“We are close then?”
“On the doorstep of the Throat of Balaam.”
Leitos began creeping down the trail. Over his shoulder, he asked, “Why does this place fill you with such dread?”
She looked at him as if he were the biggest dolt she had ever seen, an expression he was growing as used to as her constant threats. “Only fools and the servants of the Faceless One would not fear the Throat of Balaam-and I should think that even they cower in dread.”
“Why?” Leitos persisted.
Belina caught his shoulder and spun him about. “The Throat of Balaam is not just an evil place, Leitos, it is a … a womb for the creation of evil things.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Surely you cannot be this stupid?”
Leitos could not help but grin at her exasperation, but it was short-lived. “I am not from these lands. But then, neither am I from Geldain, where I was enslaved and ruled over by Alon’mahk’lar the whole of my life.” She gave him a troubled look, but he ignored her pity. “The Throat of Balaam is only a name and a strange light to me. If you want me to understand, then you’ll have to explain it-slowly, if you will, me being a fool, and all.”
“We do not have time for this,” Belina growled. “Go on, before I spill your guts.”
“There’s a new idea,” Leitos mumbled, and set out again.
They marched through the damp forest for another hour. The longer they went, the more Leitos began to wonder at how Belina and Nola had managed to carry him so far. More, he was curious about how they had kept him unconscious so long. He had seen slavemasters bludgeon men to insensibility, but usually those men came around soon after. Those who did not were rarely ever again right in their minds.
“Did you give me some kind of sleeping tonic?” he asked. At her blank look, he explained his thoughts.
“The juice from the root of the heart flower can soothe a teething babe. A bit more can put a man to sleep.”
“And if you use too much?” Leitos asked. “Would that kill a man?”
“Indeed,” Belina said cryptically.
“You have not given me much reason to trust you,” Leitos said. “At every turn, you threaten to gut me, or to feed me to fangfish, and now you tell me you might have accidently poisoned me to death.”
“When you see what I need to show you, you will understand why we do not trust outsiders,” Belina said, and ordered him to keep going.
They had not gone much farther when Belina dragged him behind the cover of a bush with leaves as broad as a man’s head. “We are close,” she said, her breath tickling his ear.
Leitos looked around, but saw only dense forest, mossy boulders, and hanging vines. The night was warm, and the long walk had brought sweat to his brow, and sweat brought buzzing midges. There was nothing around to indicate they were anywhere near the Throat of Balaam, especially the blue light that had initially drawn him. He said as much, even as he kept searching.
“We are farther up the mountain, above the entrance.”
“And where is this evidence you wanted to show me?”
“Before we go, I will answer your earlier question about why the Throat of Balaam frightens my people.” After a moment to collect her thoughts, she said, “Before the Upheaval, the Fauthians did not exist. Only Yatoans lived on the islands.”
“The Fauthians were created?” Leitos asked, thinking of the Alon’mahk’lar.
“Not exactly. Many generations gone, soon after the stars fell from the heavens and the skies burned, and the seas boiled against cracked shores, the Throat of Balaam burst open, casting its terrible light over the land. That light lured some of my forefathers to betray the command of the Great Council of Elders. They entered the Throat and communed with the Faceless One, and in that cold light, they were … remade.”
Leitos shook his head, confused. “So Fauthians are Yatoans?”
“They are not,” Belina said, fury tingeing her words. “Not anymore. The light changed them. And if not the light, then the Faceless One, who lives within the light, did it.”
Leitos’s pulse jumped. “The Faceless One lives here, on this island, within the Throat of Balaam?” It was all he could do not to shout the question. For a year, he had thought he must travel to his homelands, and from there search countless leagues of ice fields and snowy wastelands for the Faceless One. To know he stood so near his enemy, raised the hair on his neck.
“I need a weapon,” he growled. “I will destroy him-I must destroy him.”
Belina recoiled from the hatred on his face. “The Faceless One cannot be killed with a mortal weapon, otherwise it would have been done by now.”
“Perhaps those who have tried before did not have the skill or courage to do so,” Leitos countered. “Arm me or not, I am going to test myself this night.”
“The day may come when you face the enemy of humankind, but it is not this night, and not here,” she said with an odd surety in her voice.
“How would you know-your visions?”
“Yes.”
Leitos snorted and made to stand, but Belina laid his stolen dagger against his neck. “Sit down, and let me finish answering you.”
“And if I don’t, then what? Will you gut me, as you have so often promised? How does that fit with your visions?”
Belina leveled a flat gaze at him, making him feel slightly foolish for his bluster. “I do not wish to kill you, Leitos. I never have.” The way she said it made it sound as if she had known him for many years, instead of mere hours. If she really had been seeing him in visions all her life, then maybe to her it did seem as if she knew him. “You must heed me.”
“You mean trust you?”
“Yes,” Belina sighed. “Now, sit still, and let me finish.”
Leitos made a face, but settled back to the ground.
“As I was saying, those who communed with the Faceless One were never the same. For a time, my ancestors believed the Fauthians had been purified, remade with eternity in their flesh, and so honored them as gods.
“In time, the Fauthians became betrayers and destroyers of their servants, keeping only the strongest of us alive, and giving the rest to the Kelrens. Our masters began taking women and girls into the Throat, and bred them to Mahk’lar in the creation of Alon’mahk’lar. In time, they gave them over to Alon’mahk’lar, and the Na’mihn’teghul were born.”
Leitos peered at Belina. Hers was a face haunted by horrors too vile to speak of. But what if she was wrong, or lying, or telling only what she believed was the truth? As a slave, he had been deceived into thinking that his people deserved their enslavement for betraying the Faceless One. It was not until he escaped the mines, and had time to truly consider what he had endured all his life, that he changed his mind about the cruelty of the Alon’mahk’lar and their master, the Faceless One.
He looked closer at her, and saw no deception. What if everything she has said is true? If the Fauthians created changelings, then that meant they had made Sandros and Pathil … and Zera.
“Show me what you will,” he said abruptly, finding it difficult to remain impartial.
Belina looked at her hands, curled protectively around the hilt of the Kelren dagger. “I cannot know if it is too late to show you everything, but usually they keep our women for a few days, until they know that the seed of the Alon’mahk’lar has quickened within their wombs. After that, we do not know where they are taken.”
“You’re saying that some of your women are in the Throat of Balaam, at this moment?” He remembered the screams and the dead woman the Fauthians had dragged out of the Throat. He also recalled the Fauthian woman, holding a small bundle. Had she carried a changeling babe? Distaste quivered his skin.
“They may be,” Belina said. “I was child when they stopped bringing pregnant women back to the villages, where they would raise their accursed babes until the Fauthians came to take them. My mother and eldest sister were the last of our clan to be returned. My sister showed herself to be a Na’mihn’teghul the likes of which no one had ever seen, and she destroyed half the village. After that, the Fauthians began to keep the women and the babes, never to be seen again.”