The Eternal Kingdom (The Children Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  ‘What have you found?’ he asked.

  ‘There are receipts for Gogair coin in the ledger,’ she replied, not raising her head from the sheets of paper in her hand. ‘It details the number of people they have sold, but there are no names listed.’

  ‘No, there would not be. They would be going to the markets.’

  ‘They do, however, list the coordinates where the ships pick them up from.’

  Across the tent from Heast, Taaira approached one of the jars before Anemone. It had a briny, yellow colour to it. Inside sat squashed orbs. ‘Eyes,’ he said, lifting it. ‘Why would you keep eyes in a jar?’

  Anemone raised her head. ‘They sell their slaves blind,’ she said flatly, ‘because they have seen too much.’

  A sad sigh escaped the tribesman.

  ‘Do you have more information?’ Heast bent awkwardly for the paper that held the coordinates. ‘We’re not close enough to the coast to be able to put a stop to this trade.’

  ‘There is this.’ She rose from the floor, her legs pushing her upright. She held out the collection of letters that she had been reading. ‘These are written by the Marshal Faet Cohn.’

  The paper was thick and expensive, and what had been written had been inscribed in the Faaishan language by a thick quill. ‘The marshal who survived the sacking of Celp over half a year ago.’ Heast read it slowly. ‘He has a very unflattering description of me. He also has a very accurate description of the land and two of the sites we have used as camps.’

  ‘The letter is dated two weeks ago yesterday,’ Anemone said. ‘If we had not constantly been on the move, we would have been found. We would have been slaughtered by the people we are trying to help – by my people!’

  Heast began to fold up the letter.

  ‘Are you not angry?’ Her dark gaze met his searchingly. ‘Captain, we are fighting their war. It must anger you as it does me.’

  ‘I am not fighting their war,’ he said. ‘Neither are you. You are fighting my war. And in my war, this letter is nothing but currency.’

  11.

  It was not the First Queen of Ooila who hung from Mercy’s mast. The morning’s sun revealed a face that was too young and too healthy to be her and the sombre duty of identifying the woman fell to Bueralan.

  ‘Greena Fe.’ He spoke as a small boat was lowered into the black water from the huge form of Glafanr. ‘She was the First Queen’s daughter. Her oldest daughter. This was her ship.’

  ‘The dreams of our god are still flawed,’ the Innocent said, standing beside him. ‘Fate does not convey itself in the subtexts and promises of an unconscious mind. She will come to understand that as she experiences it more and more like her parents did. For them, fate was not a dream, but how they viewed the world. They saw all the possibilities, all the strands of possibility before them, and they would nudge and push events until one was realized and another destroyed. In a dream, there is no conscious choice. There is misunderstanding and absence. There is doubt where there should be none.’

  What that meant in relation to the three creatures who were responsible for the destruction on Mercy, Bueralan did not know. No answers were forthcoming, either. The blond man – the normal man – had introduced himself as Zilt, but he had not elaborated on who he was, or how he knew that Se’Saera had wanted the ship, or why he was begging for forgiveness. Ren must have had the same questions, but he had not asked any. Instead, he had nodded at Zilt, accepting what he said and then, with his scarred hands on the hilts of his old swords, walked to the stern of Mercy, to where the ship’s wheel stood empty. There, he had waited, unresponsive until the morning’s sun had risen and the First Queen’s daughter had been revealed.

  ‘She will be bothered by the mistake, but not by the actions,’ Bueralan said. ‘She will look at all those who have died here and shrug.’

  ‘Her parents would have done the same,’ said Ren. ‘Why should their child be any different?’

  Bueralan did not know how to respond to that.

  ‘You cannot lie to yourself,’ the Innocent continued, his voice solemn. ‘Servitude does not require you to believe that everything your master does is fair, or even kind, for often it is not. You are in error if you look for morals in a god, for your morals are made by those around you, by those who have raised you, and each of them is born from a mortal concern. No such thought occurs to a god. When you realize that, when you have lived long enough that your own morals are no longer understandable in the world, but are something that you hold to nonetheless, you will finally begin to comprehend the true nature of a god. You will see that mortal men and women change. That they seek to remake the work each generation. That they are but a small stain in an eternity. When you do, you will realize how precious the words of a god are. How they use those words to define the world around you, to give truth where there is none, and substance that no mortal can see.’

