“At the behest of his Alon’mahk’lar minders, Rothran provides feasts and entertainment behind the high walls of the palace. Alon’mahk’lar are the true authority here, yet they are rarely seen. Again, this is to keep humans eyes on the wrong enemy-Rothran and each other.”
“Is he an enemy?” Leitos asked.
“Yes,” Zera answered, cleaving through the press to come out on another crowded, dust-hazed street. She looked one way then another, and moved off to the south. “Not all kings are willing foes to their own kind, but Rothran takes pleasure in proving he is on the side of the Faceless One.”
“And what does he gain?” Leitos asked.
Zera ducked into the shadow of a building, pulling Leitos close. “Besides a pampered existence, he gains purpose denied the common rabble,” she said quietly. “Every day he rises for a single purpose: to serve the Faceless One.”
“And these others?” Leitos asked, watching a woman draped in colorful rags saunter from the doorway of a building across the street. She was more bone than enticing flesh, but she pressed herself against a passing guard. After fondling her a moment, he shoved her away with a lewd comment and a slap to her bony rump. Undeterred, the woman moved to another guard. “What keeps them from giving up all hope?”
Even as she answered he knew the truth, for he had lived it. “As I said before, this life is what they have, it is who they are. For most, even a worthless existence is not so easily abandoned for the cold emptiness of the grave.”
“I … I want more than this,” Leitos muttered.
Zera grinned without humor. “I should hope so. If not, then I have wasted my time dragging your scrawny shanks across the desert and through Mahk’lar-ridden bone-towns, ever just a few steps ahead of Sandros and Pathil.”
The way she mentioned the Hunters caught his attention. “Have you seen them?”
“Did you think I took us down that last alley because I enjoyed the stench?” Leitos shrugged uncomfortably at her waspish response. Zera’s hard expression relaxed. “Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” Leitos said, meaning every word. “I should have been paying closer attention-I have travelled with Hunters long enough to know better than to let anything pass unnoticed.”
Zera gripped his shoulder to show her approval. “As to my counterparts,” she went on, “I noticed Sandros just after we passed through the city gate. Had it not been for that potter and his family, Sandros would have seen us.”
“He told me once that he could smell fear,” Leitos offered, making light of it.
“Sandros can,” Zera assured him gravely. “That is precisely why I trudged through privy-leavings and gods know what else-to make sure he loses our scent. As to Pathil, his skills favor shadow and night. Best not to let either of them catch us unawares.”
“What will we do?” Leitos asked, the city abruptly seeming far more dangerous. “Where will we go?”
“I know of a place.”
Zera said little else as they moved through the city’s warren of streets. She walked differently than before, her back bent, shoulders drooping, as if all the weight of the world were bearing her down. Leitos mimicked her movements.
Hours passed, and Zera never slowed. It took almost that long for Leitos to recognize they often crossed streets they had been on before, and a little longer still to understand that she was mingling their scent in a confusing pattern all over the city. It chilled him to think that a man such as Sandros-or any man, for that matter-could track a scent as would a jackal or a vulture.
Zera finally paused before a gray-bearded man pushing a cart bearing a large clay cistern, its rounded sides damp with condensation. His eyes, filmed in white, stared at nothing while he sniffed at a pair of dried red leaves Zera held in her hand.
“A dozen leaves for two dippers of water,” the wizened fellow said.
“Has swatarin become so commonplace as that?” Zera questioned. “For a dozen leaves, you have enough water to fill our waterskins to brimming, and give over that loaf of bread you have tucked away.”
The old man grumped and huffed, cried that if he had to give up his bread he would likely die before he could put the swatarin to proper use, but it was all for show. Even as he prattled on about how Zera was cheating him, he was dipping water into the skins, never spilling a drop despite his blindness.
When finished, he held out his hand for the swatarin. Zera countered with a demand for the bread. In the end, they settled by exchanging one for the other at the same time. Leitos noticed that Zera secretly added two additional leaves into the old man’s stack. As he tooled his cart away, using a gnarled thumb to recount the leaves held in his palm, he discovered the extras and hooted in delight, then fell silent. Shoulders hunched, he hurried away, losing himself in the crowd.
Zera chuckled to herself, tore off a chunk of bread for her and Leitos, and began moving off in a new direction.
“What is so special about swatarin leaves,” Leitos asked around a mouthful of bread. He had heard that name before, but it held no meaning to him.
“A little swatarin, taken in tea or with wine, eases aches and pains of every sort. It is as valuable, or more, as firemoss.”
Leitos asked what seemed an obvious question. “If a little does that, what does a lot do?”
“In quantity,” Zera said, nibbling her bread, eyes roving, “swatarin brings terrible visions, some say of the Thousand Hells and of demons. Before the Upheaval, the Madi’yin priesthood-or begging brothers-were said to indulge in the darker nature of swatarin, hoping to gain secret knowledge of the future.”
“Did they find that wisdom?” Leitos asked.
Zera snorted. “Since that order died out during the Upheaval, I would say no-either that or they misinterpreted what their visions showed them.”
After leading them to a part of the city with fewer people, Zera turned down a narrow alley. Scanning the ground, she slowed halfway between the street they had left and the next one. She kicked aside a maggot-ridden heap of offal, revealing a smallish circle fashioned from rusted iron straps. Through the openings in the straps, Leitos heard a sluggish, oozing trickle of some unspeakable fluid … and squeaking, the restless voices of countless vermin.
He knew what she intended, even before she knelt down and wrenched the circle of iron clear of a recessed groove carved into the paving stones. Leitos could not hold back the revolted groan in his throat.
“This is the only way to truly throw Sandros off our trail,” she said, a faint line of consternation between her pinched brows. “As I have never made a habit of wandering sewers, it may take longer than I wish to find our way.”
Taking a seat with his feet dangling down into the hole, Leitos sighed, closed his mind to the stench and the sounds wafting up through the narrow portal, and dropped into darkness.
Chapter 20
Soggy gruel roared up his spasming throat, burst past his teeth, and sprayed over the seething tangle of rats at his feet.
“Gods good and wise,” Zera growled, her face ashen, “would you please stop doing that!”
Leitos looked up, eyes burning from a stench so foul he could taste in on the air-
He doubled over, spewing. When his belly eased, he straightened, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “We need to get out of here.” For hours they had wandered in the sewers, and Zera’s earlier warning about taking longer to find their way repeated loudly in Leitos’s head.
At first the sewer grates, bright with filtered daylight, had marked out various paths. The light had gradually dimmed, then failed altogether with nightfall. If not for Zera’s firemoss lamp to light the low, narrow ways, Leitos feared he might have gone mad at the way the darkness slithered-