Leviathan's Blood by Ben Peek Page A

against his chest. It would lie there until he returned home.
    He knew instantly that he would be returning to Ooila, to where the witches of his childhood blew dark expensive glass bottles from which pieces of glass were taken for the living to wear around
their necks. To where the bottle was whole once again after the death of the man or woman who had worn that piece. To where the family took the unearthly remains of their loved ones and entered
into a long-established network of barter and purchase to ensure that the bottle would sit on the nightstand of a pregnant woman in a good family. The soul would be leached into her womb with every
sip she took from the bottle, drawn down into the foetus, to search for a perch in the newly created child, to find life again.
    The Mother’s Gift, they called it.
    ‘Break the damn thing.’ The rough voice belonged to Samuel Orlan. The old white-haired cartographer had almost had his throat crushed by a creature made from shadows in the cathedral
and it had not yet healed. ‘Don’t sit there with it in your hands all night again,’ Orlan muttered from where he lay. ‘Break it. Smash it. I’ll get a stone from
outside for you to do it. Better than what she has planned.’
    ‘Your conscience has no place beside me, old man.’ Above him, the swamp crows that lined the rafters shifted, awoken by the sound of his voice. ‘Zean is dead because of you.
They’re all dead because of you.’
    ‘You would be too, if you’d come with them.’
    ‘But not you.’
    The cartographer grunted sourly as he pushed himself into a sitting position.
    ‘Why didn’t she kill you?’ Bueralan asked. ‘You’re not worth a thing compared to the people who died.’
    ‘She didn’t kill you, either.’ He coughed, rubbed at his throat. ‘She’s not a god yet.’
    The answer offered little. In truth, little made much sense after the cathedral. Outside, Ranan had been empty, and though Bueralan had felt as if he was being watched, he had not seen a single
person on the streets, or in the broken buildings. Both his horses were gone too. The tracks led off down the main street, and then disappeared into the thick sweltering marshes of Leera, but only
for a step or two. The tracks stopped suddenly and neither Bueralan nor Orlan had been able to pick them up again. With one sword between them, they had been left to walk through the marshes and
swamps, their direction mostly eastwards. The nearest port was Jeil in the Kingdoms of Faaisha, though Bueralan knew that it was not truly near. It would take weeks to walk there. Weeks, he had
told himself, without food or water.
    On the first night out of Ranan, they had been found by eight Leeran raiders. Both men had slunk into a line of trees that offered some protection, and they had collapsed, exhausted. Bueralan
had meant to split a night’s watch with Orlan, but the old man had stumbled into a deep sleep, and his own grief had swamped him and kept him awake. He had not heard the raiders approaching
until all eight were around him.
    He did not reach for his sword, did not stand. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I should never have walked out of that cathedral anyway.’
    A man stepped forward. His teeth had been filed down and his white skin was sunk against his bones, as if he was being consumed by a disease. ‘She sent this for you.’ The raider
dropped a heavy sack on the ground. ‘To reach Jeil.’
    He didn’t reach for it. ‘I don’t want it.’
    ‘You’ll starve before you reach the border,’ he said. ‘The old man before you. She has seen it.’
    ‘Then why would I take it?’
    ‘Because she has seen it.’
    He asked another question, an angry question, because on those nights his grief gave way to anger, but the Leeran raider did not respond. A moment later, he and the seven men and women who had
stood around Bueralan disappeared.
    Beneath the green-tinted light of the morning’s sun, Bueralan and Orlan had tipped the sack