just as quickly shouting: “What are you!”
She fell to the shore with her head tilted so they could see that a milky membrane covered her eyes. The gold patches on her skin gave off bright fumes that smelled a bit of sulphur.
Zvain dropped to the ground as well. “Don’t fight!” he shouted, then curled up with his knees against his forehead. “Don’t fight,” he repeated, sobbing this time. “She’ll blast you if you fight.”
Pavek stood beside Ruari, one hand on his sword, the other on his medallion, waiting for Mahtra to be herself again. The fumes subsided, the membranes withdrew. She sat up slowly, stretching her arms.
“You want to tell us what that was about?” Pavek demanded.
“The makers—” Mahtra began, and Pavek rolled his eyes.
She began to cry—at least that’s what Pavek thought she was doing. The sound she made was like nothing he’d heard before, but she was starting to curl up the same way as Zvain. Ignoring his ankle, he squatted down beside her.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“Father—”
“I don’t know what happened to your father’s body, but those aren’t his bones. Those are bones from animals. The bowls, too. The bowls are made from animal hides, inix maybe. I was a cruel, dung-skulled fool to say what I did.”
“Bones and hides,” Ruari commented. “House Escrissar wasn’t bloody enough for him, so Kakzim’s moved into a slaughterhouse—”
A slaughterhouse. Pavek got to his feet. “Codesh!” The word that had escaped before all the excitement began. “Codesh! Kakzim’s in Codesh! He’s in the butchers’ village—” His enthusiasm faded as quickly as it had arisen.
“But the passage’s in the elven market. Someone would have noticed, not me hides; maybe, but the bones for sure. There’s no way to get those bones here without someone noticing.”
Mahtra stood up slowly, using Pavek’s arm for balance. “Henthoren sent a runner across the plaza to me that morning. He said he’d let no one into the cavern since sundown, when I left. I think—I think he knew what had happened, and was trying to tell me it wasn’t his fault—”
“Because there’s another passage to the cavern… in Codesh,” Pavek concluded.
Zvain raised his head. “No,” he pleaded. “Not Codesh. I don’t want to go to Codesh. I don’t want to go anywhere.”
“Don’t worry. Codesh can wait until morning,” Pavek assured the boy. He’d had enough adventure for one day himself. His ankle throbbed when he took an aching step toward the distant ramp to Urik. The sprain wasn’t as serious as it was painful. “Food,” he said to himself and his companions. “A good night’s sleep. That’s what we all need. We’ll worry about Codesh—about Hamanu—in the morning.”
Ruari, Mahtra and Zvain fell in step behind him.
Chapter Eight
Civil bureau administrators were waiting outside the door of House Escrissar when Pavek, still hobbling on a game ankle, led his companions through the templar quarter a bit before sunset. The administrators were drowsy with boredom and leaning against the loaded hand-cart Manip had dragged up from the gate. Exercising his high templar privileges, Pavek rewarded Manip and sent him on his way before he said a word to the higher ranking administrators.
With proper deference, one of the administrators gave him a key ring large enough to hang a man. The other handed him a pristine seal, carved from porphyry and bearing his exalted rank, his common name, and his inherited house. He tried to give Pavek a gold medallion, too, but Pavek refused, saying his old ceramic medallion was sufficient. That confused the administrator, giving Pavek a momentary sense of triumph before he etched his name—Just-Plain Pavek—through the smooth, white clay surface of the deed, revealing the coarse obsidian beneath it.
The administrators wrapped the deedstone in parchment that was duly secured with the Lion-King’s sulphurous wax by them and by Pavek, using his porphyry seal for the first time. The administrators departed, and Pavek tried five keys before he found the one that worked in the door. He dragged the hand-cart over the threshold himself.
House Escrissar had been sealed quinths ago. It was quiet as a tomb beneath a thick blanket of yellow dust. Otherwise both Zvain and Mahtra assured its new master that the house was precisely as they remembered it—which sent a chill down Pavek’s spine. There was nothing in the simple furniture, the floor mosaics, or the wall frescoes to proclaim that a monster had lived here. He’d expected obscenity, torture, and cruelty of all kinds, but with their depictions of bright gardens and green forests,