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Humans were at a distinct disadvantage in the dark. The other Athasian races saw heat as well as light and had far keener night vision. If it had been simply a matter of getting to a specific location within the catacombs, he would have foregone the torch. Magic locks sealing the more valuable commodities in their storerooms shed enough eerie light for a cautious man. But Pavek didn't know where Rokka or the zarneeka had gone; he needed light to find them.
Light, that simplest of all spells, was still a gift from the sorcerer-king and not worth requesting.
He started down the long corridor, stabbing his torch into every shadow. He rehearsed his excuses: Rokka had seemed unwell. Rokka had left him, a mere regulator, in charge of the procurer's table. Rokka had not returned from the storerooms, and he, a dutiful regulator, had not dared leave the customhouse until he'd gotten the procurer's countersignature on the tax scroll.
Pavek saw things he would be careful not to remember. He interrupted a small number of storeroom trysts. High-rank templars married and raised families, but low-rank templars, living their lives in barracks and competing ruthlessly for such crumbs of patronage as slipped through the cracks, made do with empty storerooms and empty affairs. He'd never know the number or names of his children, if he had any. A woman of similar rank could not raise an infant. Her children wound up in the templarate orphanage or on the streets.
He muttered apologies and kept going.
Midway through the third tier, he found what he was looking for: a warding that shed more light than his torch, and a glimpse of lacquered amphorae through the door grate. With his fingers folded thoughtfully over his mouth, Pavek studied the warding from a safe distance. Rokka had sufficient rank to ask for such potent spellcraft, but unless the dwarf had been spending all his spare hours in the archive, like Pavek, he shouldn't have known how to cast it. Even templars' borrowed spells were more than invocations. Complex spells, such as warding, were as individual as signatures or fingerprints. The warding on the amphorae storeroom was subtle and, therefore, not Rokka's style.
A High Templar would have both the rank and requirement to protect his private chambers with such an intricate warding. Here in the customhouse catacombs, it was going to raise a lot of eyebrows come daylight.
If it hadn't been dispelled before then.
Pavek spotted a likely hiding place amid a cluster of empty barrels. He extinguished his torch in a sand-bucket, but kept it with him as a weapon. Too bad there was no meat left on the bone. Excluding the zarneeka, he hadn't eaten anything since breakfast, and his churning stomach was noisier than the catacombs vermin. Digging into the belt-pouch beneath his robe, he found several sticks of stale chord sausage. The spicy, salted meat quieted his gut, and left him half-mad with thirst.
Cursing himself, Rokka, the sorcerer-king, and everything else in Urik, Pavek hunkered down. A length of coarse-woven canvas spilled out of one barrel. He draped the musty cloth over his bright robe and settled in for an uncomfortable night's spying.
His mind went as blank as any overworked slave's, and stayed that way until footsteps and torchlight roused him. At least four individuals were trooping down the stairs. They weren't talking, but from the sounds, two of them were leather-shod and another was heavy enough to be a half-giant. Pavek had figured the worst would be a face-to-face encounter with Rokka, or Rokka's contact; he hadn't figured on a quartet, especially a quartet with a half-giant. He wished he were anywhere else.
Wishing didn't help. After confirming that he was still covered by the canvas, thereby obscuring his visual shape and his heat signature from the dwarf's inhuman vision, Pavek eased forward for a better look. Rokka led with the torch. Behind him was a tall figure whose identity was concealed by a grotesque mask.
His heart skipped a beat when he saw the mask.
Questioners sometimes hid behind masks; necromancers always did. Pavek told himself the mask might be a low-ranked templar's clever disguise. He didn't convince himself.
Between flickering torchlight and the billowing robes, Pavek couldn't get a clear glimpse of the third member of the quartet, but the fourth was, unmistakably, a half-giant, bent and cramped within the ten-foot corridors and lugging two barrels virtually identical to the one behind which Pavek was hiding. He crouched lower, hoping against hope that the quartet was headed somewhere else, but they stopped between his hiding place and the storeroom. He smelled the bitter essence of arnica as someone, most likely the masked templar, dispelled the lock.
"Hit me again with that damned barrel and you'll finish your life in the mines!"
Pavek gasped. Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy-he'd hoped never to hear Dovanne's voice at close range again. There was history between him and her: history back to their shared childhood days in the orphanage, when the customhouse had been their playground. Once they'd been more than friends, now they were much, much less.
He'd sworn the disaster hadn't been his fault: they'd both been set up. Following her instructions, sent in a signed message, he'd waited alone for hours on a dark, deserted rooftop. But Dovanne, following different instructions bearing his signature, had gone to a catacombs storeroom where she discovered, to her lasting horror and rage, that she wasn't at all alone.
He'd tracked down the ringleader: the one and only time he'd had killed with his bare hands. He'd brought proof to Dovanne in a basket, but she never believed him, never forgave him.
So they learned to steer around each other. Pavek had heard she'd found a patron and hauled herself up a few ranks. Now, he didn't know which was worse: the thought of her hooked up with Rokka or with a dead-heart. Dire curiosity lured his eyes above the barrel rim a second time.
Lord yes, it was Dovanne:
bronzed skin, human features, hair cropped short and bleached by the sun, eyes the color of amber and twice as hard. Metallic thread glinted in her left sleeve (a procurer, just like Rokka; the masked templar her patron), the right one was torn off at the shoulder.
Tattooed and coiled serpents spiraled up her exposed arm. Pavek recalled Dovanne's first visit to the skin-dyer: She swore she wasn't afraid of the leering goat, or his sharp quills, and he pretended to believe her while she clutched his hand in a frigid death-grip.
It had taken every coin they both possessed to buy a single, slender, monochrome, serpent to circle her right wrist.
"We are not alone." A surprisingly commonplace voice came from the mask that spoke to Dovanne, not Rokka. "A friend of yours, perhaps. Or perhaps not. This place holds memories for you?"
She shrugged. The serpents writhed. "Nothing worth holding, great one."
"Then it was a thought-"
Pavek trembled. Necromancers dealt with all manner of death, but only mind-benders plucked thoughts out of the air.
Who was beneath the mask? A necromancer or a mind-bender? Or a master of both arts? An interrogator.
Basic mind-bending defense was instinctive in humans, like closing one's eyes when an object came too close. Pavek thought himself small while he considered the stranger. Measured against Dovanne, the masked templar would stand eye-to-eye with Pavek, but he was much leaner. His hands were obscured by supple learner gloves and lengthened with talons that continued the enameled patterns of the mask. Even so, the fingers seemed long and narrow for human hands. And though Pavek had encountered runty elves, his best guess was half-elf. Before he could recall the names of any half-elf necromancers, Rokka ended the mystery.
