“A Hunter uses learned skills, but more importantly they employ inborn talents to manipulate their targets. Some of those traits are crude weapons-like Sandros with his great size and fierceness-while others are subtle, and the more deadly for it.”
“Like your beauty,” Leitos said, not thinking about the words until after they had passed his lips. His face flamed.
“Just so,” Zera agreed, flashing a brief smile that was both shy and pained. “I … I would not have-should not have-tempted you so. You and I are friends, and a friend cannot be a target.” Zera hung her head, looking like a vulnerable girl. “It’s just that … well … I have never failed to entice a man to desire, even when I do not try. But you … you seemed not to notice me as … as a woman.”
For a moment Leitos was stunned, his mouth hanging, then he burst out laughing. “Of course I noticed you,” he said, and barely cut himself short from describing all that he had noticed, how even with his eyes closed he could see every tantalizing inch of her. Instead he repeated himself. “I noticed you. I could not have done otherwise.” Even that sounded as if it bordered on lechery rather than praise, so he shut up.
Zera sat up straighter, a serious look on her face. “Again, I am sorry. And, I promise never to attempt to seduce you in jest again.”
Leitos shrugged reflexively, but his heart fell, and he felt more confused than ever.
“After our supper, you can sleep on the cot,” she said, the Hunter once more. “I have rested enough, so I will keep watch.”
As she spoke, she retrieved her garments and hastily drew them on. “We have only a few more hours before we must depart, and a night of hard travel after that. On the morrow, we will reach Zuladah.”
Chapter 19
As the sun rose over Zuladah, Leitos and Zera strode amid an ever-increasing throng of crofters and craftsmen. Trapped in a shallow valley, cloaked in a haze of dust kicked up by its denizens, the city emerged like a wraith escaping a reddish-gold mist. Leitos’s exhaustion evaporated at seeing their destination, so like the bone-towns in construction, but different in that it teemed with life-human life.
Men with sons, women with daughters and suckling babes, all walked at a slow pace. Others utilized burros, oxen, goats, or their own scrawny backs and legs to draw rickety carts stacked with assorted goods.
“All that the city needs, and that which the Faceless One demands in duties, comes by this road,” Zera said. “As well, fishmongers come from the south,” she added, raising a finger to direct his gaze, “from the Sea of Sha’uul.”
His breath caught when he realized that the sunlight glinting in the distance did so off a body of water stretching as far as he could see to the east, and just as far to the west. He knew of seas from his grandfather, namely the Sea of Drakarra, but hearing about so much water and seeing it with your own eyes was another matter entirely. I can even smell it, he thought, understanding now what unfamiliar scent had been tickling his nose half the night.
His wonder ceased when they passed by a trio made up of a man, woman, and boy shambling along at a slower pace than the rest. The man used a switch to goad a slat-ribbed ox hauling a flatbed cart with wobbly, much-mended wheels. The bed bore rows upon rows of carefully stacked pottery. Though young, the man and woman both had stooped backs and cracked, dry hands that looked like they belonged to people much older. This last, Leitos supposed, came from working clay into vessels.
The small family gazed ahead with hollow, hungry eyes, looking neither left nor right. Alerted to their misery, Leitos saw the same wherever he looked. Every face was gaunt. Their skin clung tight against underlying bones. None of them look any different than the men of the mines. He had believed the unchained would be more vital and hale. Instead, all looked a short pace from their own graves.
The road to Zuladah dropped off the gently sloping edge of a long plateau, and Leitos soon lost sight of the distant sea. He wished it were otherwise. Seeing so much water had brought to mind the stories his grandfather had told about the voyage across the Sea of Drakarra, enlivened some slumbering part of him to the idea of sailing those seas. There would be a freedom upon those waters, he felt sure, a means of escape unmatched by leagues of desert or even towering mountains.
Furtive movement drew his eye to a hooded fellow off to one side. He was walking the same as the others, weary and stooped, but he kept darting glances at Zera. In the shadows of his hood, Leitos made out wide fearful eyes and trembling lips. The man saw Leitos looking and ducked his head. One skeletal hand hurriedly drew his hood farther forward, obscuring his face. Leitos’s concern grew to alarm when he noticed that many people were looking at Zera that way, with a mingling of fear and unbridled hatred.
Before he could speak, Zera said, “Ignore them. If they ever got it into their minds to attack all at once, they might prove dangerous. But they never will, for fear of what would happen to them for assaulting an agent of the Faceless One.”
“They can tell … just by looking at you?” Leitos asked.
“Can you not?” Zera asked, one eyebrow arched.
Leitos allowed that he could see the difference. From the way she walked with head held high, back firm and strong and straight, and the grace of her movements, there was nothing about her that did not shout to even the casual observer that she was not subject to the same bitter, scratching existence as the others. Authority and strength wafted off her person.
“They fear me more than they do the Alon’mahk’lar,” she said-sadly, Leitos thought. “They are right to do so. I am the Hunter, and on a whim any one of them, at any time, could become the prey. Such is another means by which the Faceless One rules effectively. A natural and shared abhorrence for the Alon’mahk’lar could lead to a focused rebellion, but the Faceless One has employed humans to stand above their fellows to enforce his edicts, ensuring humans harbor a strong mistrust for their own kind. Divided so, they are weak.”
Leitos remembered Sandros’s tale about his mother’s betrayal, how she had willingly murdered his father, and then sent him away with the Alon’mahk’lar. When you could not trust even your kin, an uprising could never happen. Not for the first time, he wondered how the Faceless One’s rule could ever be toppled.
For a time they walked in the silence of the road. While there was plenty of noise from ungreased axles, wheels grating over ancient paving stones, from hundreds of sandaled and bare feet scuffling through dust and sand, no one spoke. All that changed as they neared the city gates, standing open for the incoming tide of humanity.
At first Leitos only detected a monotonous mumbling. Then he deciphered the words, spoken in a low chanting.
From the darkness between the stars,
Came He, the Lord of Light,
To deliver peace and safety upon all lands.
Praise the Faceless One,
He who suffers the unworthy.
Praise the Faceless One,
He who blesses the contemptible.
Bow to His wisdom,
Bow to His righteous judgment.
Praise be to the Merciful One,
Praise be to the Lord of Light and Shadow.
Leitos’s skin crawled as the tuneless paean washed over him, repeated again and again by cracked lips and parched tongues. While no fervor flowed amongst the words, neither did any hint of resistance or doubt. To his mind, had these people been properly fed, they would have shouted the words, sung them out with zeal. And in years past, maybe they had.