Luckily on the day of rest the markets were in full swing and the dusty streets of Zephara were packed with people. In all that chaos she knew Davrial would have a hard time seeing her even if he’d been looking. He wasn’t looking though, he was far too occupied trying to weave through the crowd.
There were loads of them. People of all shapes and sizes and outfits. People in ornate masks, people with just rags over their faces, people with neither like Zaana, struggling to breathe in the swirling dust of the markets. Some were locals like her, who were used to the constant stinging dust clouds and could bear them with no masks for a little bit. But others were obviously foreigners. Strangers from other planets who were struggling to deal with the constant dust clouds of Solinare.
The Rathelduori was a collection of planets and all of them were plagued by the dust that blew through the void there. But none had it as bad as Solinare, close as it was to Searth, the Hidden Star, from which much of the dust came. Some of the foreigners looked like they were from other parts of the Rathelduori and were somewhat accustomed to the dust. But there were others, lightning merchants out of Bebishim, gilded nobles from Callibaen, and even slavers from Astaroth in their regal white robes. It was good to see those robes getting dirty and the slavers struggling to see or breathe in the thick dust.
Davrial tied a rag over his face as he walked through the markets. Zaana had heard that the Day Star wore a particular, stylised mask. Something with fire dripping from the eyeline all down the jaw. The rag was a bit disappointing but she supposed he couldn’t exactly wear that mask out here where everyone could see.
She stalked through the dusty crowds, ignoring the shouts of merchants and the chattering of market-goers. This was still hunting but it was very different to the quiet stalking she’d practised on the cats in the temple. Staying out of sight wasn’t hard, it was keeping Davrial in sight that was difficult. With all the swaying crowds and people stomping about everywhere she had to constantly be aware of her surroundings lest she crash into someone or someone crash into her. That meant much less of her attention was on Davrial. And with his long legs he walked very fast.
He ducked into an alley where ramshackle houses towered overhead, stacked on top of each other haphazardly. Zaana followed, hoping there’d be a bit of a respite from the crowds but they were even more packed in here. People were leaning out of the buildings on each side selling all manner of foods and trinkets. The smells wafted through the alley reminding her that she hadn’t had lunch yet. She ignored them, a hunter didn’t need lunch.
Luckily while she had to push and squeeze slowly through the crowds Davrial was tall and so he wasn’t too hard to see as he moved ahead of her. Occasionally he would glance idly back but he had no chance to see her, buried as she was among all the people. So she jostled and shoved her way after him. Interested to see where this infamous and mighty warrior lived.
He lived in a perfectly average house off the alley. It was rather disappointing actually. Wasn’t he a barbarian from out of the Wastes, what was he doing in a normal house?
She watched him go in, glance briefly around and then shut the door, disappearing from her view. She waited in the crowds, annoyed. She hadn’t seen anything cool yet, just an ordinary man going into an ordinary house. Is this what the great warriors of the Wastes were like? The warriors of Zephara were much more interesting with their gleaming armour and their whirling blades. Still, he was presumably undercover, despite his confession. Maybe there was more interesting stuff inside.
She wove her way through the crowds and tried to look into his house but the curtains were drawn on this side. Most of the curtains were drawn on the houses in this alley save for those that were selling things. These windows had actual glass on them, unlike the ones at the Little Pyramid, so she couldn’t just reach through and push the curtains aside. Not that she’d want to anyway, surrounded by crowds as she was.
She thought for a minute and then decided that the other side of the house, the one not facing into this alley, might be less crowded with people. All she had to do was find it. She wriggled her way through the alley and back onto the main street. She didn’t know the streets of Zephara very well, she’d never really been allowed to leave the Little Pyramid until recently. Not that that had stopped her but it had meant that she’d never really had time to explore since there were always sisters chasing her when she did get out.
She thought about it for a while, trying to orient the city streets in her head. But she couldn’t make much sense of it so she decided to try a different strategy. Making sure to remember exactly where she’d been she found her way to an old abandoned alley. There was a pile of rags and rubbish in one corner that could have been a person but that person wasn’t looking at her so she ignored it. Then she started to climb.
It was a much harder climb than any she’d performed at the pyramid. These houses stacked up to be two stories high and they went straight up, not sloped like the pyramid. Sometimes bits of them even jutted out in her way. But she was a master hunter, she wasn’t going to let a little wall get in her way. So she climbed anyway. Working her fingers onto the windowsills and uneven stonework. While the buildings were obviously supposed to be straight they hadn’t been built very well and there were bits of brick and stone sticking out all over the place. It would have likely come away in her hands if she’d been too much heavier but there were some advantages to still being young and small. She clambered her way up to the roof.
She pulled herself up and coughed up dust lightly, blinking it out of her eyes. Her lungs were burning from exertion and from dust and her arms were dead and shaking from pulling herself all the way up. She definitely needed to practise climbing more.
She lay on the roof for a while looking up at the dusty sky. There were a few planets floating around up there, she should probably remember what they were, she was supposed to be an expert on that stuff as a sister in the pyramid. But she had no idea, so instead she just watched them slowly roll through the sky, waiting for her arms to recover.
