Zaifyr did not know how to answer Queila Meina’s question. Like her, he did not know how to react to the rich colours of the world, did not know how to explain how they had come to pass, but in that confusion, he could offer her the name of one who might.
‘Jix,’ he said.
‘You’re guessing,’ Meina retorted.
He was, but he left the stream he stood in without admitting it. He splashed the remains of the god’s stone messenger and water onto the cobbled roads of Mireea where he paused, surprised at the sight around him.
Mireea was undamaged.
Buildings stood solidly beneath thick canopies which gave the city a pleasant, shadowed feel. Zaifyr felt the urge to take a breath, to taste what he knew would be clean air, but he could not. Like a dim echo, the sensation of drowning returned to him, as if his body was filled with water it could not void.
He found the Captain of Wayfair on a wooden bench outside the market square. Any thought Zaifyr had that Jix might be able to explain what had happened was tempered by the sight of him staring at his black-skinned hands. ‘How long has it been?’ Jix asked as he approached. ‘I honestly cannot tell you. I have lost track of all the years that I waited in the wreckage of my ship.’ The dead man’s awful, drowned voice was gone, replaced now with a voice that was ruined by his emotions. ‘I had not thought that I would be so moved by the sight of myself.’
‘You knew this would happen,’ Zaifyr said, while Meina and her soldiers fell in behind him. ‘You knew the gods left messages here. You knew they had plans for us.’
Jix lifted his head, revealing only one eye, the right. The left, in opposition to how it appeared before, was empty. ‘I only suspected.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘I am just a soldier, godling. I am told little. I piece together what I do not know.’
‘Then what has happened to us?’ Zaifyr raised the staff and swung it over the reconstructed Mireea. ‘What has happened here?’
‘I believe we are in a different time, a different fate,’ Jix said. ‘Did you not hear what the Wanderer said? The gods have constructed a series of events that are tied to the fates the gods have built. Each of our acts sends us down the path of one or another. They cannot control us, so they gamble on outcomes. It is why the Leviathan told me to ensure that you and I killed the abomination before it was named.’ He looked down at his hands again, at his faded uniform of blue and red. ‘I would be bound differently if we failed, she told me, but I did not understand it fully then.’
‘But you do now?’ Meina asked, moving next to Zaifyr.
‘Both of you asked about my crew,’ he said. ‘Look at the staff.’
At first, Zaifyr saw nothing. It was made from dark wood and looked like other staffs he had seen, as if it had been carved from a single piece; but then, in the whirls and slivers of cracks in its length, he saw a vague shimmer and felt a faint coldness against his hand, a chill similar to that of a haunt. With a growing sense of horror, Zaifyr realized that the shimmers moving throughout the length of wood were spirits. Dozens and dozens.
‘My faith is strong, but yet . . .’ Lor Jix said, a true sadness in his voice. ‘Yet I would trade my place here beside you with any one of my crew.’
‘You made a deal with a god,’ a new voice said, a voice that sounded strange and deep from the small, inky black figure that appeared on the road, as if it had been plucked from the air. ‘You are a vein in a life you do not understand,’ Anguish said. ‘Faith is but a seductive delusion here.’
It startled Zaifyr to see him, just as it did to realize that the creature stared at Jix and the others with large, open eyes. They were completely black and nearly indistinguishable from the closed lids that Zaifyr had seen before.
‘Your family brought me here,’ the creature said. ‘I led them here in search of you.’
‘The red that we saw,’ Meina murmured. ‘Jix said it was life. It was your life, Zaifyr.’
‘You have only to let it find you.’ Anguish offered an inky smile. ‘But it seems you have other plans.’
‘We are to go to Heüala,’ Zaifyr said.
‘The name means nothing to me.’
‘It was where the gates of paradise were built,’ Lor Jix said. He still sat on the bench, but he stared at the small figure before him intently. ‘I remember you. You were at the abomination’s trial. You are her creation.’
‘I was her eyes,’ Anguish said.
The ancient dead’s hand shot out, grabbing him. ‘Then she sees us!’ he howled as Anguish squirmed in his fist, trying to escape his grasp, but unable to. ‘She knows what the gods plan!’
