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Pavek caught the thong on a fingertip, and didn't allow himself to think about what might have been. He spun the inix leather around his left hand and closed his fist around the familiar ceramic lump, shouted Guard me! and raised his wrapped fist high above his head:
"Hamanu! Hear me, your servant, 0 Great and Mighty One!"
Everyone in Escrissar's force heard Pavek's cry and sureed toward him. Ruari would have gone down in a pair of heartbeats once they closed, but the remaining Quraiters, though they couldn't have understood what he was trying to do, saw Ruari defending him and rushed to their aid.
The fighting was fierce and desperate around him. Pavek felt a sharp pain in his leg; then it went completely numb: the telltale sign of a serious wound. But the leg held, and he prayed as he'd never prayed before to see a pair of sulphurous eyes in the lurid sunset sky.
Shimmering ovals glowed faintly overheard: the distance between Urik and Quraite was considerable, even for a sorcerer-king.
Who knew what Hamanu saw when a templar invoked his name and power? Another sorcerer-king would know; certainly not Pavek, though he hoped Urik's ruler would see the agafari weapons of Nibenay creating carnage in his domain. And Pavek hoped Great and Mighty Hamanu, having seen that, would give a renegade templar one great and mighty spell...
"Flamestrike!" ... Granted....
The shimmering eyes flared like nearby suns, all seething reds and oranges. The air over the Quraite ramparts thickened and became very still before a wind began to blow upward from the ground itself. Will they or nil they, the men and women on both sides of the rampart lowered their weapons to stare at the sky. Urik templars, recognizing what they saw, ran for the trees-much too slowly.
A flaming bolt exploded from the sky. It grounded itself in the medallion Pavek still held above his head. Searing heat and pain beyond imagining transformed him. He thought he would surely die-thought Hamanu had chosen to destroy him first-but he did not even lose consciousness as lesser fire-bolts arced away from the inferno erupting at his wrist. The bolts struck true into the hearts of Escrissar's allies, and into them alone.
Howls that would haunt Pavek's sleep until he died escaped those living-dying-torches, which continued to burn erect even after they fell silent, until their substance was completely consumed and nothing, not even ash, remained.
Then, abruptly, the great gout of flame rising from his wrist fizzled. Heat and pain were reduced to memories; his flesh was unmarked and whole. The medallion shone with its own light for another instant before it, too, reverted to an ordinary ceramic lump. Pavek lowered his arm.
But it wasn't over. A scream out of Telhami's hut scattered the last remaining wits of the surviving Quraiters. Pavek crossed from the rampart to the hut in two leaps- remembering his wound only when he'd landed solidly on the threshold on a leg that should have collapsed.
A blackened weal ran from knee to hip along his thigh. The spell, he thought, though how a flamestrike spell had cauterized the gash and sewn up the muscles beneath it went beyond his knowledge of magic. His leg ached when he thought about it, but he knew better than to think about it twice, and swept aside the curtain-door.
Telhami had collapsed on her sleeping platform. Her eyes and mouth were closed, but her limbs sprawled at awkward and unmoving angles. She was unconscious at the least, and very likely dead. Akashia sat alone, now, weaving her hands randomly over an assortment of herbs and powders. Her face was twisted into a silent scream as she sought to both shape the guardian's power and maintain the mind-bending spells Telhami had begun.
Quraite's most dangerous enemy, Elabon Escrissar, still lurked somewhere in the guarded lands, apparently unscathed by King Hamanu's bounty.
"Ruari!" Pavek shouted. "Get in here!"
The half-elf appeared at his side, battered, bleeding, and filthy, but still on his feet. He glanced under Pavek's arms and-for once-needed no instructions. He pressed his palms against Akashia's moving hands before he settled on the floor.
"Hold steady, scum. You'll know when I've found him."
* * *
The interrogator could be almost anywhere. He wasn't within the tree circle around the village, and he wasn't among the trees themselves; Pavek tramped through the fields, to the line where Escrissar's allies had hobbled their kanks, but Escrissar wasn't there, either.
He looked until the sun was setting, the lavender sky turning to violet, and still he searched, until the only light was that of the stars. A half-elf couldn't see in the dark as well as a full-blooded elf, but still Escrissar would see better than Pavek.
The mind-bending interrogator should be nearly exhausted. Akashia and Ruari should be able to hold against him. But should be didn't always mean was, and in his heart Pavek felt fortune swinging away from Quraite again.
"Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy," he whispered, not an invocation, but a simple man's simple oath. The medallion hung around his neck again but he had no intention of using it. There was no spell in any of the scrolls he'd memorized that would guide him to Escrissar.
Then he heard sounds behind him, a heavy-footed tread, crushing the ripening grain as his own feet crushed grass in the groves. Drawing the sword, he spun around to face a silhouette half again his height and watching him with glowing yellow eyes.
"Hamanu?" Pavek whispered, then, realizing it could be no one else, dropped to his knees and threw his sword away. "O Great and Mighty King-"
"My pet is in the wastes yonder. You may follow."
The ground gave around him as King Hamanu strode past Pavek. No one knew the sorcerer-king's true aspect, if he had one. Tonight he was the Lion of Urik, dressed in golden armor and crowned with a mane of golden hair. A sword as long as a man's leg hung from his waist, but it was the sharp, curved claws he flexed with each step that froze Pavek's heart in his throat.
He followed, retrieving his own sword along the way and taking two strides for every one of the king's until they came to a dark low-crouching figure.
"Recount!" Hamanu demanded.
It was more than a simple command. Pavek's skull felt as if it had exploded, and he was, most definitely, not the king's target. Not yet.