They didn’t seem to be recovering very fast so she muttered angrily to herself and stood up anyway. The roof was thatched and covered in a thick layer of dust. Zaana, herself, had already picked up a lot of dust in getting here and it looked like she was about to pick up even more. She scampered along the rooftop, toward the house she remembered Davrial going into. She knew she’d have to jump a few times to get across streets but she wasn’t worried. She’d seen from the ground that the rooves all leaned much closer together on the top than the buildings were apart on the bottom. You could barely see the sky from the ground, how hard could it be.
She reached the first ledge. It was a lot further to jump than it had looked from the ground. She hesitated for a minute, looking at the jump, feeling the pain in her arms. It was a long way down she knew, a very long way down.
She jumped anyway, she was on the hunt, there was no time to be scared. Sure enough, while it looked far, with a decent run up she was able to land lightly on the other side and then quickly hug the roof as she landed on it, her heart hammering in her chest. She’d had to jump to catch cats before and it was much like that, just a lot more dangerous.
She got to the next street and hopped over that one as well, her fear slowly subsiding, slowly forgetting the ground. That was until she made the final jump and looked down to ensure she was in the right place. The ground was so far away! All those people milling about down there looked so far down, how had she climbed up this high? She gripped onto the roof as she looked with white knuckles and forced herself to steady her breathing. This was fine, she wasn’t going to fall, she was just in a high place. Cats probably did stuff like this all the time.
She quickly calmed herself down and instead focused on the street below. It was the same alley she’d followed Davrial down and sure enough one of the houses was his, between two stalls that were selling something or other. She put herself over his house and then followed it along to the other side, the side that wasn’t in the alley. This side was a stone courtyard with a fountain in the middle. People were walking through while others sat and read or sewed. Davrial was there, sitting by the fountain reading a book.
Zaana lowered herself behind the peak of the roof and watched him, and waited. A plan began to form in her mind. A plan requiring the utmost patience and discipline, prime qualities of a hunter. While he was right there in the courtyard there wasn’t much she could do, and even if he went into his house there wasn’t a lot she could do. Unless he went to sleep first. Then she could try and sneak in and who knew what she’d find? It could be the mask. It could be the six pointed star weapon. It could be a hidden legion of Gahenna’s army. A war monster from out in the Wastes. There could be anything in there. So she sat on the hard dusty roof and waited.
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Eventually Davrial went back inside but she waited anyway. He would likely still be awake. Above her the planets rotated and shifted and the faint glow of the Hidden Star slowly drifted across the sky, plunging the city into darkness. It wasn’t completely dark of course, only during the greatest dust storms did that happen and during those you would stay inside anyway. No, there were still the light of other stars, distant stars, both within the Rathelduori and without. And then there were the different planets, lit up in their own different ways, each with their own patterns and shapes across the surface. It was definitely beautiful, even through the haze of dust that still permeated everything. But Zaana didn’t have time for beauty, Zaana only had time for the hunt.
She started her slow climb down the wall into the courtyard. Her arms had mostly recovered by now although she was starting to grow very hungry, she’d have to sneak some food from the kitchens when she got back to the pyramid. She hoped her stomach wouldn’t rumble as she was sneaking about.
The climb down was much more difficult than the climb up had been. She had to scrabble for footholds she couldn’t see, sometimes having to lean out so she could look down and find something to stand on. The dark didn’t help, casting shadows over everything, making the smallest ridge look like a perfectly viable foothold. The ache in her arms started up again instantly and her lungs were starting to feel wracked with pain from her long time out in the dust without a mask. Her eyes were sore too, filled as they were with grit and grime.
She was surprised when she reached the bottom, she’d thought she’d been up much higher than that. Her foot hit the ground and she hopped down with relief, resting her tired arms for a minute. Then she stalked up to the door she’d seen Davrial enter. She tried it and it was locked. Her heart sank, that made a lot of sense, how had she not planned for that. She looked around desperately for another way in and then saw a window. It was a glass window with a drawn curtain so ordinarily she’d be unable to see through it or get through it, except that it was open.
That was strange, it wasn’t that warm tonight and usually if you locked your doors you would also shut your windows but Zaana didn’t think about that. She saw a way in, a way that could fit someone as small as her, so she took it.
She grabbed the window ledge and wormed her way in through the curtains, dropping lightly to the ground. It was dark inside, and cool, likely from the open window. Most of the interior was just shadows but there was a thin beam of light from where the curtains were parted. A thin beam that lit up something metal hanging on the far wall. She moved closer to that, her eyes adjusting gradually to the darkness. It was a big shape hanging on the wall, hung with robes and cloaks and scarves like a coat hanger, but it was metal and it looked sharp. She edged closer still and saw another shape hanging off it. A small dark shape the size of a man’s head, the size of a mask. She picked up the mask and turned it round, holding it into the light. It glared back at her with dead eyes, terrifying eyes set into a pattern of fire, fire that dripped down all the way to the jaw. She couldn’t see colours in the faint light and she’d never even seen the mask before but she knew what it was. The mask of the Day Star.
“I knew I shouldn’t have left that window open,” a harsh and grating voice said from behind her.
