he’s on the salt, we’ve got time, don’t we?” He imagined meeting the eyes behind the veil and making them blink. “You don’t already know what went wrong?”
“No,” her voice was barely audible. “I know that he’s alone, nothing more. I’ve come to you, before the others. You’ve a right.”
She turned away and, gripping her staff in a white-knuckled fist, began the long walk to the village and her hut. Pavek almost felt sorry for her, except: “You sent them! You wouldn’t listen, not to me, not to your guardian. You thought your zarneeka was more important, and that you were so much smarter, wiser. Damn you, Telhami, this falls on you!”
Telhami’s form shimmered and vanished.
“You shouldn’t’ve said that, Pavek.”
“It’s the truth. Somebody’s got to say it.”
“Not you. You should’ve kept your mouth shut.”
“Good advice, scum—but I don’t listen to good advice.” He picked up the hoe, tried to break the shaft over his thigh, and when that failed hurled the tool at the half-round disk of the setting sun. “Damn!—”
* * *
They met Yohan in the wastes between the village and the Sun’s Fist. The dwarf had aged profoundly since they’d last seen him. His eyes were red-rimmed and set in deep, dark hollows. His muscles had withered. His bedraggled kank was as shaky as him, and not one of the sleek Moonracer-bred bugs the Quraiters favored. He needed a steady hand when he slid from the saddle and would not meet either man’s eyes as he told his story in broken, near incoherent snatches.
He said he’d ridden day and night, sleeping in the saddle when he could no longer keep his eyes open. Eating hadn’t been a problem; he’d had no food with him when he escaped from Urik, and hadn’t wasted time stealing any. He’d had water, for the first few days. Since then he’d kept going on will alone.
Pavek, having suspected something similar from the moment Telhami gave them the news, offered Yohan a waterskin fresh from the village well. The dwarf brushed it aside.
“It’s no use. I’m finished.”
“What happened first? How did it go bad?”
“Escrissar.”
Pavek swore. He’d dared to hope that, whatever the catastrophe, Yohan had simply left Akashia in some temporary shelter, before racing back to Quraite for help. Hearing Escrissar’s name, he could only hope that she was already dead.
Very dead.
He took a swallow from the flask to calm himself.
“Stan at the beginning—”
Yohan obliged. Between Ruari’s game ankles and the dwarf’s exhaustion, their pace was slow enough that the tale was nearing its elven market climax as the three men approached the green fields.
“How’d you escape?” Pavek demanded, stopping short while they were still on barren ground. He knew his city and a dozen ways through the walls that didn’t involve the gates. But none of those secret passages used the elven market.
“That dwarf, that hairy bastard in a procurer’s robe, and a common woman with serpents tattooed on her arm were coming for us. I don’t know—maybe I could have taken them both, but that still left Escrissar, the mind-bender, and Kashi hadn’t kenned where he was all afternoon. I wanted to stand together right there, or stand alone to give her the escape.” Yohan ground his knuckles against his eyes and stared at the violet sky. “One of us had to get back to Quraite, she said. I couldn’t keep the secret, not against what we were facing: a mind-bender Kashi couldn’t ken. But she swore she could. And I knew the way out; she didn’t—”
“How did you get out, Yohan?” Pavek seized Yohan by the shoulder and spun him around—a testament to the dwarf’s weakness and exhaustion. “There’s no way through the walls from the market. Who helped you? What did he give you in return?”
“Pavek! No!” Ruari shouted, trying ineffectively to loosen Pavek’s hold on Yohan.
Pavek let go of his own accord, shoving the dwarf backward and turning his helpless fury on the half-elf. “There’s no passage in the market; the walls there are solid. He had to have help to get out of the market and out of Urik. Escrissar’s help, scum. Escrissar! Escrissar set him free, sent him back to us!”
“Not Escrissar,” Yohan said wearily. “Elves. An old debt. A tribe that didn’t die at the same time a free village went down to templars. They named me ‘friend’ and said they—all of them, whatever tribe—would owe me life whenever I needed it. They got me out. Debt’s paid now. Understand?”