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 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