Heirs of the Fallen: Book 02 - Crown of the Setting Sun (24 page)

When the sun hovered directly overhead, Leitos realized that the sounds of pursuit had stopped. He tried to remember if they had ceased all at once, or gradually fallen behind, and decided on the latter. Stroking along and drawing deep, even breaths, he looked for Ba’Sel, but saw only trees overhanging the rippling blue-green river, its surface dancing with sunlight. He could almost imagine there was no danger.

Ba’Sel gave Leitos a start when he materialized on the riverbank up ahead. He looked around, spotted Leitos, then slipped into the water. When he was close, he motioned for Leitos to swim toward the opposite shore.

“The wolves are busy hunting ghosts for their
Alon’mahk’lar
brothers,” Ba’Sel said with a broad grin, “but as they are not strictly
Alon’mahk’lar
, they are more cunning beasts than the slavemasters you faced in the mines.”

“What do you mean the wolves are not
Alon’mahk’lar
?” Leitos asked in confusion.

“What they are is of no matter, at the moment,” Ba’Sel said, leading them on.

After climbing back onto dry land, they trotted themselves dry, heading south and west until late in the day, climbing one hill after another. The forest of cool shade and dappled sunlight thinned to groves, separated by wide fields of sparse grass and jutting rock.

Having come to appreciate the cover provided by the forest, being exposed left Leitos continually glancing in all directions. In doing so, he found that the forest was only a thin green band, perhaps a league wide, following the river near the base of the Mountains of Fire. Beyond that, the desert began to impose itself again.

By dusk, the rugged hills had become sandstone plateaus. It was a familiar landscape, but Leitos felt no love for it. Neither did he want to run any farther. He struggled to remember a time when he had not been running and hiding.

Ba’Sel paused amid a patch of dusty green sagebrush, plucked a handful of foliage, and vigorously rubbed it on the soles of his boots, instructing Leitos to do the same. “Wolves can track far better than their predecessors—those you would know as slavemasters. But with a little help,” he said, holding up the ruined bit of sage, “we will become just another stinking weed in their noses. Come, we still have many miles to travel before we can rest.”

That was the last thing Leitos wanted to hear, but he plodded after Ba’Sel. As it always did, the sun fell fast over the desert, and the black of night followed just as swiftly. Jackals took up the hunt, calling out to one another in voices that seemed to speak of struggle and hardship. The waning moon rose, highlighting the slumbering landscape in a weak glow.

Leitos was asleep on his feet when a horn’s wail jerked him and Ba’Sel to a halt. For the first time since meeting him, Leitos thought he saw something besides calm in the man’s demeanor. It was not anxiety that showed on his face so much as outrage.

“How could they have found us so easily?” Leitos asked, dismayed.

“I do not know,” Ba’Sel growled, and sped up.

Leitos struggled to keep pace, searched for the strength fear would lend him, but he was either beyond such helpful terror, or his muscles simply had nothing left to give. He soon fell behind. Each breath tore at his lungs, and his legs swung in slow, numb arcs. Without question, the
Alon’mahk’lar
and the wolves were closing the gap.

Something snagged his toe, and Leitos sprawled in the dirt. He tried to stand, but his body refused to cooperate. His lungs heaved. When he looked up, blood dripped from his smashed lips to his chin. Of Ba’Sel, the man had disappeared!

As Leitos struggled to his knees, a guttural howl turned his head. Not more than a dozen paces off, two crimson eyes rushed toward him. A heartbeat more and a brutish wolf materialized from the gloom, racing toward him at full speed.

I am dead
, Leitos thought with no surprise or burst of terror. Instead it was a calm musing, vaguely remorseful, and undeniably the truth. He had run his last.

A
strong hand caught his hood and dragged him into a hidden cleft in the ground. For the barest moment, Leitos imagined an underworld demon taking him into
Geh’shinnom’atar
. Where he had been strangely calm before, now he fought, the will to survive giving him a wild, desperate strength. Another hand clapped over his mouth and he bit down. No matter what he did, the creature dragging him down into the earth was relentless and strong. Complete darkness closed over him, and dust clogged his nostrils.

“Be still,” Ba’Sel snapped.