  That certainty, Bueralan knew, was what drove Aela Ren. In the last four months, he had come to believe that the scarred man saw and recognized the destruction he was responsible for. He was not without self-reflection or awareness and he knew the ramifications of his actions: but for the Innocent, there was no act he could perform other than destruction. He saw a world in constant flux to the morals and wills of mortals, and he saw a world of chaos.

  In Dynamos, before the plank to Glafanr had been lowered, but as it drifted into the strait of the port, Bueralan had walked the town’s empty streets. Around him, the buildings stood tall but silent, as hollow as the old butterfly corpses that cracked beneath his boots. Without any goal in mind, he found himself at The Mocking Quarrel, the inn that he and Samuel Orlan had stayed in when they first arrived in Ooila. Inside, he walked up the stairs and past the rooms. Through the open doors, he saw unmade beds, open drawers, and other signs of a hasty exit.

  When Bueralan returned to the ground floor, he found Samuel Orlan sitting at one of the centre tables, a pitcher of beer and a glass beside him.

  ‘I realized,’ the cartographer said, ‘that I have not seen a butterfly alive for days.’

  ‘No.’ Bueralan picked up a glass from the bar. ‘In Cynama, I thought the fires had driven them away. But here, I have seen only their husks.’

  ‘They will not rise again,’ he said. ‘She has drawn Maita’s power from the ground as she rode here, as if she were putting a comb through her hair.’

  The saboteur was not surprised. He placed the glass on the table and unstrapped his sword, laying it before him.

  ‘It is what Aela wanted us to see,’ Orlan said, raising his gaze as he spoke. ‘Remember when he came to us in that barn, after they had conquered Cynama? He could have left us there. She had no need for us. But he came back for us, so we could see what she has done. So we could bear witness to her birth. He called us his prisoners when he stepped through the door, but we misunderstood the nature of our prison. We have waited for a shackle and a cage but there is none. We are not prisoners in the way we know the word to be used. Such a prisoner is not allowed to hold a sword. He is not allowed to ride off and reclaim it before he returns to the city.’

  ‘We should walk away, then.’ Bueralan began to pour warm beer from the pitcher into his glass. ‘If it is that simple, after all. So why don’t we?’

  ‘Because we are caged regardless.’

  He sat down across from the other man. ‘Yes, we are,’ he said, after a moment.

  ‘I did not expect a god to return in my lifetime.’ The cartographer turned his gaze to his own still full glass. ‘Every Samuel Orlan has feared that it would happen, but I did not think it would be me. I am too old for it now. I should be finding a successor. A new god should be a concern for the eighty-third Samuel Orlan. Or for the ninety-first, or the hundred-and-ninth. One of them should be witness to this, not me.’

  ‘But it is you.’

  ‘Yes, and everything I have done to try and stop her—’

  ‘Has been useless.’ Bueralan took a deep drink, a quarter of th
e tall glass. ‘I’ve not been any better,’ he said, after he had lowered the glass. ‘I don’t have a plan. I don’t know how to stop this. I am still trying to find a way to do that. But I know that when that ship comes to port, I will walk up the plank and I will find a cabin in it. I can do nothing else after what was done to Taela and Zean. Ren knows that. That is why he let me go back to my mother’s house that night. That is why he allows me to wear a sword. What he knows about you, I do not know. I imagine it’s something similar.’

  ‘He wants me to believe in her,’ Orlan replied sourly. ‘No, not believe. He wants me to know. He wants me to stand beside him and support her. He wants me to admit that the world is better with her. He wants you to acknowledge it as well.’

  ‘What we think matters very little to him.’

  ‘No, what we think does matter. What all god-touched men and women think has always mattered to Aela Ren. They are his family.’

  ‘There’s a thought,’ Bueralan said, and drank more of the warm beer.

