she was made, not born. She’s lying—!”
Pavek watched those jewel-like eyes brighten as the New Race taunt came out of Ruari’s mouth. “Shut up—both of you!” he shouted.
All along, while Escrissar was his enemy and Laq the scourge Pavek sought to eliminate, Escrissar’s halfling slave had lurked in the background. The Lion-King had come to Quraite to destroy Escrissar, but the Lion didn’t know about the slave. Among the last things the living Telhami had said to him was that Hamanu didn’t notice a problem until it scratched him in the eye. Kakzim—whose name Pavek had gotten from Zvain that same day when Telhami died—had finally caught the Lion’s attention. Pavek wondered how and, though he didn’t truly want to know the answer, asked the necessary questions:
“How do you know of Kakzim? What has he done?”
Bright eyes studied Ruari first, then Zvain before returning to Pavek. “He is a murderer. His face was the last face Father saw before he was killed…” Mahtra’s composure failed. She looked down at her hands and contorted her fingers into tangles that had to hurt her knuckles. “I turned to Lord Escrissar, but he never returned. Another high templar sent me to Lord Hamanu, and he sent me here to you. Aren’t you also a high templar? Don’t you already know Kakzim?”
Pavek was speechless. This Mahtra had elegant phrases and elegant hands, but she was a child in her heart, a child in her mind, and he didn’t know how to answer her questions. He paid dearly for his hesitation, though, when Akashia said:
“Escrissar.” Her loathing made a curse of the name. “You turned to that foul nightmare disguised as a man? What was he—your friend, your lover? Is that why you wear a mask? Rotter. Is it your face that’s rotten, or your spirit?”
He’d never heard such venom in Akashia’s voice. It rocked Pavek back a step and made him wonder if he knew Akashia at all. Were a handful of days, however tortured and terrible, enough to sour Kashi’s spirit? What did she see when she looked at Mahtra? A mask, long and menacing fingernails, black cloth wrapped tightly around a slender body. Were those similarities enough to summon Escrissar’s memory to her eyes?
Without warning, Akashia lunged toward Mahtra. She wanted vengeance, and failed to get a taste of it when Pavek and Zvain together seized her and held her back. The golden patches around Mahtra’s eyes and on her shoulders glistened in the lamplight, distorting the air around them as sunlight distorts the air above the salt flats.
“Kakzim was Escrissar’s slave,” Pavek shouted, wanting to avert disaster but pushing closer to the brink instead. “His house would be the first place anyone would look.”
“Get her out of here,” Akashia warned, wresting free from them, no longer out of control but angrier and colder than she’d been ten heartbeats before. “Get out of here!” she snarled at Mantra.
“I go with High Templar Pavek,” the New Race woman replied without flinching. She was eleganta. She made her life in the darkest shadows of the high templar quarter. There was nothing Akashia could do to frighten her. “With him alone or with any others who desire vengeance. Do you desire vengeance, green-eyed woman?”
Confronted by an honesty she couldn’t deny and a coldness equal to her own, it was Akashia who retreated, shaking her head as she went. Pavek thought they’d gotten through the narrows, but he hadn’t reckoned on Ruari, who’d come to Akashia’s defense no matter how badly she treated him—or how little she needed it.
“She can’t talk to Kashi that way. Take her to the grove, Pavek!” he demanded—the same demand he’d made when Pavek had arrived here, and for roughly the same reason. “Let the guardian judge her, and her Father and her vengeance.”
“No,” he replied simply.
“No? It’s the way of Quraite, Pavek. You don’t have a choice: the guardian judges strangers.”
“No,” he repeated. “No—for the same reason we’ll bury the templars and return their belongings. The Lion will know what we do to his messengers, and he knows how to find us. And, more than that, this isn’t about Quraite or the guardian of Quraite. This is about Urik and Kakzim. I saw Kakzim making Laq, but I didn’t go back to find him because I thought when he couldn’t make Laq anymore, he couldn’t harm anyone either. I was wrong; he’s become a murderer with his own hands. Hamanu’s right, it’s time for me to go back. We’ll leave