Heirs of the Fallen: Book 02 - Crown of the Setting Sun

by James A. West

  “Yes, but I feared you were not coming,” Toron said, popping up from behind a pair of barrels sitting to one side of the stable doors. Clad in an ankle-length, dirty white tunic, he was as slight as Leitos and two hands shorter. He started at sounds not there, and his hands fidgeted at his waist. The boy was shaking from head to toe.

  Lakaan eyed him a moment, then opened one stable door and vanished into the waiting gloom. Leitos and Zera came next, followed by Toron. As soon as the boy closed the door, Lakaan caught his shoulders. “Where is your father?”

  Toron squeaked and tried to worm away. After a moment, he gave up. “Sons of the Fallen,” he said in a fearful whisper. “They took him, not long after you came earlier. The patrols are everywhere this night.”

  “Alon’mahk’lar taking prisoners?” Lakaan thought about that, then turned the boy and gave him a swat on the backside to get him moving. “Get yourself to bed, boy. If anyone calls at your door, do not answer.”

  “Is my father coming back?” Toron asked, tears in his voice.

  Lakaan nodded. “Nimah knows what he is about, boy, trust in that. He will return.”

  Leitos was not sure he believed that, but Lakaan’s pledge held enough promise for Toron. The boy bobbed his head and scurried away.

  “You two get the cart,” Zera spoke up, each word an effort. “I’ll follow at a distance.”

  “Where are we heading?” Lakaan asked.

  “West,” Zera said, “as far as the road will take you.”

  Lakaan’s face tightened, but he did not argue.

  Zera pulled away from Leitos and staggered deeper into the stable. Leitos tried to follow, but she waved him off. “I’ll be fine. Just go. Hurry.”

  “Come along, boy,” Lakaan rumbled, clapping a huge hand on his shoulder. “She is not new to this game.”

  With a reluctant nod, Leitos followed after Lakaan’s lumbering bulk. He cast a lingering glance at the patch of darkness into which Zera had vanished.

  Lakaan led them to a stall that let out on the fenced paddock. Within the stall waited a pair of burros harnessed to a cart that, by Leitos’s estimation, should have been broken up and used for a cook fire many years before. Lakaan peeled back the tattered canvas stretched over the back of the cart’s bed, revealing several bundles, tall clay pots with hempen cords to secure their tops, tools similar to those used in mines, and coils of rope. Satisfied, Lakaan replaced the tarp.

  “If we are halted by anyone,” Lakaan warned, “keep your mouth shut, and let me do the talking. I’m just a poor crofter with need to dig a well, and you are my mute bastard.”

  “What about Zera?”

  Lakaan gave him a quizzical look. “I should not have to tell you, boy, that Zera can take care of herself—anything you or I do on her account will only foul things up.”

  “She is injured,” Leitos said, thinking that she must be, even now, bandaging her wound to staunch the flow of blood.

  “That is when a Hunter—her in particular—is most dangerous,” Lakaan said uneasily, as if he wanted no dealings with Zera at her most lethal.

  Leitos peered into the motionless gloom, but saw no sign of Zera. He imagined her slumped in some dark corner, emerald eyes fading to a hint of their former luster, glazing over—

  Leitos spun away from Lakaan and moved back toward the shadows where Zera had vanished. He had left her at the gorge, but not this time, never again. Every step he took eased the burden on his heart. He was done leaving behind those he loved.

  Love? The word filled him with a storm of joyful confusion. What do I know of love? His pace quickened, as if carrying him away from the thought. Perhaps he was deluded, perhaps not, but in the end all that mattered was that he had to get back to Zera and help as he could.

  Heavy footsteps sounded behind him. Without slowing, he looked over his shoulder. Lakaan bore down on him, face set in a scowl. “We will go when Zera is safe,” Leitos said.

  “We will do as she told us,” Lakaan responded, reaching out.

  Leitos quickened his pace. I am coming, Zera—

  A stony fist crashed into the back of his head, catapulting Leitos into the dirt. Dazed, he rolled over, trying to get his bearings. His arms and legs refused to work right, and Lakaan’s bulk swam into view. The big man struck him again, and a false night fell over Leitos.