Relief poured through Leitos and he relaxed, allowing Ba’Sel to run, carrying him like a sack. The warrior’s labored breathing was harsh and erratic, amplified by the close confines. His footsteps thudded like a drumbeat. A howl from behind seemed to slam into them with physical force, and then the shriek of claws tearing at rock filled the narrow space.

“We will make it,” Ba’Sel muttered to himself. He kept repeating those words, as if they were a command. All at once he flung Leitos ahead, and he bounced off a rough stone wall and sprawled in the sand.

Ba’Sel’s figure danced between the advancing wolves’ burning red eyes and Leitos. There came a grating noise that drowned out the wolf’s growls, then a roar of falling stone filled the passageway. Dust billowed, leaving Leitos coughing uncontrollably.

Rough hands pulled him to his feet, and Ba’Sel wheezed, “We must keep going. They will soon dig their way through.”

Despite his warning, he moved away and rummaged around back toward the rock fall. The sound of metal scraping over stone, followed by a shower of sparks, drew Leitos’s attention.

In the stuttering light, Ba’Sel knelt over something, his back toward Leitos. The light vanished, leaving a dizzying afterimage. The flickering flash came again … faded … then a small flame burst to life on the end of a torch. Resin-dipped rushes flared bright with a hissing crackle, and Ba’Sel stood up. The natural passage proved no wider than two men abreast, and the ceiling hung a bare inch above the warrior’s head.

He handed Leitos a pair of unlit torches taken from a niche in the wall near the rock fall. “We are far from safety, and even that refuge may be in question now,” he said without explanation. “We must hurry.”

Cradling the torches, Leitos hurried after Ba’Sel. The passage twisted and turned, with many new passages branching off into the darkness. Footprints dimpled the sandy floor, but he could not have guessed how old they were.

Only when Ba’Sel’s torch began guttering out did Leitos see the first indication that people did more than walk these dark ways. At the junction of four passages, two small clay pots sat in a niche in the wall. Both had tops sealed with wax. After lighting a second torch, Ba’Sel cocked his head, listening. Far, far away, the grinding sounds of shifting rock slithered toward them.

“They are not through yet,” Ba’Sel said, relieved.

He handed Leitos the burning torch and moved to the clay pots. After studying faint markings on the tops of each, he chose one and went a little way down the passage. Leitos held the torch high, moving his head back and forth in a bid to see what the brother was up to.

Ba’Sel worked with haste, but carefully. After using a knife to slice away the wax, he set the top aside and poured a measure of thin oil into a bowl cleverly concealed behind a knuckle of stone protruding from the wall. He did the same on the other side, then made his way farther down the corridor, performing the same task a half a dozen times, until he was twenty or more paces back the way they had come.

Leitos studied the closest bowl and found that a small wooden lever sat under its bottom edge, and attached to that was a very fine black string. The line zigzagged back and forth from the bowls to the low ceiling through a series of tiny, nearly invisible metal rings. Like the first bowl, all the subsequent bowls, metal rings, and the line were invisible to anyone coming the way Ba’Sel had brought them. The last thing the warrior did was to unwind a tail of the line and stretch it low over the ground, farther down the passage from the last bowl. As he worked, the line tensed and released, jiggling the levers under the bowls.

When Ba’Sel came back and retrieved the second pot, he answered Leitos’s questioning look. “I am setting a snare. This,” he said, slicing the wax off the clay container, “is a gift given us soon after the Faceless One rose to power. An old woman, Hya of the Sisters of Najihar, showed us how to make it, just before her long years took her from us.”

“What is it?” Leitos asked, careful not to touch anything, as he followed Ba’Sel to the farthest bowl.

“The Blood of Attandaeus,” Ba’Sel said grimly. “The Nectar of Judgment. A single drop of any liquid sets it alight—we use oil, because it flows better and does not splash so easily as water. Nothing can smother its fire before it has burned away.”

Ba’Sel knelt on the ground and brushed clear a line in the sand, revealing a thin slat of wood. He pried up the slat and set it aside. Below waited a deep, narrow groove etched into solid rock. One end was open to a sloping gutter gouged in the wall under the bowl of oil waiting above.

