“No?” The figure shrugged slender shoulders. “Perhaps it only feels like that to me, what with trying to counter all that has changed of late.”
“I seek shelter,” Zera said. “Only for the night. As well, a team of burros and a cart.”
“I loathe to ask,” Suphtra said, not sounding troubled at all, “but with the burden of obligations increased of late, I would require payment before delivery.”
“I have swatarin,” Zera offered. She opened a leather packet to display a large bundle of dried leaves.
“A year gone,” he said regretfully, “such would have bought you a pair of horses to ride and an oxcart loaded with supplies. Now....” He let the unvoiced refusal hang between them a long moment, then said, “Gold is required.”
“Since when do Hunters, or even smugglers, trade in gold?” Zera blurted.
“We never have,” Suphtra said, “which is at the root of my problem. I was informed this morning past that should I wish to receive the king’s continued blindness to my trade, I would pay with gold, silver, or precious stones.”
Suphtra’s voice had risen in anger as he spoke, until he was near to yelling. “Long years have I helped keep the people of Zuladah passive for Rothran and the Faceless One’s empire! Now … now the king and the Faceless One take and take, leaving people with nothing. They are either fools … or they want to incite a rebellion. In the end, if the obligations continue to rise, it will not matter, for rebellion is what they will reap. Men can only be pushed so far before they break.”
Zera tugged open the throat of her tunic and withdrew her stone of protection. “Do not insult me by claiming these have become valueless.”
Suphtra sat forward, the ridge of his nose pressing like a blade into the bloody light falling from above. “There is nothing more precious than that,” he murmured. “I must ask, what madness would drive you to relinquish such a prize?”
Zera showed her teeth in a mirthless grin. “As you said, things have changed of late.”
Suphtra nodded and sat back, threw a leg over the arm of his chair, and raised a hand to his chin. “What have you there, another stray … and this one an escaped slave, if I do not miss my guess?”
Zera stood motionless, silent.
“There is no point hiding it—I see the set of his shoulders, the bow of his back. This boy has spent his life digging and hauling rock, for whatever purpose that serves the Faceless One.” When Zera still did not respond, Suphtra chuckled. “Have no fear, my girl. He is safe here, at least for a night, as are you.”
“He is escaped,” Zera admitted, but would say no more.
“And you mean to safeguard his freedom,” Suphtra said. “I understand. I do, truly. But you must know that yours is likely time and effort wasted … unless you mean to take him far from the reach of the Faceless One … and from your fellow Hunters?”
“I see not how this discussion has anything to do with shelter for a night and a pair of burros. Do you wish to trade for what I need, or not?”
“I taught you to barter better than that,” Suphtra chuckled. “You must find a common bond between yourself and those with whom you would trade, create a kinship of sorts. But we will come back to our negotiations. For now, I desire information—a most undervalued commodity. I want to understand why so many slaves of late have taken to fleeing their masters? Surely a Hunter must be privy to such knowledge.”
“I do not know what you mean,” Zera said, sounding curious despite herself.
“Perhaps you do not,” Suphtra allowed. “Because I value our relationship, I will tell you some of the things that have come to my ear. By my count, there have been no less than a dozen escapes this year alone, and countless attempts—before that, perhaps one or two in a year. It seems reasonable to assume that even the slaves are growing restless.
“What’s more, rumors have it that some mines have been abandoned, the slaves chained like dogs and left to die, their masters simply gone. Other tales point to stirrings in the far west, skirmishes, murdered Alon’mahk’lar. Other whisperings say that the bone-towns—never safe at the best of times—are worse than ever, overrun by Mahk’lar and strange, twisted breeds of Alon’mahk’lar.”
Leitos flinched involuntarily at that, but Suphtra continued as if he had not noticed.
“Something, dear girl, has changed in the order of things, something for the worse, something not seen since the Upheaval.”
“I’m sure you will work your way around it,” Zera said. “You always have.”
He shook his head. “Not this time. I’m getting too old to play these tired games, too old to adjust to changes … too old, perhaps, to continue serving the Alon’mahk’lar and their pet king.”