  He and Orlan drank the rest of the pitcher and another one before the saboteur left. At the door of the inn, he had seen the old man return to the bar for a third, intent on drowning his thoughts. But he had not seen him again until the last of Aela Ren’s soldiers boarded Glafanr. He had been in their midst, a drunk and forlorn figure who, after he had found a cabin, had retreated into himself. In the months that they had been at sea, Orlan had rarely left his cabin and had spoken only when the door was opened, and when a question was asked of him. Even then, he had only spoken in brief snatches.

  Beside Bueralan, the Innocent watched not the arrival of his new god at the wreckage of Mercy, but the three figures who stood at the broken rail awaiting her.

  A Small Flame

  ‘Weeks later,’ Aelyn Meah said, after I asked her when she became aware of what she had done. ‘It consumed me once I realized it. I saw it not just in my dreams, but in my moments of solitude. At night, I would see the storm giant I created tearing Yeflam apart. In the middle of the day, I would see the waves rise to crash into the pillars. But then my family . . .’ She paused on the word. ‘But then the Keepers,’ she resumed, the change well noted, ‘would reach me. They would pull me down from the sky roughly and sedate me.’

  She fell silent. She would often pause while we talked, to gather her thoughts. What she said was important to her, even though she knew that very few people would read what I wrote. Histories threaded through the hold of my ship in Leviathan’s End, but few people came to read them.

  ‘I tried to tell myself that I was not responsible for what I had done,’ she said. ‘I was well aware by then of the extent of Kaqua’s control over the Keepers and me. But it was hard. When I woke in the Mountains of Ger he was beside me. In those weeks where I was consumed by my power, he cared for me. He made sure I did not hurt myself. He fed me. He changed my clothes and washed me. He was so much the friend he had always been that I fell easily into relying upon him. When I began to tell myself that I was not responsible, that it was in fact his fault, I would be filled with such self-loathing that I would consider killing myself. I tried more than once.

  ‘Kaqua was always there to stop me, of course.’

  —Onaedo, Histories, Year 1029

  1.

  The morning’s sun rose with a violent edge as Ayae drove the cart and the two bodies out of Yeflam in silence.

  After Se’Saera left Tan’s body, he had not lasted long. He had coughed and, as he tried to rise, the flesh and muscle around his neck peeled open, revealing the bone behind his throat. His neck had broken moments later. Little could be done for him and, in silence, Ayae and the others watched him die. Xrie had broken it first. After Tan had become still, and as the blood seeped off the back of the wagon, he said to them that they should keep the knowledge of the Innocent to themselves. Ayae did not know if he meant to keep it a secret from Muriel Wagan or Lian Alahn, or just from the camp population in general, but she had nodded in agreement, regardless. She did not agree out of obedience to Xrie or to his rank as his soldiers had, and neither did she agree as Eidan had with a shrug, as if it were not of consequence what anyone in the camp knew. No, Ayae nodded because she could not trust herself to speak. Even now, as the horse pulled the cart over the stone bridge, her fear uncoiled through her, causing her heart to quicken, her skin to prickle, and fingers to tighten and release the reins without any conscious decision on her part.

  Aela Ren. She almost said the words aloud, but did not. The Innocent.

  Ayae told herself that what she felt was irrational. Ahead, the bridge dipped down into the camp. The sprawling tents and dying fires that sat before her were in no way similar to the camp she had spent her early years in. There were no huge, fire-scarred wooden barricades. There was no fear every time that the huge gates began to grind open. No whispers that followed the sound, no voices that murmured as if in prayer, wishing that the Innocent was to the south, to the south, to the south. No, there was none of that in the camp she rode into. And neither was she the child who had lived behind that wall, either. She was an adult now. A woman. She had stood on the Spine of Ger beside the mercenaries of Steel. She had killed men and women. She had watched her friends die. And she had stood in the centre of Yeflam against the god who was now the master of Aela Ren. She did not need to be afraid. She—

  Eidan’s crippled hand fell on her leg. ‘Careful,’ he said, quietly.

  A crowd had begun to spread across the road before her, the front of it leading down to the shoreline. ‘Thanks,’ she said, pulling on the reins.

