After they had progressed a few more miles, Lakaan had halted the burros and freed Leitos with a warning. “Try and run back, boy, and I’ll beat you again-I don’t want to, but I’d rather suffer your anger than Zera’s vengeance.” At Leitos’s look of concern, the big man had added in a gentler tone, “Trust that she is well, boy. A little scratch cannot stop the likes of her.”
When the sun was high, and his anger had faded, Leitos moved up beside Lakaan. “That seemed too easy,” he said. Having failed to distract himself from thinking of what Zera might be facing, he had no choice but to speak with Lakaan. Behind them, the road shimmered under the already hot sun, and ran in a dusty line back to the east. On either side, withered brush dotted a parched land of sand and pitted rock.
Lakaan kept his squinty eyes on the road ahead, now climbing up the flank of a tabletop plateau. Sweat glistened in his closely shorn black hair, dripped over skin the color of timeworn leather. His jowls seemed more flabby than they had in the dark of night. “What was easy?” he panted.
“Escaping,” Leitos said, trying to keep his voice even. Despite being unconscious at the time, it seemed that simply walking away from those who hunted them should have proved far more difficult. “That boy at the stables, Toron, he said his father was taken, that Alon’mahk’lar patrols were everywhere. Sandros and Pathil were after us, too. How did we just walk out of Zuladah?”
“Could be that Zera had a hand in misdirecting our enemies,” Lakaan allowed. “Far as getting out of the city, well … it has always served me well to be everyone’s friend-even if I hate them.”
Leitos’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “How do you hate a friend?”
Lakaan explained, “Something I learned from Suphtra-curse his black heart. A man has few true friends, but many cunning enemies. If you are unwary, they take all you have and leave you a corpse in the gutter.” He nodded to himself, then went on.
“A clever fellow will play the fool, give up a few gems, but secretly turn the table and steal the lot for himself. That, boy, is what Suphtra did to me and Zera. I was a fool to trust that bastard as much as I did, but have no doubt he was a clever, thieving son-of-a-whore.”
As they crested the plateau an hour later, Lakaan halted the burros with a yank on the lead ropes. “Past time for a drink and a meal.” His gap-toothed smile changed him from a hulking brute into an overlarge child. Leitos could not help but grin in return.
They shared a loaf of bread and drank water from one of the cisterns, never moving from the middle of the road. As their desolate surroundings heated under the climbing sun, a lizard darted over hot sand to take shelter in the shade of a thorn bush.
Leitos focused on the mountains far to the west. The Mountains of Fire. They jutted black and sharp, an occasional peak spewing a thin plume of smoke, which the wind tore apart and drove south in a hazy gray line. Over the Sea of Sha’uul, hidden now behind the curve of the horizon, that haze billowed anew, growing into gleaming white thunderheads.
“Will we wait for Zera?” Leitos asked.
“No,” Lakaan said. “She will find us. That is what she does. We will go as far as the road takes us, as she ordered.”
Leitos looked back at the Mountains of Fire. “And how far is that?”
“Farther than I have ever been,” Lakaan admitted, blinking away a drop of sweat. “Perhaps farther than anyone has been since before the Upheaval. No one really knows, for this is a land long forsaken by gods and men.”
Leitos did not mention the Brothers of the Crimson Shield, but Lakaan’s opinion troubled him. What if that mysterious order did not exist? They must be real, he told himself, otherwise Zera was a liar, and he refused to believe that.
“Let’s put this daylight to proper use,” Lakaan said, and they set out again.
The plateau rose a bit higher, then began a steady drop into a strange land of waterless canyons and gorges, towering stone spires, and steep hills of weathered boulders. By late in the day, as the road meandered around stony obstacles, the Mountains of Fire were lost to sight. Leitos and Lakaan trudged along without talking. The only sound came from the cart’s wheels grating over the roadway.
The road continued to snake its way through deep canyons that offered surprisingly cool shade at all times, save midday. When the sun hovered at its zenith, escape from the oppressive heat was impossible. Whether in sunlight or shadow, Lakaan sweated new rings into his grimy tunic, and kept up a ceaseless lament over his rumbling belly. That complaining, initially humorous, quickly became tiresome. Leitos bore it all, always watching for Zera. And as ever, all that lay behind them were their own pursuing tracks pressed into the dust of the road. She will come … she must.
Many days passed on their westward march, until Leitos lost all track of time’s passage. They had to replenish the cisterns with water dug from the sandy soil. The digging reminded Leitos of life in the mines. But when he drank, he did so relishing his freedom.
Their supply of bread dwindled faster than the water, and what remained became hard and tasteless. Leitos did not complain. It was food, it soothed the empty ache in his belly, kept his stride firm. Lakaan protested bitterly, until he remembered a sling hidden away within their supplies. With startling skill, he deftly took down the occasional hare, and a glut of lizards and adders. If it moved, it was food to Lakaan.
Leitos was eyeing Lakaan’s bulk one day, thinking that the man looked decidedly smaller than when he had met him, when the road took a sharp turn, and began climbing out of the endless maze of canyons, gullies, and ravines.
By that evening, they crested a steep slope, and halted before a landscape that numbed Leitos’s senses.
“Good thing we filled the cisterns this morning,” Lakaan said, his voice tinged with the same dread that filled Leitos’s chest.
Far nearer than before, the Mountains of Fire jutted off a sprawling plain dominated by pillowed black and gray rock, and interspersed by pockets of yellowed grass that swayed in the wind. Like a line of frozen waves, the craggy mountain peaks reached higher than Leitos believed possible. The columns of smoke he had thought were billowing off the peaks, actually originated from deep, sharp-edged crevasses running up the flanks of the mountains.
He was startled to see that white crowned the very highest peaks-snow and ice, Leitos knew at once. Adham had often spoke of the ice fields of the far north that never diminished, no matter the heat of summer in the lowlands. Leitos saw all this at a glance, and at the same instant recognized that there could be no passable route over such a barrier.
Carried by contrary winds, a bitter reek wafted over Leitos and Lakaan. Both fell into a fits of coughing, and the burros flattened their ears and brayed in affront. As quickly as the offensive odor came it departed, leaving man and beast with the gift of watering eyes and flaring nostrils.
“Brimstone,” Lakaan wheezed in disgust. “Damnable rock as far as the eye can see, no water, and surely no food.”
“You wail like a teething babe,” a placid voice said behind them.
Leitos spun, a startled cry locked in his throat. Lakaan cut loose with a garbled squeal and dashed forward a few ungainly paces, then tripped over his own feet. He landed with a grunt and rolled over, one arm flailing in a desperate warding gesture.
Zera gazed at them from farther down the road, eyes twinkling green mirth. With a backdrop of mazelike canyons spread out for leagues behind her, she appeared lessened in stature, but still dangerous-Beautifully so, Leitos thought.
He ran forward and halted before her. “Your wounds?” he asked, reaching out to touch her shoulder, just to make sure she was real.