Jae’le’s hand shook Ayae gently.
She had been dreaming of Sooia. She remembered standing on an empty, dusty street of the town she first remembered. She was not the child she had been, but the adult she was now, and her boots walked over stones her bare feet had. She could see no one: not on the street, nor in the rough huts, where the cloth doors had been pulled back. She could see the rough chairs and the darkened pans, signs of life, of culture. She wanted to walk up to them, to rest her hand on the frame and call inside. Surely someone would answer. She would speak in Jafila, though she had not spoken that language for well over fifteen years and had forgotten most of it. But there, in her dream, she knew it, knew it intimately. If she could just move, Ayae knew she would be able to speak. But she did not move. She remained in the street and the dirt began to shift around her feet and the walls of the town began to shake and—
Jae’le’s hand was on her shoulder. ‘He is gone,’ he said softly into her ear. ‘Zaifyr is gone.’
From where she lay, Ayae could stare directly at the empty mattresses where the ghosts had laid Zaifyr’s body. It was empty and the ghosts had vanished.
‘An old man took him,’ he continued, his hand still on her shoulder, his voice still soft, as if he told her a secret. ‘He came up through a break in the floor. The ghosts parted for him. He picked up Zaifyr and returned the way he had come.’
‘You saw this?’ she asked as Eidan and Tinh Tu walked around the mattresses. Had they seen it as well? Was she the only one who slept? ‘You didn’t try to stop him?’ she asked, but she knew the answer.
‘What could anyone do with him?’ Jae’le’s hands knitted together before him. ‘A dead man cannot die again.’
‘They could burn him.’ She could not believe she said it. ‘They could dismember him. They could—’
‘Do nothing,’ he finished. ‘If the ocean did not destroy his flesh, he is as safe as he can be.’
Ayae quelled the panic she felt and pushed herself to her feet. She picked up her sheathed sword as she rose and, as she approached the mattresses, belted it around her waist. Behind the three mattresses, she could smell water. It came from the gap in the floor that the old man had climbed out of. Staring into it, she could make out the faint, broken hint of rubble, a dangerously sloped path that led into the caverns below Mireea.
‘Was the old man like us?’ Ayae asked.
‘There are worse than us,’ Tinh Tu said. ‘He was one of the god-touched.’
‘He is the man who told me Lor Jix’s name,’ Eidan added. ‘He follows the river to the east.’
Towards the Black Lake. ‘Assuming the rivers have not been diverted greatly,’ Ayae said, ‘he can follow that towards Leera.’
It was Eidan who descended into the hole first. He used both his hands, though she could see that the scarred one was still weak, and it gripped the edges harder in compensation. When he let go and dropped the few feet to the cave floor, his fingers left indentations. Ayae’s gaze did not linger on the breaks in the tiles, however, for after he landed, the floor began to glow with phosphorescent light. A single set of footprints glowed on the ground. In that light, Tinh Tu followed. She dropped her staff down to Eidan first, then lowered herself as a woman much younger in physique might. Ayae half expected her white raven to follow, but it had not liked the inside of the foyer and had taken to roosting on the roof of The Pale House. It had made no appearance by the time that Ayae and Jae’le had dropped to the stone floor.
Lit by the phosphorescent footprints, Ayae gazed at the broken remains of stone buildings and streets that she stood in. A City of Ger, she realized. She walked along the streets that had long ago lost their distinction from the stone around it. The buildings looked like old heads, the skin shrunken to reveal the shape of the skull, and little else. In some, roofs had caved in and doors had broken. Among the broken stalagmites, Ayae could see some faint lights, lost beneath two slabs of rock that had collided with each other. The lights she could see, Ayae knew, had been used by the men and women who had lived in the caverns after the War of the Gods. The people had been faithful to Ger and had shunned the outside world to be near him.
The Cities of Ger had attracted treasure hunters and miners. Many were lost to the rivers that ran throughout the mountains and which were prone to flooding. Mireea drew its water from two of the largest rivers that ran through the mountain, but there were others, as well. Each one of them ran the length of the mountains until they burst out in a series of waterfalls over the Black Lake in Leera. The lake was so named because it drew its water from Leviathan’s Blood and was the cause of the continual growth of swamps and bogs that plagued much of Leera and left it poorly suited for farmland.