  Chapter 22

  A pale splash of rose and gold washed away the night’s persistent indigo stain. The air cooled in the hour before first light, giving Leitos something to consider besides Zera’s absence, Lakaan’s abuses, and his own aching head.

  Feet padding along between the cart’s thin wheel tracks, Leitos walked with his face lost in the shadow of his hood. When he had come to, he found himself trussed in the back of the cart, the canvas rolled back. Twisting about, he had seen the night-shrouded desert, but no sign of Zuladah.

  After they had progressed a few more miles, Lakaan had halted the burros and freed Leitos with a warning. “Try and run back, boy, and I’ll beat you again—I don’t want to, but I’d rather suffer your anger than Zera’s vengeance.” At Leitos’s look of concern, the big man had added in a gentler tone, “Trust that she is well, boy. A little scratch cannot stop the likes of her.”

  When the sun was high, and his anger had faded, Leitos moved up beside Lakaan. “That seemed too easy,” he said. Having failed to distract himself from thinking of what Zera might be facing, he had no choice but to speak with Lakaan. Behind them, the road shimmered under the already hot sun, and ran in a dusty line back to the east. On either side, withered brush dotted a parched land of sand and pitted rock.

  Lakaan kept his squinty eyes on the road ahead, now climbing up the flank of a tabletop plateau. Sweat glistened in his closely shorn black hair, dripped over skin the color of timeworn leather. His jowls seemed more flabby than they had in the dark of night. “What was easy?” he panted.

  “Escaping,” Leitos said, trying to keep his voice even. Despite being unconscious at the time, it seemed that simply walking away from those who hunted them should have proved far more difficult. “That boy at the stables, Toron, he said his father was taken, that Alon’mahk’lar patrols were everywhere. Sandros and Pathil were after us, too. How did we just walk out of Zuladah?”

  “Could be that Zera had a hand in misdirecting our enemies,” Lakaan allowed. “Far as getting out of the city, well … it has always served me well to be everyone’s friend—even if I hate them.”

  Leitos’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “How do you hate a friend?”

  Lakaan explained, “Something I learned from Suphtra—curse his black heart. A man has few true friends, but many cunning enemies. If you are unwary, they take all you have and leave you a corpse in the gutter.” He nodded to himself, then went on.

  “A clever fellow will play the fool, give up a few gems, but secretly turn the table and steal the lot for himself. That, boy, is what Suphtra did to me and Zera. I was a fool to trust that bastard as much as I did, but have no doubt he was a clever, thieving son-of-a-whore.”

  As they crested the plateau an hour later, Lakaan halted the burros with a yank on the lead ropes. “Past time for a drink and a meal.” His gap-toothed smile changed him from a hulking brute into an overlarge child. Leitos could not help but grin in return.

  They shared a loaf of bread and drank water from one of the cisterns, never moving from the middle of the road. As their desolate surroundings heated under the climbing sun, a lizard darted over hot sand to take shelter in the shade of a thorn bush.

  Leitos focused on the mountains far to the west. The Mountains of Fire. They jutted black and sharp, an occasional peak spewing a thin plume of smoke, which the wind tore apart and drove south in a hazy gray line. Over the Sea of Sha’uul, hidden now behind the curve of the horizon, that haze billowed anew, growing into gleaming white thunderheads.

  “Will we wait for Zera?” Leitos asked.

  “No,” Lakaan said. “She will find us. That is what she doe
s. We will go as far as the road takes us, as she ordered.”

  Leitos looked back at the Mountains of Fire. “And how far is that?”

  “Farther than I have ever been,” Lakaan admitted, blinking away a drop of sweat. “Perhaps farther than anyone has been since before the Upheaval. No one really knows, for this is a land long forsaken by gods and men.”

  Leitos did not mention the Brothers of the Crimson Shield, but Lakaan’s opinion troubled him. What if that mysterious order did not exist? They must be real, he told himself, otherwise Zera was a liar, and he refused to believe that.

  “Let’s put this daylight to proper use,” Lakaan said, and they set out again.

  The plateau rose a bit higher, then began a steady drop into a strange land of waterless canyons and gorges, towering stone spires, and steep hills of weathered boulders. By late in the day, as the road meandered around stony obstacles, the Mountains of Fire were lost to sight. Leitos and Lakaan trudged along without talking. The only sound came from the cart’s wheels grating over the roadway.