  The horse pawed nervously at the ground while Xrie and his soldiers cleared a path for the cart. As they passed, Ayae saw a heavy-set white man standing on the side of the road talking to the Soldier, pointing to the east. She followed his hand and saw, emerging from the morning’s sun, a huge-sailed ship. The light left it unformed, as if it drifted out of the brightness like a long-forgotten creature of the sun god, Sei.

  Beside her, she heard Eidan murmur the word, ‘Saan.’

  ‘Saan?’ Xrie began to move to the shore, leaving the two of them to drive to the stables without a word. ‘How can you tell?’ she asked.

  ‘Only they have masts so big and boats so unwieldy.’

  At the makeshift stables, she left the horse, cart and bodies with Jaysun. He did not wince at the sight of the two corpses when he lifted the blanket over them. He simply said that he would see to their disposal and let the cover fall back. After Ayae thanked him, she approached Eidan and asked him if he wanted to go to where the crowds had begun to swell, but he shook his head. ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘Besides, this is politics that I have no interest in.’

  She watched him make his slow, limping way through the near-empty paths of the tent city, before she headed towards the crowds.

  In a certain way, she did not quite know what to make of Eidan, even after the time they had spent together. When Zaifyr had described him to her, he had said that he was methodical, and that he had a certain coldness, an almost clinical nature to him. Yet she found his attention to Yeflam to be in opposition to that. It was, Ayae believed, emotion that drove him, as if, by repairing the broken cities, and those that had sunk, he was proving his love for Aelyn. She had not heard him mention her – in fact, he did not refer to the Keepers at all – but it was clear that Aelyn’s betrayal of not just him, but Yeflam as a whole, hurt him, and she could not help but think that his actions were a message to his absent sister.

  As she drew closer to the shore, the press of people around her thickened and the noise of the camp rose. ‘Do you think they are here to conquer us?’ Ayae heard one man ask. She did not hear the reply. A woman beyond him said loudly, ‘This would not have happened if we’d rebuilt the fleet.’ ‘The Soldier,’ said an older man. ‘The Soldier was born in the Saan.’ That man turned to Ayae and apologized as she tried to move past him. At his use of her name, her passage became easier, and it was not long until Ayae found herself at the front
of the crowd, behind a force made from the Yeflam Guard, the Mireean Guard and Kal Essa’s Brotherhood.

  The Saan ships were huge beasts that wallowed in the black ocean. The single vessel that had risen so prominently in the distance was but one of three. The other two were revealed once the massive white and yellow sails that had drawn the first ship into view of the shore had been lowered. As she watched them drop anchor, Ayae thought that they looked more like cargo ships than warships. She could imagine them crashing through waves in storms and labouring in still water when the wind fell away and only muscle could move them. It was an opinion she heard repeated behind her, but it was followed by a jibe about the Saan sinking before they made shore. It fell flat when a man said that the Saan were the cargo, the Saan and their swords.

  How would you feel, Ayae thought after, if you knew that the Innocent would be here soon?

  A pair of longboats detached themselves from the first Saan ship and approached the shore slowly, a white flag held high before them. When the colour became clear to the crowd, it was as if a breath that had been held was let out, though Ayae felt no such relief herself.

  In Leviathan’s Blood, a brown-skinned, handsome man in heavy, pitted leather dropped from the first boat. The armour that he wore was to protect him from the water that came up to his waist. A second man similarly attired jumped from the following boat. With the water around their waists, the two hooked rope harnesses to their armour and pulled the boats onto the shore, revealing two warriors adorned with copper bracelets and an older man in the first, and half a dozen similarly adorned warriors with a woman in the second.

  The oldest of the men was the first to step upon the shore: a thick, solid man with sun-darkened brown skin and long, thick arms. Of all the warriors who stepped from the boat with swords at their sides, only he did not wear any of the copper rings on his arms. Instead, a single, small, dull gold ring pierced the left side of his bottom lip: it glinted like a golden tooth in a smile. Yet there was something humourless about the man, a trait accentuated by the razor shave that ran across his head and face. It left a series of straight, humourless lines of age to define his features. Features that disappeared as he knelt and lowered his head.