A plump, sable body squirmed over his feet, trailing a pinkish tail. He held still. Dancing about only drove the rats into a squealing frenzy.
“We are almost there,” Zera said with a relieved sigh. Leitos did not bother asking where there was. It did not matter to him, as long as they could escape the close confines.
True to her word, Zera scuffled through the waves of rats with an indifference he at once admired and envied, then halted below a grate. She listened a moment, carefully reached up, and pushed it aside. Next, she pulled herself up and out of the sewer.
Leitos took Zera’s waiting hands, and she hauled him out, depositing him amid a scatter of discarded crates. They hunkered in an alley. On either end, men and women moved by in the night, their demeanor different from earlier in the day. Arm in arm, swaying and singing they went, hurling jovial curses at any and all. Song and music meandered through the narrows ways, climbed the pocked walls of the buildings, mingling with boisterous laughter and ribald shouts.
Leitos would not name it merrymaking, for the noise carried upon its breath the flavor of anger. Restrained though it was, rage lurked, sought an escape. It made him wonder just how accepting people really were of the abuses heaped upon them. He sensed that one small gust might coax a guttering flame into an inferno.
“Follow me,” Zera said. “Keep your hood up, now, and say nothing.”
They had not gone far when a hulking figure rose up from the ground beside a closed door. Leitos’s heart skipped a beat, certain that all their efforts to evade Sandros had failed. But it was not the Hunter, could not be, unless he had grown.
“Stand aside,” Zera said, her sword flashing out, “or I’ll hew off your stones and feed them to you.”
The figure’s broad, flabby jaw thrust forward. “Zera? By the gods good and dead,” he rumbled, twisting the axiom with a dry chuckle. “Haven’t seen you in an age.”
Zera peered at the hulking shadow, still poised to destroy. “Lakaan? I did not recognize … are you thinner?”
“I am,” the monstrous fellow said morosely, patting the swollen bulk of his hanging belly with a huge hand. “The demand for obligations has risen again. It has gotten so a rogue must scrounge for even a bite of stale bread. And do not speak of getting ahead.”
Zera sheathed her sword. “I believe that is the point,” she laughed darkly.
“Of course,” Lakaan agreed, “but it is worse than ever. The king and his dogs now leave folk with but a tenth to trade. Suphtra, as always, takes no more than a tenth of a tenth in payment, which means I go hungry. It is … felonious,” he complained.
Zera tossed him what was left of the loaf she had bartered for earlier. Lakaan caught it, took a sniff, then stuffed what was easily half of the original loaf into his mouth-all of it, Leitos noted with amazement-bloating his already considerable cheeks. Equally amazing was all the rest of the sagging flesh the man carried on his frame. Leitos had never seen anyone so hugely fat, and did not know how Lakaan’s legs, thick columns though they were, could hold him up.
“Is Suphtra here?” Zera asked.
Lakaan bobbed his head, making his jowls wiggle. “If there are whores to monger, swatarin and swill to sell, and goods to be smuggled and traded, you can rest assured Suphtra will be about. Just now he is in the back, skulking in the shadows. Way he keeps hidden anymore, you would think he fancies himself kindred to the Faceless One.”
Zera and Lakaan had a good laugh over that, but the humor was lost on Leitos. His continued silence drew the big man’s questioning gaze.
“What you got there,” Lakaan inquired, eyes fixed on Leitos, “a weanling pup missing his mother?”
“A stray that shows potential,” Zera answered, her hesitation so brief that Leitos nearly missed it.
Lakaan’s already slitted eyes, however, narrowed a fraction. “Just so,” he murmured doubtfully, before perking up. “Well, bring him along! Suphtra will be pleased to see you. Stay around awhile, and it could be that I can teach this little man the art of stealing back some of the loot the king’s men steal from us.”
Lakaan booted open the door he had been guarding. He motioned them into a dim hallway thick with smoke, and a sickly sweet odor that went straight to Leitos’s head. In the light of thick, guttering candles poked into crude wall brackets, Lakaan bolted the door behind them, then led the way deeper into the building. They passed many open doorways that let in on rooms packed with crates of every size, overflowing sacks, and barrels filled with all manner of weaponry.
“Is Suphtra planning a rebellion?” Zera asked casually.
“You will have to talk to him about that,” Lakaan said over his shoulder, sounding uncomfortable. Zera did not ask any more questions, but she did not stop looking. Leitos did the same.
In one room men and women, all half-starved and bleary-eyed, sat about on a dirt floor. Flagons littered the ground around them. Many wafted the smoke rising from clay bowls into their faces, while others sat bolt upright, listening to the murmurings of a strange figure in rags.
Peering more closely, Leitos stopped dead. “Alon’mahk’lar!” he breathed.
The figure looked to be two people melded together, sharing the same misshapen body, yet having two heads bowed over a smoldering bowl. As if sensing his shocked appraisal, those heads swiveled toward him on a pair overlong, spindly necks. Two pairs of eyes peered at him from under deep brows, and two pairs of lips turned up at the corners. One head belonged to a woman, the other to a man.
Even though he had gasped the word just above a whisper, Zera spun, green eyes blazing, ready to join battle. Seeing what had captivated Leitos, she relaxed.
“The Twins,” she said with quiet deference, “are as human as you and I. They are seers-or maybe very good charlatans. Either way, they tell futures that seem to come to pass more often than not. Come, leave them to their work.”
The Twins nodded at his scrutiny, each of their heads bobbing independently of the other. Leitos’s insides twisted and he looked away. Zera and Lakaan moved down the hall, and he hurried after.
There were other rooms filled with people. One room in particular shocked Leitos to his core. Behind a sheer, pale green veil, naked bodies writhed against each other over a floor covered in rugs and heaped with pillows. Low moans and wicked, lustful laughter drifted out of that room and into the hallway. His face flaming, Leitos rushed by, refusing to look at Zera when she glanced at him over her shoulder.
After some time, the air cleared of the heady smoke, and Lakaan stopped before a door. “Wait here,” he said, opening the door and closing it behind him.
“What is this place,” Leitos asked, mind reeling at all he had seen … especially within that last room. Gods good and wise!
“People who can, often drown their sorrows in decadence,” Zera said with a shrug. “It is a weakness to my mind, and a waste. However, providing such services has made Suphtra a man of some wealth, even where such wealth is forbidden. It also makes him a danger to the order of things, which is why he hides his doings within the most sordid quarter of Zuladah. Bribing any that would report him to the king is also to his benefit.”
Lakaan squeezed through the doorway and into the hallway. “Suphtra will see you,” he said. Looking despondent, he added, “I suppose I will go back to guarding the alley. You don’t have any more to eat, do you?”
Zera grinned at him, rooted through her satchel, and pulled out a lump of something wrapped in greasy leather. Lakaan bowed his thanks and went on his way. After a few paces, he gave a delighted cry: “Cheese!” Then he was gone, a shadowy mountain of flesh vanishing behind a swirling haze of pungent smoke.