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"I could wait for you...."
"Don't bother."
Pavek left with the sound of laughter ringing in his ears. Maybe she would wait. Tomorrow was Todek's Day, so named for the largest of the outlying villages, which, according to the ten-day rotation that was as old as Urik itself, was scheduled to bring its produce into the city market.
More importantly, tomorrow was the one day in ten that he could claim for himself. He usually spent his free time in the archives, copying and memorizing spellcraft, but there were other ways to pass the time. She was only a messenger; he was a regulator. He couldn't put in a useful good word for her with Metica, but he could buy her a free day. A day with him.
Striding along the crowded streets between the custom-house and the stone-fronted civil bureau where Metica had her office, Pavek weighed the possibilities several times. Any-thing to distract him from thinking about the reasons his taskmaster want to see him.
If she did want to see him. The old adage about not trusting strangers held true in the bureaus. He didn't know the messenger.
Pavek paused at the bottom of the broad stairway leading to the administrators' chambers, mopping the sweat from his brow and shaking the dust from his robe, then started climbing.
A man got tired in the templarate. Pavek guessed he was about twenty-five years old, but he'd already accumulated a lifetime of tired. For once he thought of Metica not as a familiar adversary, but as a gray-haired half-elf, and wondered how she had survived-how anyone survived long enough to grow old. His life wasn't a choice between the half-elf girl and a day in the archives, it was a choice between any tomorrow and no tomorrow at all. Sometimes he wondered why he hadn't Mowed his mother's example, except that when templars cracked-and one did from time to time-they didn't do it quietly or alone.
All at once and without warning, his thoughts were back in Joat's Place, watching the raver suffocate, and in the squatters' quarter, looking down at a woman with a broken neck. He swallowed the thoughts and kept climbing.
* * *
"Sit," Metica said when his shadow touched the door-less threshold of her chamber. Her back was to the door. A hot afternoon wind blowing through the open window in front of her lifted tendrils of her dull, gray hair. Pavek thought he'd been quiet coming up the stairs; he guessed he'd been wrong.
Surely Metica was after his hide.
"Our Mighty King's personal necromancer extends her thanks," Metica began, fixing Pavek with a chilling smile.
"The king's-?" he stammered: "I'm grateful, great one." "The corpse, Regulator! The broke-neck corpse you found three nights' past."
"I brought her here, to the civil bureau. It was street crime, our crime. I even marked the roster-"
"Well, she wound up at the palace and-thanks to your mark in the roster-that black-hearted dead-speaker knew enough to send her pleasure to me."
Metica was after his hide, his life, and his eternal essence. The only thing that might appease her was a rounded heap of gold and silver coins, mostly gold. Pavek felt rich when he had a heap of ceramic bits.
"Thought you might like to know what she said."
Pavek lifted his head in time to see the folded parchment Metica scaled his way, but not in time to catch it. He fished it off the floor without letting his eyes drift away from the half-elf's face. Damned if she wasn't pleased about something.
He opened the parchment, scanned the script. The necromancer had gotten the woman's name, her man's, and the name of their son, Zvain, which Pavek immediately associated with the boy who'd gotten away after punching him in the groin. The report confirmed that she'd been murdered by her man and that he'd been raving mad when the crime was committed. Nothing more.
It was hard to believe Metica was pleased; Pavek certainly wasn't when he returned the parchment to her worktable.
"There should've been more," he grumbled, risking Metica's good humor.
"There was," she confirmed. "What you gave the palace was better than gold. Not that the necromancer told me, mind you. But she was happy, no doubt of that."
With a steady expression of disinterest fixed on his face, Pavek wondered how many lies Metica had just told him, and whether he dared ask her what was better than gold. "I did my duty, great one. Nothing more," he said with lowered eyes and excruciating deference.
"In your dreams, Regulator, in your bloody dreams. I don't want to know why you hauled that corpse up here. I truly don't. You were lucky, not smart, Pavek-"
He looked up again. Last time Metica called him by his name he was only sixteen. She said he'd scored well on his bureau exams, said he had rare talent. Then she said she was almost sorry he was dirt-poor and without patrons.
You'd rise with gold and connections, Pavek. As it is, you'll stay right here for as long as I want to keep you. "I don't want you pushing luck again," the half-elf continued. "You hear me? You stay smart and keep your
rock-head down in the gutter where it belongs."
"Yes, great one. I don't know what got into me."
Metica settled into a sturdy chair. She shuffled scrolls, tablets and marking pens. "I heard there was scarcely a mark on him-except for that black tongue. Believe that, if you want. But the black tongue was what they called important, Regulator Pavek: a thread toward Laq. You stay clear of it now, if you're smart. You don't want to be near that thread when it gets pulled. You understand?"
