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open call on their patron's power and protection.
Once convinced of the mark's authenticity, he'd have more friends than he knew
what to do with. In his mind's eye, Pavek watched the taskmasters,
administrators, and procurers who'd run his life since his mother bought him a
pallet in the templar orphanage trample each other in their eagerness to curry
his favor.
Pavek had countless fantasies beneath the scorching sun, but he indulged them
only because he knew that many of those whose comeuppance he most wished to
witness were already dead, and that he'd never act on the rest. He'd had too
much personal acquaintance with humiliation to enjoy in any form.
Besides, in his calmer moments Pavek wasn't certain he wanted to be a high
templar. He certainly didn't want to have regular encounters with Urik's
sorcerer-king. On the other hand, the more he learned from Mahtra, frequent
encounters of any kind were a decreasing possibility. First he had to survive
this, his first high-templar assignment. Night after night as they sat around
a small fire, Pavek quizzed the white-skinned woman about the disaster that
had eventually brought her to Quraite.
Mahtra had told him about a huge cavern beneath the city and the huge water
reservoir it supposedly contained. When he gave the matter thought, it seemed
reasonable enough. The fountains and wells that slaked Urik's daily thirst
never ran dry, and although the creation of water from air was one of the most
elementary feats of magic-he'd mastered the spell himself-it was unlikely that
the city's water had an unnatural origin. That a community of misfits dwelt on
the shores of this underground lake also seemed reasonable. For many people,
life anywhere in the city, even in the total darkness beneath it, was
preferable to life anywhere else.
Not much more than a year ago, Pavek would have thought the same thing.
And he could imagine a mob of thugs descending on that community with
extermination on their minds. It wasn't a pleasant image, but riots happened
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in Urik, despite King Hamanu's iron fist and the readiness of templars to
enforce their king's justice. While he wore the yellow, Pavek had swept
through many an erupting market plaza, side-by-side with his fellow templars,
bashing heads and restoring order with brutal efficiency that kept the bureaus
more feared than hated.
It was the sort of work that drove him to a melancholy two-day drunk, but
there were a good many templars who enjoyed it, even volunteered for it.
Templars were certainly capable of causing the carnage in Mahtra's cavern, but
it seemed this was one civic outrage for which they weren't responsible. With
all the time she'd spent in the templar quarter, Mahtra would know a templar
if she'd gleaned one from the dying memories of the mind-bender she called
Father. But there wasn't a snatch of yellow in the images she'd received from
Father's dying mind and, even off-duty, the kind of templars who might have
ravaged the cavern wore their robes as a sort of armor.
What Mahtra had gleaned from inherited memories was the face of a
slave-scarred halfling who she insisted was Escrissar's alchemist. Pavek had
seen Kakzim just once, when he stood beside his master, Escrissar, in the
customs-house warrens. It had struck Pavek then that the alchemist had enough
hate in his eyes to destroy the world. He could believe that the mad halfling
was the force behind the rampage. What he couldn't figure was Kakzim's purpose
in slaughtering a community Lord Hamanu would have executed anyway.
It didn't make sense to a thick-skulled man like himself, any more than it
made sense that the Lion-King would send across the Tablelands for him to
resolve the problem. True, he'd been concerned that Kakzim hadn't been caught
and killed along with Escrissar in the battle for Quraite, but not concerned
enough to pack up his few possessions and head back to the city. He'd seen no
pressing need. Urik belonged to Lord Hamanu, as children belonged to their
parents, and over the millennia the king had demonstrated that he could take
good care of what belonged to him.
If Lord Hamanu wanted Kakzim dead, Kakzim would be dead. Simply and
efficiently.
Try as he might, Pavek could find only one satisfactory explanation for the
summons Mahtra carried to Quraite: Lord Hamanu was bored. That was the usual
explanation when sudden, strange orders filtered down through the bureau
hierarchies; orders that once put an adolescent orphan on the outer walls
repainting the images of the Lion-King for a twenty-five day quinth, changing
all the kilts to a different color.
Lord Hamanu made war to alleviate his boredom and indulged his high templar
pets for the same reason. He'd turned Pavek into a high templar, and now it
was Pavek's turn to provide a day's amusement before Lord Hamanu hunted down
the halfling himself.
Pavek dreamt of sulphur eyes among the stars, eyes narrowing with laughter,
and razor claws descending through the night to rip out his heart. The heavens
were naturally dark each time he awoke, but the gouged medallion was hot
against his ribs, and Pavek was not completely reassured.
In contrast to his own nightmare anxiety, Zvain and Ruari seemed to think
they'd embarked on the great adventure of their young lives. They chattered
endlessly about cleverness, courage, and the victory that would be theirs.
Zvain imagined throwing Kakzim's bloody head at the Lion-King's feet and being
rewarded with his weight in gold. Ruari, to his credit, thought he could
assure Quraite's isolation. Even Mahtra got swept up in vainglory, though her
expectations were more modest: an inexhaustible supply of cabra melons and red
beads.
The trio tried to infect him with their enthusiasm, calling him an old man
when he resisted. They had a point. Pavek could remember himself at Ruari's
age-it wasn't more than a handful of years ago-and he'd been a cautious old
man even then.
After dealing with the sorcerer-king's boredom, Pavek feared his greatest
challenge was going to be riding herd on his rambunctious allies.
Ruari had matured in the past year. He had moments of blind, adolescent
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stubbornness, but overall Pavek trusted the half-elf to act sensibly and hold
up under pressure. Zvain was still very young, in the midst of his most
willful and rebellious years, and nursing childhood wounds. He was inclined at
times to crumble, to curl in on himself- especially when Pavek and Ruari
lapsed into one of their vigorous but ultimately inconsequential arguments.
The boy craved affection that Pavek could barely provide and then frequently
rejected it just as fast, which only made life more difficult.
As for Mahtra... the made-woman was an enigma. Younger than Zvain by several
years, she wasn't so much a child-though she had a child's notion of cause and
effect- as a wild creature, full-grown and unpredictable. She was much
stronger than she appeared, and, or so she claimed, had the capacity to
'protect herself'.
Mahtra said she'd ridden out of Khelo, the market village most nearly aligned
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