For two days, Tinh Tu’s forces made camp in the port town of Gtara. There, they dismantled the six ships that had been abandoned, left tied to the dock.
To reach Gtara, the ragged force had marched along the edges of the Black Lake until the Leeran coastline emerged. The route had been forced upon them by the earth that – even now, nearly a week later – rolled from the Mountains of Ger. It was caused by continuing landslides and cave-ins along the range, Ayae thought, and the earthquakes that accompanied the two, along with the bad visibility, left the main roads a dangerous path of sink holes and expanding swamps. It had been a sink hole that forced Tinh Tu to leave the main roads: it was there the morning after she took command, the vanished ground leaving an inky darkness that, if it had grown any larger, would have swallowed the makeshift camp whole. As it was, they were woken by the protesting cries of swamp crows, which continued to complain while Ayae pored over a map to organize a path to Gtara. ‘We can reach Ranan from there,’ she said. ‘As for the town itself, I don’t know what kind of condition it will be in. I wouldn’t expect anything pretty.’
When she said that, Ayae envisioned Gtara as a series of broken building frames, wire fences and a dock stretching into Leviathan’s Blood. She knew that there would be people there, but it did not occur to her that it would be they who were stripped down to a nearly unrecognizable state.
Ayae rode into the town beside Jae’le, driven ahead of the main body of Tinh Tu’s army by the demands of the Mireean and Yeflam soldiers rather than by the old woman’s harsh command. After she had mapped a path to Gtara three dozen soldiers had waited for Ayae near the small roll she had slept on the night before.
Vune, a middle-aged Mireean soldier, was their spokesperson. ‘We don’t feel like we have much choice going forward,’ he said. ‘It isn’t like we love Leera or the new god, but, well, we seen a lot of our friends die. Some may survive. We think we ought to go look for them.’ When she didn’t speak, he rubbed at his dirty cheek. ‘The woman who took away our voices, who made us kneel, you’re more like her than us,’ he said with blunt honesty. ‘You got that curse. You could speak to her. Tell her to let us go.’
‘I have no control over Tinh Tu.’ She glanced at the predominantly male soldiers in front of her. ‘You talk to her yourself.’
‘We want her to know we’ve done enough,’ Vune said. ‘We’re not dogs.’
No, she told him, told all of them, you’re not, but no matter what she said, they kept trying to pressure her into speaking to Tinh Tu. After Vyla Dvir revealed that the Lord of the Saan was still unable to speak, they began to double their efforts, and by the end of the second day, their list of grievances had grown to include how hard Tinh Tu was driving them and how she was not listening to suggestions. Unfortunately, Ayae could sympathize with their festering resentment, and it left in her a rising frustration, because she knew that she could not address it. By the third and fourth day, she had taken to riding ahead with Jae’le as a scout, knowing that it was a coward’s solution, and one that would not last.
When the two entered Gtara, the smell of decay was the first thing that they noticed. Bodies of men, women and children lay on the ground, covered in dirt from the Mountains of Ger. Jae’le had warned her about the bodies before they entered – ‘A bird told me,’ he said, scratching the chin of the swamp crow on his shoulder, perhaps the same one as the one in the tree or another she did not know – but even though she was prepared, the sheer number of the dead surprised Ayae. She stopped at the first of them, the smell leaving her nauseous, the sight of the crows picking through the remains only adding to the feeling. It took a moment before she realized that the man in dirty white armour was someone she knew.
Paelor.
‘Jae’le,’ she said, nudging her horse forwards to catch up to him. ‘These are the Keepers.’
‘Some of them, yes.’ He indicated the single dock, the dock where they would soon stand and watch Eidan drag ships onto the shore. ‘The rest are slavers from Gogair, I believe.’ He slid off his horse. ‘Did you notice the condition of the bodies of the Keepers?’ Without qualm, he grabbed one by the leg and pulled the body clear, a pair of crows hopping calmly away as he did. The bird on his shoulder glided down and, with the other two, moved back to the body they had been poking at, leaving Ayae and Jae’le to stare at a face that showed no decay, but rather the signs of advanced age, as if its muscle had been removed. ‘Mequisa, the Bard,’ he said, ‘to judge by his clothes. Not that you would notice it from his body. It is as if his very essence has been stripped out.’
‘Do you think . . . ?’ She stopped, rephrased it so she would not mention Se’Saera’s name. ‘Is this what the new god does?’
‘To those like you and me?’ He shrugged. ‘I suspect so. We will have to ask Eidan to bury the bodies. We cannot leave them out in the open like this.’
‘We are surely not planning to stay here?’
‘Soon Faaishan scouts will be upon us, and we’ll want to be able to hold a meeting with their marshals. But more immediately, we will need to take those ships apart to build siege equipment. Our soldiers will need it.’
‘Our soldiers?’ she repeated. ‘Jae’le, why do we even need soldiers?’
‘You need an army in war.’
‘Think about the things we can do,’ she said. ‘They can’t do those things. In many ways we would have more freedom without them.’
‘No, not against the god-touched.’ The swamp crow squawked and lifted from the ground, to return to his shoulder. ‘We will need soldiers,’ he said. ‘Even those who want to mutiny, but can’t.’
It did not sit well with Ayae, not then, not later that day, when the two scouts entered Gtara and were taken to Tinh Tu. By then, the dead had been swallowed by the ground, and the stench of decay was hidden beneath the smell of Leviathan’s Blood. Still, Ayae felt a chill when the two men rode into the town, over the freshly churned soil, as if she was seeing an image of the future of all the soldiers around her.
The scouts did not get to speak to Tinh Tu. After they were presented to her, she said, ‘Bring me the Lord of Faaisha and his marshals.’ She handed them a letter she had written. ‘I expect them in two days.’