Leviathan's Blood (62 page)

‘Betrayal of your peers, but not your country.’ From behind her, Lian Alahn emerged from the narrow alley next to the brothel. He was covered in dust and cobwebs, having taken a
passageway that Sinae told Ayae later was rarely used, even by politicians who wanted to keep their reputations unsullied. Sinae followed Alahn and his guard, standing on one side of Lady Wagan,
with the blonde woman whom Ayae believed was Sinae’s own guard, on her right. Alahn scowled. ‘I could almost applaud you,’ he added, ‘if I did not believe that you knew full
well of the attempt on my life.’

‘Spare me your indignation, Mister Alahn.’ The Soldier turned and indicated for one of his soldiers to come forward. In his hand, he held a cloth sack, its end stained darkly even in
the night. ‘You are a man of opportunism and I have never had time for such men. However, what is taking place on Yeflam now goes far beyond you and the petty politics you peddle. If you
doubt me, you need only ask a friend of mine for his opinion on the matter.’

The red-bearded head of Fiel, the Feral, rolled out of the sack.

A moment later, the first of three quakes shook Yeflam. The head shifted and rolled past Alahn. The Traders’ Union official ignored it as he tried to keep his balance, only to fall when
the second quake moved the ground. Finally, the head came to rest at the feet of Lady Wagan.

She picked it up by its red hair a moment before the third and strongest quake shook Yeflam. Without so much as a false step, the Lady of the Ghosts held the head and walked past Alahn and Ayae.
‘You do as I say,’ she said to Xrie, ‘and we will save as many people as we can. After that, we will march on Se’Saera and take our retribution for all that she has
done.’

Xrie did not reply immediately and Ayae, her hand dropping to her sword, believed that he would deny her.

‘Agreed,’ he said in his damaged voice.

Ignoring Lian Alahn’s loud protests, Lady Wagan led the Soldier into Sin’s Hand. In the wreckage of the bar, she had a map of the artificial country laid out and began to plan the
evacuation. Ayae lit the candles and lamps in the room, and once she had finished, she saw that Alahn had entered. He was not lending his voice to the plans and did not until Ayae stood in the
doorway, preparing to leave. Now the Yeflam people had begun to flood the dark streets: their cries for help filtered through the conversation and planning of movements. In the distance, Ayae could
hear shouts and screams – worse, she heard the sound of stone breaking, as if the whole of Yeflam was groaning in pain. Her gaze turned in the direction of Nale, and she thought of
Zaifyr.

The night had been bright when she first stepped out of the door in pursuit of Eira, but the light had come from the bodies of the dead. She had seen that light in Mireea after Fo and Bau died
and she could still remember the chill when one brushed against her. If she closed her eyes on the step of Sin’s Hand, she could picture the ghosts of Mireea along the cobbled roads. She
could see the haunted look that they gave her as they passed, a look that mixed envy with desire. The darkness that she stared at now was far more troubling. In it, she saw only tragedy, and her
mind conjured images of Zaifyr lying dead beside Jae’le and Eidan.

‘You don’t have to go,’ Caeli said, her voice still soft. ‘He would not expect it.’

‘But he would do it for me,’ she replied.

The guard grunted, but she had seen the same bright sky Ayae had. ‘Try to stay safe,’ Caeli said to her. ‘I don’t want to have to come looking for you.’

‘After you were released from your prison, I asked your sister why she accepted your freedom.’ The Pauper spoke casually from the broken piece of stone he sat upon,
his faded robes drawn about him in a mash of sodden colour. ‘You had destroyed her home just as you had destroyed mine, after all. Do you know what she said?’

Zaifyr rose slowly to his feet. He ached: his skin felt as if it had been scalded, and the effort of swimming up had left his muscles burning. His clothes were heavy with water that irritated
his skin, but they had been torn as well. The ancient dead had done that, and it had ripped handfuls of charms off him as it did. No doubt they drifted through the ocean, where they would come to
rest on the floor of Leviathan’s Blood. But what he had lost was replaceable.

As a light rain began to fall, he gazed at the ruins around him and admitted that what he saw might not be so easily replaced either.

Nale was split in half.

