“Leitos,” Zera said softly, concern furrowing her brow, “are you well?”
Leitos pulled back from the dismal trance. “Yes,” he lied. He had not known the people who had once lived in the city, did not even know its name, but he felt those long-dead people around him, as if they yet lived.
Avenge the blood of our forefathers. That command now meant more to Leitos, and he was beginning to understand why his grandfather had given his life. He had wanted freedom for Leitos, but more, he desired that all men would one day live free of the Faceless One’s bondage. But how, grandfather, can I accomplish what you died for? At that moment, Leitos felt weaker than ever.
“Are you sure you were not bitten by something?” Zera asked sharply, catching his head in her hands and studying his face. “You look sick.”
Leitos froze, mesmerized by the color and depth of her eyes. Her skin was hot against his, her closeness pressing in. With a sigh, all the world seemed to pass away, leaving only him and Zera. Dust coated her cheeks and brow, but could not mar the smoothness of her skin. His pulse raced at the thought of drawing nearer, of falling into her embrace, of pressing his lips against hers—
As though by an unspoken command, they moved away from each other. A little breathless, and wholly confused, Leitos nodded belatedly at her question. “I am just thirsty and hungry,” he said, almost choking on the words. Had she seen into his mind, or read his features?
After a final lingering glance that seemed, ever so briefly, to mirror his uncertainty, Zera swept her gaze over the nearby ruins. “Better if we had reached the far side of the city before dark,” she said, “but there is nothing for that now.”
“I am not too tired to go on,” Leitos offered. That was an absolute lie, but he would rather press on, than set camp and try to act like his mind had not run rampant with amorous thoughts.
“Bone-towns are dangerous at any time, but more so after the sun falls,” Zera said. She pointed out a large building. Blocky and plain, it squatted in shadow like a broken thing just inside the collapsed city gate. “We will shelter there.”
Zera led the way to an area in front of the building littered with cracked paving stones. She sat Leitos down on a sturdy bench pulled from under a pile of rubble. Without a word of explanation, she walked back into the street, now enshrouded by the coming night. It was hard to see what she was up to, but for a long moment she appeared to be getting undressed. Sweat sprang up on Leitos’s brow. When he realized that she had only taken off her cloak, he breathed easier.
She strode to the city gate and, using her cloak like a broom, she whisked away all evidence of their passage back to where Leitos was sitting.
“What about our tracks outside the city?” Leitos asked, compelled to learn from Zera the same way he had learned from the Hunter.
Zera shot him a devious grin. “Sandros—and Pathil, if he chooses to follow that brute—will believe I am taking you to Zuladah to gain my reward. The road south is the safest and fastest way to get you there, so there is no reason to hide our route. But when they find that our tracks end at the gate, they will have two choices: waste time by searching the entire city, on the chance that I am up to something else, or try to get ahead and catch us on the road. Either way, they will have to take time to try and outwit me, which gives us more time to outwit them.”
“Could they do that?” Leitos asked, worried more about what they might do to Zera than to him. “Could they get ahead of us, even with the poison you gave them?”
“Anything is possible,” she admitted, “but highly unlikely. Because Sandros is so large a man, I sprinkled a double measure of poison in the wine—much to Pathil’s regret, I am sure.”
“But that shout,” Leitos said. “That did not sound like someone who was poisoned.”
Zera gave him a flat look. “Do not doubt me, boy.”
Chagrined, Leitos shrugged. “I still do not understand why you let them live.”
“I am not in the habit of repeating myself,” Zera snapped. “But because you seem rather slow of mind, I will explain it to you once more. A true Hunter takes great pleasure in besting their fellows, and leaves them alive to spread the tale of how they were outwitted, thus earning the respect of other Hunters and, more importantly, the trust of the Alon’mahk’lar.”
