Heirs of the Fallen: Book 02 - Crown of the Setting Sun (20 page)

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 jackals, 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?”

“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.

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.