‘I didn’t paint it,’ the old man said. From his seat at the fire, he twisted to the painting behind him, as if it was the first time he had seen it. ‘If you were going to ask, that is.’ In his hand, a broken stick twitched back and forth between Ayae, Jae’le, Eidan and Tinh Tu. ‘I can’t paint,’ he admitted, still staring at the painting. ‘I make, well, I can’t make.’
Ayae was the first to draw her attention from the painting and turned to him. ‘Who did paint it?’ she asked.
‘No, no, you are not meant to ask that.’ He looked at her, but his stick continued to bounce between the four. ‘You are meant to ask, you are meant to say, “Where is my friend?” Where is your dead friend? That is what you ask. Then the two men beside you threaten and ask and threaten again until I tell them.’
‘No one is going to threaten you. We just want to know where Zaifyr is,’ Tinh Tu spoke with a strange gentleness in her voice. ‘Why don’t you help us find him?’
‘But he’s not here. He’s gone. Gone, gone, gone. I gave him to a blind child and a dead woman. They were here, waiting for me. I told them to do that. To wait for me, that is. I said, “I won’t be gone long. You won’t have to go into the city. You can trust me.” They both would have stuck out up there, you see. That’s why I had to do it. You will find, you will find . . . well, you won’t find either of them now, but you’re welcome to look down the passage to my right to see if the two are still there if you want.’
‘He isn’t there,’ Eidan said. ‘No one is there. The earth would tell me.’ With slow steps, he began to approach the old man. ‘But you know that. You know me. You’ve seen me before. You gave me Lor Jix’s name.’
‘You looked familiar but I didn’t want to assume.’ With a sly glance at the others, the man slipped from his seat and drew close. ‘You’ve changed a bit,’ he said, his whisper the kind that a stage actor might make of dramatic whisper in a comedy. ‘Just between you and me, of course. The scars make you stand out. Leviathan’s Blood made them, I know. She got into you, tried to change you, like she did those sharks and squids. But you’re smart. I can tell. No, no, don’t protest these things. I know you are. You know her blood can’t hurt you. Just like you know you can’t hurt me. But I’ll tell what I know. I’ll tell you that Zaifyr is in Ranan. Well, that he will be soon. He’ll be with her.’
‘With Se—?’
The old man screamed and leapt forwards. He was so loud that Ayae blanched, and Eidan took a step backwards. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No! You can’t say her name, you can’t!’ Then, as quickly as his fury had risen, it left, and he held out his hands in apology, patting Eidan’s chest. ‘Sorry. Sorry, but she hears it. All the gods hear their names. Well, did. Some still do. They hear it spat on each day. But not Ger.’ He turned and spat into the fire and then grinned. ‘You can spit on Ger all day.’
At the painted wall, Jae’le lowered his hand. While the others were speaking, he had gone to it, running his hand along it, his fingers lingering not on the images, but on the cracks and faults that ran through the bone. ‘What is your name?’ he asked, turning to the old man.
‘Irue Tq,’ he said.
‘That was the name of the Fifth Philosopher seventeen thousand years ago,’ Tinh Tu said. The gentleness in her voice had left, and her tone was hard and blunt. ‘What is your name?’
The old man smiled blissfully. ‘Jiqana Felune.’
‘That is a slave in Gogair,’ Tinh Tu said coldly. ‘I ask you again: what is your name?’
‘High Priest Famendora of Met—’
His voice broke off suddenly as Eidan lifted him into the air. ‘I have no time for your games. Not now.’ With an easy movement, he flung the old man towards the back of the cave, towards the elaborate painting on one of Ger’s bones. Yet, rather than hit the wall, rather than crumple to the ground at Jae’le’s feet, the old man controlled the toss and landed on his feet. When he was upright, he offered a small bow to his unreceptive audience. ‘A name is power,’ he said. ‘I am not so foolish as to give any of you a name. If one is needed today, then I am Irue, for Irue – Irue had handwriting to admire in a man. Or a woman.’
An arm’s length from him, Jae’le made a disgusted noise. ‘God-touched,’ he said, the word an insult. ‘I should have struck you down in The Pale House.’
Irue offered a second bow of failed dignity. This time, he tilted in mid-dip and almost fell. ‘You know it would have done nothing,’ he said, after he had straightened. ‘You of all the people alive in this world know that.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Ayae said. ‘Surely this man is not the same as the Innocent?’
‘Poor Aela.’ The old man sighed. ‘You must realize that the War of the Gods drove him mad. I have – I know what it is to be mad. To be not a little mad, but to be truly, truly mad, and he is mad. The greatest tragedy of his madness is that it is coherent. It is a terrible combination for a man who was once quiet and honest. A man who might have been the best of us. Of course,’ he added, with a glance at Jae’le, ‘a man he trusted impaled him on a tree for thousands of years. That didn’t help, either.’
‘Are you Ger’s servant, then?’ Ayae asked and indicated the painting again. ‘Is that yours?’
‘I told you I did not paint that.’ Irue stood taller, filled with sudden importance. ‘Besides, Ger did not have a servant. Well,’ he added. ‘Not until recently. Though recently is really our invention. It is a view of the world that is unique to us. The gods saw time as a whole, until they didn’t see it. So, for Ger, his servant was always here, even if we could not see it. He was only available to us once our perceptions had defined the world adequately and straightened out time to such a point that he was born.’ The old man made pulling motions with his hands. ‘But still. Still. Ger didn’t always have a servant.’
‘Did that servant paint this?’
‘Well, no. No, I don’t think Ger’s servant is much of a painter. I mean, I only met him briefly, so he could be a painter. But. Well. You’re a painter. He isn’t a painter. He is a killer. And this leg is Ger’s leg. It is the bone of his leg, I mean. It had flesh on it before. How could anyone paint a scene on it, if they were not the owner of the leg? So, I figure, Ger painted it.’
Ayae turned back to the painting as he talked. She thought of how the Wanderer had appeared over Zaifyr in Asila. She thought about Lor Jix’s speech in Yeflam, of how he had been left to wait for the moment he would be called upon out of the black ocean. The gods had plans. That much, she knew, was true. They had seen what would happen when Se’Saera was born, and the painting before her was, like the others, a message left for the mortal men and women they had seen. The problem was that Ayae did not recognize herself in the image before her. Oh, it was her: from the brown of her skin, to the shape of her nose and the dark of her hair: it was all her. But the emotions in her eyes, the suggestion that she had turned away from what was happening around her in fear . . . that was not her.
‘Taane was my mistress,’ the old man said quietly. ‘Taane, the Goddess of Madness. She was a difficult god to serve. She wanted to be defined to the broken, the lost and the mad, and she did not care what she had to do to speak to them. She did not care what she had to do to me, to be more correct. I look at myself and I look at Aela and I think: that could be me if Taane was still alive. She never made any attempt to protect me. She simply made me do the things she wanted. Even doing this for Ger. All he wanted was for me to be in certain places in certain times, but Taane bound me to his command to stop me from wandering. It was after Linae died. She left me no choice but to obey his every command. His first words to me felt like four mouths, and all he said was that he was the warden and he wanted me to help keep guard on his jail until I could not. But. But. But. But, it was not what I thought. I thought it would be the wind and the rain and the earth and the fire, but it was not the elements that he kept in his chains. It was not he, it was . . . well, I should show you. I should. Come. Come.’
He beckoned to them and, without turning to see if they followed, walked to the back of the cave, to a tunnel that led beneath the splitting bones of a dead god.