Heirs of the Fallen: Book 02 - Crown of the Setting Sun (17 page)

BOOK: Heirs of the Fallen: Book 02 - Crown of the Setting Sun
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With a sudden blur of speed she was on him, a breathtaking hunter, him the hapless prey. She loomed, her face inches from his. Her lips stretched, and for a moment gleaming white teeth and twin portals of a green inferno filled his vision.

She abruptly caught the back of his head and drew him close. “Before we sup,” she growled playfully, “I must tend your wounds.”

“W-what?” Leitos rasped, his wounds that last thing on his mind.

“Your hand,” Zera said, sitting back on her heels. One moment she was there, so close his skin still held the memory of her faint heat; the next she had moved away, leaving him with a disturbing sense of loss. Her gaze flickered to his hand.

Leitos blinked rapidly, trying to understand what had just happened. To keep Zera from seeing the confusion in his eyes, he looked down at his hand, the same he had slashed while retrieving his knife when fighting the
Alon’mahk’lar
. He had forgotten about cutting himself, and during the night the wounds had clotted. Swimming and climbing in and out of the pool had reopened the cuts. Blood, a scrawl of thin reddish ink, stained the pale skin of his palm.

He was still looking at his wounds when Zera moved closer, until their knees touched. Stricken by conflicting thoughts—
Is she playing some perverse game? Am I a gullible, self-deceiving fool?
—he had not noticed that she had gotten up and returned with supplies. He looked into her face, then quickly away, resolving not to let her ensnare him again by whatever baffling charms she had used before.

Without speaking, she used a rounded wooden rod to grind together a mixture of dried leaves and water in a stone bowl. Once finished, she dipped her fingers into the thick, foul-smelling paste, then daubed a layer on his wounds. Finally, she bandaged his hand with a scrap of faded brown linen. Through it all, her touch was delicate and sure, suggesting she had done the same for others, even herself, many times before.

When at last she glanced up, she did so with a contriteness that troubled Leitos. Hers was not a face made for regrets. “I am sorry I toyed with you,” she said in a rush. Leitos felt a flash of vindication, then tamped it down. He did not want to revel in her apparent shame. She went on.

“A Hunter uses learned skills, but more importantly they employ inborn talents to manipulate their targets. Some of those traits are crude weapons—like Sandros with his great size and fierceness—while others are subtle, and the more deadly for it.”

“Like your beauty,” Leitos said, not thinking about the words until after they had passed his lips. His face flamed.

“Just so,” Zera agreed, flashing a brief smile that was both shy and pained. “I … I would not have—
should not have
—tempted you so. You and I are friends, and a friend cannot be a target.” Zera hung her head, looking like a vulnerable girl. “It’s just that … well … I have never failed to entice a man to desire, even when I do not try. But you … you seemed not to notice me as … as a woman.”

For a moment Leitos was stunned, his mouth hanging, then he burst out laughing. “Of course I noticed you,” he said, and barely cut himself short from describing all that he had noticed, how even with his eyes closed he could see every tantalizing inch of her. Instead he repeated himself. “I noticed you. I could not have done otherwise.” Even that sounded as if it bordered on lechery rather than praise, so he shut up.

Zera sat up straighter, a serious look on her face. “Again, I am sorry. And, I promise never to attempt to seduce you in jest again.”

Leitos shrugged reflexively, but his heart fell, and he felt more confused than ever.

“After our supper, you can sleep on the cot,” she said, the Hunter once more. “I have rested enough, so I will keep watch.”

As she spoke, she retrieved her garments and hastily drew them on. “We have only a few more hours before we must depart, and a night of hard travel after that. On the morrow, we will reach Zuladah.”

Chapter 19

A
s the sun rose over Zuladah, Leitos and Zera strode amid an ever-increasing throng of crofters and craftsmen. Trapped in a shallow valley, cloaked in a haze of dust kicked up by its denizens, the city emerged like a wraith escaping a reddish-gold mist. Leitos’s exhaustion evaporated at seeing their destination, so like the bone-towns in construction, but different in that it teemed with life—
human
life.

