Heirs of the Fallen: Book 02 - Crown of the Setting Sun (18 page)

“Come,” Zera said, drawing him away. “All belongs to the king, and what is the king’s belongs to the Faceless One.”

“Is there nothing that can be done?”

“Indeed,” Zera answered. “The better question is would it be worthwhile to die by halting one small trouble of many hundreds in a given day?”

“She needs help,” Leitos insisted, pulling away from Zera.

“Perhaps one day you can help, if you still have the mind and will to do so—but not this day.”

Leitos flinched when the woman began screaming, a high crystalline wail that sliced to his soul. He was turning back when Zera wrenched him around.

“Keep your fool head down,” she said in an icy, uncompromising voice. “There are greater troubles in this land than that of one idiot’s wife and their wretched get. He should have let the guards have what they would, without a contrary word. Now he has lost what little he was allowed to have. Short days from now, even his life will be taken from him.”

Leitos went along, unable to do otherwise with Zera’s grip threatening to pop his head from his neck. Behind them the woman’s screams ceased with a finality that brought to mind images of a sudden and violent end. Leitos thought he might vomit, but managed to quell the urge. The throng of people behaved as if they had neither heard nor seen anything out of the ordinary.

And, of course, they did not
, Leitos thought darkly. To them such screams, such groundless outrages against their fellows, must be commonplace to the point of acceptance.

“How can people live like this?” he demanded. “How can they tolerate such injustice?”

Zera looked askance at him, as if to confirm to herself that he would not do anything foolish, then released his neck. “They do not know or expect anything else. This way of life is all they have ever known.”
And so it is with slaves
, Leitos thought.

They went deeper into the city. The life he had believed he would see was no life at all. Rather it was a twisted, accursed form of living death. Listless trading went on everywhere: grain for stunted vegetables, vegetables for tiny loaves of hard bread, bread for wedges of moldy cheese, cheese for coarse cloth. Goods of every sort were bartered, but at the end of it no one seemed better off for what little they had gained. Having food this day meant going hungry on the morrow, when food would be needed to trade for some other necessity.

King’s guards strode every street ahead of high-wheeled wagons. With a word and a cuff to the head, they took additional obligations in the name of the king, and tossed them into the wagons.

“What can one man do with all that,” Leitos asked.

“King Rothran is little more than a provincial gaoler of Zuladah and its nearby territories, which in turn is but a parcel of land that serves as an open prison in this region of Geldain. There are many such kings of the same purpose across this and all lands. They are men chosen by the
Alon’mahk’lar
hierarchy to serve as the human representative of the Faceless One.”

She stepped into a crowded alley reeking of excrement, urine, and sweat. “As to what is done with all the obligations,” Zera went on, “King Rothran makes a fine show of squandering them for his
Alon’mahk’lar
masters, while at the same time secretly hoarding much wealth.”

“Why hide anything?” Leitos asked.

“Humans are forbidden to amass wealth or goods—this keeps them weak, and ensures that they can never have the means to mount a rebellion—not that Rothran would ever risk his position by staging a revolt.

“At the behest of his
Alon’mahk’lar
minders, Rothran provides feasts and entertainment behind the high walls of the palace.
Alon’mahk’lar
are the true authority here, yet they are rarely seen. Again, this is to keep humans eyes on the wrong enemy—Rothran and each other.”

“
Is
he an enemy?” Leitos asked.

“Yes,” Zera answered, cleaving through the press to come out on another crowded, dust-hazed street. She looked one way then another, and moved off to the south. “Not all kings are willing foes to their own kind, but Rothran takes pleasure in proving he is on the side of the Faceless One.”

“And what does he gain?” Leitos asked.

Zera ducked into the shadow of a building, pulling Leitos close. “Besides a pampered existence, he gains
purpose
denied the common rabble,” she said quietly. “Every day he rises for a single purpose: to serve the Faceless One.”

“And these others?” Leitos asked, watching a woman draped in colorful rags saunter from the doorway of a building across the street. She was more bone than enticing flesh, but she pressed herself against a passing guard. After fondling her a moment, he shoved her away with a lewd comment and a slap to her bony rump. Undeterred, the woman moved to another guard. “What keeps them from giving up all hope?”

