Leviathan's Blood Read Free Page A

as he made his way back along the beach, the afternoon’s sun setting in a dark orange light behind him.
    In the village he nodded to the few people he passed on the streets, but he did not tell them about the ship. If they noted that there was something strange about him – a tension, perhaps
– they did not comment. The empty houses that stared at all of them with blank eyes gave them more than enough reason to think he was troubled.
    Three years ago, he had petitioned the Fifth Queen for funding, not just for his work with the fish, but for the village. The old Queen had died and it was said that the new one was sympathetic
to what he was doing, so he wrote to her. Originally, he had named the village Stone River, but the name had never taken, and the people who lived in it, and those in the area, simply referred to
it as the village. No capitalization, no title. He had used the name Stone River when he had petitioned the Fifth Queen, but when she had approved the funding for more buildings and new wells, she
had signed it to Ja Nuural, ‘of the village’. Yet, despite her support, he had never been able to grow the village as he wanted, had never been able to attract enough people. Many of
the new houses sat like the dark husks of the butterflies, waiting to be crushed and reborn. It was widely believed that the Fifth Queen would not fund him for another year once she found out how
little her gold had bought.
    The thought entwined with the image of the ship – not
Glafanr
, but
the ship
, he repeated – and he thought of how much he had worked to build the village, how much
he had sacrificed of his life, of his youth. He considered that as he walked out the other side of the village.
    The woods began shortly past the beach, and it was there that a series of large wide rock pools awaited. There were over twenty, including two large enough to hold five creatures that were twice
the size of him. These large beasts had long, ugly teeth. Their grey skin shimmered beneath the surface when they were close, but the light disappeared when they went deeper – and they were
often in the depths for days at a time. In the old books, fishermen had called them sharks, but Leviathan’s Blood had changed them. Their fins were made from hard bone and their dark eyes
wept a black mucus at times of great anger and hunger. They had lost two villagers to the sharks over the last five years, but he still regarded the work as a success: three of the five had only
known the clean water of the pool.
    In another year, perhaps, they would be able to pull out the original sharks and butcher their bodies for research.
    He passed the sharks’ placid pool, moving to the others. Each was still and silent. In the last of the pools he stopped at, a soft phosphorescent light had begun to emerge as the
afternoon’s sun finally disappeared. Pausing, he watched tiny minnows dart back and forth, the light becoming a bloom that lit up the area. They were Ja’s favourite – caught not
with rods, but long nets they threw out into the ocean from a boat. He would often spend the early hours of the evening watching them, enjoying their delight in the clean water, but he could not do
it this night. Seeing the light, he thought of it as a beacon that would lead a single, awful man and his army up the beach from where they landed.
    The thought followed him to bed, but the sight of the faceless soldiers did not linger in his dreams. No, his dreams were of the deck of the ship he would not call
Glafanr
, and of its
gentle sway and its silence.
    He dreamed that he was standing on it.
    Slowly, Ja approached the railing of the ship and looked into the ocean. The water’s surface was like smoke and he thought he saw shapes beneath it. Tiny shadows at first, like the minnows
he had seen earlier. They flickered and flickered until, without any warning, a shape rushed beneath the ship, a beast so huge and of such monstrous, unprecedented, size that