hands. The druids hung back, their expressions more complex and much harder to read.
Few words were exchanged. Everyone, presumably, had heard Pavek’s midnight explosion—by rumor, at least, if he hadn’t actually awakened them. There wasn’t much more to say. The sky was bright and cloudless, as it usually was. A storm—dust, wind, or Tyr—might sweep down on them before they got to Urik, with no one in Quraite ever the wiser. But, if there were no storms, they’d reach Urik in about four days. And after that—?
What could anyone say to three men riding to certain and unpleasant death?
What could they say to each other?
Nothing.
Yohan tapped his kank’s antenna to get it moving. Ruari went next with an optimist’s bug at the end of a rope. Pavek took up the rear.
* * *
Telhami was waiting for them on the verge of the Sun’s Fist. Her silhouette was hunched and shrunken. Despite the familiar veiled hat, Pavek didn’t recognize her at first. She asked—an honest request, not a disguised command—to use her arts together in their minds to sequester their knowledge of Quraite against all inquiry. It wouldn’t, she insisted, prevent them from returning, but it would thwart Elabon Escrissar or anyone else who sought to unravel their memories.
“For Quraite—?” she asked.
Ruari and Yohan dismounted; Pavek stayed where he was. They knelt on the hard ground and were entranced by mind-bending and spellcraft. He and Telhami were effectively alone.
“For Quraite,” she repeated, and he wasn’t swayed. “The guardian will keep your secrets safe from Elabon Escrissar.”
Reluctantly, Pavek slid from the kank’s back. He had to kneel: there was no other way she could touch his eyes and ears or press her thumbs against his temples. Bolts of white lightning rebounded within his skull, within his mind. When they ended, Telhami was gone, the other two had remounted, and there was a mote of utter emptiness in his memory.
Settling himself in the kank’s saddle he realized he knew exactly what the emptiness had contained: the background against which he’d lived his recent life. There were names: Telhami, Akashia, the farmers and the other druids, each associated with a familiar face and floating in an unnatural gray fog, as if he had dwelt in a cloud of smoke since leaving Urik.
He had Telhami’s word that he could find his way back, if me was lucky enough to escape Elabon Escrissar; and that he would betray nothing if his luck ran out. It was thin, cold comfort, and he shivered the length of his spine, prodding the kank onto the dazzling Sun’s Fist behind Ruari and Yohan.
* * *
They left the kanks at a homestead barely within the broad belt of irrigated farms from which Urik drew its foodstuffs. A small shower of silver from Yohan’s coin pouch bought promises that the bugs would cared for and left in an open pen. There was risk. There was always risk when one man bought another man’s promise; neither knew who else might raise the asking price.
But few things held as much risk as breaking into a High Templar’s house with thoughts of assassination in their minds.
Getting into Urik wasn’t so difficult. Generations of templarate orphans had dared each other into reckless explorations of the city’s remotest corners. They lacked prestige and promotions, but their knowledge of Urik was legendary. And just as Pavek was certain that there was no passage through walls near the elven markets, he knew there was one beneath the northwest watchtower. The only thing he feared as he cleared away the rubble from a loose foundation stone was meeting a band of his younger counterparts somewhere in the narrow, twisting passageway.
He knew they were halfway to the templar quarter when the passage widened into the shimmering blue-green curtain of the sorcerer-king’s personal warding.
“You first,” he said to Ruari, who turned gray in the eerie light and refused to move. “You’ve got my medallion. Give it back if you don’t want to go first.” He held out his hand.
“What makes you think I’ve got it with me?” Ruari countered, all spit and vinegar, and clutching his shirt where Pavek had known the ceramic lump was hidden.
He cocked his head toward Yohan who, with a weary sigh, thumped the half-wit between the shoulders, propelling him through the curtain, which hissed and sparkled but did not harm him. He and the dwarf scurried through before the sparking died.
“What if I didn’t?” Ruari demanded.
“You’d be dead,” he said bluntly and kept walking.