“What are you saying?” Zera asked.
“War is coming—that is the change I sense. I do not know who will start it—humankind or demon-spawn—but it is coming.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“When all is taken,” Suphtra said slowly, “your family, your home, the very food you eat … when all that is stolen away, and there is nothing at all left to live for, men stop caring whether they live or die. Some will look to death, and whatever waits beyond the grave, as the better choice. The same can be said of the Mahk’lar, those which had free reign to haunt dead towns, but are now as much the slave as humans. War,” he said again, “is coming, because the Faceless One has miscalculated his strength and his perceived divinity.”
“You may be right,” Zera said, “but for now what might come to pass has no interest to me. I need shelter, burros, and a cart.” She held silent for a moment, then added with an edge in her voice, “And no one must know that either I or the boy were here.”
“How is Sandros these days?” the smuggler asked. “And Pathil? I have not seen either in Zuladah for some time.” He sounded merely curious, but Leitos sensed otherwise.
Zera glowered for a moment, then threw her hands up in surrender. “Very well,” she said, catching hold of the leather thong around Leitos’s neck, from which hung his stone of protection. With a deft twist, she pulled the amulet free. “Surely this will seal your lips.”
Suphtra gave her a look of mock astonishment. “You mistake me, dear girl. I would never betray you. Not for any price!”
“Indeed,” Zera growled, to which Suphtra laughed merrily.
Chapter 21
Leitos startled awake. Night’s black face, adorned with slashes of dim moonlight peeked through the gaps in the shutter of the room’s lone window. The raucous noise that had earlier filled Suphtra’s debauched refuge had ceased, and so too the racket upon the streets of Zuladah.
Zera, a faint lump on a pallet across the room, slumbered on. Her long, even breaths calmed him, but still he listened, waiting. Something had brought him out of a sound sleep.
The moments stretched, the silence held, and his eyelids grew heavy again. Zera murmured in her sleep, rolled over onto her back, went still. Caught between sleep and waking, Leitos heard again Suphtra’s warnings of change and coming war, leading him to wonder where he would be in a month … a year … in ten. He could scarcely imagine what the morrow would bring. As sleepiness stole over him, thoughts of the future, or anything for that matter, faded to nothing.
A rattle at the door made his eyes flare wide. Just another drunken reveler, lost and wandering. There had been many after they settled in the room Suphtra had given them for the night, enough that Zera had lost her patience and struck the last fool to barge in, knocking him unconscious. She dumped him in the hallway, and the presence of the bleeding brute had put an end to unwelcome visitors. Before falling into her blankets, Zera had made sure the door was bolted, and then shoved a heavy chest in front of it for good measure.
The latch jiggled again, softly. Instead of some grumbling fool throwing a shoulder against the door, there seemed to be an element of stealth with this would-be intruder.
Leitos sat up, straining to see. A blade, its keen edge crawling with a gl
eam of moonlight, pushed slowly between the gap of the door and the doorframe. It slid up, clicked almost inaudibly against the iron bolt’s shaft, then began wiggling gently in a bid to slide it loose.
“Zera,” Leitos hissed. “Wake up.”
She sighed peacefully.
Leitos flung his blankets aside and crawled over to her, cringing at ever pop and creak of the dusty floorboards. “Zera!” he said, his nose an inch from hers.
Her eyes blinked open, dancing with a muted emerald glow. “Why have you waited so long?” she murmured, as if still asleep. “Do you find me displeasing?”
Leitos stammered a senseless response, cleared his throat and started again. “There’s trouble. Someone … someone is trying to get—”
Her fingers curled around the back of his neck and his teeth clicked together, cutting off anything else he might have added. He had no mind to resist as she slowly pulled him down. A sound akin to distant wind filled his ears as their lips met, Zera’s heat mingling with his own, searing away all thoughts, all concerns. Unresisting, he pressed against her—
Zera’s eyes suddenly bulged, the sleepiness blasted away by a full, infuriated awareness. “What are you doing?” she asked coolly.
