Leviathan's Blood (60 page)

But to do so would be to let Caeli die, she knew. To deny her power, to deny both the heat in her and the hardness that could encase her, would be just as bad as letting it sweep through her
without control. To give into her fear of how she had killed Faise was to kill Caeli. She could not allow that. Not again. She would not allow the power in her to kill because she did not have the
discipline to control it. Before Ayae, the edges of Eira’s hair began to catch alight, and her cloak began to burn suddenly and violently. Eira dropped her sword, but the fire found life
easily in the alcohol-soaked clothing of the Cold Witch and soon the woman was screaming as the flames covered her entire body, as they remained confined to her, even after her cloak fell to the
ground.

Ayae watched as Eira ran towards the front doors of Sin’s Hand and flung them open to reveal the night. The night’s darkness was not thrown back by the flames that clung to the
Keeper, but by a sky that had been lost beneath the broken white light of the dead.

‘What you need,’ Aela Ren said, ‘what you have always needed, Bueralan, is a clear motivation.’

Slowly, the saboteur pushed himself off the ground. Halfway up, he stumbled and fell to his knees, but his good hand circled around the hilt of the Innocent’s sword, and he used that to
pull himself upright. His head swam, and he could barely see the scarred man ahead of him: gummed with blood and swelling shut with pain, his left eye could not focus properly, and the pain had
begun to extend to his right eye. He took a deep breath to steady himself and it hurt enough that he was sure he had broken ribs. But the worst of his pain was in his right arm and he cradled it
tight against his chest, unsure if the white he saw was his tattoos or his bone. Yet he took a step, and as he did, his left hand dragged Ren’s sword from the dirt, and he began to struggle
after him, aware that the men and women who had watched him and Ren fight had come closer and formed a dark, faceless circle around them.

Bueralan slowly closed the gap between himself and the Innocent, who stood before the dark shadow of the stables. ‘Let her go,’ he said in a cracked voice when he was finally in
reach of the scarred man. ‘Let them both go.’

‘I could not care less about Samuel Orlan. If I was confident that the next would be a better man, I might kill him myself, but history has proved that they are rarely anything but an
annoyance. But the Queen’s Voice –
but Taela.
She is simply mortal.’ He drove the young woman to the ground in front of Bueralan, his hand wrapped tightly around the hair
at the base of her skull. The right side of her face was bloodied, and a long cut ran into her hairline, but the fear in her eyes, he saw, was not for herself. ‘Isn’t that right,
Taela?’

The saboteur raised the sword, even as the Queen’s Voice mouthed
no.
‘I’ll say it again,’ he said. ‘Let her go. Let them both go.’

‘I do not fear my own sword.’

Slowly, Bueralan turned the blade around and pressed it against his stomach. ‘Nothing gets said if I die, remember.’

A thin smile cut a new scar on Ren’s face. ‘Do you honestly think you’ll die?’ He tightened his grip on Taela’s hair, causing her back to arch in pain. ‘Look
at yourself, Bueralan. If you were but a mortal man, you would be dead, but you are not. You are god-touched and you cannot die. Not until a god allows you to.’

‘I die like everyone else,’ he snarled.

‘No,
she
dies like everyone else.’

A strong hand took the sword from him, a hand belonging to one of the shadows around him. He saw a woman’s white face and in her dark eyes he saw a sadness that his weak hand made no
attempt to hold tightly onto the hilt.

‘Bueralan.’

His hand curled into a fist.

‘You know her name,’ Aela Ren continued. ‘I will hear it. We will all hear it. If you do not say it, only an innocent will die.’

It was the repeat of the word innocent that caused a broken laugh to escape him. His leg gave way and he slumped to the ground, his laugh turning bitter.
Only when what is at stake is
innocence
. Bueralan heard the child’s voice again and met Taela’s gaze. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, though he knew, even as he said it, that he had nothing to
apologize for. But he could think of no other way to respond to the sympathy he saw in her eyes. ‘I just don’t know any name.’

