like, and any death at Hamanu’s hands was unspeakably unpleasant. Still, something was seeping through Urik. Folk were starving themselves, going mad, and dying with dead black tongues.
“Never been one this hard to kill before,” the magic student mused, no worse for his battering and standing, once again, beside his table, collecting his parchment scraps. “If it’s Laq, something’s been added. Something’s been changed.”
The dreaded word, more dreaded than Laq itself: change.
Imagine telling King Hamanu that his magic had been scarcely strong enough to bring down a starving human, then imagine telling him that there was something loose in Urik that had given madmen mind-bender’s strength and the ability to throw off magic.
A sane man would make the corpse tell his own story. And it could be done. A sorcerer-king had ways of getting what he wanted from the dead, and ways of punishing them, too, but not even King Hamanu could unscramble a madman’s wits.
Failing the corpse, send that ridiculous-looking student, who’d raised the whole uncomfortable possibility…
“Pavek!” the blond templar shouted, pointing at the table.
But Pavek was gone, with only swaying strands of beads in the doorway to say that he’d left in a hurry. A templar rushed into the alley after him. Joat scurried to the table, worried that he’d been stiffed, but—no. Though the parchment scraps and the wax tablet were missing, two chipped, dirty ceramic coins sat in their place. Joat swept them into his belt-pouch. Then he made the rounds again, chivying the regulars to pay their tabs and pleading for someone to haul the corpses to the boneyard. They took the elf, and left him with the raver.
Joat hobbled to the bar, the ache in his head nearly balanced by the ache in his side. He probably had a few cracked ribs—nothing that wouldn’t mend naturally in ten days or twenty. When it came to getting beaten up, there were advantages to being a dwarf. He felt under the mekillot rib for the sack where his wife kept the powder she smeared on their grandchildren’s gums when they were cutting their teeth. Mixed with a bit of water and swallowed fast, Ral’s Breath did wonders for aches that were too big to ignore but not serious enough for a sawbones or healer.
* * *
Pavek heard his name followed by a string of curses. He’d heard worse and kept walking at the same steady pace, confident that no one seriously considered pursuing him. Templars didn’t act without orders, the smart ones didn’t anyway, and Nunk, the blond Instigator with the rotten teeth, wasn’t going to issue any more orders tonight. Nunk wasn’t bad, for an Instigator, and he wasn’t stupid. He’d guess what Pavek meant to do, and leave him alone to do it. There wasn’t going to be enough glory in this night’s work to warrant a share of it.
The customhouse bordered one of the few neighborhoods that hadn’t been rebuilt since the Tyrian gladiators sacked the city. It might be, eventually, but in the meantime its broken buildings swarmed with squatters. All sorts of folk wound up there. Some were hiding from creditors or templars, some were only temporarily down on their luck, but for most of them, the quarter was the last stop before the boneyard. They were too poor to be robbed and too desperate to risk robbing someone else.
Pavek paused on the brink of the rubble. He cocked his head, using the stars to fix his position relative to Joat’s Den, then recalling the first scream, the murdered woman’s scream.
There was little doubt in his mind that the raver had killed her before bursting into Joat’s: the timing was right, the raver would have killed anything that crossed his path, and, witless as the madman was, the squatter’s quarter was probably where he’d been living.
The footing here was more treacherous than any of the inhabitants. Leaving his metal knife secured in its sheath, Pavek started down a street still littered with fire-charred bricks.
By Hamanu’s decree, Urik was a square city. Streets were supposed to intersect at squared angles, but the king’s order had broken down in the squatter’s quarter. The old streets were blocked with fallen walls, new paths wove drunkenly through the ruins.
Pavek took his bearings again and reconsidered his whole plan. This wasn’t his job. He was a customs guard: third-rank Regulator in link’s third-rate civil bureau, who spent his days making sure no one stole the city’s bonded property without the proper signatures. He wasn’t authorized to