but a well-thrown punch hit his jaw before he got his foot up.
“Damn you. Damn you to life everlasting,” Dovanne hissed as she clouted him again.
Pavek’s neck snapped against the half-giant’s hard chest. He was stunned: unable to feel anything, but clear-headed enough to wonder what she had concealed in her fist. Then the pain started, and he was grateful for the next weighted blow.
Thought you’d sneak away again, didn’t you?”
Another punch, square in his undefended gut. He lost strength in his legs and would have fallen if the half-giant hadn’t held him up. Between blows, Dovanne asked more questions Pavek didn’t try to answer. He didn’t notice that she’d stopped pounding him until he hit the cobblestones.
“Get up,” Dovanne demanded, jabbing her boot into his flank. “He wants to talk to you.”
Groaning and retching, Pavek hauled himself to his knees. His last-ditch defiance, which had broken his nose so many times, sent disastrous words to his mouth: Elabon Escrissar can wait until I’m dead. But fortunately, his mouth was full of blood and he couldn’t say anything. Dovanne yanked her one-time lover to his feet.
“Carry him,” she told the half-giant.
That was more indignity than a living man could endure. Pavek spat blood. “I… can… walk.”
“Then start walking.” Dovanne pointed a slender sap at the open door.
Pavek took one unsteady step after another. He clung to the handrail and pretty much fell down the first flight of stairs. It got easier after that. Dovanne delivered a solid wallop, but she and her sap hadn’t broken any bones. He wondered if that was an accident or the lingering scar of affection.
The pain was down to dull aches and he was moving fairly well by the time they got to the zarneeka corridor. The locked door was open. Dovanne gave him a shove between the shoulder blades.
A trestle table had been set up in the center of the storeroom. Rokka stood behind it, busily mixing tiny scoops of zarneeka powder with much larger dollops of plain flour from the half-giant’s barrels. He dumped the combination onto scraps of crude paper. Escrissar himself folded the scraps into self-sealing Ral’s Breath packets with elegant movements of his taloned fingers.
The mask tilted upward. Their arrival had been noticed. Sharp eyes appraised him coldly from the depths of the mask. He turned away.
There was a halfling in the storeroom as well; he must have been behind the half-giant earlier. A hideous scar in the form of the Escrissar family crest had been burned into the halfling’s face. The slave worked alone in a corner, blending zarneeka powder in a bowl with what looked and smelled like golden wine. A similar bowl bubbled on a tripod set over a blue-flamed lamp.
The implication was clear enough, even to a punch-drunk regulator: zarneeka was the necessary ingredient in Ral’s breath, but, contrary to Metica—and King Hamanu’s assertion—it was also the necessary ingredient in something else. “Pavek, Pavek, Pavek,” Escrissar chanted, sucking his teeth and shaking his head between each repetition of Pavek’s name. “Whatever are we going to do with you? You’ve made quite a nuisance of yourself. Too bad you weren’t born in Tyr; there they might call you a hero, but here you’re just a pathetic little man. A jozhal nipping at the Dragon’s heel.”
The question was pure rhetoric. Pavek knew what they intended to do with him. He had nothing left to lose or defend. That realization made him reckless. “Haven’t you heard—the Dragon’s dead-brought down by a pack of jozhals.”
Escrissar’s enameled talons flashed in the lamplight. They were razor-sharp near the tips and opened Pavek’s cheek despite his belated efforts to dodge them. He caught his balance dangerously close to the halfling’s tripod. The scarred slave’s eyes were dead-black and filled with contempt; that expression did not change when the slave looked past Pavek to his master. Pavek let the wall do the hard work of keeping him upright while he sorted through what he saw.
Slaves did not cherish their masters. Hatred, intense and justified, seethed just below the most obsequious smile. Insolence that fell just short of disobedience had to be tolerated, even in Urik, but no slave should have survived the look the halfling gave his master.
Yet, like Rokka with the druid woman, Escrissar didn’t retaliate.
Through the aches and haze, Pavek slowly understood that Escrissar didn’t know the secret of the simmering decoction. He stared at the tripod, envisioning his foot thrust through the tripod’s legs, overturning the crucible, and blatantly daring Escrissar