2.

 

The Floating Cities of Yeflam shimmered in the distance, an elegant construction on the edge of the Leviathan’s Blood, a beacon that promised rest, security and heartbreak.

Ayae knew the last to be true, though it was entirely possible that she was the only one of the men and women on the road who did. Four days behind them, Mireea remained on the back of Ger’s Spine, its cobbled streets alive with ghosts—both the dead who were known and those who were not.

It had been a horrific event for all, her included. The Mireeans did not share a single belief about the afterlife; and what belief they did share was agnostic, a fatalism borne out of the fact that they all knew and accepted that death was part of life. For some, death was the end and you no longer existed after you died; others thought that you moved on, to a better world, a new world, that your soul endured; while others still, believing in the same endurance, said that you returned. But the sight of the dead, of men and women and children who were friends and family, had shown to all that they had all been wrong, that something much, much worse happened to you when you died.

Ayae had experienced it just as everyone else had. As the flesh of Fo and Bau was stripped beneath invisible hands, the dead began to appear around her and the first she had seen was Queila Meina.

The mercenary captain was not as she had been in death, and for that Ayae was thankful. But there was a terrible sadness in her spirit, and her mouth moved wordlessly to convey words, all of which failed to emerge. It was the same with all the ghosts that had appeared; despite their sudden density none could speak or be felt. They moved to do both, but the result was only that a sense of futility was emphasized, and the sense that they—that all the dead—were trapped, grew.

By the evening, all the living in Mireea had fled, beginning a march down the mountain, as the first of the earthquakes began.

The Mountains of Ger had begun to move.

To those around her—who gave her a wide berth—the answer for the sudden quakes was a mystery. But the result was that, in combination with the city of ghosts, a wedge was driven between them and the Leeran Army. As the morning’s sun rose there was no sign of the opposing force, and according to the whispers among those on the road they were in prayer, even as the ground around them shuddered.

As for herself, Ayae had been mostly silent as they made their way down the great road to Yeflam. Oh, she had spoken: she was invited to the meetings Lady Wagan held, and said her piece there as she saw fit, but her topics were limited to Zaifyr, the Keepers and what she had witnessed.

She had spoken to Bael and Maalen as well. Meina’s two uncles had taken the news of her death stoically, as if they had expected nothing less.

When she had pointed this out quietly, Bael turned to reply.

“This is a business of mortality,” he said. “War is paid for in blood and tears, no matter what side you are on. If you do not expect that, the grief will only be harder.”

“What will you do now?”

“Finish this business, see you to Yeflam.” Behind, the line of refugees had begun to stretch out, and a pair of Mireean Guards rode past, to bring it up. “After, we will disband. There is no Steel without Queila Meina.”

“She has a child,” Maalen said. “We will tell her.”

She could not imagine the conversation, but both appeared to be burdened under the weight of the words they would need to speak as they left her.

Her silence was not dissimilar. As Yeflam drew closer, as the smell of blood and salt—the smell of the black ocean—reached her, Ayae felt her ability to form words dry up so much so that she attended meetings mutely, while within her mind her words tumbled effortlessly and disorganized. When she entered the city, she knew she would have to speak. First to Aelyn Meah, to the leader of the Keepers, and then to those around her; and then at the trial, for there would surely be a trial, a huge and public one where Zaifyr would stand at the front in chains, a villain, a man who deserved to die.

He had told her that, in the Spine’s Keep.

“Leave!” She stood apart from him, confused, horrified, driven away by what she had just seen, drawn by the sad knowledge in his eyes. “We can go down the other side, through the Leerans, to— to—”

“To nowhere.” His empty hands showed themselves to her, an offer she could take. “Yeflam is the only place to go.”

“Even if it is in chains?”

“I must look harmless.”

She looked around her, looked at the ghosts that pulled themselves from the ground and drifted through walls. “You could not ever be, Zaifyr.”

His smile was sad. “War is coming to us, Ayae.”

“You don’t have to be part of it.”

Behind her the tower cracked and began to crumble, the flames destroying its support.

“I do. We do. We all must, for it is a war between us and a god,” he said. “Look around us. You see the dead. I have lived with this for a life longer than nearly all others. I thought it my own fault for the longest time that they suffered, a failing of my own to help them, but it is not true. They are held here by a god who needs power, by a being who has not enough to do what she wants, and so draws on the souls of the dead just as a witch and a warlock do. Imagine that. A being of such power that she can keep the dead here, trapped, but even that power is not enough. I have been witness to that for thousands of years and I will be witness no more. I will go to war, and the men and women of Yeflam will know that I do so, with or without their consent.”

She glanced behind her at the Spine of Ger in the distance. It ran like a thick, stone vertebrae along the mountain, broken only where Mireea was and the tallest parts of the Spine’s Keep were visible. She could no longer see smoke, the remains of the fire that had died the evening they left the city, a sudden rain quenching it. But what would it matter if it had? Her home was defined by the ghosts in it, by the dead that had slowly dissipated along the road.

Except that they had not, and no one in the train to Yeflam believed that to be so. The dead were with them, invisible, silent, unseen to all but the man who had asked Heast to put chains on him.

Zaifyr had said to her once that she would be sad on the day that she learned the true power of her peers. He had not been wrong. It had cost her deeply, in terms of friendship and of her home. But more than that, it terrified her, not just because of him, but also for herself and what she was capable of, what her potential was. She had already begun to dream of her fall from the tower, her subconscious mind reinforcing what she knew: that she had survived not because of fire, but because of wind and earth, an acknowledgment that only deepened her connection to the men and women who could create atrocities.

It seemed to her that there was now no longer any respite from that. Not even, she admitted, in death.