The northern half of it had fallen into the black ocean. Eidan’s punch through the ground had broken the huge pillar that held it. It had also spread destruction to the cities that
surrounded Nale. The bridges had gone first, it appeared. Even in the night, Zaifyr could see how a tremendous weight had been put on them, as they struggled to hold Nale aloft. When the bridges
had given way, the force by which they were wrenched into Leviathan’s Blood, the strength that tore them out of the stone fittings, was so powerful that the pillars that held up the other
cities had cracked. He could see that the edges of Fiys and Maala had already begun to sag, and he could hear the grating of stone, as if it were the groan of the living, as it struggled to remain
upright. Voices – in shouts and screams – filled the night to accompany it. They joined the cries that came from the churning waves of Leviathan’s Blood, from the people who clung
to pieces of wreckage and who were terrified by the water that they were in.

‘She said,’ Kaqua continued, after it became clear that Zaifyr would not reply, ‘that she did not resent a dog its nature.’

Behind the Keeper, the Enclave slumped, half its walls broken to reveal furniture like the innards of a giant, while its end pointed towards the Mountains of Ger.

‘You’re not listening,’ the other man said.

‘You haven’t said anything worthwhile yet.’

‘You have never listened to me, Qian.’

He could not see Jae’le, Eidan, or even Aelyn. ‘Where are the others?’ he asked.

‘You have never had time for a man like me. Your family is just the same. I could not speak to the dead or change the very nature of life. I could not grab the sky or the earth in my
hands.’

The rain began to fall harder. On the remains of Nale, on the wreckage that lay in the black water, Zaifyr saw the Keepers emerge. They were dull impressions, but they grew stronger as they
pulled themselves from the water. The strongest sensations he had were of damp forests and a person who did not register as one, but as many.

Zaifyr finally turned to the Pauper. ‘You forgot Tinh Tu,’ he said.

‘No, I did not forget her.’ Now that Kaqua had his attention, he rose from his seated position. ‘She would have understood what was happening here long before now. She would
have felt my pushes. She would have seen my influence.’

‘The Enclave is not one person,’ he said, feeling as if a final piece had slotted into place for him. He saw now how Kaqua had hidden behind that line, how he had used it to shield
himself as he manoeuvred the Keepers to where he wanted. Including, perhaps, his sister. ‘That makes it easier, doesn’t it?’

‘It does, yes. It makes it easier to nudge, to suggest and to prompt. You must understand: I do not tell people to do anything, I do not make them act against their nature. That is what
Tinh Tu does. Her voice is her power. That is why she stitches her lips together. That is why she does not speak. But I am not like that. I must see the problem first. I must be able to work with
it. Then it is true: the more people you have, the more chance you have to see a problem. The more voices you have to speak it, the more debate you have. It is like a web you spin. After a while,
everyone sees how the problem is theirs. How it is our shared responsibility. Of course, not everyone will be like that. Take you, for example, Qian. You understand the pain the dead experience,
but you do not see it for the living. You do not see the struggle mortals have in this world. You do not see that this is as important as their death, as well.’

‘I see a lot of people suffering right now. You don’t seem too concerned that there are people drowning. That your navy appears to have been destroyed.’

‘It breaks my heart.’ Behind Kaqua, more Keepers began to appear. They came to the edge of Nale, to where the buildings fell into the ocean, where the broken stone of the city lay
upon other pieces of stone. ‘We worked so hard to not bring it to this point. We had tried to convince Se’Saera that the embarrassment she endured in the trial was not widespread across
Yeflam. But she would hear nothing of it. She demanded that the words die here.’

‘And you agreed?’

‘Look at this world, Qian. Look at these broken suns and poisoned oceans. Madness, war, plague – this is the end of times. One day soon the suns will extinguish and we will die in
the darkness. If a nation must be sacrificed for that to be stopped, then that is a fair trade.’ He sighed. ‘I wish it were not true, but it is.’

Delicately, Zaifyr began to reach out with his power. He could feel the dead, but their cold, their whispered desires, were no worse than the words of the man before him. ‘I find it hard
to believe that my sister agreed with you,’ he said.

‘I have had over a thousand years to weave my web around Aelyn.’ The Pauper smiled. ‘But to be honest, it was you who finally pushed her into supporting Se’Saera. It was
you who convinced her that the responsibility of the world was one that we could not shoulder. After Asila, she took that upon herself. She saw how fragile this world was. She and Eidan both saw
that. But it was only once you were here, once you ignored all her power, that she realized she could not keep the burden she had taken upon herself.’