  The road continued to snake its way through deep canyons that offered surprisingly cool shade at all times, save midday. When the sun hovered at its zenith, escape from the oppressive heat was impossible. Whether in sunlight or shadow, Lakaan sweated new rings into his grimy tunic, and kept up a ceaseless lament over his rumbling belly. That complaining, initially humorous, quickly became tiresome. Leitos bore it all, always watching for Zera. And as ever, all that lay behind them were their own pursuing tracks pressed into the dust of the road. She will come … she must.

  Many days passed on their westward march, until Leitos lost all track of time’s passage. They had to replenish the cisterns with water dug from the sandy soil. The digging reminded Leitos of life in the mines. But when he drank, he did so relishing his freedom.

  Their supply of bread dwindled faster than the water, and what remained became hard and tasteless. Leitos did not complain. It was food, it soothed the empty ache in his belly, kept his stride firm. Lakaan protested bitterly, until he remembered a sling hidden away within their supplies. With startling skill, he deftly took down the occasional hare, and a glut of lizards and adders. If it moved, it was food to Lakaan.

  Leitos was eyeing Lakaan’s bulk one day, thinking that the man looked decidedly smaller than when he had met him, when the road took a sharp turn, and began climbing out of the endless maze of canyons, gullies, and ravines.

  By that evening, they crested a steep slope, and halted before a landscape that numbed Leitos’s senses.

  “Good thing we filled the cisterns this morning,” Lakaan said, his voice tinged with the same dread that filled Leitos’s chest.

  Far nearer than before, the Mountains of Fire jutted off a sprawling plain dominated by pillowed black and gray rock, and interspersed by pockets of yellowed grass that swayed in the wind. Like a line of frozen waves, the craggy mountain peaks reached higher than Leitos believed possible. The columns of smoke he had thought were billowing off the peaks, actually originated from deep, sharp-edged crevasses running up the flanks of the mountains.

  He was startled to see that white crowned the very highest peaks—snow and ice, Leitos knew at once. Adham had often spoke of the ice fields of the far north that never diminished, no matter the heat of summer in the lowlands. Leitos saw all this at a glance, and at the same instant recognized that there could be no passable route over such a barrier.

  Carried by contrary winds, a bitter reek wafted over Leitos and Lakaan. Both fell into a fits of coughing, and the burros flattened their ears and brayed in affront. As quickly as the offensive odor came it departed, leaving man and beast with the gift of watering eyes and flaring nostrils.

  “Brimstone,” Lakaan wheezed in disgust. “Damnable rock as far as the eye can see, no water, and surely no food.”

  “You wail like a teething babe,” a placid voice said behind them.

  Leitos spun, a startled cry locked in his throat. Lakaan cut loose with a garbled squeal and dashed forward a few ungainly paces, then tripped over his own feet. He landed with a grunt and rolled over, one arm flailing in a desperate warding gesture.

  Zera gazed at them from farther down the road, eyes twinkling green mirth. With a backdrop of mazelike canyons spread out for leagues behind her, she appeared lessened in stature, but still dangerous—Beautifully so, Leitos thought.

  He ran forward and halted before her. “Your wounds?” he asked, reaching out to touch her shoulder, just to make sure she was real.

  “My wounds are mending nicely,” she laughed, catching him in her arms. He eagerly returned the hug, then drew back, feeling awkward and out of sorts.

  Her lips quirked toward a smile, and she gave him a questioning look. Thankfully, Lakaan spoke up, sparing Leitos the effort of trying to voice his jumbled thoughts.

  “I had nearly given up hope that you escaped Zuladah,” Lakaan said, grunting as he gained his feet. “Where have you been?”

  “First we eat,” Zera said, holding up a string loaded with a half dozen scrawny, gray-brown hares. She threw her arm around Leitos, pulled him close, and whispered, “Let your heart be at ease, I am well.”

  Leitos smiled. “I am glad you’re back … that is we—Lakaan and I—are glad you are safe.” He shut his mouth before he started babbling.