Leitos held silent, and Zera produced a skein of dark cord from her satchel and strung it low off the ground, crisscrossing it over all available paths needed to enter their shelter. After creating a nearly undetectable web, she anchored the cord’s ends to various bits of rubble. To the last, those pieces sat precariously upon other debris, and Leitos guessed that if any careless searcher passed by, their feet would tangle in the cord and drag down enough bricks to make a terrible racket. Even if her web was detected, there was no way to breach it without the same end.
While she worked to perfect her trap, Leitos thought about what she had said about Hunters, and decided that it sounded like a baffling game, and said as much.
Moving sections of the cord to more satisfactory places, Zera nodded absently. “Indeed it is, and all the world of men is forced to play by the rules and pleasure of the Faceless One. Living and dying, scheming against one another, these things come naturally enough, but the Faceless One and his Alon’mahk’lar have raised the stakes, disallowing any escape when you grow weary of the sport.”
“What does the Faceless One hope to gain?”
Zera shrugged. “No one really knows. Some think his motivation is simply an abiding love for brutality. Others believe he has another goal in mind, some unknown secret, and that he pits men against each other to distract them from his true ends. For me, all that matters is destroying the Faceless One and his hordes. That is what I live for, and what I will die for. It is for others to decide what happens after.”
Leitos stopped himself from saying how bleak that sounded.
“I trust you have a stone of protection?” Zera asked, drawing one similar to that which he wore from under the collar of her snug tunic. He nodded in answer, but she wanted to see it before believing him. She came close enough to fill him again with that stirring anxiety, then moved away, and led him into the building.
She halted just inside the entrance, dug through her satchel, and pulled out a palm-sized leather sack. Leitos gasped when she untied the drawstring and upended it, spilling a brightly glowing, pale amber glass orb into her hand.
“Firemoss,” she said in answer to his amazement. “When dry it casts no light, but add water and.…” She raised the glass ball, letting its radiance speak for itself. “It can only be harvested from the Qaharadin Marshes, north across the Sea of Drakarra—” her eyes found his “—your homeland.”
“That swamp lies far to the south of Izutar,” Leitos said, “so my grandfather told me.” At some point, Adham had mentioned firemoss as well, but Leitos had never expected to see any.
Zera shrugged at his correction and moved away, following the glow of firemoss. Leitos trailed after her, trying to focus on what the light showed, but finding his eyes drawn again and again to her silhouetted shape. While that was an attractive vision, his mind shifted, and he found himself basking in the idea of what her lips must feel like—
You are a fool, he scolded himself. There is nothing between us, and there never will be. Instead of relief, or a sense of acceptance, that idea brought only melancholy. You are a fool, he chided himself again.
They did not go far into the building before coming to a broad, square room filled with wooden furnishings so heavily dry-rotted as to be useless.
“This may have been the common room of an inn,” Zera said, placing the firemoss globe in a broken bowl sitting on a table. Instead of bread and cheese, she laid out a meal of water and more dried meat.
While he ate, Zera paced back and forth, the firemoss casting too small a glow to drive back the gloom. With each step she seemed to grow more agitated, and a deep frown pinched her brow.
“I must find water,” Zera
muttered quietly. Before leaving, she pressed a short knife into his reluctant hand. “If anyone comes, defend yourself.” Leitos nodded, certain she was annoyed with him.
She left, depleted waterskins in hand, melding silently into the waiting shadows. Alone, Leitos worried off a bite of the leathery meat, but found it salty to the point of bitterness. He spat it out, wiped his lips, and stood up. He wandered aimlessly about the room, keeping at the verge between darkness and light.
There was nothing to see that did not bring to mind the futility of standing against the Faceless One: a human skull buried under a stack of broken benches, as if in some bygone era someone had hidden a friend or a loved one with all that was at hand; an abandoned packrat’s nest of twigs and straw and scraps of what might have been cloth but looked more like scraps of skin; shattered crockery and a collection of cracked wooden cups that would never again hold liquid.
All of it spoke of the failure to overcome the evil days that had befallen the world long before his birth. Yet, for the memory and love of his grandfather, he would take the path of vengeance Adham had set him upon. He would reach the Crown of the Setting Sun and find the Brothers of the Crimson Shield.