Even as she answered he knew the truth, for he had lived it. “As I said before, this life is what they have, it is who they are. For most, even a worthless existence is not so easily abandoned for the cold emptiness of the grave.”

“I … I want more than
this
,” Leitos muttered.

Zera grinned without humor. “I should hope so. If not, then I have wasted my time dragging your scrawny shanks across the desert and through
Mahk’lar
-ridden bone-towns, ever just a few steps ahead of Sandros and Pathil.”

The way she mentioned the Hunters caught his attention. “Have you seen them?”

“Did you think I took us down that last alley because I enjoyed the stench?” Leitos shrugged uncomfortably at her waspish response. Zera’s hard expression relaxed. “Forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” Leitos said, meaning every word. “I should have been paying closer attention—I have travelled with Hunters long enough to know better than to let anything pass unnoticed.”

Zera gripped his shoulder to show her approval. “As to my counterparts,” she went on, “I noticed Sandros just after we passed through the city gate. Had it not been for that potter and his family, Sandros would have seen us.”

“He told me once that he could smell fear,” Leitos offered, making light of it.

“Sandros
can
,” Zera assured him gravely. “That is precisely why I trudged through privy-leavings and gods know what else—to make sure he loses our scent. As to Pathil, his skills favor shadow and night. Best not to let either of them catch us unawares.”

“What will we do?” Leitos asked, the city abruptly seeming far more dangerous. “Where will we go?”

“I know of a place.”

Zera said little else as they moved through the city’s warren of streets. She walked differently than before, her back bent, shoulders drooping, as if all the weight of the world were bearing her down. Leitos mimicked her movements.

Hours passed, and Zera never slowed. It took almost that long for Leitos to recognize they often crossed streets they had been on before, and a little longer still to understand that she was mingling their scent in a confusing pattern all over the city. It chilled him to think that a man such as Sandros—or any man, for that matter—could track a scent as would a jackal or a vulture.

Zera finally paused before a gray-bearded man pushing a cart bearing a large clay cistern, its rounded sides damp with condensation. His eyes, filmed in white, stared at nothing while he sniffed at a pair of dried red leaves Zera held in her hand.

“A dozen leaves for two dippers of water,” the wizened fellow said.

“Has
swatarin
become so commonplace as that?” Zera questioned. “For a dozen leaves, you have enough water to fill our waterskins to brimming, and give over that loaf of bread you have tucked away.”

The old man grumped and huffed, cried that if he had to give up his bread he would likely die before he could put the
swatarin
to proper use, but it was all for show. Even as he prattled on about how Zera was cheating him, he was dipping water into the skins, never spilling a drop despite his blindness.

When finished, he held out his hand for the
swatarin
. Zera countered with a demand for the bread. In the end, they settled by exchanging one for the other at the same time. Leitos noticed that Zera secretly added two additional leaves into the old man’s stack. As he tooled his cart away, using a gnarled thumb to recount the leaves held in his palm, he discovered the extras and hooted in delight, then fell silent. Shoulders hunched, he hurried away, losing himself in the crowd.

Zera chuckled to herself, tore off a chunk of bread for her and Leitos, and began moving off in a new direction.

“What is so special about
swatarin
leaves,” Leitos asked around a mouthful of bread. He had heard that name before, but it held no meaning to him.

“A little
swatarin
, taken in tea or with wine, eases aches and pains of every sort. It is as valuable, or more, as firemoss.”

Leitos asked what seemed an obvious question. “If a little does that, what does a lot do?”

“In quantity,” Zera said, nibbling her bread, eyes roving, “
swatarin
brings terrible visions, some say of the Thousand Hells and of demons. Before the Upheaval, the
Madi’yin
priesthood—or begging brothers—were said to indulge in the darker nature of
swatarin
, hoping to gain secret knowledge of the future.”

“Did they find that wisdom?” Leitos asked.

Zera snorted. “Since that order died out during the Upheaval, I would say no—either that or they misinterpreted what their visions showed them.”

