was replacing the half-elf—but it was. Pavek felt as if he’d been stained with a foul dye that would never wash off.
The woman registrator retreated a full stride. “We will send to Khelo for sedan chairs, Lord Escrissar.” She flashed a hand-sign and two elven templars took off running. “There are none here.”
Another reason they should have gone to Khelo. Draft and riding animals were outlawed in Urik and in the belt of land between the city and its market villages. High templars and nobles got around that law with slave-labor sedan chairs, which could be hired at Khelo.
“There’s no time for that,” Pavek protested, finding his voice too late to recall the elves. “Water and a hand-cart, that’s all we want; then we’ll be on our way.”
They got their water, and all the succulent fruit they could eat, but not the hand-cart. There was no way Modekan’s chief registrator was going to let a high templar, especially a high templar calling himself Lord Escrissar, leave her village pulling his own baggage in a rickety two-wheeled bone-and-leather cart. The village had twenty hale men who’d be honored to pull their cart. Her very own son would be especially honored to pull a second cart for the eleganta, whose rank they’d mistaken earlier.
“Surely, Lord Escrissar, you can’t expect her to walk?”
Pavek knew Mahtra wasn’t nearly as frail as she appeared to be, but her sandals weren’t suited for the long walk to the city. After a futile grumble, he bowed his head, accepting the registrator’s advice. The bloody sun hadn’t moved twice its breadth across the cloudless sky, and already he was being told what to do again, respectfully and correctly, but told, nonetheless.
By the time the Modekaners had piled what appeared to be every pillow in the village into Mahtra’s cart, there wasn’t a yellow-robed elf to be seen. The templars at the city gate weren’t going to be surprised by an unexpected high templar and his entourage. And Pavek wasn’t going to get an opportunity to talk tactics with his companions on the final leg of their journey, as—fool that he was—he’d intended.
Pavek didn’t get a chance to talk with them at all. In addition to the two men pulling the carts, half the able-bodied folk of Modekan marched along with them, each of them taking advantage of the opportunity to ply a cause or air their favorite grievance with, wonder-of-wonders, an approachable high templar. They made varied promises and offered their service for quinths, phases, or all the years of their lives, if only he would take them into his presumably vast patronage. One nubile young woman offered to become his wife, guaranteeing him strong, healthy sons to carry on his lineage; she already had three by the man she was leaving, the man who, moments earlier, had offered to become his water-servant for ten years and a day.
He said he’d think about it and tucked the little seal-stone with her name on it into his bulging belt-pouch. An older fellow, a dwarf with a mangled ear and a gimpy leg, took aim at him next, but not before Pavek got a glimpse of Mahtra, Ruari, and even Zvain under similar assault, the three of them looking similarly overwhelmed. He cursed himself for a fool and was glad Telhami wasn’t around to see what a mess he’d made of things, then the dwarf caught up with him.
The dwarf knew of a place, deep in the barrens, where a sandstorm had overtaken a rich caravan, leaving everyone dead but him. For twenty years, he’d kept the caravan’s lost treasure a secret, but now, if Lord Escrissar would put up twenty gold pieces—for men, supplies, and inixes to haul the treasure back to Urik—the dwarf would split the treasure evenly with him.
Hamanu’s infinitesimal mercy! Did they all take him for that great a fool?
Pavek grew more irritated with himself and the smarmy dwarf until the walls and roofs of the city hove into view. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed Urik—he hadn’t thought he’d missed it at all, but the sunlight flash of the Lion-King’s yellow-glass eyes embedded in the majestic walls sent a chill down his spine. His body tightened. He walked lighter, feeling Urik’s vitality through the balls of his feet, the chaotic rhythms of sentient life different from the slow regularity of Quraite’s groves. The dwarf fell behind as Pavek picked up the pace. Cruel, perhaps, to take advantage of a dwarf’s shorter stride, but not