‘She will not die easily.’ A dagger appeared in the Innocent’s hand and he pressed it hard against her neck, breaking the skin, and letting a line of blood appear. ‘I
will take parts of her with this dagger. I will take her mind and her beauty with her limbs. I will take all that is her before I allow the eternal suffering that is death to reach her,
Bueralan.’ As he talked, the saboteur’s blurred gaze remained on Taela. He could see her determination and her strength, both of which she would use against Ren. He saw around her neck
the strap of leather that he had tied around the pouch that held Zean’s soul, the pouch that came to rest down in the centre of her chest, not over the heart, not directly, but close. As Aela
Ren spoke his litany of horrors that he would bring on the woman before him, he wanted to tell her to throw the stone away, to take it from around her neck; he wanted to tell her about the man who
had been his blood brother, the man who had followed him into exile, who had stood beside him through so much, and who he had ultimately left to die alone.

Slowly, his gaze left Taela and found the Innocent. ‘I keep telling you, she doesn’t have a name,’ he said. ‘She’s nothing but a piece of evil, a thing to dominate
us, she . . . she . . .’

Ren threw Taela to one side and grabbed Bueralan’s blood-soaked shirt. ‘What is her name?’ he demanded.

‘You’re a fool,’ Bueralan said roughly. ‘She won’t give you what you want.’

‘Her name?’ His voice roared with his need and, as the words washed over him, the saboteur felt himself dwarfed by the magnitude of it, the lifetime of pain. ‘
Tell me her
name!
’

‘Se’Saera,’ he whispered, once.

It was spoken without words, pushed into his mind like a brand, burnt upon the consciousness, and he heard nothing and thought nothing but the name Se’Saera.

It was accompanied by a wave of pure force that rushed over Zaifyr. He felt himself lifted by it, and as he rose into the air, he felt his connection with the dead stretch thin. It was as if he
was suddenly limited to them by a tether that kept him within their reach and felt it go taut. He felt his body strain. His joints began to ache and he thought that he would snap, that he would be
severed . . . only for the connection he had to the dead to do exactly that. He felt their need leave him for the first time in ten thousand years, felt an emptiness inside him grow. He felt a
singular bliss that he had not felt since he had been but a young man sleeping beneath the furs in his parents’ tent. He would tie the charms of protection to the covers before he went to
sleep. As he floated, he thought of those that he still wore, one for each god who would die. Who was dead. He longed to reach out to touch the copper and silver, to assure himself that the bliss
he had begun to feel was real, to know that it was not his imagination or a dream, but as he thought that, as he felt his hands move, the feeling of emptiness began to dissolve, and he heard Lor
Jix’s bellow, his cry of sheer outrage—

And then Zaifyr slammed into the stone ground.

‘Se’Saera,’ he murmured.
A name.

Her name.

Hands shook him, dragged him along the stone, and he heard his name called. But it was not until he heard a sword being drawn that his vision began to return, that the world returned to him in a
startling, painful rush.

Jae’le stood above him. He held his sword in his right hand, but it was what Zaifyr could not see that disturbed him. All his senses were open, all his power, but he could not see the dead
that he had given form too, could not see those who had swarmed over the child, or those who did not. He could not see the crew of
Wayfair
and he could not see the darkness that had spread
out in the sky. He could not see Lor Jix and he could not see Se’Saera. Where but moments before the ancient dead had stood with his colourless hands around Se’Saera’s beautiful
neck, there was nothing, not even marks against the stone ground to suggest that she or the ancient dead had stood there.

The three creatures that had stood with Se’Saera remained, however. It was their bloody forms that had begun to circle around him and Eidan that had prompted Jae’le to draw his
sword.

Slowly, painfully, Zaifyr began to push himself to his feet. As he did, a growing awareness of the dead around him began to filter back, as if they were lamps relit after being blown out. As
their strength increased, he began gradually to filter his awareness of them from his sight. ‘Why do they not attack?’ he asked, indicating the three creatures.

‘Our sister approaches,’ Jae’le said quietly. ‘I fear the suggestion of betrayal we heard from the child is no longer that.’

It was not until Aelyn and the Keepers were lit by the moon’s light that Zaifyr began to sense them by their power. The sadness he had felt earlier returned with it, only now it had a
depthless quality to it, and it threatened to combine with the bitterness he felt over Se’Saera’s escape. He knew that the god had been taken to whoever had said her name and that a
part of her had been solidified because of it. Zaifyr could not explain how he knew the latter, but he had the strong sense of a part of his world being made permanent, and the sensation left him
with the urge to sink back to the ground in frustration.