Men with sons, women with daughters and suckling babes, all walked at a slow pace. Others utilized burros, oxen, goats, or their own scrawny backs and legs to draw rickety carts stacked with assorted goods.

“All that the city needs, and that which the Faceless One demands in duties, comes by this road,” Zera said. “As well, fishmongers come from the south,” she added, raising a finger to direct his gaze, “from the Sea of Sha’uul.”

His breath caught when he realized that the sunlight glinting in the distance did so off a body of water stretching as far as he could see to the east, and just as far to the west. He knew of seas from his grandfather, namely the Sea of Drakarra, but hearing about so much water and seeing it with your own eyes was another matter entirely.
I can even smell it
, he thought, understanding now what unfamiliar scent had been tickling his nose half the night.

His wonder ceased when they passed by a trio made up of a man, woman, and boy shambling along at a slower pace than the rest. The man used a switch to goad a slat-ribbed ox hauling a flatbed cart with wobbly, much-mended wheels. The bed bore rows upon rows of carefully stacked pottery. Though young, the man and woman both had stooped backs and cracked, dry hands that looked like they belonged to people much older. This last, Leitos supposed, came from working clay into vessels.

The small family gazed ahead with hollow, hungry eyes, looking neither left nor right. Alerted to their misery, Leitos saw the same wherever he looked. Every face was gaunt. Their skin clung tight against underlying bones.
None of them look any different than the men of the mines
. He had believed the unchained would be more vital and hale. Instead, all looked a short pace from their own graves.

The road to Zuladah dropped off the gently sloping edge of a long plateau, and Leitos soon lost sight of the distant sea. He wished it were otherwise. Seeing so much water had brought to mind the stories his grandfather had told about the voyage across the Sea of Drakarra, enlivened some slumbering part of him to the idea of sailing those seas. There would be a freedom upon those waters, he felt sure, a means of escape unmatched by leagues of desert or even towering mountains.

Furtive movement drew his eye to a hooded fellow off to one side. He was walking the same as the others, weary and stooped, but he kept darting glances at Zera. In the shadows of his hood, Leitos made out wide fearful eyes and trembling lips. The man saw Leitos looking and ducked his head. One skeletal hand hurriedly drew his hood farther forward, obscuring his face. Leitos’s concern grew to alarm when he noticed that many people were looking at Zera that way, with a mingling of fear and unbridled hatred.

Before he could speak, Zera said, “Ignore them. If they ever got it into their minds to attack all at once, they might prove dangerous. But they never will, for fear of what would happen to them for assaulting an agent of the Faceless One.”

“They can tell … just by looking at you?” Leitos asked.

“Can you not?” Zera asked, one eyebrow arched.

Leitos allowed that he could see the difference. From the way she walked with head held high, back firm and strong and straight, and the grace of her movements, there was nothing about her that did not shout to even the casual observer that she was not subject to the same bitter, scratching existence as the others. Authority and strength wafted off her person.

“They fear me more than they do the
Alon’mahk’lar
,” she said—sadly, Leitos thought. “They are right to do so. I am the Hunter, and on a whim any one of them, at any time, could become the prey. Such is another means by which the Faceless One rules effectively. A natural and shared abhorrence for the
Alon’mahk’lar
could lead to a focused rebellion, but the Faceless One has employed humans to stand above their fellows to enforce his edicts, ensuring humans harbor a strong mistrust for their own kind. Divided so, they are weak.”

Leitos remembered Sandros’s tale about his mother’s betrayal, how she had willingly murdered his father, and then sent him away with the
Alon’mahk’lar
. When you could not trust even your kin, an uprising could never happen. Not for the first time, he wondered how the Faceless One’s rule could ever be toppled.

For a time they walked in the silence of the road. While there was plenty of noise from ungreased axles, wheels grating over ancient paving stones, from hundreds of sandaled and bare feet scuffling through dust and sand, no one spoke. All that changed as they neared the city gates, standing open for the incoming tide of humanity.

At first Leitos only detected a monotonous mumbling. Then he deciphered the words, spoken in a low chanting.

From the darkness between the stars,

Came He, the Lord of Light,

To deliver peace and safety upon all lands.

