than dying, aren’t there, Lord Pavek?” The king looked at Pavek, and Pavek knew his ordeal was about to begin. “Recount.”
Words flowed out of Pavek’s mouth as fast as he could shape them, but they were his own words. He didn’t feel his life slipping away; Hamanu wasn’t unreeling his memory on a mind-bender’s spindle, like silk from a worm’s cocoon. He told the truth, all of it, from Quraite to Modekan, Modekan to the elven market and the warded passage underground. When he got to the cavern, the pressure on his thoughts relented. He described how the bowls and their scaffolds had first appeared: magically shimmering and glorious from the far side of the cavern. And how, when he pierced their glamour, he learned that they actually were made from lashed-together bones and pitch-patched hide and filled with sludge he believed was poison.
“I thought of Codesh, O Mighty King. But I wanted proof, not my own guesses, before I came here.”
“You wanted a measure of that sludge, because you’d forgotten to collect it the first time and you believed your own words would not be enough.”
Pavek gulped air. The king had used the Unseen Way. His memories had been unreeled, and he had not died, he had not even known it was happening…
“Tell me the rest, Lord Pavek. Tell me your conclusions, which are not part of your memories. What do you think?”
“I think Kakzim has found a way to poison Urik’s water, but I have no proof—except for a few stains on Ruari’s staff—”
Hamanu moved swiftly, more swiftly than Pavek could measure with his eyes, to Ruari’s side, and when the half-elf did not immediately relinquish his staff, the Lion-King roared loud enough to deafen them all. His arm swept forward, claws bared, and took the wood out of Ruari’s hands. Ruari collapsed on his hands and knees with a groan. Pavek didn’t twitch to help his friend, couldn’t: he was transfixed by Lord Hamanu’s rage.
The Lion-King’s human features had all but vanished. His jaw thrust forward, supporting a score or more of identical, sharp teeth. His leonine mane vanished, too, replaced by a dark, scaly crest. He seemed not so much taller as longer, with an angled spine rather than an erect one, and a sinuously flexible neck. Dark, nonretractable talons slashed through the linen bound over the stains on Ruari’s staff. A slender, forked tongue slashed once and touched the stains, then with another roar, Lord Hamanu hurled the staff over their heads. It exploded when it hit the wall and fell to the floor in pieces.
“Why have you taken so long?”
The words echoed inside Pavek’s skull. He was not certain he’d heard them with his ears and didn’t try to answer with his fear-thickened tongue. Instead, Pavek threw up images a mind-bender could absorb: He’d tried. He’d done his best to solve problems he didn’t understand. He was merely a human man. If they had failed, it was because he had failed, and he alone should bear the blame. But his failure was not deliberate—merely mortal.
Pavek stared into the eyes of a creature who was everything he was not. He willed himself not to blink or flinch, and after an eternity it was the creature who turned away. With the tension broken and their lives saved for another heartbeat, Pavek let his head hang as he tried, gasp by painful gasp, to draw air into his burning lungs.
“It is enough. I am satisfied. I am satisfied with you, Lord High Templar, and with what you have done. But you are not finished.”
A shadow fell across Pavek’s back. He could see the Lion—
King’s feet without raising his head. They were ordinary human feet shod in plain leather sandals. For one fleeting moment he thought he’d rather die than raise his head—then shuddered, waiting for the fatal blow, which did not fall, though Pavek was certain he had no secrets from his king. It seemed Lord Hamanu wanted him to live a little longer.
Sighing, Pavek straightened his neck and looked upon a king once again transformed, this time into a man no taller than he. A hard-faced man, no longer young, but human, very human with weary human eyes and graying human hair.
“What else must I do, O Mighty King?”
“I will give you a cadre from the war bureau. Lead them into the cavern. Destroy the scaffolds. Destroy the bowls and their contents. Then, find the passage to Codesh. Another cadre will await you. With two cadres,