Samuel Orlan had taken Ayae to the end of the Spine of Ger – to where the stone wall ended abruptly – to show her the Black Lake shortly after he took her on as an apprentice. She could still remember listening to him tell her about the poisoned water while staring in awe at the waterfalls pouring into the huge, still Black Lake. The horizon had been one long dark smudge where the ocean and sky met in the smell of copper and salt.
The footsteps of the man who had stolen Zaifyr led them through a second and third City of Ger. In the second, the crumbling, stone faces of the city were exposed to the clear night sky and looked to be gazing up at the stars in awe. Xrie and the combined forces had left the morning after he had spoken to Eidan, leaving Mireea quiet. Beyond it, the third city began, and there the lower halves of buildings from Mireea, of houses and factories, speared through breaks in the rock as if they had fallen from a great height. Ayae made her way past both silently, feeling as if she had entered a world that she did not recognize, one that had taken what she had known and loved and left only a world of sadness in its place.
After the third City of Ger, the path of the body-snatcher went deeper into the Mountains of Ger. He left the rivers, which surprised Ayae, but she did not say anything to the others. Instead, she followed the lighted prints as they made their way through narrow splits in the stone, across a wide bridge that had once spanned an empty expanse, but which now provided a smooth road over the jagged debris from a cave-in. The prints wound down narrow and wide tunnels. Paths split frequently and the steps went left, then right, then up a small incline, before going down a steep wall that the four had to climb down.
It was shortly after the wall that Eidan stopped. ‘A quake is coming,’ he said.
It was much stronger under the mountains: the walls around Ayae shook and stones and dirt broke free. The ground beneath her feet opened in hairline fractures, and she stepped away from them.
‘That seemed worse,’ Tinh Tu said, once the ground stilled. ‘Worse than the others.’
‘It was,’ Eidan said. ‘We do not want to be here much longer. A mountain range of this size is difficult to control, even for me.’
The footsteps led them into a new tunnel, one littered by soil and stone. The phosphorescent light, however, remained clear and steady until the tunnel began to branch into a new cavern. From there, a faint hint of smoke could be seen, clawing along the roof.
‘He is up ahead,’ the stout man said softly. ‘He has started a fire. I believe he is waiting for us.’
Jae’le took a step past him, but Eidan’s hand stilled him.
‘Zaifyr is not there with him,’ he said.
‘Where is he?’
‘I do not know. He came down the wall with him. The stones remember the weight of the two, but they cannot tell me where it changed, or if there was another here with him.’
In the pale light, Ayae could see the concern on Jae’le’s face. She thought that he might say something, but instead he nodded and continued forwards.
The smoke thickened and, shortly before the narrow tunnel opened into a much larger room, a fire was visible. It was a small campfire, ringed by rocks. There was a woodpile behind the fire, on which the old man Jae’le had told her about sat. He was an old white man, a nest of bones, grey hair and tattered clothing. He was small and did not look as if he could lift the blocks of wood that he sat on, much less a body.
But it was not that the sight of him that caught Ayae’s attention.
It was not he who stole her breath.
Behind him was a splitting bone, but to describe it as such, to suggest that it was a bone, was to give it a sense of perspective and reality that Ayae did not believe it had. It was of such a size that it filled the entire cavern behind the old man, the edges disappearing into shadows and smoke before becoming lost in the stone.
Upon it was a painting.
It was a battle, one in a city that Ayae did not recognize, but which was defined by flat roofs. Across the roofs men and women and creatures fought, while around them rivers of fire burned, the flames leaping out of the ground as if it had fractured, much like the bone that it was painted on. In the centre of the painting was a great cathedral and the smoke from the fire was drawn towards it. It twisted around the building, taking on a form that resembled the seething, unformed shape Ayae had seen at Zaifyr’s trial. Her attention did not linger on it, but was instead drawn to the foreground, to the images of herself, of Jae’le, Eidan, Tinh Tu and Aelyn Meah. Her face was turned towards her, and in her eyes, Ayae could see flames, and fear. Of the five, only she was turned away from the cathedral, towards the entrance of the cave. On one of the flat roofs close to the cathedral Jae’le fought with shadowed figures, while further down, Tinh Tu led a force. But it was to the right of her face that Ayae found her gaze drawn, to images of Eidan and Aelyn, to the sight of the latter cradling the former in her lap, while Eidan’s blood pooled around them and into the shadows of the cave.