Leitos had no head for such scheming, and decided to leave it to her.
The day passed, a seemingly endless flight under scorching heat and blinding sunlight, across a dead land filled with sand and dust and scrub. The only good Leitos could count was that the Hunter’s furious cry had not come again, suggesting that Zera’s poison had done its work. But Sandros would follow at some point, of that Leitos had no doubt.
By the time they reached the second bone-town two days later, all Leitos really cared about was water. Zera had doled out sips from a waterskin along the way, always giving him a greater measure than she herself took. In addition, she occasionally fed him hard strips of leathery, salty meat. “It is not much,” she said once, “but it will keep up your strength.”
On the rare occasions Zera bothered to say anything, she usually sounded like that-distant, as if talking to herself. The Hunter had also spoken to himself. But then, who else do they usually have to speak with, other than themselves? In a strange way, he suspected the Hunters were as much slaves as he had been.
The second bone-town resembled the first, a forsaken habitation of crumbled buildings and smashed palaces, all surrounded by a fallen warding wall. The only true difference was the size. With nightfall coming swiftly, he judged that the first bone-town had been a mere village next to the second. Leitos imagined the city as it had been before the Upheaval, a thriving capital of some lost kingdom, filled not with thousands of people, but tens of thousands. For the barest moment the illusion held, the grandeur of life made all the more believable by the golden glow cast by the dwindling sunlight….
Then the sun sank below the horizon, and the inviting city of gold and light transformed into a vast and open crypt bathed in blood. The false allure withdrew, revealing a haunt of jackals and carrion birds, lost spirits and lurking shadows. Jagged and misshapen, the bones of what forgotten men had built rose toward the coming night, as if in supplication for an unattainable mercy.
“Leitos,” Zera said softly, concern furrowing her brow, “are you well?”
Leitos pulled back from the dismal trance. “Yes,” he lied. He had not known the people who had once lived in the city, did not even know its name, but he felt those long-dead people around him, as if they yet lived.
Avenge the blood of our forefathers. That command now meant more to Leitos, and he was beginning to understand why his grandfather had given his life. He had wanted freedom for Leitos, but more, he desired that all men would one day live free of the Faceless One’s bondage. But how, grandfather, can I accomplish what you died for? At that moment, Leitos felt weaker than ever.
“Are you sure you were not bitten by something?” Zera asked sharply, catching his head in her hands and studying his face. “You look sick.”
Leitos froze, mesmerized by the color and depth of her eyes. Her skin was hot against his, her closeness pressing in. With a sigh, all the world seemed to pass away, leaving only him and Zera. Dust coated her cheeks and brow, but could not mar the smoothness of her skin. His pulse raced at the thought of drawing nearer, of falling into her embrace, of pressing his lips against hers-
As though by an unspoken command, they moved away from each other. A little breathless, and wholly confused, Leitos nodded belatedly at her question. “I am just thirsty and hungry,” he said, almost choking on the words. Had she seen into his mind, or read his features?
After a final lingering glance that seemed, ever so briefly, to mirror his uncertainty, Zera swept her gaze over the nearby ruins. “Better if we had reached the far side of the city before dark,” she said, “but there is nothing for that now.”
“I am not too tired to go on,” Leitos offered. That was an absolute lie, but he would rather press on, than set camp and try to act like his mind had not run rampant with amorous thoughts.
“Bone-towns are dangerous at any time, but more so after the sun falls,” Zera said. She pointed out a large building. Blocky and plain, it squatted in shadow like a broken thing just inside the collapsed city gate. “We will shelter there.”
Zera led the way to an area in front of the building littered with cracked paving stones. She sat Leitos down on a sturdy bench pulled from under a pile of rubble. Without a word of explanation, she walked back into the street, now enshrouded by the coming night. It was hard to see what she was up to, but for a long moment she appeared to be getting undressed. Sweat sprang up on Leitos’s brow. When he realized that she had only taken off her cloak, he breathed easier.
She strode to the city gate and, using her cloak like a broom, she whisked away all evidence of their passage back to where Leitos was sitting.
“What about our tracks outside the city?” Leitos asked, compelled to learn from Zera the same way he had learned from the Hunter.
Zera shot him a devious grin. “Sandros-and Pathil, if he chooses to follow that brute-will believe I am taking you to Zuladah to gain my reward. The road south is the safest and fastest way to get you there, so there is no reason to hide our route. But when they find that our tracks end at the gate, they will have two choices: waste time by searching the entire city, on the chance that I am up to something else, or try to get ahead and catch us on the road. Either way, they will have to take time to try and outwit me, which gives us more time to outwit them.”
“Could they do that?” Leitos asked, worried more about what they might do to Zera than to him. “Could they get ahead of us, even with the poison you gave them?”
“Anything is possible,” she admitted, “but highly unlikely. Because Sandros is so large a man, I sprinkled a double measure of poison in the wine-much to Pathil’s regret, I am sure.”
“But that shout,” Leitos said. “That did not sound like someone who was poisoned.”
Zera gave him a flat look. “Do not doubt me, boy.”
Chagrined, Leitos shrugged. “I still do not understand why you let them live.”
“I am not in the habit of repeating myself,” Zera snapped. “But because you seem rather slow of mind, I will explain it to you once more. A true Hunter takes great pleasure in besting their fellows, and leaves them alive to spread the tale of how they were outwitted, thus earning the respect of other Hunters and, more importantly, the trust of the Alon’mahk’lar.”
Leitos held silent, and Zera produced a skein of dark cord from her satchel and strung it low off the ground, crisscrossing it over all available paths needed to enter their shelter. After creating a nearly undetectable web, she anchored the cord’s ends to various bits of rubble. To the last, those pieces sat precariously upon other debris, and Leitos guessed that if any careless searcher passed by, their feet would tangle in the cord and drag down enough bricks to make a terrible racket. Even if her web was detected, there was no way to breach it without the same end.
While she worked to perfect her trap, Leitos thought about what she had said about Hunters, and decided that it sounded like a baffling game, and said as much.
Moving sections of the cord to more satisfactory places, Zera nodded absently. “Indeed it is, and all the world of men is forced to play by the rules and pleasure of the Faceless One. Living and dying, scheming against one another, these things come naturally enough, but the Faceless One and his Alon’mahk’lar have raised the stakes, disallowing any escape when you grow weary of the sport.”
“What does the Faceless One hope to gain?”
Zera shrugged. “No one really knows. Some think his motivation is simply an abiding love for brutality. Others believe he has another goal in mind, some unknown secret, and that he pits men against each other to distract them from his true ends. For me, all that matters is destroying the Faceless One and his hordes. That is what I live for, and what I will die for. It is for others to decide what happens after.”