“M-me?” he babbled, trying to disentangle himself from her grasp. Her once gentle and caressing fingers had become like iron. “I … I—” he faltered. Then he remembered, and his heart skipped into a gallop. “There is someone—”
The door exploded inward. Shards rained down around Leitos and Zera. With impossible strength, she threw him to one side. He revolved through open space, struck a wall, and dropped to his rumpled pallet. Before he could right himself, Zera was on her feet, advancing on the grinning figure that filled the doorway—the Hunter, Sandros!
“You conniving bitch!” he snarled, rushing forward. His feet slammed into the old chest Zera had placed before the door. It had moved when he broke through, but not enough to help. The Hunter crashed down with a string of vile curses. Zera ended them with a thudding kick to his rage-twisted face. His head snapped back, then slammed forward to strike the floor.
Another figure slid through the doorway. “Is that any way to treat a friend?” Pathil asked, his white teeth a gleaming line splitting the dark skin of his face. Before Zera could react, another voice spoke from behind him.
“Give over the stray, and you can go.”
“Suphtra?” Zera said softly. “How could you betray me to the likes of these rogues?”
“We cannot resist the rule of the Faceless One. To thrive we must pay a price, make sacrifices—”
Zera moved before he could finish. One moment Pathil was standing between her and Suphtra, the next his limp body crashed into one corner of the room and thumped to the floor, and Zera had vanished into the hallway. A thick tearing sound cut off Suphtra’s squawk of fear. All sounds of the brief struggle gave way to a horrid bubbling noise.
Zera stalked back into the room. “Get your things.”
Leitos thrust what little he possessed into his satchel, then his eyes found Pathil. Something about the way the Hunter lay on the floor wrenched at Leitos. After a moment, he realized the man’s torso had been twisted like a damp rag, his spine folded in half until the back of his head pressed against his heels.
A pattering sound around Zera’s feet drew Leitos’s attention. She swayed slightly. “You are hurt,” Leitos blurted.
“We cannot delay,” Zera said, ignoring his concern.
“Damn you, Zera,” Pathil mumbled. The Hunter’s mangled flesh was changing, healing—
Lakaan burst into the room. “Let us be gone!”
Zera caught hold of Leitos and shoved him past Lakaan. In the dim hallway, Suphtra sat against the wall, one leg splayed out, the other bent under him. A bloody dagger lay a few inches from his limp hand. His eyes had rolled up to show the whites. Most of his throat was gone … not slashed, but torn away.
Then they were running down the hallway. Drawn by all the commotion, bleary-eyed men and women popped out of their rooms to see what was afoot.
Lakaan bawled, “Run, you damnable sheep! For your miserable lives, get away!” Where his thundering cries failed to spur them into flight, his battering shoulders slammed them aside.
Shouts of confusion followed in their wake, but the trio did not slow. Lakaan continued to smash his way through the crowd, while Leitos stayed at his heels, propelled by Zera’s firm hand.
They charged down the stairs. From there, they turned down another hallway lined with doorways hung with sheer curtains. Leitos noticed Zera’s hand leave his back.
Without slowing, he cast a look over his shoulder to find her halted, a burning candle in one hand, and a swatch of gauzy curtain in the other. She touched the flame to the material. Bearing aloft that makeshift torch, she lit every curtain she passed.
As the flames spread up the walls, quickly growing into a conflagration, pandemonium exploded behind them. In all that chaos of flame, roiling smoke, screaming and running people, Zera followed, her eyes burning bright and fierce like twin bores opened to some unknown realm of Geh’shinnom’atar. When the panicked shouts became howls of agony, she dropped the flaming material and ran.
Lakaan took them through a maze of hallways until bursting through a door that opened onto a broad street. From there he turned and raced along, keeping close to the front of several different buildings.
By then people were streaming out of Suphtra’s fiery deathtrap. Leitos looked back and found Sandros and Pathil, both seemingly larger than they had been before, smashing aside the shrieking throng. In the light of leaping flames, and through the haze of smoke, the two Hunters barely looked like men.
