the templars would have spotted it from the ambush sight. Of course, without the forest, there would have been no ambush, and no halfling houses, either. The halflings lived in a circle of huge, spreading trees around a shaded, moss-covered clearing. Some of their homes had been, carved out of the trees’ trunks so long ago the bark had healed around them. Others were perched in their branches: like nests. The homes seemed both alive and ancient, and all of them were too small for even a dwarf’s comfort.
Tiny, feral faces—halfling children—peeked out of moss-framed windows, but the men and women of the community had gathered in the clearing, with weapons ready. A duet of Halfling singsong passed between the templars’ captives and the anxious villagers. One of the templars translated:
“Our fellows said they had no choice; we would have killed them and gotten the information from their corpses. The old fellows in the center, they speak for the village and they wanted to know why we’ve come, what we’re looking for.”
Commandant Javed nodded. Speaking clearly in the Urikite dialect, confident the elders could understand, he said, “We’ve tracked a renegade halfling to this village, a blond man with Urik slave scars on his cheeks. If they surrender him at once, and if they provide us with an antidote for the poison they used on our comrade, we will depart immediately. Otherwise we’ll destroy this village and everyone here, one by one. Children first.”
When the elders protested in a passable dialect that there was neither an antidote nor a blond, scarred halfling, Commandant Javed turned to Pavek.
“My lord?” he asked, cold as a man’s voice could be.
Pavek set down the sword he’d held ready since the ambush began. He dug out his bit of ensorcelled hair and let it spin freely, as much to give the halfling elders additional time to consider their folly—they might be superb fighters for their size, but they didn’t stand a chance against Javed’s maniples. For the first time, the hair pointed in a different direction, almost perpendicular to the path they’d been following since Khelo. The halflings who’d watched this subtle bit of Tablelands magic seemed impressed, but did not recant.
Their elders repeated that there was no antidote for the poison the halflings smeared on their arrowheads. The templar woman would die without awakening. And there was no blond-haired halfling with Urikite slave-scars on his cheeks in this village or anywhere else. Didn’t the templars know that halflings would sooner die than surrender their freedom?
Faced with such intransigence, there was nothing Pavek could do to save them or their village. He met the commandant’s eyes and nodded. Javed barked orders to his maniples:
The first were to stand with swords drawn, guarding the armed adults and venerable elders already gathered in the clearing. The second would collect flaming brands from the halfling hearths and set fire to the tree homes—and be prepared to snare the halfling children as they fled their burning shelters.
When a human templar seized the first halfling child as it bolted, hair and clothes aflame, toward its parents, the armed halflings surged against their enemies in a desperate attempt to save their children.
But the templars had their orders; the carnage was proceeding to its inevitable, one-sided conclusion, but just as blood began to flow:
STOP!
It was a frantic, mind-bending assault against them all, templar and halfling alike, and the Unseen, unheard shout was, in its way, louder than the shrill halfling screams or the crackling flames. It echoed in Pavek’s mind, and was enough to make him retreat from the dirty work of slaying halflings. He was not alone in his retreat: though most of the templars brought their swords down toward their victims without hesitation, some did not, and even the halflings’ resistance seemed to falter.
Paddock! Another Unseen shout, accompanied this time by an image Pavek recognized as his own face. Make them stop, Paddock. I’ll give you what you want!
A second face loomed in Pavek’s mind, a face covered with shiny, weblike scars, a face surrounded by tangled wisps of dark brown hair, a face he didn’t recognize until its eyes absorbed his attention.
Eyes like black, bottomless pits, eyes of infinite hate and madness.
Kakzim’s eyes.
“Stand down!” Pavek shouted. “Javed! Commandant! Give the order to stand down. Now!”
For a moment he wasn’t certain the order would be obeyed, but Javed pulled his sword-stroke before it sliced a halfling’s head from its shoulders, and once their commandant stood down, the other templars followed.