The haunts appeared as, from the water behind him, Zaifyr felt his sister rise from Leviathan’s Blood. The two haunts he had animated, a young man and woman who had fallen and drowned in
the splitting of Nale, streamed into the hard, white-lit ghosts to kill Kaqua . . . but before they could, he felt himself lifted by a swirl of wind, felt hands grab him, and he was dragged into
the surging storm that he knew, even before he saw his sister, came from deep within Aelyn.

Ayae made her way with difficulty through the crowded streets of Ghaam. Each step away from Sin’s Hand took her further beyond the order that the Yeflam Guard had
established. Each step took her closer to a growing wind, to a cold rain, and to where the sky had begun to swirl above Nale in an ugly, bruised coloration. Yet, she made progress towards it,
pushing her way through streets that were filling with hastily loaded wagons, occasionally pushed by men and women, but mostly pulled by oxen and horses. Other men and women ran past her, carrying
children and possessions on their backs or in their hands. She had thought that she would see carriages ferrying people, but she had already passed one of the long ones, overturned, its horses
stolen. She did not linger to learn what had happened, but continued to push further into the city. Around her, she heard snatches of conversation. ‘The Leerans?’ said one man; another
spoke in a near hysterical voice, ‘The pillar in Nale is broken, we’re all—’ ‘We’re fine, we’re fine,’ a woman cooed to her children, running away
from him. ‘—it is the Keepers, they have betrayed—’ said an elderly man, his cane thrust out before him. ‘For the priests—’ ‘—the Keepers would
not—’ one couple argued darkly. ‘There was a fire—’ ‘—at the start, I saw—’ ‘Ran down an alley—’ A man, a woman, and a woman
again, caught Ayae’s attention, and she slowed to a walk to hear their words. ‘She was alive. I could hear her cry, I could.’

Despite herself, Ayae stopped. ‘Where exactly is she?’

The woman she had spoken to was perhaps a year or two older than her, but narrow and tall, her dark hair slick with rain. ‘Two blocks south,’ she said, finally. ‘Near the road
that leads to the docks. You will see two houses with red doors and a third with orange. The alley there. But I do not think you should bother. She is likely dead already.’

Ayae thanked her and began to run along the stone road. Ahead, the bruised sky darkened further, and she heard the violent rushing of the wind rise above the crash of the ocean. To her horror,
she thought that the wind had begun to take on a shape, a definite human shape. It loomed above Nale, undefined in its face and in its body, but the shape was unmissable. She was also sure that
there was a buzzing sound, as if hundreds of voices were speaking softly, but she could not make out a single word. Still, it was enough that Ayae told herself that she ought to follow part of the
woman’s advice, that she should not bother looking for the woman who had been on fire and continue onwards to Zaifyr. But when the lane that led to the docks appeared, she took it, and soon
found the houses that the woman had mentioned.

In the middle of the alley she found Eira.

The Cold Witch lay against a fence, her body soaked by the rain and curled against the wooden pales. At first glance, Ayae thought she was dead, but she could feel the sensation of cold coming
from the body.

With her foot, she nudged the Keeper onto her back, and blanched. Eira’s skin was a mess, a heavy blackened melt that the wet had gone some way to solidifying. Her hair had been burnt
away, and she had torn her armour off as she ran, leaving little to cover the rest of her body. There was hardly anything that Ayae could identify as human, but the hatred that broke apart the
loose flesh of Eira’s face when she bared her teeth at the sight of Ayae left her in no doubt that the Keeper was still very much alive.

‘You’ll heal from this,’ she said quietly.

Eira made a guttural noise in reply, unable to speak.

‘You probably think I’m going to leave you because of that,’ she continued. ‘You think I’m going to leave you be because I feel pity.’ Her hand fell to the
hilt of her sword. ‘But Aelyn was right about one thing: you cannot put aside the burden of your actions.’

The Keeper’s burnt fingers began to push at the ground, began to try desperately to put distance between her and Ayae.

Ayae’s foot settled on Eira’s leg and she felt the flesh give way as she pushed down. A small whimper escaped the woman. Ayae could see in her eyes a terrible panic and fear that
replaced the hatred. Her foot did not rise, however. Once, she might have responded, but it would have been because she did not know that Eira would follow her for years, that she would do so to
enact a revenge that would be targeted at the people in her life as well as her. She knew now that Eira would pursue her. Bnid Gaerl had taught her the folly of believing otherwise.