James West - Crown of the Setting Sun

That was the last thing Leitos wanted to hear, but he plodded after Ba’Sel. As it always did, the sun fell fast over the desert, and the black of night followed just as swiftly. Jackals took up the hunt, calling out to one another in voices that seemed to speak of struggle and hardship. The waning moon rose, highlighting the slumbering landscape in a weak glow.

Leitos was asleep on his feet when a horn’s wail jerked him and Ba’Sel to a halt. For the first time since meeting him, Leitos thought he saw something besides calm in the man’s demeanor. It was not anxiety that showed on his face so much as outrage.

“How could they have found us so easily?” Leitos asked, dismayed.

“I do not know,” Ba’Sel growled, and sped up.

Leitos struggled to keep pace, searched for the strength fear would lend him, but he was either beyond such helpful terror, or his muscles simply had nothing left to give. He soon fell behind. Each breath tore at his lungs, and his legs swung in slow, numb arcs. Without question, the Alon’mahk’lar and the wolves were closing the gap.

Something snagged his toe, and Leitos sprawled in the dirt. He tried to stand, but his body refused to cooperate. His lungs heaved. When he looked up, blood dripped from his smashed lips to his chin. Of Ba’Sel, the man had disappeared!

As Leitos struggled to his knees, a guttural howl turned his head. Not more than a dozen paces off, two crimson eyes rushed toward him. A heartbeat more and a brutish wolf materialized from the gloom, racing toward him at full speed.

I am dead , Leitos thought with no surprise or burst of terror. Instead it was a calm musing, vaguely remorseful, and undeniably the truth. He had run his last.

A strong hand caught his hood and dragged him into a hidden cleft in the ground. For the barest moment, Leitos imagined an underworld demon taking him into Geh’shinnom’atar . Where he had been strangely calm before, now he fought, the will to survive giving him a wild, desperate strength. Another hand clapped over his mouth and he bit down. No matter what he did, the creature dragging him down into the earth was relentless and strong. Complete darkness closed over him, and dust clogged his nostrils.

“Be still,” Ba’Sel snapped.

Relief poured through Leitos and he relaxed, allowing Ba’Sel to run, carrying him like a sack. The warrior’s labored breathing was harsh and erratic, amplified by the close confines. His footsteps thudded like a drumbeat. A howl from behind seemed to slam into them with physical force, and then the shriek of claws tearing at rock filled the narrow space.

“We will make it,” Ba’Sel muttered to himself. He kept repeating those words, as if they were a command. All at once he flung Leitos ahead, and he bounced off a rough stone wall and sprawled in the sand.

Ba’Sel’s figure danced between the advancing wolves’ burning red eyes and Leitos. There came a grating noise that drowned out the wolf’s growls, then a roar of falling stone filled the passageway. Dust billowed, leaving Leitos coughing uncontrollably.

Rough hands pulled him to his feet, and Ba’Sel wheezed, “We must keep going. They will soon dig their way through.”

Despite his warning, he moved away and rummaged around back toward the rock fall. The sound of metal scraping over stone, followed by a shower of sparks, drew Leitos’s attention.

In the stuttering light, Ba’Sel knelt over something, his back toward Leitos. The light vanished, leaving a dizzying afterimage. The flickering flash came again … faded … then a small flame burst to life on the end of a torch. Resin-dipped rushes flared bright with a hissing crackle, and Ba’Sel stood up. The natural passage proved no wider than two men abreast, and the ceiling hung a bare inch above the warrior’s head.

He handed Leitos a pair of unlit torches taken from a niche in the wall near the rock fall. “We are far from safety, and even that refuge may be in question now,” he said without explanation. “We must hurry.”

Cradling the torches, Leitos hurried after Ba’Sel. The passage twisted and turned, with many new passages branching off into the darkness. Footprints dimpled the sandy floor, but he could not have guessed how old they were.

Only when Ba’Sel’s torch began guttering out did Leitos see the first indication that people did more than walk these dark ways. At the junction of four passages, two small clay pots sat in a niche in the wall. Both had tops sealed with wax. After lighting a second torch, Ba’Sel cocked his head, listening. Far, far away, the grinding sounds of shifting rock slithered toward them.

“They are not through yet,” Ba’Sel said, relieved.

He handed Leitos the burning torch and moved to the clay pots. After studying faint markings on the tops of each, he chose one and went a little way down the passage. Leitos held the torch high, moving his head back and forth in a bid to see what the brother was up to.

Ba’Sel worked with haste, but carefully. After using a knife to slice away the wax, he set the top aside and poured a measure of thin oil into a bowl cleverly concealed behind a knuckle of stone protruding from the wall. He did the same on the other side, then made his way farther down the corridor, performing the same task a half a dozen times, until he was twenty or more paces back the way they had come.

Leitos studied the closest bowl and found that a small wooden lever sat under its bottom edge, and attached to that was a very fine black string. The line zigzagged back and forth from the bowls to the low ceiling through a series of tiny, nearly invisible metal rings. Like the first bowl, all the subsequent bowls, metal rings, and the line were invisible to anyone coming the way Ba’Sel had brought them. The last thing the warrior did was to unwind a tail of the line and stretch it low over the ground, farther down the passage from the last bowl. As he worked, the line tensed and released, jiggling the levers under the bowls.

When Ba’Sel came back and retrieved the second pot, he answered Leitos’s questioning look. “I am setting a snare. This,” he said, slicing the wax off the clay container, “is a gift given us soon after the Faceless One rose to power. An old woman, Hya of the Sisters of Najihar, showed us how to make it, just before her long years took her from us.”

“What is it?” Leitos asked, careful not to touch anything, as he followed Ba’Sel to the farthest bowl.

“The Blood of Attandaeus,” Ba’Sel said grimly. “The Nectar of Judgment. A single drop of any liquid sets it alight-we use oil, because it flows better and does not splash so easily as water. Nothing can smother its fire before it has burned away.”

Ba’Sel knelt on the ground and brushed clear a line in the sand, revealing a thin slat of wood. He pried up the slat and set it aside. Below waited a deep, narrow groove etched into solid rock. One end was open to a sloping gutter gouged in the wall under the bowl of oil waiting above.

With excruciating care, Ba’Sel filled the groove on the floor with what looked like glimmering crimson sand, replaced the slat, and then covered it with sand. They retreated a little way, and he repeated the task. By the time he began filling the fifth groove, sweat glistened on his brow. He daubed it away with his sleeve, took a few deep, calming breaths, and continued until the last groove was filled and covered. While he had no doubt of the destructive nature of fire, Leitos wondered aloud how such a trap could work.

“When the first enemy trips that far line,” Ba’Sel said, pointing down the passage, all the bowls tip at once. The oil is thin and flows fast, but not too fast. Once it ignites the Blood of Attandaeus, even a running intruder will not have passed this point before the flames trap it. Anyone or anything behind it will also be consumed.”