She dropped the mask to the floor and spun around, terror and panic rising up to fill her. It was only now she realised what she was dealing with. This man was a warrior, a killer. He’d slaughtered hundreds of people in Gahenna’s crusades and she’d just snuck into his house for no reason at all. Was she going to die?
“It’s just so small in here you know,” Davrial’s voice continued. “Out on the Wastes everything is open all the time. In here I feel so small, so cramped.” Behind her she heard something slithering against the wall, something metallic. The cloaks and scarves started to slump to the ground as the metal shape they were hanging on moved away.
“I’m not sure how you city dwellers do it. Living like this day in and day out.” A shape moved in front of the window and shut it. Zaana just stood there, legs trembling, sweat starting to seep into her clothes despite the cold. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t breathe. All the pain in her arms and lungs was gone yet it didn’t matter. She was going to die anyway.
She didn’t see the huge weapon move off the wall but she felt the wind of its passing as it slashed through the air. Not toward her though, toward the shadow that had just closed the window. There was a flash and she blinked and then there was Davrial, standing in front of her holding a candle that was flickering with fire. Behind him a dark shape moved, not a star, more like a twisting serpent of some kind. It slithered away somewhere into the darkness and Davrial smiled down at her.
He sat down on a seat and put the candle on the table then gestured to another seat across from him. Zaana remained paralysed with fear, eyes fixated on him as he tried to look friendly.
“I see you’ve figured out who I am. That’s not very ideal, you know. In the old days I would just kill you but things are different now. I’m trying to change you see. All that killing it really weighs you down...” He looked up at her and he seemed sad. He didn’t seem that scary any more. Just a normal man. The panic that had been pounding in her chest started to slowly fade away.
“I’m hoping that you aren’t some sort of spy for the masked man and the capital, tasked with hunting me down. I’ve met their spies before and they don’t usually start so young. You hungry?” he asked and she slowly nodded.
He smiled wider and his slithering shape moved to him in the darkness, carrying a few rolls of bread it had skewered. He picked them off it and started using it to cut them and spread something onto them. It looked so strange, him holding the bread roll with one hand and not even using his other hand as the metallic shape just worked on its own.
Zaana fought down her fear and moved over to the table to look at what was happening. It was fascinating. He smiled and offered her a bread roll as he began working on the next one. Remembering how hungry she had gotten waiting on a roof all day she began to dig in as he kept speaking.
“I’m guessing you just followed me home from the pyramid,” he said and she managed a nod as she stuffed the bread into her mouth. “Very impressive, I didn’t see you at all and I’m supposed to be on the lookout for these things.”
She felt a little glow of pride at that. If even the Day Star himself hadn’t been able to see her, maybe she really was a master hunter.
“You’ve no doubt realised that I’m in hiding from the masked man and his forces. We thought the Pharaoh was bad enough to us out in the Wastes but the masked man is much worse, and now our army’s in ruins.” Davrial sighed and took a bite of one of the bread rolls, offering another to Zaana who gobbled it up. “The long story is that our little war is in shambles. We lost, I’m not really any danger to anyone anymore. And I don’t really want to be.” He looked at her sadly and passed her the last bread roll.
“I don’t have any reason to trust you but I’m going to anyway because the alternative is killing you and I really don’t want to kill a child. So I need you to keep who I am completely secret. Tell no one, not even the priestess.”
“Doesn’t the priestess already know?” she asked with her mouth full of bread.
“Aha so you were listening to the confession. Yes she does know but she doesn’t know that you know. If agents of the masked man come through interrogating everyone, that could be important so that you don’t get in trouble.”
Zaana nodded, these things were very serious. Much more serious than just messing around with the sisters like she’d done all her life. It felt good to be involved in something so serious.
“Now it’s probably best you run along back to the pyramid before they get suspicious that you’re gone so long. Tell them you were just out exploring or something, whatever it is you sisters do on your days off.”
Zaana nodded vigorously and swallowed the last of the bread roll. She looked around but the shadowy serpent piece of metal had disappeared. She walked to the door but then stopped.
“Are you really the Day Star?” she asked curiously as she unlocked the door.
“Well... yes,” Davrial replied, turning in his chair to face her.
“Where’s your big weapon thingy? You know, the star weapon?”
“The star blade? Oh I try not to use that anymore. A bit too dangerous for serving supper don’t you think?”
Zaana nodded suspiciously. She would have still liked to see it though. She opened the door and rushed off into the night, back to the pyramid.
Behind her Davrial closed the door and sat down dejectedly in his chair. He had to leave, he knew he had to leave. His secret was out and there was no way a little girl like that could keep it. She’d tell her friends, her parents perhaps. Did girls at the pyramid have parents? He didn’t know how that worked. But she’d tell someone for sure. So he had to leave, but he had more that he needed to confess. Just one more confession.
He could have killed her. Maybe he should have killed her. But she looked just like that girl he’d killed in Pereselis. The one that still filled his dreams every night with her scream. It had seemed necessary to kill her at the time too. He put his face in his hands and slowly sobbed into them. He wouldn’t be sleeping well tonight.