Eventually, Taela asked if Bueralan could leave her alone, just for a while.
He pulled the door shut gently and made his way along the corridor, the low ceiling forcing him to hunch as he did. He glanced behind him, once, just once, as he stood at the base of the stairs that led onto the deck of Glafanr, but the saboteur knew that he could do very little for Taela: her pain could not be shared. Se’Saera’s violation of her had been terrible and intimate in nature, a rape by all definitions, and Bueralan knew he could do nothing to change this fact.
On the deck, the moonlit water lay in a smooth, black expanse, mirroring the wooden boards that he walked across.
Glafanr was a huge and ancient creature on Leviathan’s Blood. Despite its size, it glided through the waves as if it were a sleeker, smaller ship, and there was no doubting the terror it would strike into anyone who saw it coming for them. Standing beneath its five masts, Bueralan felt dwarfed. From the thick masts, sails made from a deep crimson unfurled, flecks of black littered through them. At the very top of the centre masts were two crow’s nests. It was from one of those that he had heard the sad melody of a flute earlier. No such music greeted him in the darkness as he passed beneath it now. Below the deck, behind narrow doors and in rooms that ran three levels deep before the hold opened up, Aela Ren and his army lay in their narrow beds, leaving the piloting of the ship to other hands.
‘You don’t sleep, Bueralan.’ Se’Saera stood at Glafanr’s bow. She wore a simple gown of white that, along with her white skin and blonde hair, caught the moon’s light and left her with an ethereal quality. ‘Yet again.’
‘The night is the best time to be awake,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘I merely guide the ship at night,’ she said. ‘It is my gift to the men and women who sleep beneath us – who sleep as they have never slept before.’
The night that Bueralan had ridden out of Cynama, the night he had begun to ride towards Dynamos and the hulking shape of Glafanr, Samuel Orlan had told him that Ren and his soldiers had not slept since the War of the Gods. On the day Linae fell, the cartographer said, sleep had been taken from them. As the old man spoke, the sky above them had been tinged red, turned that colour by the fires that burned in the city, by the lava that had awakened before they left. In that light, the men and women around him of Ren’s army looked gaunt and malnourished.
‘Imagine the gift she gives them,’ Orlan had said. ‘The weight she lifts from them with a simple gesture.’
To the new god, Bueralan said now, ‘You buy them cheaply.’
‘I have not bought them at all.’ Se’Saera’s gaze left the black ocean and met his. ‘They are the mortal instruments of gods. They were once figures of glory. They will be once again.’
‘I don’t wish for glory.’
‘I know. I have treated you poorly, Bueralan. I do not apologize for it, but I do acknowledge it.’ She turned away. ‘I can see now that I rushed to consume everything around me. To consume the world of my parents. My Faithful were at times affected by this. But with a name, I have grown . . . more aware of the world. One day, you will understand this.’
This change in the god’s personality still unsettled Bueralan. At first, he had greeted it with relief, but it was not until he rode out of Cynama that he realized how deeply it bothered him. When she first appeared – after he had said her name – she accused him of conspiring against her with others. She had been much like the child he had met in the cathedral in Ranan. There, he would have said that she hated him, that she held the death of her Mother Estalia against him, and saw conspiracies and enemies everywhere. But that had not been the case since he had said her name.
‘We will find the wreckage of a ship tonight,’ the god said to him. ‘I saw it in a dream. An hour before dawn, the wreckage will appear to you and I. You and Aela will swim over to it. You will search for the First Queen.’
‘The First Queen is dead. She did not survive your attack on Cynama.’
‘You said that in my dream. You wore that sword Aela allowed you to reclaim and you held it tightly, as if you would use it.’
The sword still lay beneath his narrow bed. ‘What did you say next?’ he asked.
‘I said that I agreed,’ she said. ‘But I do not. The First Queen still lives. You will find evidence of her escape on the wreckage we find.’
Bueralan’s only relief from her change came from this, came from the fact that she did not consider herself a complete god.
He had discovered it by accident, having overheard the new god and Aela Ren in the remains of the First Queen’s palace after he had entered the ruins. As the midday’s sun rose high, Bueralan had walked down a set of broken stairs and into a massive web of passages and cellars. He told Orlan that he was going to look for Taela, but mostly he wanted to be away from the smoke and the smell of sulphur. After a short, painful walk, the dark passage around him shifted and earth rained over him as the foundations of the palace’s remains threatened collapse, he considered turning back to the daylight.
It was then that he heard Se’Saera’s voice.
‘The paintings are of Mahga, of the Fifth Kingdom,’ she was saying. ‘They were commissioned to show its splendour. Its decadence.’
‘Rivers that run with gold,’ the Innocent replied. ‘It is surely what the Five Queens sought to remake in their reign.’
‘No.’ It was Taela who spoke, her voice cracking, as if it struggled against itself and its use. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘Zeala Fe did not want to remake Mahga. She showed me these paintings. She spoke about how it was a mistake to try and recapture it. How we had to break away from it.’
‘In this matter, she was correct.’ Bueralan could not tell if Se’Saera’s voice leaked through the cracks in the wall or if it drifted up the passage he stood in. But he remained still, afraid to move and lose the sound. ‘Mahga was Eidan’s kingdom. Few could rule as he did.’
‘Eidan believed he was a god. His brothers and sisters shared that belief.’ It was Ren who spoke then, his voice calm. ‘They left their kingdoms once they realized they were not.’
‘I have seen parts of it,’ Se’Saera said. ‘The past is strange to me. It feels to me as the present does now. Last night I dreamed that Eidan returned here even as he did not.’
‘The gods saw all of time at once. It was not linear to them. It will not be linear to you, once you have gathered all the power of the gods to you.’
‘I once considered him an ally, Aela. He turned on me and spoke against me in Yeflam.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He passed judgement on me. My parents had left a messenger to tell the world that I was not their child. He agreed with it.’
‘Was the messenger one of us?’ the Innocent asked.
‘No, he was a cursed mortal. His name was Lor Jix.’ Se’Saera said the name without emotion and it was there, at this moment, that Bueralan began to realize just how much she had changed. ‘He had been a priest of my mother, the Leviathan.’
‘Yet you are a god,’ he said. ‘It is not just your name or your presence. I see you gather the remains of the gods to you. You are them, even if they did not wish you to be. I was never told the reason why the gods went to war. My master, your father, did not share that with me. The same is true of all of us. But we were their mortal instruments. We can see the divine in the world. We saw it in the pretenders. We saw it in the unfortunates who could not control it. We have seen what has happened when the divine has been broken apart as it has. I cannot imagine that any priest, cursed or otherwise, could look upon the world and believe that it is better for what the gods have done.’
‘Yet Lor Jix did,’ she said. ‘But it does not matter. I see now that my parents could not exist as I did. I see that they could not accept that. As you said, I am them. With enough time, I believe Eidan will understand this as well. Before he dies, he will ask for forgiveness from me.’
If Aela Ren replied, Bueralan did not hear it.