Lakaan turned down an alley, and the two were blessedly gone from sight. Leitos was uncertain if they had been seen, but he added his minuscule strength to help drive the lumbering brute ahead of him. Lakaan seemed to be slowing, his gasps were loud and wheezy, but with both Leitos and Zera now pushing him along, he managed to keep a brisk pace. After some long moments, twisting and turning at each new alley or street, the sounds of terror faded behind them.
“Do you know where you are going,” Zera demanded, “or are you just rabbiting along?”
Lakaan made a fair attempt to respond, but only managed a series of gasps. In the end, he gave up trying to speak and ran on.
Perhaps sheer terror overwhelmed him, or the rush of blood through his brain, but Leitos envisioned the man’s huge buttocks as a pair of heaving boulders trapped under a blanket, and he fell into a fit of hysterical laughter. Lakaan kept on, but Zera’s hand caught hold of his cloak, her fist bunching the material between his shoulder blades.
“Are you daft?” Zera snapped against his ear.
Leitos, tears streaming down his cheeks, could only answer by shaking his head and pointing at Lakaan’s swaying backside. Zera’s brow furrowed. A moment more and her lips quirked toward a smile. Then, all at once, she burst out laughing. Their merriment ended when Lakaan halted.
“By all the gods,” he panted, mouth gaping wide to draw breath, “what are you two going on about?” Sweat beaded on his brow, dribbled over his fleshy jaw.
“Never mind,” Zera said, struggling to hold back a gale of mirth. “Where are we going?”
Lakaan took a dozen deep breaths before he could respond. Even then, his answer came in fits and starts. “There … across the street … one of Suphtra’s stables. He … had me … ready a cart and a team of burros … before those hunting bastards came.”
At the mention of Sandros and Pathil, the last of Leitos’s hilarity dried up. “Are they—”
“They are Hunters,” Zera interrupted. “They need be nothing more for us to make haste from this damnable city, with all its deceitful friends.”
“Suphtra would not have betrayed you,” Lakaan said, sounding doubtful. “The Hunters forced him to it.”
“Am I to believe,” Zera said icily, “that when Suphtra tried to gut me after I dealt with those jack
als, it was a mistake? Or was it because he thought my blood would adorn his blade so prettily?”
“He stabbed you?” Lakaan gasped. “But … why would he want a cart prepared for you?”
“A ruse for you, Lakaan,” Zera said gently, “so that you would never doubt him, and so that you would be out of the way when he betrayed me.”
Leitos remembered the pattering sounds around Zera’s feet, just before they fled the room. “We must tend your wounds.”
“Later,” Zera said. “Take us to this cart, Lakaan … that is, unless, you have decided to turn against me as well?” That she had winced when she moved was not lost on Leitos.
Lakaan recoiled at her accusation. “You know me better than that, Zera,” he said with a dejected sigh.
He turned away and searched the street. Nothing moved, and quiet held sway. Leitos could almost believe Sandros and Pathil were not after them, that Suphtra’s building was not, even now, charring to cinders … that Zera was not slowly bleeding to death.
He touched her arm, drawing her attention. The strange inner light normally burning in her eyes had faded, and her movements seemed sluggish. She swayed more than ever. “We have to stop the bleeding,” he said, mustering all the calm authority he could.
For a moment he thought she would castigate him, but she relented and gave him a wan smile. “I will see to that. There is time—believe me, I know.”
With no choice but to accept her assurance, Leitos nodded. He moved closer. She surprised him by draping an arm across his thin shoulders. He took her weight and wrapped a hand around her waist, his fingers sinking into the blood soaking her cloak. She hissed in pain at his touch, and gently moved his hand lower. “Keep a firm grip,” she said, leaning more heavily on him.
“All is clear,” Lakaan said. He trundled into the open, angling across the street toward a low, squat building with a rail fence jutting off one side.
“Lakaan?” a tremulous voice called out when the trio came within a few paces of a set of wide doors.
“Be at ease, Toron, it is I,” Lakaan answered. “Is all in order?”
Heirs of the Fallen: Book 02 - Crown of the Setting Sun Page 15
