size. The swollen flesh darkened to angry shades of red and purple, shot with oozing streaks of yellow—like the northern sky when acrid dust blew down from the Smoking Crown volcano. Sometimes his arm below the elbow was numb, but mostly it seemed that a colony of fire ants had burrowed under his skin.
The joint itself was exquisitely tender. One night Pavek scavenged a scrap of cloth from the market plaza. He bound his arm in a crude sling and continued to hope for the best.
Wage-labor of any sort was out of the question until the injury healed. Pavek grew gaunt from fever and denial; Sassel’s purse grew even thinner. Examining the ugly wound by the cool light of morning—after a night in which the throbbing had never subsided enough for him to sleep—he realized the time had come for desperate measures. If he didn’t find a cheap healer, he’d be dead of blood poisoning long before he starved.
He began his search with his former colleagues. Templar life had its own predictable dangers. Each bureau maintained a cadre of healers, any one of whom could have purged the poisons from his wound. They were well-paid for their work, but no templar was above a little side profit. Pavek got as far as the inner gate to the administrative quarter where the templarate bureaus maintained their red-and-yellow edifices.
Then he saw a templar wearing an enameled mask and the mostly-black robe of necromancy striding across the paved courtyard. With the distance, Pavek couldn’t tell if it was Escrissar or not, but the risk of exposure had suddenly become greater than the pain warranted.
Pavek headed for the daily market where he spent a whole silver piece on a packet of Ral’s Breath powder that shouldn’t have cost more than two ceramic bits. Mixed with water, it barely numbed his tongue and did nothing at all for the throbbing in his elbow.
With grim irony Pavek recalled the moment in Metica’s office when she marveled about complaints. If he hadn’t been a fugitive he would have complained himself: there was a city seal on every packet of Ral’s Breath vouching for its purity. Urik had survived for over a thousand years because its seal meant as much as its army and king.
When that seal was worthless, someone, somewhere should care.
A naked-sleeved messenger jostled Pavek while he pondered the decline of his city. Out of sheer habit, he started to upbraid the youth, but the pain soared to new heights, and he slumped against the wall instead. The boy grimaced, eyeing Pavek’s sling and suppurating wound. Planting himself unsteadily over his feet, Pavek raised his fists and had new, unwelcome insights about the behavior of mortally wounded animals in the gladiatorial arenas: movement was agony, maybe death, but he’d take that messenger with him, if it was the last thing he did.
“That wants healing, unless you’re looking to die,” the boy said in a matter-of-fact, almost friendly tone. “You’ll pay a fortune if one of our healers looks at it, but there’s an old dwarf-woman in the northwest corner of the elven market. She’s a little crazy-calls on ancient seas for her power—but she’s cheap, and reliable.” He dug beneath his robe—it was so new the pleats weren’t frayed—and produced an unchipped four-bit ceramic piece, which he laid atop Pavek’s trembling fist before walking away.
Gasping with astonishment, he nearly dropped the coin. What was happening to his city? Had he sunk so low that a messenger was offering him advice and charity? Had he ever, in his messenger days, offered four precious bits to the rabble? He couldn’t answer his first question and didn’t want to answer his second, but the answer to the last was no, although he’d given as much and more to Dovanne.
The boy messenger disappeared into the maw of the war bureau. He’d have to harden if he wanted to wear that yellow’ robe and survive, just as he and Dovanne had hardened. Pavek pushed the coin into Sassel’s purse and headed for the elven market. A cheap healer, even a crazy dwarf, sounded as good as he was likely to get.
* * *
Pavek found the healer right where the messenger predicted. She was the oldest dwarf he’d ever seen, sitting cross-legged on a scrap of cloth that might once have been green. A begging bowl half-filled with water and a few dirty coins balanced on her ankles while she chanted eyes-closed prayers to forgotten oceans.
She looked up when Pavek’s shadow blocked