haul corpses up to the necromancers for interrogation, and he wasn’t authorized to worry about Laq.
But he’d gotten a glimpse into the fire of the raver’s mind just as he’d gone flying rump-first into the wall, and he’d seen the face of a woman torn apart with terror.
Find the woman, find some answers about Laq—that was his entire plan. Urik was all the home he’d ever have, and he didn’t like the thought of its being overrun with ravers, especially mind-bending, magic-resistant ravers. Pavek had been face-to-face with King Hamanu just once in his life, when he’d gotten his first yellow robe. He’d have sworn there wasn’t anything he feared more than his king, until he watched five templars focus flameblade spells on a black-tongued raver, without reducing him to ash.
Eventually, Pavek found what he was looking for: human, lying on her back, half in shadow, half in the pale starlight, one leg tucked demurely beneath the other, her neck so brutally torn and twisted that her face was pressed against the ground. Pavek moved her gently into the full starlight; his hands trembled as he turned her head back to a normal angle. The face matched the one the raver had blasted into his memory. The bureau necromancers would be pleased: a sudden death—alive one heartbeat and dead the next—meant the dead-heart sorcerers would get useful answers to their questions.
Pavek closed her mouth and eyes, then closed his own, waiting for his nausea to pass before he tried to hoist her across his shoulder for the long hike back to the civil bureau’s headquarters.
A scraping sound emerged from the nearby shadow: a leather sandal grinding on sand and broken bricks, but a smaller sound than anything full-grown would make. Pavek lunged low and caught himself an armful of human boy that he dragged into the starlight for closer inspection.
“Leave her alone!” the boy sobbed, pummelling Pavek ineffectively with his fists.
“I can’t. She’s been murdered. Questions have to be asked, answered. The man who did it can’t help. His mind was gone before he died.”
The boy went limp in the templar’s arms as all his strength flowed into wails of anguish. Pavek thought he understood. He’d never known his father. His mother had done the best she could, buying him a bed in the templarate orphanage when he was about five years old. He’d hardly seen her after that, but he’d cried when they told him her crumpled body had been found at the base of the highest wall. There was a lock of her black hair beneath the leather-wrapped hilt of his metal knife.
But Pavek had forgotten the words for compassion, if he’d ever known them. Ten years in the orphanage, another ten in the barracks had erased such simple things from his mind. He squeezed the boy against his chest and thumped him on the head. He thought that was what his mother had done, once or twice, and the boy did grow quiet.
“Give me a hand. We’ll take her to the civil bureau, then I’ll find you a place—”
“The bureau!” Shocked out of his tears, the boy wriggled free. “Who are you?”
“Pavek. Just plain Pavek. Regulator—”
“A templar!”
The boy’s fist shot forward, a small hard object striking just below Pavek’s groin. He folded inward, barely staying on his feet as the boy scampered into the shadow. Not far. The footsteps didn’t fade; they stopped. Pavek cursed beneath his breath as he slowly straightened his back and his legs.
“Boy—come back here. Urik’s no place for a boy alone.”
Pavek knew he was right, but words gasped through clenched teeth lost something of their effectiveness, and the orphan stayed where he was. When he was confident of his balance, Pavek removed a few ceramic coins from his belt purse, displaying them in the starlight.
“Look—you’ll need these.”
The boy didn’t take the bait. Well, Pavek reckoned he wouldn’t have taken it either, under similar circumstances. He dribbled the coins into the dirt for the boy to retrieve later, then, with a stab of pain through his midsection and a loud groan, he hoisted the corpse across his shoulders and headed back the way he’d come.
Chapter Two
Hot, sun-filled days came and went. The fist-sized bruise in Pavek’s groin faded; so did the memory of who’d given it to him and why. He filled his memory with scribbling from the archive, not the dreary details of his own life.
Pavek was on morning duty in the vast customhouse, transferring hock-sized sacks of salt from one barrel