Spirits began to appear along the soggy, burned shoreline well before Heüala did.
One of Meina’s soldiers delivered the news to Zaifyr. He had no real idea how much time had passed since he and the others had stepped onto Glafanr, but it was long enough that the others had left him alone. Meina, Anguish and Jix had left the captain’s cabin hours, days, maybe months ago, each to enter their own timeless world aboard the ship. Zaifyr had left the cabin as well: he had wandered alone through the long corridors, climbed the rigging, stood beside the wheel, and watched for the sight of the dead in the still river they drifted down. He did not sleep and he did not feel hunger, but eventually he returned to the cabin and its chained book. He sat there, tapping against the charm beneath his left wrist in an odd beat. It was there that the soldier Meina sent found him.
Outside, Zaifyr found the Captain of Steel by the rail. The small pitch-black form of Anguish sat on her shoulder, and he, not her, turned towards Zaifyr as he approached.
‘Can you see it?’ she asked.
He looked across the still water: a man, his body made from pale silvered lines, rode a horse. It was similarly defined, but it was stretched out in a gallop to keep pace with Glafanr. ‘I do.’
‘I have seen his like before in Mireea.’ She continued to stare out across the water. ‘Anguish tells me that you have seen them before, as well.’
‘They were in Yeflam,’ the creature murmured.
‘Ancestors from the tribes of the Plateau.’ Zaifyr remembered the misshapen bodies that they had worn, the awful violence within them. ‘They should not be here.’
But they were, of course.
Zaifyr had never liked the Plateau. He had walked across it early in his life, when he heard about pacifist tribes who lived with the spirits of their ancient family members. He had thought that the tribes would be able to help him live beside the dead and even, perhaps, help him find a way to ease their torment. But the haunts he saw every waking moment of his life were not like the dead in the soil of the Plateau. Those spirits had no fear of losing their identity and they had no desperate need of him. They had responded to Zaifyr in a way unlike any other dead man or woman.
It was not long until the lone rider was joined by another and another, until half a dozen spirits had emerged from the still, burned landscape.
They were a patrol, Meina said, and Zaifyr agreed. They came to shadow Glafanr, but not to attack it and, with a sinking sensation, the charm-laced man believed that they would find more of them in Heüala. The thought was not one that filled Zaifyr with pleasure. He could remember only bits and pieces about the kind of soldiers the ancestors had been, but he knew that, for all the violence, all the horror, they had been an excellent fighting force.
Ahead, Heüala, the City of the Dead, began to appear.
It was defined at first in slivers of silvered shape: a straight line high in the sky, a hint of a round dome, a long wall. It took a moment for each part of the city to emerge, as if it had no real form of its own, but was instead made in response to the expectations of those who came to it.
What, then, did it say about Zaifyr that Heüala was not built on the barren land around it, but rather that it sat in the middle of the River of the Dead, surrounded by a stillness of water that made it look as if it floated? Zaifyr did not know. It was certainly not an image that he had been told of as a child, or seen before. To get a clearer look at it, he walked to the front of Glafanr, where he was joined by Meina, Anguish and Steel. Lor Jix already waited there. He was not pleased to see Heüala, not in the way he had greeted the ship he had stood on. If anything, he appeared confused by what he saw before him.
Up closer, Heüala looked like a walled prison island. There was a single, empty dock, from which paths ran up the barren ground to the gate of Heüala. Despite the actual space between the two being small, the paths looped and turned, disappearing and re-emerging from the ground beneath. There were dozens of paths and not one was like another, not in terms of design, or the material that had been used to construct it. Some were made from dirt, others from stone, and others from gold. As near as Zaifyr could tell, they all ended at the gate of Heüala, but he was not at all confident of that: the path chosen could very well be a choice of divine judgement, or a reflection of the souls that came to it. The gate, likewise, baffled him, for it was not made from any earthly substance that Zaifyr could name. Instead, it had been forced from something solid and dark, and then it had been speckled with white, as if the stars themselves had been captured and warped into the gates, creating a sense of depth in which anyone who gazed at it could be lost.
Yet, it was what was wrapped around the highest building that drew Zaifyr’s attention, even before he saw the spirits on the walls, saw the scouts that had followed them leap into the water and begin to ride to the city. It was the sight of a form he had seen before, a horrific, monstrous figure that had pushed through the sky over Yeflam.
It was, as then, a body made from darkness, one bestial, yet unlike any beast Zaifyr had seen in size, and in the spread of the wings that lay against its colossal body. It was different, as well. The body he had seen over Yeflam had not been completely formed: it had been breaking apart, as if it was made from smoke. But that was no longer apparent. The creature appeared whole and, despite its stillness, very much alive.
‘Se’Saera,’ he whispered.