James West - Crown of the Setting Sun

“You’ll want to break your fast,” the Hunter said after a time. “We’ve leagues to go this day, and I’ll not tote you like a weanling babe.”

“I’m not hungry,” Leitos muttered sullenly, unable to guess why the man had failed to react as he had believed he would.

The Hunter turned and slowly drew off his hood. His dark eyes shone like glass. “You’re a poor liar, boy. I can hear your belly grumbling from here.” He smiled then, a cheerless turn of the lips that showed strong, white teeth. “Come, I’ll cut you free. We can sup together on the sage hares I snared last night. They are scrawny, much like you, but I have a bit of salt and spices to flavor them.”

After the Hunter deftly used a wide-bladed knife to slice through his bonds, Leitos sat up, rubbing away the numbness in wrists, then worked on his ankles. He offered no word of thanks. The Hunter did not seem to mind, and went about starting a fire of twigs and dried dung. Next, he drove a pair of forked sticks into the sand on either side of the flames. He pulled a pair of mangy hares from a threadbare sack, skinned and spitted them, then set to roasting them.

“I would gladly die before eating anything from your hand,” Leitos said, wishing his belly agreed.

“You’re too weak by half, boy, to travel very far without growing faint. You will eat.”

“I have come this far,” Leitos retorted.

“And how far is that, do you believe?” the Hunter chuckled grimly. “A few days of hard travel from the mines, boy-that is all you managed. Your masters would have caught you if not for the river, which those iron-boned Alon’mahk’lar will not cross without a sturdy barge. As there are no barges in this part of Geldain, and fewer bridges, they sent word out to all their spies and Hunters to keep an eye out for a fleeing slave boy, and offered a fair reward to anyone who captured you.”

Leitos receded into himself, considering what the Hunter had said first. On one hand, it was hard to believe he had traveled so little, but on the other, he knew it for the truth. At the start of his journey, he had reasoned that it would be weeks, if not months, to reach the Mountains of Fire. Now, captured by the Hunter, he guessed he might never see those crags. His grandfather had placed his faith in the wrong person, Leitos thought, and had pointlessly thrown his life away. Save getting himself beaten to a pulp, captured and bound, Leitos grudgingly accepted that he had accomplished nothing.

The smell of roasting meat gradually drew Leitos from the smothering morass of his bleak ponderings. During his lengthy brooding, the Hunter had continually turned the spitted hares, searing them over a small fire. Now the brute rummaged through a handful of tiny leather sacks arranged around an iron pot and a few other cooking implements, all nestled within an old wooden crate sitting open beside his knees. He carefully sprinkled salt over the hares, delved into another sack and brought out some dried green leaves. These he crushed into coarse flakes, letting them drift onto the glistening meat.

Despite his conviction not to eat, the aroma of the cooking food set Leitos’s mouth to watering. He cursed his weakness. The only way to distract himself was to start talking. If the Hunter wanted to batter him for speaking out of turn, so much the easier to resist thoughts of eating.

“What is this place?” he asked.

The Hunter seemed to ignore him, not once looking away from the hares. Leitos had given up any expectation of receiving an answer when the man began to speak.

“One of my hideaways,” the Hunter said. “I have many. Some are mere hollows; others are deep and winding caverns. All Hunters have their secret dens. Most, like this one, are more than they appear, even up close. Behind a rock at the back of this cave,” he said, tilting his head to a spot hidden in the gloom behind Leitos, “there is a crack. Squeeze through it, and you find a passage that leads to a large chamber with a seep of the sweetest water you have ever tasted.”

Leitos found that interesting, but there was really only one thing he wanted to know. “Why do you do this?” The Hunter turned a questioning gaze on him. Leitos thought about it, then asked bluntly, “Why do you serve the Alon’mahk’lar . Surely their rewards alone do not make you want to betray your own kind.”

“My kind?” the Hunter snapped with a bitterness that went far deeper than anger. “By that I suppose you mean humankind, like those who placed me into the hands of the Alon’mahk’lar … much like those who did the same to you?”

“I was not placed into their hands,” Leitos insisted, then repeated what his grandfather had always told him. “ Alon’mahk’lar raided our village and took us captive.”

“You are a blind fool. I grant that some few of your people still hide and fight from their icy strongholds, but has it never entered your mind to wonder how those places are found in the first place? Do you think Alon’mahk’lar wander about, covering league after endless league in search of future slaves?”

Leitos blinked. He had never considered that Izutarians might be swayed as easily as other peoples. Broached now, that idea troubled him.

“The last of your people, and you as well,” the Hunter went on, “fail to understand that the age of men died a generation gone, a doom heralded by the destruction of the Three and the burning heavens. Men do not rule anything anymore, boy, save the lost kingdoms of dwindling memory that the Faceless One allows them to rule. There is no war to fight, no matter that they raise banners and steel against him. The world of men is a corpse consumed by rot.”

Indifferent to the flames licking his fingers, the Hunter tore a chunk of meat off one hare and popped it into his mouth. He chewed for a moment, then sprinkled more spices on the hares. Again, he remained silent long enough that Leitos began to think he would say no more, but then he did.

“Some few are taken ,” he relented, “but most men are sold into chains by their fellow men. And here is a secret, boy: most often the price needed for men to sell men is nothing of true worth, rather a pat on the head. For a bit of meaningless praise, and maybe a stale loaf for the reluctant, a loving mother will convince herself that her children would be better off in the hands of slavemasters. If not that, then she will tell herself that she would be better off-”

“You are a liar,” Leitos blurted.

“Of course I am,” the Hunter growled with a humorless smirk, “as I have learned to be. Lies and smiles, boy-that is how you survive under the rule of the Faceless One. We lie to our masters, bow and scrape, but mostly we deceive ourselves about the reasons and meaning of it all. As to what I said before about men, that was the plain truth.”

“You are wrong,” Leitos said, outwardly unmoved, but beginning to wonder.

“Am I? Then tell me, boy, how is it that you are bound and I am not? We are both of us humankind, as you say, yet I am a Hunter, ordained to that station by the very same creatures who enslaved you and your kin. The Alon’mahk’lar use me, and those like me, to seek and capture those like you.”

“You are a betrayer .”

“That I am,” the Hunter agreed once more, unapologetic in tone and countenance. Neither was there shame in his admission, but something very much like pride. “Unlike most, boy, I take satisfaction that I only became a betrayer after I was betrayed.”

“Is that another of your lies … what you tell yourself to excuse your treachery?”

The Hunter’s dark stare glazed over, as if he were no longer looking at Leitos, but something beyond. “That, boy, is one of the few absolute truths I cling to,” he muttered. “Like you, I was a slave. For five years the pain and disgrace heaped upon me was far worse than anything you have ever imagined or felt. I was betrayed not by the Alon’mahk’lar or the Faceless One, but by men … rather, by a woman. From that experience, I learned to accept the truths you still deny.”