After leading them to a part of the city with fewer people, Zera turned down a narrow alley. Scanning the ground, she slowed halfway between the street they had left and the next one. She kicked aside a maggot-ridden heap of offal, revealing a smallish circle fashioned from rusted iron straps. Through the openings in the straps, Leitos heard a sluggish, oozing trickle of some unspeakable fluid … and squeaking, the restless voices of countless vermin.

He knew what she intended, even before she knelt down and wrenched the circle of iron clear of a recessed groove carved into the paving stones. Leitos could not hold back the revolted groan in his throat.

“This is the only way to truly throw Sandros off our trail,” she said, a faint line of consternation between her pinched brows. “As I have never made a habit of wandering sewers, it may take longer than I wish to find our way.”

Taking a seat with his feet dangling down into the hole, Leitos sighed, closed his mind to the stench and the sounds wafting up through the narrow portal, and dropped into darkness.

S
oggy gruel roared up his spasming throat, burst past his teeth, and sprayed over the seething tangle of rats at his feet.

“Gods good and wise,” Zera growled, her face ashen, “would you
please
stop doing that!”

Leitos looked up, eyes burning from a stench so foul he could taste in on the air—

He doubled over, spewing. When his belly eased, he straightened, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “We need to get out of here.” For hours they had wandered in the sewers, and Zera’s earlier warning about taking longer to find their way repeated loudly in Leitos’s head.

At first the sewer grates, bright with filtered daylight, had marked out various paths. The light had gradually dimmed, then failed altogether with nightfall. If not for Zera’s firemoss lamp to light the low, narrow ways, Leitos feared he might have gone mad at the way the darkness slithered—

A plump, sable body squirmed over his feet, trailing a pinkish tail. He held still. Dancing about only drove the rats into a squealing frenzy.

“We are almost there,” Zera said with a relieved sigh. Leitos did not bother asking where
there
was. It did not matter to him, as long as they could escape the close confines.

True to her word, Zera scuffled through the waves of rats with an indifference he at once admired and envied, then halted below a grate. She listened a moment, carefully reached up, and pushed it aside. Next, she pulled herself up and out of the sewer.

Leitos took Zera’s waiting hands, and she hauled him out, depositing him amid a scatter of discarded crates. They hunkered in an alley. On either end, men and women moved by in the night, their demeanor different from earlier in the day. Arm in arm, swaying and singing they went, hurling jovial curses at any and all. Song and music meandered through the narrows ways, climbed the pocked walls of the buildings, mingling with boisterous laughter and ribald shouts.

Leitos would not name it merrymaking, for the noise carried upon its breath the flavor of anger. Restrained though it was, rage lurked, sought an escape. It made him wonder just how accepting people really were of the abuses heaped upon them. He sensed that one small gust might coax a guttering flame into an inferno.

“Follow me,” Zera said. “Keep your hood up, now, and say nothing.”

They had not gone far when a hulking figure rose up from the ground beside a closed door. Leitos’s heart skipped a beat, certain that all their efforts to evade Sandros had failed. But it was not the Hunter, could not be, unless he had grown.

“Stand aside,” Zera said, her sword flashing out, “or I’ll hew off your stones and feed them to you.”

The figure’s broad, flabby jaw thrust forward. “
Zera?
By the gods good and dead,” he rumbled, twisting the axiom with a dry chuckle. “Haven’t seen you in an age.”

Zera peered at the hulking shadow, still poised to destroy. “Lakaan? I did not recognize … are you
thinner
?”

“I am,” the monstrous fellow said morosely, patting the swollen bulk of his hanging belly with a huge hand. “The demand for obligations has risen again. It has gotten so a rogue must scrounge for even a bite of stale bread. And do not speak of getting ahead.”

Zera sheathed her sword. “I believe that is the point,” she laughed darkly.

“Of course,” Lakaan agreed, “but it is worse than ever. The king and his dogs now leave folk with but a tenth to trade. Suphtra, as always, takes no more than a tenth of a tenth in payment, which means I go hungry. It is …
felonious
,” he complained.