skin and elven eyes, the commandant was little more than a moonlit ghost himself.
“You heard him. Commandant.”
“Do you think you could ever outrun me, my lord?” Ivory teeth made a smile beneath glassy eyes.
“Javed—” Pavek dug the toe of his sandal into the loose debris that covered the forest floor. “I plan to outrun death itself.”
He filled his lungs and pushed off with all the strength in his body. The elven commandant fell behind for two paces, then he was back at Pavek’s side, grinning broadly, running effortlessly.
“Lean into your strides, Pavek, put your head down and breathe!”
Pavek hadn’t the wherewithal to answer, but he took the lessons to heart as Cerk shouted another “Veer left!” in his ear.
He saw hearthfires flickering in the near-distance. He’d heard nothing louder than Cerk or the pounding of his own feet since the thunder rolled over them, but silence didn’t reassure him. Mahtra’s protection was a potent weapon. She could have felled a score of halflings, but they wouldn’t stay down for long. Pavek fingered the knotted leather looped over the top of his scabbard and drew his sword as he and Javed led their templars into a clearing that was larger than the whole halfling settlement, quiet as a tomb and almost as dark at its heart.
“Spread out. Keep your wits and swords ready!” Javed shouted his orders before he stopped running.
In pairs, as always, the men and women of the war bureau did as they were told.
“Mahtra! Mahtra, where are you?” Pavek set Cerk down without protest and spun on his heels as he called her name again: “Mahtra!”
“Pavek?” Her familiar, faintly inflected voice came from the black center of the clearing. “Pavek!”
He heard her coming toward him before her pale skin appeared in the moonlit. Javed took a brand from the nearest hearth. Her mask was gone. Another time, her face would have astonished him—he would have made a rude fool of himself gaping and staring. Tonight, he blinked once and saw the blood on Mahtra’s neck, shoulder, and arm instead; her own blood, from her stiff, uncertain movements. Then he noticed the bodies. There were bodies everywhere: halflings on the ground, felled by thunder and just starting to move; halflings overhead, dangling from the branches of the biggest tree Pavek had ever seen, halflings whom Mahtra might have stunned, halflings who’d died long ago, and—scattered in the torchlight—bodies that weren’t halflings, including a lean, lanky half-elf he recognized between two heartbeats.
“Cut him down,” Mahtra pleaded before Pavek could say a word.
“Hamanu’s mercy,” Pavek’s voice was soft, his lungs were empty, and his heart. “Cut him down.” He couldn’t breathe. His sword slipped through his fingers. “Zvain?” he whispered, starting another sweep of the bodies in the tree and those on the ground, looking for a halfling who wasn’t a halfling.
“Alive,” Mahtra said. “Hurt. Cut him down?”
All of which confirmed Pavek’s dire guess that Ruari was neither hurt, nor alive. His mouth worked silently; the commandant gave the order. Two templars ran where the hanging ropes led, into the dark, toward the great tree’s trunk. Their obsidian swords sang as they hacked through the ropes. Bodies fell like heavy, reeking rain, Ruari’s among them, completely limp… deadweight… dead.
Pavek started toward his friend’s lifeless body; the emptiness beneath his ribs had become an ache.
Mahtra stopped him. “Kakzim’s gone. He grabbed me; he was touching me when the thunder happened. Another mistake. He got away.”
“Which way?” Rage banished Pavek’s grief and got his blood flowing again. “Which way, Mahtra?”
“I don’t know. He got away before I could see again.”
Pavek swore. His rage was fading without a target; grief threatened. “Couldn’t you hear something?” he demanded harshly, more harshly than Mahtra deserved.
Her neck twisted, bringing one ear down to her bloody shoulder: her best impression of misery and apology. “A sound, maybe—over there?” She pointed with her bloody arm.
A sound, that was all the help Mahtra could give him; it would have to be enough. Retrieving his sword, Pavek jogged into the moonlit forest. Javed called him a fool. Cerk warned him his chase was futile and doomed. He could live with doom and futility—anything was better than facing Ruari’s corpse.
Kakzim left no trail. There was a path, but it petered out on the bank of a little brook. Kakzim could have crossed the water or followed it upstream or down—if he’d come this way at all. The chase was futile and doomed, and Pavek knew himself for a fool.