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"Is there a spy, Lord Elabon?"
Lord was a courtesy title. There were no nobles in Urik's templarate, but Elabon Escrissar was an aristocrat in every other sense. The child, grandchild and great-grandchild of High Templars, for all that he was of a mixed and outcast breed, he had a flair for cruelty that, according to rumor, entertained Urik's ancient, jaded king. Metica wasn't going to be happy when she heard her regulator say that not only was Escrissar involved in the zarneeka trade, he was a mind-bender as well.
"Take a look around," the mask said. "See that we're alone."
Unless Metica already knew. She'd said High Bureau dead-hearts had performed the interrogation. She and I Elabon were both half-elves. Half-elves weren't as clannish as full-blooded elves, but Pavek was ready to wager his last ceramic bit that Escrissar bad gone to Metica after the interrogation and she had sold him to save herself.
Rokka searched the corridor where nothing could be hiding; Dovanne came straight at the barrels. Pavek's chances were slim, nil, and none; but he couldn't surrender without a fight. Abandoning the bone torch, he leapt straight up. Both hands grasped an overhead beam, and he swung his heels forward, into Dovanne's face. She collapsed with a growl. Pavek landed within arm's reach of Escrissar, and, with nothing to lose, chopped the black-wrapped neck with the callused edge of his hand. Escrissar went down like a market-place puppet.
The half-giant blocked the stairway up, so Pavek dived past Rokka. The dwarf, reasonably expecting Elabon to end the chase with spellcraft, flattened against the wall. He shared Rokka's expectation, but had to keep going until a spell dropped him in his tracks. But that didn't happen. Vaulting over a stair-rail, he made his escape into the depths of the catacombs.
He ran around the next corner, careened down another flight of stairs, and ran along a lock-lit corridor. Rokka was a coward at heart, but Dovanne had surely recognized his face. She'd track him to the end of time, with or without her patron's permission. Sound was Pavek's greatest enemy: he sank into each stride to minimize the noise, thinking that if he could get behind Dovanne, he'd have a chance at climbing one of the other stairways to the street level.
And then what? Trust himself to Metica?
Throw himself before King Hamanu's mercy? King Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy?
Fear tightened his chest and he stumbled to a halt in the near-darkness. Gasping for air, he swore he wouldn't worry about the future until he reached the street. His ribs relaxed. He spared a heartbeat to listen for Dovanne's footsteps. There was only silence, and he started off at a fast, quiet, walk.
There was method in the catacombs. Corridors crossed at predictable places. Pavek approached each one with caution, working his way across the man-made cavern, far below the room where the zarneeka powder was stored. He allowed himself to believe that he'd gotten behind Dovanne and to hope mat her hunger for revenge would lead her back to the places they had explored years ago while he headed for a stairway that hadn't been built until after the Tyrian raid.
Pavek climbed the steps soundlessly on the balls of his feet. The street door was bolted from the inside, which he judged a good omen. With his weight against the wood, he withdrew the bolt from its slot. It squeaked loud enough to wake the dead. He hid in the shadows, counted to fifty, then pushed the door outward. A band of moonlight widened into a rectangle through which he discerned no movement.
The door bumped once against the outer wall, then was still and silent Pavek counted to fifty again and crossed the threshold.
Arms as thick as a man's thighs dropped around his shoulders before he'd taken his third step. Half-giants were massive and strong, but their bodies were put together the same as any human's. Pavek crashed a boot-heel into his captor's knee and dug his fingertips into sensitive gaps in the half-giant's huge wrists. A pained bellow shattered the night as the brute's muscles spasmed. A second good crack into the half-giant's kneecap might have produced both freedom and a head start down the alley, but a well-thrown punch hit his jaw before he got his foot up.
"Damn you. Damn you to life everlasting," Dovanne hissed as she clouted him again.
Pavek's neck snapped against the half-giant's hard chest. He was stunned: unable to feel anything, but clear-headed enough to wonder what she had concealed in her fist. Then the pain started, and he was grateful for the next weighted blow. Thought you'd sneak away again, didn't you?"
"Get up," Dovanne demanded, jabbing her boot into his flank. "He wants to talk to you."
Groaning and retching, Pavek hauled himself to his knees. His last-ditch defiance, which had broken his nose so many times, sent disastrous words to his mouth: Elabon Escrissar can wait until I'm dead. But fortunately, his mouth was full of blood and he couldn't say anything. Dovanne yanked her one-time lover to his feet.
"Carry him," she told the half-giant.
That was more indignity than a living man could endure. Pavek spat blood. "I... can... walk."
"Then start walking." Dovanne pointed a slender sap at the open door.
Pavek took one unsteady step after another. He clung to the handrail and pretty much fell down the first flight of stairs. It got easier after that. Dovanne delivered a solid wallop, but she and her sap hadn't broken any bones. He wondered if that was an accident or the lingering scar of affection.
The pain was down to dull aches and he was moving fairly well by the time they got to the zarneeka corridor. The locked door was open. Dovanne gave him a shove between the shoulder blades.
A trestle table had been set up in the center of the storeroom. Rokka stood behind it, busily mixing tiny scoops of zarneeka powder with much larger dollops of plain flour from the half-giant's barrels. He dumped the combination onto scraps of crude paper. Escrissar himself folded the scraps into self-sealing Ral's Breath packets with elegant movements of his taloned fingers.
The mask tilted upward. Their arrival had been noticed. Sharp eyes appraised him coldly from the depths of the mask. He turned away.
There was a halfling in the storeroom as well; he must have been behind the half-giant earlier. A hideous scar in the form of the Escrissar family crest had been burned into the halfling's face. The slave worked alone in a corner, blending zarneeka powder in a bowl with what looked and smelled like golden wine. A similar bowl bubb
led on a tripod set over a blue-flamed lamp.
The implication was clear enough, even to a punch-drunk regulator: zarneeka was the necessary ingredient in Ral's breath, but, contrary to Metica-and King Hamanu's assertion-it was also the necessary ingredient in something else. "Pavek, Pavek, Pavek," Escrissar chanted, sucking his teeth and shaking his head between each repetition of Pavek's name. "Whatever are we going to do with you? You've made quite a nuisance of yourself. Too bad you weren't born in Tyr; there they might call you a hero, but here you're just a pathetic little man. A jozhal nipping at the Dragon's heel."
The question was pure rhetoric. Pavek knew what they intended to do with him. He had nothing left to lose or defend. That realization made him reckless. "Haven't you heard-the Dragon's dead-brought down by a pack of jozhals."
Escrissar's enameled talons flashed in the lamplight. They were razor-sharp near the tips and opened Pavek's cheek despite his belated efforts to dodge them. He caught his balance dangerously close to the halfling's tripod. The scarred slave's eyes were dead-black and filled with contempt; that expression did not change when the slave looked past Pavek to his master. Pavek let the wall do the hard work of keeping him upright while he sorted through what he saw.
