaifyr said.

‘That is why the Enclave is meeting,’ Eidan answered.

‘They are not a unified whole,’ Jae’le said. ‘They tear at each other, now. They may not stand united against her.’

‘They cannot allow the child to live,’ Zaifyr said.

Though she remained silent, Ayae agreed. Aelyn did not have much choice, as far as she could tell. She had made the agreement to sacrifice Mireea – the knowledge of which sat hard and
heavy in Ayae’s stomach and had done so as she walked through the Enclave halls – but to maintain the agreement would be to seed a deep ideological threat in Yeflam that she would never
fully remove. To accept the Leeran god meant that the Keepers acknowledged that they were not, and would not be, gods themselves.

Jae’le rose from the chair, his cloak a green ribbon that he slung over his arm. ‘We should head up there,’ he said. ‘She may agree with us, but we should take care to
support her.’

‘Yeah,’ Zaifyr said. ‘I’ll be along in a moment.’

The other man nodded and at the door was joined by Eidan. A moment later, the small, dark figure of Anguish appeared, and in quick, strange movements, climbed up the latter’s leg and to
his shoulder.

Once the footsteps of the two had faded, Zaifyr turned to Ayae and met her gaze. ‘You’re quiet,’ he said.

‘I am,’ she said.

‘You all right?’

‘Not really.’

Ayae laid her heavy hand on his, but could not feel his skin. ‘I can’t feel anything,’ she said. ‘What if it doesn’t stop?’

Gently, Zaifyr tapped the back of her hand. ‘You just have to take control of it,’ he said, and turned his hand around to hold hers. ‘It’s discipline,
remember?’

‘I don’t – I lost that a while back, I think.’

She wished that she could feel his hand tighten around her own, but she could only see the pull of the muscles. ‘It happens to us all,’ he said. ‘You’ll get it
back.’

‘I don’t know that I can do this war,’ Ayae said, after a moment. ‘Not today. Not this week. I can’t fight a god this week, Zaifyr.’

‘Maybe in a month?’

‘A month is fine.’

In the faint light, she saw him smile. ‘A month and it’ll be over.’

Ayae did not believe that. It could not be true, though she saw in Zaifyr’s gaze a confidence that it would be, and she wanted to reach out, to warn him not to take that belief to the
Enclave, but she did not know how. She still did not know after his hand left her own, after he had left the room, and any chance she had to know was ruined when a shadow fell across the open
door.

‘Well, it is just as I thought: you are not coming to the meeting.’ Eira spoke quietly from the doorway, her voice almost a purr of pleasure. ‘A wise choice, now that everyone
knows that you went to kill Fo and Bau. You should know that no dark hole will save you.’