Praise the Faceless One,

He who suffers the unworthy.

Praise the Faceless One,

He who blesses the contemptible.

Bow to His wisdom,

Bow to His righteous judgment.

Praise be to the Merciful One,

Praise be to the Lord of Light and Shadow.

Leitos’s skin crawled as the tuneless paean washed over him, repeated again and again by cracked lips and parched tongues. While no fervor flowed amongst the words, neither did any hint of resistance or doubt. To his mind, had these people been properly fed, they would have shouted the words, sung them out with zeal. And in years past, maybe they had.

Before reaching the main gates, Zera veered off to one side and addressed a tall, rawboned solider clad in voluminous trousers the color of sand, and a boiled leather breastplate bearing no insignia or mark of any sort. His arms flexed as he slanted his long spear across his chest. Like his brothers-in-arms, he was better fed than the common rabble, though just. Eyes black and stern, he peered at the two of them from an open-faced leather helm snugged tight to his skull.

Leitos thought trouble was coming, but the man simply inclined his head at Zera’s softly spoken words and said, “You and your prisoner may pass, Hunter.” He opened a small wooden door set in the wall, stood aside as they strode through, then closed the door behind them.

Past the small gate they again joined the steady trickle of incoming traders and crofters heading down a main thoroughfare that stretched ahead, arrow-straight. A young boy with a harried expression sprinted by, heading for the gatehouse. Leitos thought nothing of it, captivated as he was by the press of folk around him. They had not gone a hundred paces when a roared command drew up short those closest to hand.

“You there, potter, halt.
Halt
, damn you!”

Anyone with more than three ranks of people between them and the gates bustled ahead a little quicker. Everyone else froze in place. Zera kept on, Leitos at her side, craning his neck to see what was amiss.

A pair of guards marched briskly to the potter’s cart that Leitos had noted earlier. The man stood a little apart from his small family, as if in an attempt to draw the guards’ eyes from his wife and son.

“The king has sent word that he has a need for wares such as yours,” said the guard in command, fingering an ewer at the end of the cart.

At the door of the gatehouse, bent double with his hands on his knees and gasping for breath, waited the runner Leitos had seen. He had no preconceived expectations of what a king’s runner would look like, but the child seemed ill-suited and poorly clad to be a messenger of any highborn.

“Of course,” the potter mumbled, bobbing his head in acceptance. “But these vessels are poorly made, meant for trade amongst the lowborn, unfit for the king.”

The guard was unrelenting. “The lot of it
.

The potter’s placid gaze blossomed with alarm. “
All
of it?” he breathed. “If you take it all … I cannot trade for food, for cloth, for
clay
to make new pottery. You have already taken the required obligation, and more.”

Leitos halted. Weighing what he saw now and what he had noticed earlier, he judged that the cart bore far less than half the load it had earlier.

“Please,” the potter begged, “find another to fulfill the king’s need. When I return, I will bring more pots and pitchers, crocks and bowls, all finely made, a proper tribute to the king.”

“The lot,” the guard repeated. His eyes then fell to the ox. “And the beast, too. The king is feasting his court this night, and has need of meat.”

Desperation flooded the potter’s eyes. “This wretched creature is no fit fare for the king,” he babbled, running his boney hands over the beast’s even bonier flank. “If you take it, I cannot draw my cart … and if not that, I cannot meet the king’s required obligations.”

The guard struck the man a backhand blow, knocking him into the dust. A collective, fearful murmur went up amongst the crowd. Once curious eyes turned inward, and people began shuffling hurriedly away, as if afraid that what was befalling the potter was a catching sickness.

Lolling in the street, the potter groaned. The blow had smashed his lips, crushed his nose, and blood dribbled from both. Indifferent to the man’s suffering, the guard cast a leering grin at the potter’s wife and son. “Take them, as well,” he ordered his fellow. “The king can fatten them both … and use them as he will.”

The woman wrapped protective arms around her son, drawing him close, even as she backed away from the advancing guard. She made a sound then, a strange mewling, whimpery noise that caused a sickening wave of anger and disbelief to rush through Leitos.

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