Instead, he greeted his sister.

‘It was inevitable from the day you arrived in Yeflam,’ Aelyn said, ignoring his greeting. She no longer wore her blue, but was dressed instead in a mixture of leather and chain, and
a cloak he had not seen her wear since she had begun to build Maewe. As in the wars they had waged before then, Aelyn did not wear a sword. ‘I asked you not to begin this. I pleaded with you
from the moment you walked into Yeflam not to destroy all that I had worked for.’

‘Are we to have a conversation, then?’ Jae’le asked evenly. ‘One in which your betrayal is given legitimacy?’

‘Does Eidan still live?’ A strained thread entered her voice. ‘Tell me that there is that still, at least.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Zaifyr saw his brother shift beneath the cloak of feathers, a bloodied hand emerging. ‘He lives,’ he said.

‘Allow me to take him.’ Aelyn took a step forward. ‘He can be healed here.’

‘And after?’ He looked at Jae’le. ‘What do you think will happen after?’

‘The rest of her betrayal,’ he replied.

‘
My betrayal?
Only you two could believe that.’ While she spoke, the Keepers began to spread out. The order, Zaifyr saw, was given by Kaqua, who stood just behind Aelyn.
Yet, as they began to form a ring around him and his brothers, he noticed that not all the Keepers were present. He was not familiar enough with all to name those who were missing, but he thought
that it was three in number. ‘Neither of you have looked upon the world in the last hundred years,’ Aelyn said. ‘You have been hidden for so long that you cannot see that the
world no longer needs men like you. It no longer needs destroyers or conquerors. It needs healers. That is what the people want. That is our responsibility, now. The pair of you cannot see that
because you create nations without compromise. You make them by razing the ground beneath any who do not agree with you. I know, because I have seen it. Just as Eidan and Tinh Tu have seen it. It
is why neither of you could make a country like Yeflam. Why you could never champion education, peace or prosperity as all three of us have. You could never have built what we have and you could
never have governed it.’

‘I do not see Tinh Tu here.’ Jae’le lifted his sword as he had done earlier. ‘And our brother is at our feet dying.’

‘It was not meant to be this way.’

‘That is the child’s fault. She is no more than you describe us to be. She is merely an echo of what began long ago.’

‘We are all echoes, brother. Will you give me Eidan?’

Before either Zaifyr or Jae’le could reply, the ground shook. It began beneath Zaifyr’s feet and rolled out through the Keepers and the child’s creatures, forcing some of the
former to their knees. But it was the loud crack nearest to him that caught Zaifyr’s attention, and he turned in time to see Eidan’s hand rise a second time before it fell again.

In the aftershock, the pillar that held Nale aloft began to split.

Bueralan was not aware of everything that followed. He had spoken her name and, in the aftermath, he felt as if it had been torn from him. He felt the absence of it, though he
had not known it was there, and he wondered how it was that he had not recognized it. He had no answers and, above him, the sky began to break apart. It no longer resembled broken glass, but was
instead made from smoked air and burnt soil, and for a moment, he thought that a darkness had formed, that it had ruptured the sky and come to loom over him. He feared that he was going to be
lifted up, and for a moment, he felt himself rising . . . but soon he realized that what lifted him were hands, a woman’s hands, and that Taela had pulled him into her lap. She came into his
vision, but his blood-blurred eye had trouble focusing on her. Against the dark, dark sky, he saw her in two forms, her bruised and cut face overlaid with that of a woman of wealth, a woman older
than she was now but one of an undeniable grace. He could not escape the impression that these two versions were trying to combine, to return to a single vision of the future, but the longer he
looked at her, the further the two seemed to drift apart. She spoke, at first to him, though the words were dim, and then over her shoulder. Bueralan could no longer see the shadowed shapes of the
god-touched men and women who stood beside Aela Ren. As Taela began to speak again, he reached for her with his good hand, to tell her to flee, but she merely took his hand and held it, as one
might someone who was dying, and she spoke again. This time, he heard Samuel Orlan reply. His voice sounded as if it came from a great distance, and it had in it an undeniable sadness.