Leitos stopped himself from saying how bleak that sounded.
“I trust you have a stone of protection?” Zera asked, drawing one similar to that which he wore from under the collar of her snug tunic. He nodded in answer, but she wanted to see it before believing him. She came close enough to fill him again with that stirring anxiety, then moved away, and led him into the building.
She halted just inside the entrance, dug through her satchel, and pulled out a palm-sized leather sack. Leitos gasped when she untied the drawstring and upended it, spilling a brightly glowing, pale amber glass orb into her hand.
“Firemoss,” she said in answer to his amazement. “When dry it casts no light, but add water and.…” She raised the glass ball, letting its radiance speak for itself. “It can only be harvested from the Qaharadin Marshes, north across the Sea of Drakarra-” her eyes found his “-your homeland.”
“That swamp lies far to the south of Izutar,” Leitos said, “so my grandfather told me.” At some point, Adham had mentioned firemoss as well, but Leitos had never expected to see any.
Zera shrugged at his correction and moved away, following the glow of firemoss. Leitos trailed after her, trying to focus on what the light showed, but finding his eyes drawn again and again to her silhouetted shape. While that was an attractive vision, his mind shifted, and he found himself basking in the idea of what her lips must feel like-
You are a fool, he scolded himself. There is nothing between us, and there never will be. Instead of relief, or a sense of acceptance, that idea brought only melancholy. You are a fool, he chided himself again.
They did not go far into the building before coming to a broad, square room filled with wooden furnishings so heavily dry-rotted as to be useless.
“This may have been the common room of an inn,” Zera said, placing the firemoss globe in a broken bowl sitting on a table. Instead of bread and cheese, she laid out a meal of water and more dried meat.
While he ate, Zera paced back and forth, the firemoss casting too small a glow to drive back the gloom. With each step she seemed to grow more agitated, and a deep frown pinched her brow.
“I must find water,” Zera muttered quietly. Before leaving, she pressed a short knife into his reluctant hand. “If anyone comes, defend yourself.” Leitos nodded, certain she was annoyed with him.
She left, depleted waterskins in hand, melding silently into the waiting shadows. Alone, Leitos worried off a bite of the leathery meat, but found it salty to the point of bitterness. He spat it out, wiped his lips, and stood up. He wandered aimlessly about the room, keeping at the verge between darkness and light.
There was nothing to see that did not bring to mind the futility of standing against the Faceless One: a human skull buried under a stack of broken benches, as if in some bygone era someone had hidden a friend or a loved one with all that was at hand; an abandoned packrat’s nest of twigs and straw and scraps of what might have been cloth but looked more like scraps of skin; shattered crockery and a collection of cracked wooden cups that would never again hold liquid.
All of it spoke of the failure to overcome the evil days that had befallen the world long before his birth. Yet, for the memory and love of his grandfather, he would take the path of vengeance Adham had set him upon. He would reach the Crown of the Setting Sun and find the Brothers of the Crimson Shield.
He settled under the table upon which the firemoss globe faintly glowed within a black void, and tucked one of the satchels under his head. He waited for Zera’s return, but sleep took him long before she came back.
Chapter 15
Zera hovered over Leitos. The emerald vibrancy of her eyes had dimmed, as had the glow of the firemoss, which now cast all in the sickly, greenish light of corruption. Everything looked wrong, skewed and malignant.
“Did you find water?” Leitos asked. Though it seemed the wrong question, he needed to hear her voice.
Instead of answering, she lifted her arm, her face as blank as that of a corpse. A solitary waterskin floated up, its neck clenched in her fist. It hung above him, bloated, leaking some reeking, honey-thick pestilence that collected on the underside in a single, quivering bead of moisture. Leitos tried to move away before it could fall, but an unseen force held him captive, constricted his chest. The droplet grew fatter … fatter … stretching toward its eventual release.
I cannot let it touch me, he thought, eyes growing wider with each passing moment. Try as he might, he could not shift even a finger. Within that drop, now the hue of poisoned, long-dead blood, his distorted reflection stared back, a terrified spirit-boy held captive by invisible bonds. “Please,” Leitos wailed, “do not do this … please.”
Zera’s pupils lost their shape, swirled like a befouled mist, devouring the dull green. Swiftly, that eddying darkness obscured even the whites of her eyes, then began to trickle over her cheeks. Hissing, those rivulets parted her flesh as though sliced with a keen blade, revealing the underlying bone.
“The age of men has ended,” she said hollowly. But it was not her voice, not anything human. “You are but a wasp without a sting, droning about its nest, smelling the smoke, but impotent against the coming inferno. Power never meant for mortals has nevertheless taken hold within their unworthy flesh. Better that you open your veins, than dare to stand against the coming tide of fire.”
Leitos’s gaze darted from the horror of Zera’s melting features to the engorged, venomous globule hanging from the waterskin-a corrosive fluid, surely the same substance that dribbled from her now oozing sockets. Then something stirred beneath her tunic, a pulsing, undulating, swelling movement that brought bile to the back of his throat. There is something inside her … trying to get out.
As if drawn by that thought, a vaporous thread wormed out of her forehead, another from her neck. More pierced her clothing. Before he could fully register what was happening, each of the threads had thickened to the size of his finger … his wrist … his thigh, nearly obscuring Zera. Their mottled surfaces rippled, dripped, thrashed. Bone broke apart with a sodden crunching noise. A wriggling stew boiled out of her ruptured skull, poured over her shoulders, splattered at her feet. Her mouth yawned to release a single, deep, resonant note.
Clapping his hands to his head, Leitos shut his eyes and screamed in a bid to block the sight and sound of the nightmarish vision-
Fingers, powerful and digging, caught hold of his arms and dragged him into a sitting position. He refused to open his eyes, and the hands holding him upright slid to cradle his face. “We must leave,” Zera said gently. It was her voice, the real Zera.
Leitos opened his eyes, expecting the worst, but finding all was as it should be, down to her blazing green gaze. “A nightmare,” he muttered. “It was … was….” He could not finish. No words could convey the horror of what he had seen, nor express his relief that it had not been real.
Zera hauled him to his feet. “You can tell me about it later,” she said, struggling for calm. “Now, we must flee.”
“Is there danger?” he asked, having no intention of recounting the nightmare.
Zera repacked the satchels while she spoke, her movements hurried, but not one wasted. “There is much of the world that you do not know. The Faceless One is powerful, but there are things worse than him.”
Leitos helped as he could, but mostly just got in the way. “What things?”
“Mahk’lar,” Zera said.