He didn’t know where to go, wasn’t even sure where he was. Streets and quarters that he’d known all his life had gone suddenly strange. Crouched in an airless alley, he beat his head gently against the wall, hoping to loosen something useful from his panic-bound thoughts. He’d been among templars for twenty years, always above Urik’s laws, never outside them.
Finally his mind produced a coherent thought—a long—forgotten memory from his early childhood: a horrible day when he’d gotten separated from his mother near the elven market. Tears leaked from his eyes, stinging sharper than all the sweat.
Shame seized Pavek’s gut, forcing him to choose between nauseous surrender and a fight against his burgeoning fears. He chose to fight and broke panic’s siege. He recognized the alley where be cowered and heard the night sounds for what they were: ordinary and nonthreatening.
He remembered that there was a place in Urik where a fugitive could hide: the squatters’ quarter.
* * *
Guthay had slipped below the rooftops by the time Pavek entered a courtyard deep in a ruined quarter. A double-handful of people of indeterminate race huddled together along the walls. They took note of a stranger’s entrance: the whites of their eyes glistened like opals. But Pavek made a brawny silhouette in the starlight, even with one arm folded tight against his flank. No one challenged his right to drink from the pitch-patched cistern in the courtyard’s center.
Pavek gulped the cool liquid, ignoring its resinous taste and gritty texture. He dipped the ladle a second time and held the water on his tongue before swallowing it. In all Athas, nothing was truly more precious than water.
He spat the last mouthful into his good hand, then swiped the hand over his face and neck.
Without water a man might die in a single day; with it, he could plan for tomorrow. Spying an empty patch of wall, Pavek claimed it for his own with a heartfelt sigh.
His silent neighbors watched a while longer, until they were satisfied that he was, for this night at least, one of them. Pair by pair, the opalescent eyes closed and the varied sounds of sleep filled the courtyard, while Pavek relived each moment of the previous day, berating himself with if-onlys and might-have-beens. He mourned his lost yellow robe and the heavy wool cloak hanging from a peg above his barracks cot, the stash of coins buried beneath it, and a dozen other things until sleep snared him by surprise.
He awoke with a start in the bright of dawn with the daily harangue ringing in his ears. The orators’s voice, augmented by magic, penetrated every quarter of the city, as regular as the huge blood-red sun creeping above the eastern rooftops.
King Hamanu did not claim to be the city’s divinity, or any divinity at all, but he did not object when the orator led his subjects through a litany of praise and prayer whose words lad not changed in centuries.
Templars, by custom and command, raised their fist in respectful salute for the duration of the harangue. Pavek suppressed the almost instinctive gesture. He clutched his medallion in his fist instead.
“Great and Mighty King Hamanu exhorts his subjects, slave and free alike, to be on watch for a renegade templar, a former regulator of the civil bureau and known as Pavek. Pavek has committed grave crimes against our beloved city. A reward often gold coins is offered for his capture.”
The just-named renegade templar forced his face to remain calm. Dreading his sudden conspicuousness, he tugged sharply on the medallion thong, but the strand of inix hide was new and personally guaranteed by the dwarven tanner who made it not to break or rot for three full years. And, while the Orator continued the day’s harangue, Pavek let his head drop forward. He studied his neighbors through the fringe of his hair. They all seemed to be going about their morning business, lining up at the cistern, gathering their belongings for a day spent elsewhere begging, stealing, and generally avoiding all templars, renegade or not. No one, to his relief, was staring at the midnight arrival, nor seeming to listen to the orator’s continuing exhortations.
But ten gold coins, however thinned or clipped, represented a year’s wages to the average citizen. Somebody, somewhere in Urik, had surely listened to the harangue and would keep a sharp eye peeled for fortune.
An eye sharpened for what? Pavek asked himself after another moment and began to relax. Barring the