  “I am happy you’re happy,” she said, and playfully elbowed his ribs. In that moment, all returned to normal, and a weight seemed to fall off Leitos’s shoulders. “Now it is time to eat. I am starving!”

  As they set camp, night settled heavy and dark. After feeding and watering the burros, Leitos and the others fed themselves. In the flickering firelight, Zera licked the grease off her fingers from the last roasted hare with the same greedy zeal as Lakaan.

  Leitos was more reserved, picking the stringy meat off the bone. He could not keep his eyes off Zera, nor could he shake his awe of her. He had not known that he had built up any expectations of what he would find when she returned to them, but he had. The woman sitting cross-legged across the fire from him did not resemble, in any way, who he had believed he would see.

  With little water to spare for washing, her face was as grimy as his and Lakaan’s. She wore the dirt better than either of them. And where Lakaan’s girth had dwindled, and the already scant flesh covering Leitos’s arms had thinned, Zera appeared as if she had never gone a day in her life without food. Perhaps she had not—she was a Hunter, after all. There was also no sign she had been gravely injured, as she moved without a hint of pain.

  “Getting out of the city was not so difficult,” she said now, continuing the story she had begun while they prepared their camp. “It was not the first time I have had to climb a city wall.”

  “What of your wounds—” Leitos began, falling silent when Zera held up a hand.

  “Were not so grievous as I first believed,” she said, flashing him a mollifying grin. “I’ll carry a scar, have no doubt, but it will serve as a reminder of the foolishness for trusting the likes of Suphtra.”

  “Even I believed he was loyal,” Lakaan mumbled.

  “He was,” Zera said, “if only to himself. I cannot fault him for that. But when he made the choice to turn on me, he sealed his own fate.”

  “Did anyone follow you beyond Zuladah?” Leitos asked.

  “I hope so,” Zera said. “I left a trail that headed straight to the harbor. With so many fishermen coming and going, it will be assumed that I escaped on fisherman’s skiff.”

  “What about Sandros and Pathil?” Leitos asked, having decided that they must not have been as grievously injured as he first believed. As to thinking that they had begun to change form, he knew well enough that terror had a way of twisting the mind. When he fled the mines, such fright had made him see a slavemaster that had not been there.

  “No doubt, they are cursing me even now,” Zera said proudly. “Although, they must know by now that I never intended to hand you over to the Alon’mahk’lar. I suppose my days as a H
unter are finished.”

  “I’ve heard enough,” Lakaan grumbled, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. He rose and shuffled beyond the firelight and fell into his blankets. “If trouble comes,” he called, “keep it to yourself.”

  “If there is trouble,” Zera whispered to Leitos, “it will have come and gone before we can wake him.”

  “Do you think there is any danger coming?” Leitos asked, looking to the east. Far away, he thought he could hear a voice on the wind moaning through the canyons.

  “Of course,” Zera said. “These lands—all lands—are full of menace … especially for humankind. Keep on your guard, but do not worry yourself into a panic over what might be.”

  “I tried to come back for you,” Leitos said hesitantly, “at the stable.”

  Zera gave him a reassuring grin. “I know you did, and I thank you.” With mock sternness, she added, “But I told you to go on without me. Trust that when I give you an order, it is for the best—for both of us.”

  Leitos nodded. Silence fell between them, underlain by the soft crackle of burning twigs. A jackal yipped, another answered. A star streaked across the sky, a brief and violent flaring, then was gone.

  “Will you sleep with me?” Zera asked quietly. Leitos almost swallowed his tongue. “This close to the mountains,” she went on, unaware of his shock, “it is cold at night. We can share our warmth.”

  “Good idea,” Leitos said after clearing his throat.

  He looked to the mountains in question, thankful for the distraction. There had been no question in his mind how they had derived their name, what with all the smoke, but in the night, it became all the more obvious. Deep red, meandering veins crept down the mountains’ flanks. “What manner of fire is that?” he asked.

  Zera looked from him to the west. “It’s molten rock,” she said absently. “It bubbles up from deep vents that, some say, reach to the very bowels of the Thousand Hells.” She chuckled as if that belief was the height of absurdity.

  Neither stirred for a long time. Zera sat lost in thought, while Leitos did everything he could to avoid thinking. The fire died slowly, until only faint embers glowed under layers of ash.