deny the accusation. “The zarneeka—that yellow powder you bring to the customhouse—it gets made into a poison called Laq—”
The half-elf leaned on his staff, and Pavek groaned.
“Ease off, Ru. Let him finish.”
Between coughs and gasps, Pavek had a heartbeat to wonder if he hadn’t made the biggest mistake in his soon-to-be-ended life. “Ral’s Breath was sold freely and cheaply everywhere in the city. Folk who couldn’t afford a healer’s touch thought it eased their pain. Now your zarneeka gets simmered into a poison that rots a man’s mind and turns him into a raving beast before it kills him. I thought you would want to know. I thought a druid—”
Pressure returned with a vicious twist—
“Ruari!”
—And eased again.
“I thought a druid would care.”
“He’s a templar. A liar and a spy. Let’s kill him and leave him here. The quicker the better.”
The fire-hardened staff wavered in Ruari’s hands, but his aim was true enough to kill a helpless man in a few, pain-filled moments. The druid steadied the staff with her own firm grip. “Why should I believe anything you say, bloodsucker?”
“Because you kenned me already, and you know I speak the truth. You need my help, woman… if you care.”
“My name is Akashia,” she said, pushing the staff aside. “And I do care. What about you? Since when does a templar care about anything that does not line his purse with gold or power?”
It wasn’t an easy question to answer, especially with that half-elf ready to send him to oblivion for every hesitation or ill-chosen word, but he tried. He described the Laq-crazed man storming into Joat’s Den, and how that had led him to a woman’s broke-neck corpse, an administrator’s chamber, the inspection sands and, finally deep in the customhouse itself.
He did not mention names—not Rokka, Dovanne, nor Elabon Escrissar—because he judged the key to surviving this lopsided conversation was a miserly hand on the truth (unless Akashia had kenned every thought and memory in his mind, which by all that he knew of spellcraft or mind-bending was not possible in such a short time). Nor did he mention Zvain or the round-faced, smiling cleric Oelus.
Akashia’s face, viewed from his current angle, was as hard and passionless as any templar’s. He was fat gone from the pan to the fire, and it was just as well that the boy had vanished.
“I’ve been outcast these last six weeks, with a forty-gold-piece price on my head, waiting for you to return—”
“You are the Pavek written on the wall?” the druid asked, warming slightly and revealing that she, too, possessed forbidden literacy.
He nodded. The movement drew the staff to his throat again.
“A templar—excuse me—a renegade templar with a conscience. Let him up, Ruari.”
He got slowly to his feet, dusting his shabby shirt and tugging it smooth beneath his belt. “Pavek—” he extended his hand. “Just-Plain Pavek. I don’t like what this Laq poison does before it kills. I don’t claim a conscience but—” A length of rust-colored cloth rippled, though the air was still inside the cloth quarter. He stood on his toes, trying to see over the cloth. Once again he caught the impression of a dark, lithe, and fleeting shadow; nothing more—until he felt Ruari staring at him with renewed suspicion.
“But what, Just—Plain Pavek?” Akashia urged, seeming not to notice that anything was amiss. “What do you have, if it’s not a conscience?”
“The information you’ll need if you want to stop—” Pavek caught himself with Escrissar’s name on his tongue. “If you want to see that your zarneeka powder isn’t turned into Laq.”
“And what to you want in exchange for this information, Pavek—since you don’t have a conscience to tell you right from wrong?”
She’d insulted him. Pavek was sure of that from her arched eyebrows, but for the life of him, he didn’t know how. She’d changed the rules, and he felt shame as he explained himself. “First off, I want safe passage from Urik to your bolt-hole. You must have one. Then we’ll trade for my information.”
“He can’t be serious!” Ruari exclaimed, then, when the woman did not immediately support him: “Akashia—you can’t be serious. He’s a templar! Once a yellow-robed bloodsucker, always a yellow-robed blood-sucker. He’ll betray us all—if he hasn’t betrayed us already. He’s been looking all around, like a scum-slime traitor who’s led us into an ambush. Shifty-eyed templar-scum.”
The youth thwacked Pavek’s shin with his staff, drawing blood and, very nearly, retaliation.
“Are you looking for something, someone?” Akashia asked.
His initial judgment had not changed: he wasn’t sure