no choice tonight or ever, either of them.
But he still couldn’t get that look out of his mind.
“I said: I’m no healer!” Ruari’s hand struck his arm, demanding attention. “Wind and fire, Pavek, you’re not listening. What’s wrong with you?”
He truly hadn’t heard the words the first time Ruari must have said them, but something in the words—or tone—of the repetition penetrated Akashia’s mindless daze. She whimpered and buried her face against his neck, but when he put his other arm around her, she stiffened, then began to tremble.
His own helplessness in the face of Akashia’s need drove Dovanne at last from his consciousness, replaced her death-mask with a black mask and talons. He’d come back. Escrissar would answer for what he’d done.
But first they had to get Akashia out of Urik.
“Pavek!”
“Nothing. I’m trying to think.”
“Think fast,” Yohan suggested. “Curfew’s going to ring soon. Inside or out, we can’t be here when it does. Don’t suppose you had any friends who might do you a favor? A woman, maybe?”
Dovanne returned, hard and angry, and remained with him until he shook his head so vigorously that Akashia’s trembling intensified, and she clutched his shirt in fists so cold he could feel the chill through the coarse cloth. Telhami could heal her, he was certain of that, but getting her to Telhami wasn’t going to be easy.
He saw no other choice except to go to ground for the night and hope that sleep and food—which they could buy in the morning market—would restore her enough to make the rest of the journey possible.
But go to ground where? The places of his life: the orphanage, the barracks, the archives, and even the customhouse paraded themselves before his mind’s eye. Of those, the customhouse, with its myriad maze of storerooms, might be a last-chance refuge—a very last chance.
There was Joat’s Den, near the customhouse, where he’d done his after-hours eating and drinking, but Joat wasn’t a friend to his customers, and the Den stayed open well past curfew. Besides, there was a reason he’d spent his off-time at Joat’s: they couldn’t go there without being seen by the very templars whose attention they were determined to avoid.
There was one other place, filled with such mixed memories that he’d forgotten it entirely, even though it was where he’d spent his last night in Urik: Zvain’s bolt-hole beneath Gold Street, near Yaramuke fountain. Considering his leave-taking, Zvain was likely to be less a friend now than Joat, but he would take them in—if only because with Yohan and Ruari beside him, they would be three against one.
And maybe tomorrow he could complete the circle by taking Zvain out of Urik with them. There were four kanks; they could do it—
“Now, Pavek. Now!”
“All right. I’ve… thought of a place. We’ll be safe there.”
Yohan took Akashia in his arms and lifted her to his shoulder. “Where? How far?”
“A bolt-hole under Gold Street.” He started walking. “Belongs to an orphan I knew—” He was going to say more, then reconsidered. “He’ll take us in, that’s all.”
Three disparate men marching through the streets with a human woman draped over a dwarf’s shoulder wasn’t uncommon in a city where marriage was frequently a matter of slavery or abduction. They drew a few stares, but the people who stared were hurrying home, even here in the templar quarter, and not inclined to ask any questions.
They had an anxious moment at the gate between the templar quarter and the rest of the city, but apparently no respectable household had reported a missing young woman. Pavek’s explanation that his sister had run off with the wrong man—along with a hasty shower of silver from Yohan’s coin pouch—saw them into the next quarter of artisans and shopkeepers with nothing more than a warning to be off the streets by curfew.
* * *
The alley where the Gold Street catacomb began had taken a beating in the most recent Tyr-storm. Most of the debris had been scavenged clean, but larger chunks of masonry covered the cistern that, in turn, had covered the catacomb entrance.
Pavek swallowed panic—he hadn’t considered what the storm might have done to Zvain’s bolt-hole; hadn’t, he realized gazing on this small disaster, truly considered what might have happened to Zvain, either. But the catacomb would have survived—the bakery attached to the alley made more money renting space dug out from its cellar than it made from its ovens, and Zvain… Zvain had managed before he’d arrived—he’d have survived his leaving as well.
Pavek glanced around