Meina’s sword fell lightly, edge first, on Jix’s arm. ‘Let him go,’ she said softly. ‘If you don’t, I’ll see if you bleed, or if you simply break apart, like the dead I’ve killed before.’ There was no give in her voice, but Zaifyr did not know why she wanted to save Anguish.
He asked her that while the small, inky-black creature scurried along the edge of her sword, to her shoulder.
‘Close your eyes,’ she said to Anguish, before she answered him. ‘Because he is here,’ she said to Zaifyr. ‘Is that that not enough? That old piece of death just told us that the gods had plans. He doesn’t know how many, but he knows that when one fails, another begins. He said that right before this creature appeared. Is that not coincidence enough to keep him alive?’ She slipped her sword into its scabbard. ‘Perhaps even my words are part of their plan. Maybe they push fate in a way that the gods want, or need. Who are we to say? After all, we’re all being used like tools. We’re no more than that staff you hold.’
‘Se’Saera will know where we go,’ he said, not disagreeing with her.
‘If she is in this city of the dead, she already knows.’
There was little else for him to say, after that. Jix, Zaifyr could see, was not happy, but the sense that he, along with the rest of them, was part of something they did not control was not one that he was prepared to argue against. In that logic, each action they took, each choice they made, placed them in a fate that the gods had made. It was possible that not killing Anguish would be terrible for all of them, but it was just as possible that it would not. They would not know until they reached Heüala.
Unconsciously, because he knew that it would not be there, Zaifyr’s left hand felt for a thin copper charm on the wrist of his right. Yet, when his fingers touched the bent metal, he did not feel surprise, but rather a sense of ease. With each charm that appeared on him, wrapped on chains around his wrists and in his hair, he felt more and more himself. He felt a sense of agency return to him, as well. This he doubted: he had returned to the shallow stream the Wanderer had stood in with no conscious thought of his own.
His boot was flooded with water and, despite himself, he laughed. Of all the things that would follow him into death, a pair of boots with holes in the soles seemed oddly fitting, in a small, darkly humorous way.
‘It is no joke where we go,’ Jix said from behind him. He had stepped into the stream as well, and shouldered past Zaifyr. ‘Heüala is the most divine of cities,’ the Captain of Wayfair continued. ‘It is where we are all judged.’
‘We should be so lucky,’ Meina said, as she too stepped into the river, her soldiers following her. ‘Lead the way, Zaifyr.’
‘I am just going to follow,’ he said.
‘That will be fine as well.’
The shallow water ran out of Mireea, but when Zaifyr stepped beneath the Spine of Ger, the clear sky and whole sun disappeared. It was replaced by a sky of empty darkness and fields of dead, brown grass. Zaifyr would have said that the fields, which ran as if they were straight, and not part of a mountain, had been burned. But the ground around the stream was muddy, and the trees that grew further out drooped with half-dead yellow foliage above exposed roots.
He turned back in the direction he had come: but the soggy, burned-looking fields stretched as far as he could see and offered him no sight of either the Mountains of Ger or Mireea.
‘It was as Jix said, a different world,’ Meina said. ‘A world where the gods felt it was safe to leave us messages.’
‘A world we cannot return to,’ Zaifyr added.
The stream continued, but the world around them did not change, not for a long time. Again, Zaifyr felt that the ability to tell time was taken from him. The sensation was heightened by the parts of scorched grass and sickly trees that could have been endless reproductions of the first ones that he had seen. Zaifyr found himself expecting to see a spirit in the fields, one of the long dead that the gods had sent to purgatory, for he was sure that that was what ran beside the shallow water that he and the others walked through. But he could see none, and had no sense of anything in the fields. Could it be, he asked himself, that all the dead are truly trapped in the world?
Ahead, a shape began to emerge, accompanied by the sound of a large, moving body of water. Within moments, a ship appeared as the lamps on its deck began to ignite, as if whoever was on board wanted it to be a beacon for them – though Zaifyr could not see anyone lighting the lamps.
The ship was unlike any he had seen before. It was huge and old, its folded sails a faded red. It appeared, Zaifyr thought, as he and the others approached, that the river had been designed for it, rather than the river dictating its design, though he could not explain what it was about the ship or the lonely dock that it sat against that allowed him to think that.
‘The ship of the dead,’ Lor Jix said in awe. ‘Glafanr.’