With excruciating care, Ba’Sel filled the groove on the floor with what looked like glimmering crimson sand, replaced the slat, and then covered it with sand. They retreated a little way, and he repeated the task. By the time he began filling the fifth groove, sweat glistened on his brow. He daubed it away with his sleeve, took a few deep, calming breaths, and continued until the last groove was filled and covered. While he had no doubt of the destructive nature of fire, Leitos wondered aloud how such a trap could work.

“When the first enemy trips that far line,” Ba’Sel said, pointing down the passage, all the bowls tip at once. The oil is thin and flows fast, but not too fast. Once it ignites the Blood of Attandaeus, even a running intruder will not have passed this point before the flames trap it. Anyone or anything behind it will also be consumed.”

“What if more come,” Leitos asked, “after the first wave?”

Ba’Sel smiled humorlessly. “My brothers and I can set enough traps to destroy a small army. They may not be needed, for even the most bloodthirsty
Alon’mahk’lar
fears death enough to reconsider a useless attack. Nevertheless, I will set all I can.”

True to his word, Ba’Sel set many more traps along the way. The first two were rock falls like the one he had used to block their pursuers, the next was an even more elaborate snare using the Blood of Attandaeus, in which crumbly clay pipes routed the deadly substance overhead, and also along the ground. Other traps employed unseen mechanisms that hurled darts tipped in poison, or hinged grates arrayed with wicked iron spikes. The farther they went, the more deadly the contraptions became.

“They have to be,” Ba’Sel said, when Leitos asked after the reason. “If an enemy is tenacious enough to come so far, then they are truly a deadly foe.”

“Has an enemy ever come so far?”

“Only in our first Sanctuary,” Ba’Sel said, tying off a trip line which would unleash a fall of dust that, he explained, was laced with powder from a plant that dissolved the eyes and liquefied the lungs.

As they pressed on, he spoke of another matter. “Rumors say that the Faceless One is tightening his grip across Geldain, perhaps all the world. I have heard that the bone-towns are teeming with
Mahk’lar
and strange
Alon’mahk’lar
, not those brutish wretches that serve as slavemasters, but other
things
. Neither I nor my brothers know what this means, but there can be no question that the world is changing. I fear that the darkest days since the Upheaval are before us.”

“I was in a bone-town overrun with
Mahk’lar
and their vile creations,” Leitos said. “With Zera.”

Ba’Sel seemed about to say something, but then pressed his lips together, and led them into a series of ever tighter passages. At one point the main passage took a sharp turn around a jut of stone. Instead of continuing on, the brother circled around the protruding rock and got down on his hands and knees. “Stay close,” he advised.

They followed the flickering torchlight into a suffocating crevice. Going forward proved to be sweaty work that forced them to contort themselves around sharp rocks and tight corners. They finally emerged in a small chamber. In the wall to one side, a small opening overlooked a pool of water far below.

Ba’Sel raised his torch, showing an arched doorway at one end of the chamber, and beyond a near vertical set of steps leading down. At the top of the stairs a bronze disk splotched with green corrosion hung by a length of rope attached to an iron ring set in the ceiling. Ba’Sel rapped the disk twice in rapid succession with the hilt of his dagger. The resonant notes filled the chamber and echoed away.

“This will let my brothers know one of their own has returned.” When the disk fell silent, he struck it three more times. “That,” he said, “will tell them death follows close at my heels.”

Leitos cringed. “Won’t that lead the
Alon’mahk’lar
and the wolves to us?”

“If they are through the first barrier, they will hear the gong as easily as my brothers,” Ba’Sel said. “But beyond this grotto, the alarm sounds as if it is coming from all directions, making it hard to pinpoint. My brothers standing watch up ahead will hear it and repeat the message. Farther along, other guards will do the same, until the Sanctuary is alerted to the coming danger.”

Ba’Sel led them down the steep steps. Leitos abandoned counting the stairs after he passed three hundred. Soon after, his weary legs buckled and he stumbled into Ba’Sel. The warrior’s quick grab pulled him back from falling into the well of darkness that waited on their left side.

“Unless you can fly,” Ba’Sel said, firmly placing him nearer to the wall, “you may not want to go that way.”

Leitos swallowed. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply until the quivering in his legs subsided.

“Can you continue?” Ba’Sel asked patiently.

Leitos nodded, hoping they were almost to the Sanctuary.