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He'd just found one when Ruari erupted with a streak of panicky oaths. Casting the stick aside and drawing his sword in its place, Pavek raced to the half-elf's side.
"Pyreen preserve and protect!" Ruari sputtered, invoking the aid of legendary druid paladins. "What is she... it?" he asked, retreating from the rider he'd hauled down from the bug's back.
Pavek caught Ruari at the elbows from behind and steered him to one side. For all his sullenness and swagger, for all his hatred of Urik and the human templar who, in raping his elven mother, had become his father, Ruari was an innocent raised in the clean, free air of Quraite. He knew elves and dwarves and humans and their mixed-blood offspring, but nothing of the more exotic races or the impulses that might drive a woman to mark her body, or wrap it in a gown tight enough to be a second skin and cut with holes to display what the women of Quraite kept discreetly covered.
A templar, though, had seen everything the underside of Urik had to offer—or Pavek thought he had until he squatted down for a better look at what Ruari had found. She was beyond doubt a woman: leaner than Ruari or a full-blooded elf, but not an elf, not at all. Her skin wasn't painted; white-as-salt was its natural color, despite the punishment it must have taken on the journey. Pavek couldn't say whether the marks around her eyes were paint or not, but the eyes themselves were wide-spaced and the mask that ran the length of her face between them covered no recognizable profile. He'd never seen anyone like her before, but he knew what she was—
"New Race."
"What?" Ruari asked, his curiosity calming him already.
"Rotters," Zvain interrupted. He left off searching, but didn't come all the way over to join them. "Better be careful, they're beasts for the arena. Things that got made, not born. Claws and teeth and other things they shouldn't have. Rotters."
"Most of em," Pavek agreed, sounding wiser than he felt and wondering if the boy knew something that he didn't. The white-skinned woman with her mask and torn gown appeared more fragile than ferocious. As the wheels of fate's chariot spun, he knew that appearances meant nothing, but if this was the woman Akashia had sensed, he wanted to preserve the peace as long as he could. "They stay beasts, if they start out beasts. If they start as men and women, that's what they come out as, but different. And they don't all choose to go to the Tower. Some do; they've got their reasons, I guess. Mostly it's slavers that take a coffle chain south and bring back the few that come out again." Time and time again during Pavek's years as a templar, the civil bureau had swept through the slave markets in search of the lowest of the low who supplied the mysterious Tower. Maybe they saved a few slaves from transformation, but they did nothing for the ones who'd been transformed.
"Come from where? Come out how? What Tower?" Ruari pressed. "I know elves and half-elves; she's neither. Wind and fire, Pavek, her skin—She's got scales! I felt them. What race of man and woman has scales?"
Pavek shook his head. "Just her, I imagine. Haven't seen many of them, but I never saw two that were alike—"
"But you said 'New Race'."
"They're New Race because, man, woman, or beast, they all come from the same place, 'way to the south. Somewhere south there's a place—the Tower—that takes what it finds and changes it into something else—"
Pavek sighed. They were young. One of them had seen too much; the other, not enough. All men were made, women, too. Talk to any templar. "Made, not born. All by themselves, no mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers. They die, though. Just like the rest of us."
Ruari shuddered. "She's not dead. I heard her—felt her—breathing." He shuddered a second time and wraped his arms over his chest.
Her eyes were closed and she lay with her arms and legs so twisted that Pavek had taken the worst for granted. His mastery of druid spellcraft didn't extend this far from the grove and didn't include the healing arts, but Ruari was a competent druid; he knew enough about healing to keep her alive until they found Akashia.
Kneeling beside the fallen New Race woman, he held his hands palms out above her breasts and looked Ruari in his moonlit eyes. "Help me." The words weren't phrased as a request. Ruari shrugged and twisted until their eyes no longer met. "You're wrong, Ru," Pavek chided coldly. He loosened the length of fine, dark cloth the woman had wound around her head and shoulders, then he laid his big, callused hands on her cheek to turn her head and expose the fastenings of her mask.
"Don't!" Zvain shouted.
The boy had finally come closer and taken Pavek's place beside the manifestly uncomfortable Ruari. Had his arms been long enough, Pavek would have grabbed both of them by their ears and smashed their stubborn, cowardly skulls together. He might do it anyway, once he'd taken care of the matters at hand.
"Don't touch her!"
He'd be damned first, if he wasn't already. Pavek touched her cold, white skin and found it scaled, exactly as Ruari had warned, but before he could turn her head, a Zvain-sized force struck his flank, knocking him backward. Blind rage clouded Pavek's eyes and judgment; he seized the boy's neck and with trembling fingers began to squeeze.
"She'll blast you, Pavek!" Zvain said desperately. He was a tough, wiry youth, but his hands barely wrapped around Pavek's brawl-thickened wrists and couldn't loosen them at all. "She'll blast you. I've seen her do it. I've seen her, Pavek! I've seen her do it."
With a gasp of horror, Pavek heard the boy's words, saw what he, himself, had been doing. His strength vanished with his rage. Limp hands at the end of limp arms fell against his thighs. Zvain scampered away, rubbing his neck, but otherwise no worse for the assault. Pavek was too shamed to speak, so Ruari asked the obvious question:
"Where did you see her?"
Shame was, apparently, contagious. Zvain tucked his chin against his breastbone. "I told you she was a rotter. I told you. She'd come to—you know—that house, almost every night."
Pavek let the last of his breath out with a sigh. "Escrissar? You saw her while you were living with Escrissar?" He swore a heartfelt oath as the boy nodded.
"She's got a power, even he couldn't get around it, and she doesn't like anyone to touch that mask."
"What was she doing at House Escrissar?" Ruari demanded, his teeth were clenched and his hands were drawn up into compact fists. He'd never forgive or forget what had happened to Akashia in House Escrissar; none of them would. Lord Hamanu had exacted a fatal price from his high templar pet without slacking Quraite's thirst for vengeance.
Zvain didn't answer the question. He didn't willingly answer any questions about Elabon Escrissar or his household. Akashia remembered him from her own nightmare interrogations. That was enough for her, but Pavek, who knew the deadhearts better and despised them no less, suspected Zvain had endured his own torments as well as Akashia's.
"What was she doing there?" Ruari repeated; Zvain withdrew deeper into himself.
"He doesn't know," Pavek shouted. "Let it lie, Ru! He doesn't know. She can tell us herself when we get her to the village—"
