‘Shouldn’t you be sleeping?’ Bueralan asked.
‘I do not like it,’ Aela Ren said. He stood in the middle of Glafanr’s deck, Leviathan’s Blood spread around him in an endless, shifting darkness. Above, the stars and the moon appeared pale, as if they were part of another world, dwindling. ‘I am unaccustomed to sleep. After all these years it feels like the embrace of emptiness. When I awake, I feel as if the world has tried to reorganize itself. As if a thousand possibilities have suddenly been removed. It is an unsettling experience.’
Bueralan, who had stood on Mercy with him and listened to him speak about Se’Saera, was surprised.
‘Shouldn’t you be enjoying that experience?’ Taela said, as if reading his mind. ‘You don’t want your new god to think you disapprove, do you?’
‘I do not fear Se’Saera knowing how I feel. In truth,’ the Innocent said, ‘it is right that I feel this way. I am a man who has lived a long life in a world that is slowly coming to an end.’
‘You say the most reassuring things,’ she said drily.
‘I meant only that Se’Saera will rebuild this world.’ He turned to her, the faded moonlight highlighting the scars along his face, allowing it, for a moment, to look as if his skull had revealed itself. ‘But both you and Bueralan appear to have been raised with a similar belief that a god must act in kindness, that a god is kindness. No doubt it is because you were born into a world without divinity that allows you to believe such a thing. It is oddly touching, in a certain way. Like a child believing that their parents are perfect.’
‘Just imagine if the world was built on benevolence and kindness.’ Bueralan could not keep the cynicism from his voice. ‘It would be nothing but endless suffering.’
‘It would be someone’s.’ The ghost of a smile touched Ren’s scarred lips. ‘The two of you are not new to power. You have stood beside people who wield it. Who is it better for? I ask you. A soldier, a queen, or a slave?’
‘A god is meant to be different.’
‘You have never known a god, so how can you say such a thing? What if a god is naught but a divine power forming itself into a philosophy? Or an idea that is prevalent among mortals?’ Around them, Glafanr pushed through a swell. ‘I stood by my god Wehwe for thousands of years and I do not claim to know him intimately. I would not dare. To do so would be to suggest that divinity is something that I can know, but it is nothing of the kind.’
‘Then why stand beside a god?’ Taela asked. ‘If it cannot be known, why would anyone offer it loyalty?’
‘Again, you think of a god as you do a king, or a queen,’ the Innocent said. ‘Perhaps it is our fault that you do,’ he added. ‘It is the responsibility of all god-touched men and women to represent the gods. It was our task to translate what they were to everyone else. When the War of the Gods ended, we stopped doing that. I have upon occasion thought that we should have defined what a god was in those years after. It would have made it harder for the pretenders of the Five Kingdoms to come to power. Of course, we were in no condition to do that after the war. Still, it would make things easier now. Not just for all of the mortal men and women in the world, but for you, Taela. If we had stayed in the world, you would know that the Goddess of Fertility saw birth as one aspect of a child’s arrival in the world. She concerned herself with parents, with conception, and with the rearing of the child itself.’
‘Ren,’ Bueralan began.
‘Let him say it,’ Taela said, a measured defiance in her voice. ‘Let me hear it.’
‘Kaze will be of great help you,’ Aela Ren said, unconcerned by her tone. ‘She was made to stand beside mothers. She will do all that she can for you.’
‘No.’
There was no give in her voice.
Earlier, Bueralan had been awoken by the sound of Taela heaving, the smell of vomit tart in the cabin. Wordlessly, he had pushed himself up, poured a glass of water, and handed it to her. He had taken the wooden bucket to the window and tossed what was in it outside. It was the same bucket he had carried to the deck with Taela, after she had finished drinking, and said that she could do with some fresh air. She apologised for waking him while they walked through the corridor, but he said that he should thank her. He had been dreaming about the City of Ger, beneath Mireea, and the Temple of Ger. In his dream, he had stood above the glass covering. He had not seen a piece of Ger’s skin, as he had when he had stood there before, but a huge eye. It had stared up at him in question, and the fact that he had no answer had been deeply unsettling to him. ‘I’ll try and throw up tomorrow night then,’ Taela had said, as they walked up the stairs, onto the deck, where Aela Ren stood.
‘I am trying to help you,’ the Innocent was saying, now. ‘I know you will not believe that. I know that I am a monster to you. But soon, we will reach the shore of Leera, and we will be in danger there. You will need assistance.’
‘I’ve had enough assistance from you.’ There was no mistaking her tone. ‘From all of you. You all stood and watched me be raped by your new god.’
‘And we would do it again,’ he said.
Taela spat at him.
Bueralan tensed, but Ren simply wiped the spittle from his face. He did not seem angry, or amused. Instead, he watched Taela as she walked across the deck to the prow of Glafanr. ‘Once we land,’ the Innocent said to the saboteur, ‘we will be at war. It will be a different war to the one that my soldiers and I fought in Sooia.’
Taela blended into the shadows of the ship, her body a faint outline. ‘Because of Zilt and his soldiers?’ Bueralan asked.
‘Because they were once the God of War’s favourites.’
‘Kaze told me that earlier, but she did not say it would make a difference to anything once we landed.’
‘Baar saw war as many things. He was like Linae and Wehwe, like all the other gods. He saw war as liberating, but also an act of oppression. He knew that mortals took up a blade for coin, and that they took it up because of morals. Much of Onaedo’s time was spent campaigning against the propaganda that many a nation created about it.’
‘Onaedo?’ It surprised him to hear Ren mention the ruler of Leviathan’s End. ‘What does she have to do with this?’
‘A long time ago, she asked Baar to help her show the dichotomy of war to men and women. In every generation she asked him to bless a soldier to destroy and a soldier to preserve. General Zilt was one of the last that Baar favoured. The other was a man by the name of Kues—’
‘Who led the Tribes into the Plateau,’ Bueralan finished. ‘Are you saying that they will rise up against us?’
‘No,’ Aela Ren said. ‘But Onaedo will know that Zilt has returned. She will have felt it. And she will bring balance to this conflict. On Leera, we will find ourselves challenged in ways we have not been before.’