He settled under the table upon which the firemoss globe faintly glowed within a black void, and tucked one of the satchels under his head. He waited for Zera’s return, but sleep took him long before she came back.
Chapter 15
Zera hovered over Leitos. The emerald vibrancy of her eyes had dimmed, as had the glow of the firemoss, which now cast all in the sickly, greenish light of corruption. Everything looked wrong, skewed and malignant.
“Did you find water?” Leitos asked. Though it seemed the wrong question, he needed to hear her voice.
Instead of answering, she lifted her arm, her face as blank as that of a corpse. A solitary waterskin floated up, its neck clenched in her fist. It hung above him, bloated, leaking some reeking, honey-thick pestilence that collected on the underside in a single, quivering bead of moisture. Leitos tried to move away before it could fall, but an unseen force held him captive, constricted his chest. The droplet grew fatter … fatter … stretching toward its eventual release.
I cannot let it touch me, he thought, eyes growing wider with each passing moment. Try as he might, he could not shift even a finger. Within that drop, now the hue of poisoned, long-dead blood, his distorted reflection stared back, a terrified spirit-boy held captive by invisible bonds. “Please,” Leitos wailed, “do not do this ... please.”
Zera’s pupils lost their shape, swirled like a befouled mist, devouring the dull green. Swiftly, that eddying darkness obscured even the whites of her eyes, then began to trickle over her cheeks. Hissing, those rivulets parted her flesh as though sliced with a keen blade, revealing the underlying bone.
“The age of men has ended,” she said hollowly. But it was not her voice, not anything human. “You are but a wasp without a sting, droning about its nest, smelling the smoke, but impotent against the coming inferno. Power never meant for mortals has nevertheless taken hold within their unworthy flesh. Better that you open your veins, than dare to stand against the coming tide of fire.”
Leitos’s gaze darted from the horror of Zera’s melting features to the engorged, venomous globule hanging from the waterskin—a corrosive fluid, surely the same substance that dribbled from her now oozing sockets. Then something stirred beneath her tunic, a pulsing, undulating, swelling movement that brought bile to the back of his throat. There is something inside her … trying to get out.
As if drawn by that thought, a vaporous thread wormed out of her forehead, another from her neck. More pierced her clothing. Before he could fully register what was happening, each of the threads had thickened to the size of his finger … his wrist … his thigh, nearly obscuring Zera. Their mottled surfaces rippled, dripped, thrashed. Bone broke apart with a sodden crunching noise. A wriggling stew boiled out of her ruptured skull, poured over her shoulders, splattered at her feet. Her mouth yawned to release a single, deep, resonant note.
Clapping his hands to his head, Leitos shut his eyes and screamed in a bid to block the sight and sound of the nightmarish vision—
Fingers, powerful and digging, caught hold of his arms and dragged him into a sitting position. He refused to open his eyes, and the hands holding him upright slid to cradle his face. “We must leave,” Zera said gently. It was her voice, the real Zera.
Leitos opened his eyes, expecting the worst, but finding all was as it should be, down to her blazing green gaze. “A nightmare,” he muttered. “It was … was….” He could not finish. No words could convey the horror of what he had seen, nor express his relief that it had not been real.
Zera hauled him to his feet. “You can tell me about it later,” she said, struggling for calm. “Now, we must flee.”
“Is there danger?” he asked, having no intention of recounting the nightmare.
Zera repacked the satchels while she spoke, her movements hurried, but not one wasted. “There is much of the world that you do not know. The Faceless One is powerful, but there are things worse than him.”
Leitos helped as he could, but mostly just got in the way. “What things?”
“Mahk’lar,” Zera said.
“They are here?” Leitos asked, looking to the darkest corners for movement that was not there.
“Yes,” Zera answered, and said no more.
They made their way out of the building by another route than the way they entered. Every step was precarious, and more than once they had to climb over wobbly mounds of brick, leaning tangles of collapsed timbers, or dusty piles of furniture.
