Heirs of the Fallen: Book 03 - Shadow and Steel (17 page)

“It is time,” Adu’lin said.

While his fellows looked on in bleary-eyed confusion, Sumahn staggered closer to the Fauthian leader. “Time for what?” He gave a halfhearted effort at brandishing the flagon, but felt foolish for doing so. This was their host, Adu’lin. He was no enemy.

Adu’lin smiled in his flat way. “It is time for you and your fellows to repay our generosity.”

Sumahn considered that … rather, he tried. In truth, he had no idea what Adu’lin was getting at. What he really wanted was to return to whatever games Ina had dreamed up.

With that in mind, he faced her with a leering smile. Ina gazed back, her face as smooth and emotionless as carved stone. “Something amiss, my love?”

She moved with such blinding speed that Sumahn could not react. In the next moment, he found himself sprawled on his back, the gathering hall spinning around him. His jaw felt crushed, and that made no more sense than the taste of blood in his mouth. He tried to talk, but sharp pain stilled his tongue. From far off, he heard dismayed shouts, followed by the sounds of men slamming against the hall’s floor.

What is happening?
That thought flitted through Sumahn’s mind, an instant before Ina’s bare foot viciously slammed against his head. All that he knew became as black and formless as the darkest reaches of the firmament.

Chapter 23

Gripping the rope, Leitos swung across the crevasse. Over the wind in his ears, he heard an alarming creak. The cleft below him was no more than a dozen feet wide, but darker than the night, and seemingly bottomless. Halfway across, something snapped overhead, and the rope dropped several inches.

Then he was on the far side, beyond danger. He dropped to the ground with no small measure of relief, and put more distance between his feet and the edge of the gap. He swung the rope back, and Belina caught it.

“Move over there,” she said, pointing at a tree farther along the trail.

“Do you not trust me yet?”

Belina laughed. “If I trusted strangers so quickly, I would have been captured or killed long ago.”

“I think the limb this rope is attached to might have broken,” he cautioned.

“Move,” Belina said, serious again.

Leitos held up his hands in surrender, and did as she commanded. He supposed he could have just as easily run off—it had crossed his mind more than once in the hour since she freed him—but he wanted to see her evidence against the Fauthians.

She eyed mistrustfully. Leitos folded his arms and leaned against the tree she had pointed out, doing his best to seem uninterested in what she was doing.

“If you do anything—”

“You’ll gut me where I stand,” Leitos interrupted, chuckling.

“No,” she said sweetly, “I’ll strip you bare, tie you up, and dip you into a stagnant pool favored by fangfish. For the mud and slime, you’ll not see them come, but you will feel them. They have wicked teeth, those little fishes, and a fierce appetite. They’ll make a eunuch of you in moments. If I decide to leave you in the water, they’ll make bones of you quicker than it takes for you to perish.”

Leitos swallowed. She sounded as though meant it. “I won’t do anything,” he said, thinking maybe he should take the opportunity to run.

She gazed at him a moment longer then, seemingly satisfied that he was telling the truth, she swung across the cleft. The rope neither creaked nor dropped, and she landed lightly as a butterfly.

“From here on,” she said, “we need to move as if they are waiting for us.”

“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.”

“We should go,” he said.

“Follow me,” she answered in a hollow voice. Instead of threatening to spill his blood in some new way, she handed over the Kelren dagger and set out, leaving him to follow or stay behind.

He went after her, his heart racing as fast as his mind. If even half what she said was true, he intended this night to end his quest for vengeance against the Faceless One this night.

Chapter 24

Ringed by torchlight, Damoc inspected the pigsty that had held Leitos, then the severed vines that had held shut the small door.
My own daughter has betrayed me.

Damoc cursed, ripped the door off the pen, and hurled it into the forest. Nola gave him a startled look, her green eyes wide … Nola, who looked so much like the first abomination foisted upon him and his wife by their Fauthians masters.

He had not always thought so poorly of that first daughter, but that had been before her change, and his wife’s death. On that night, when all that Belina had foretold came to pass, he had finally seen the truth, which led him to stir his people against their oppressors.

Even now, it pained him to admit that until that tragedy had struck him, he and most of the other elders had refused to believe the evil of the Fauthians. Instead of listening to the rational voice in his head, he had believed the Fauthians were good, and that serving them was the proper course. But no more.

“Will we go after them?” Nola asked. Her startlement had vanished. She was so different than Belina and their mother. If anyone had been born to fight, it was Nola. In truth, he sometimes feared that she craved battle too much.