what was coming next. He’d seen two of the halflings flinch when Javed implied the necromancy for which the templarates were infamous. A third had lowered his eyes when the commandant asked for a volunteer. Although necromancy would be more difficult without borrowed spellcraft, Pavek trusted that Javed wouldn’t have made the threat if he didn’t have the means to carry it through. He also trusted that one of the other templars would have seen the halflings’ reaction and would report them to the commandant. Pointing out an enemy who’d shot poisoned arrows at him didn’t trouble him, but condemning a man to death and worse because he wouldn’t betray his home and family wasn’t something Pavek could do.
As Ruari had told him when they’d argued in Escrissar’s garden, he had a convenient conscience.
And not long to wait. The maniple templars had caught all four halflings reacting to Javed’s speech. The commandant grabbed the lone woman in the group, not—Pavek assumed—strictly because of her sex, but because she had huddled close by one of the men. When templars of any rank, from any bureau, wanted fast intimidation results, they turned their attention to the smaller, weaker partner in a pair, if a pair was available.
While one templar held the woman from behind and another pressed his composite sword’s blade against her pulsing throat, Commandant Javed removed a scroll from his pack. He broke the heavy black seal and began to read the mnemonics of the same necromantic spell Pavek had expected the Lion-King to use on him at Codesh. Midway through the invocation, the sword-wielding templar pricked the halfling’s skin with the blade’s razor-sharp teeth.
The woman gave no more reaction to the pain and the trickling of her own warm, red blood than she had to the commandant’s speech, but the sight was too much for the halfling she’d huddled against. He sprang to his feet.
“Spare her, and I’ll lead you to our village,” he said in the plain language of the Urik streets.
His halfling companions, including the woman whose life he was trying to save, sputtered epithets in their clicking, screeching language. The woman got another nick in her throat; the other two halflings got savage blows from the hilts of templar weapons. Templars did not tolerate in others those treacherous, divisive behaviors they practiced to perfection among themselves.
“And the scarred, blond-haired halfling?” Javed asked.
The traitor wrung his hands. “I know of no such man.”
Javed’s long arm swung out to clout the halfling. He staggered and tripped over his indignant companions.
“We know he came this way!” the commandant thundered. “I will have the truth, from your mouth or hers!” He shook the scroll he still held in his right hand and began again to read the mnemonics.
With a hand held over his bleeding mouth, the halfling scrambled toward Commandant Javed. “Great One,” he cried, “there is no such man. I swear it.”
“What do you think, Lord Pavek? Is he telling the truth?”
Eyes turned toward Pavek, who scratched the bristly growth on his chin before asking: “Which way to your village?”
Eager to respond to a question he could answer, the halfling pointed in the direction they’d already been headed, but regarding his truthfulness, Pavek could only scratch his chin a second time. Halflings were rare in Urik, unheard of in the templarate. He could count the number he knew by name on the fingers of one hand, and save his thumb for Kakzim. As far as he was concerned, halfling faces were inscrutable. The male halfling in front of him could have been Zvain’s age, his own age, or venerable like Javed; he could have been telling the absolute truth, or lying through his remaining teeth.
The only certainty was that Pavek held lives on the tip of his tongue. He looked at Javed; the commandant’s shadowed face was as inscrutable as the halfling’s. In the end, Pavek relied more on hope than logic.
“I believe him about his village. As for the other—” following the commandant’s lead, Pavek didn’t say Kakzim’s name aloud “—men of no account frequently don’t know the answers to important questions.” Fate knew, he, himself, dwelt in ignorance most of the time. “We’ll talk to the elders when we get there.”
Javed bowed his head. “Your will, Lord Pavek.” He crumpled the scroll he’d been reading, and it vanished in a flare of silvery light.
The village to which their halfling captive led them wasn’t far away. If they’d been on the barrens instead of deep in a forest,