Once free of their temporary shelter, Zera led them deeper into the city. They crossed open areas in a crouched run, hugged walls between places that offered cover. Where she stalked along leaving no trail, Leitos made a terrible racket no matter how he tried to mimic her stealth. She scowled at him when his foot loudly crunched through a slat of wood. Without a word, she placed his hand on her trailing shoulder, indicating with a look that he dare not let go. Soon after Zera halted in a dark alley.
“You are not telling me something,” Leitos whispered, but even that sounded too loud.
She eyed him a moment, then nodded in appreciation. “You are no fool, but your insight will earn you no comfort. The few Mahk’lar that have always resisted joining with the Faceless One,” she said, resuming her sneaking stride, “have hidden themselves away in order to build their own army. Some believe they mean to rise against both the Faceless One and humankind, and take the world they believe is rightfully theirs.”
Leitos swallowed. “An army of what?”
“Abominations, horrors unimagined by even the most depraved and forsaken mind,” Zera said. “Strange breeds of Alon’mahk’lar.”
“Is that why we are fleeing?” Leitos wondered aloud.
Instead of answering, Zera jerked him off the street and into a readily defensible nook created by a building’s collapsed side wall. In the same motion, she dropped into a crouch and dragged him down by her side. A long, slender dagger appeared in her hand.
Remembering the knife she had given him earlier, Leitos drew it from his satchel. In comparison to hers, it was a paltry example of a weapon. He waited, looking from Zera to the narrow, twisting street. Zera fixated on something, but he made out only darkness, outlines of collapsed buildings—
He detected a shape … a shadow within a shadow, low to the ground, sliding along in perfect silence. Something about the way it glided over the roadway, like a thick mist, raised the hair of his head. Once seen, he noticed more shapes like the first. Their paths seemed aimless, and thus unpredictable.
“Gods good and wise,” Zera breathed. Though just audible, her voice carried a note of fear that compounded Leitos’s own. “The city is overrun with Mahk’lar.”
“Then why did you bring us here?” Leitos demanded, his voice little more than a trembling hiss.
“Bone-towns have always been
haunts for Mahk’lar,” Zera said. “Stones of protection prevent them from possessing the living ... but I have never seen such a gathering.”
“What do we do?” Leitos asked, clutching the stone dangling from its leather cord around his neck, even as he wondered how a bit of polished rock could offer any defense against creatures of the Thousand Hells.
Before she could answer, a chill blade slid up Leitos’s spine. He flung himself against Zera, who first cursed his clumsiness, then went rigid, eyes locked on something over his shoulder.
Leitos wheeled. Within the darkness before his eyes hung something darker still, a total absence of light in the shape of no living creature he had ever seen. The blade that had caressed him was no blade at all, but a jagged, inky-black talon. That terrible claw raised up amid eight others, all spread in a wide fan. They slashed suddenly, almost playfully, across his face. Cold agony raked through one cheek, the bridge of his nose. He wrenched back with a garbled shout. With the pain came a brief flaring of dull blue light that originated from the stone of protection and raced over his skin, then dissipated in crackling sparks.
The Mahk’lar jerked away with a hiss, a twisted thing trailing wisps of vapor. A single gray eye centered in its forehead narrowed in hate. “Yours is a destiny cursed,” it snarled. “The age of men is an undying corpse longing for the reeking soil of the grave.” The demonic spirit said more as it retreated and vanished, the words spoken in a language beyond human understanding.
“Come,” Zera urged, rising from her knees.
Heart pounding, Leitos touched his face, and found the skin whole. “What of the Fallen?” he asked.
“Safeguarded as we are by the stones of protection, no Mahk’lar can harm our souls or our flesh, but their creations—the Alon’mahk’lar—can destroy us.” She dragged him up and over the rubble at their backs, and they dropped into a lightless alley.
Shaking off his revulsion, Leitos pulled his wrist from her grip. “I will follow.”
Heirs of the Fallen: Book 02 - Crown of the Setting Sun Page 10
