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There were wildflowers in bloom and birds singing in the trees—all the beautiful things she'd neglected since her return from Urik. There was a path, too, which she'd never noticed before and which she followed... to a waterfall shrouded in rainbows.
Chapter Seven
A trek across the Athasian Tablelands was never pleasant. Pavek and his three young companions were grateful that this one was at least uneventful. They encountered neither storms nor brigands, and all the creatures who crossed their path appeared content to leave them alone.
Pavek was suspicious of their good fortune, but that was, he supposed, his street-scum nature coming to the fore as he headed back to the urban cauldron whe
re he'd been born, raised, and tempered. That and the ceramic medallion he'd worn beneath his home-spun shirt since leaving Quraite.
The closer they came to Urik, the heavier that medallion—which he had not worn nor even touched since Lord Hamanu strode out of Quraite—hung about both his neck and his spirit. The medallion's front carried a bas-relief portrait of the Lion-King in full stride. The reverse bore the marks that were Pavek's name and his rank of third-level regulator in the civil bureau, marks now bearing a lengthwise gouge where the sorcerer-king had raked his claw through the yellow glaze. Ordinarily, high templar medallions were cast in gold, but it was that gouge, not the precious metal, that declared a templar had risen through the ranks of his bureau to the unranked high bureau.
Still, with nothing but the relentless sun, the clanging kank bells that limited conversation among the travelers, and the mesmerizing sway of the saddle to distract him, Pavek let his imagination run wilder each day of the ten-day journey from Quraite to Urik.
There were no more than fifty high templars in Urik— men and women; interrogators, scholars, or commandants—whose power was second only to Lord Hamanu's. Pavek considered paying a visit to his old barracks, the training fields, or the customs house where he'd worked nine days out of ten. Not that he'd left any friends behind who might congratulate him; he simply wanted to witness the reaction when he unslung the medallion and made the gouge visible.
There'd be laughter, at first. No one in his right mind would believe any templar could rise from third rank to the top, especially not within the civil bureau where the ranks weren't regularly thinned by war.
But that laughter would cease as soon as someone dared touch his medallion. That lengthwise gouge couldn't be forged. Even now, quinths after the Lion-King had touched it, the medallion was still slightly warm against Pavek's chest. Anyone else would feel a sharp prickling: high templars had an open call on their patron's power and protection.
Once convinced of the mark's authenticity, he'd have more friends than he knew what to do with. In his mind's eye, Pavek watched the taskmasters, administrators, and procurers who'd run his life since his mother bought him a pallet in the templar orphanage trample each other in their eagerness to curry his favor.
Pavek had countless fantasies beneath the scorching sun, but he indulged them only because he knew that many of those whose comeuppance he most wished to witness were already dead, and that he'd never act on the rest. He'd had too much personal acquaintance with humiliation to enjoy in any form.
Besides, in his calmer moments Pavek wasn't certain he wanted to be a high templar. He certainly didn't want to have regular encounters with Urik's sorcerer-king. On the other hand, the more he learned from Mahtra, frequent encounters of any kind were a decreasing possibility. First he had to survive this, his first high-templar assignment. Night after night as they sat around a small fire, Pavek quizzed the white-skinned woman about the disaster that had eventually brought her to Quraite.
Mahtra had told him about a huge cavern beneath the city and the huge water reservoir it supposedly contained. When he gave the matter thought, it seemed reasonable enough. The fountains and wells that slaked Urik's daily thirst never ran dry, and although the creation of water from air was one of the most elementary feats of magic—he'd mastered the spell himself—it was unlikely that the city's water had an unnatural origin. That a community of misfits dwelt on the shores of this underground lake also seemed reasonable. For many people, life anywhere in the city, even in the total darkness beneath it, was preferable to life anywhere else.
Not much more than a year ago, Pavek would have thought the same thing.
And he could imagine a mob of thugs descending on that community with extermination on their minds. It wasn't a pleasant image, but riots happened in Urik, despite King Hamanu's iron fist and the readiness of templars to enforce their king's justice. While he wore the yellow, Pavek had swept through many an erupting market plaza, side-by-side with his fellow templars, bashing heads and restoring order with brutal efficiency that kept the bureaus more feared than hated.
It was the sort of work that drove him to a melancholy two-day drunk, but there were a good many templars who enjoyed it, even volunteered for it.
Templars were certainly capable of causing the carnage in Mahtra's cavern, but it seemed this was one civic outrage for which they weren't responsible. With all the time she'd spent in the templar quarter, Mahtra would know a templar if she'd gleaned one from the dying memories of the mind-bender she called Father. But there wasn't a snatch of yellow in the images she'd received from Father's dying mind and, even off-duty, the kind of templars who might have ravaged the cavern wore their robes as a sort of armor.
What Mahtra had gleaned from inherited memories was the face of a slave-scarred halfling who she insisted was Escrissar's alchemist. Pavek had seen Kakzim just once, when he stood beside his master, Escrissar, in the customs-house warrens. It had struck Pavek then that the alchemist had enough hate in his eyes to destroy the world. He could believe that the mad halfling was the force behind the rampage. What he couldn't figure was Kakzim's purpose in slaughtering a community Lord Hamanu would have executed anyway.
If Lord Hamanu wanted Kakzim dead, Kakzim would be dead. Simply and efficiently.
Try as he might, Pavek could find only one satisfactory explanation for the summons Mahtra carried to Quraite: Lord Hamanu was bored. That was the usual explanation when sudden, strange orders filtered down through the bureau hierarchies; orders that once put an adolescent orphan on the outer walls repainting the images of the Lion-King for a twenty-five day quinth, changing all the kilts to a different color.
Lord Hamanu made war to alleviate his boredom and indulged his high templar pets for the same reason. He'd turned Pavek into a high templar, and now it was Pavek's turn to provide a day's amusement before Lord Hamanu hunted down the halfling himself.
Pavek dreamt of sulphur eyes among the stars, eyes narrowing with laughter, and razor claws descending through the night to rip out his heart. The heavens were naturally dark each time he awoke, but the gouged medallion was hot against his ribs, and Pavek was not completely reassured.
In contrast to his own nightmare anxiety, Zvain and Ruari seemed to think they'd embarked on the great adventure of their young lives. They chattered endlessly about cleverness, courage, and the victory that would be theirs. Zvain imagined throwing Kakzim's bloody head at the Lion-King's feet and being rewarded with his weight in gold. Ruari, to his credit, thought he could assure Quraite's isolation. Even Mahtra got swept up in vainglory, though her expectations were more modest: an inexhaustible supply of cabra melons and red beads.
The trio tried to infect him with their enthusiasm, calling him an old man when he resisted. They had a point. Pavek could remember himself at Ruari's age—it wasn't more than a handful of years ago—and he'd been a cautious old man even then.
After dealing with the sorcerer-king's boredom, Pavek feared his greatest challenge was going to be riding herd on his rambunctious allies.
Ruari had matured in the past year. He had moments of blind, adolescent stubbornness, but overall Pavek trusted the half-elf to act sensibly and hold up under pressure. Zvain was still very young, in the midst of his most willful and rebellious years, and nursing childhood wounds. He was inclined at times to crumble, to curl in on himself— especially when Pavek and Ruari lapsed into one of their vigorous but ultimately inconsequential arguments. The boy craved affection that Pavek could barely provide and then frequently rejected it just as fast, which only made life more difficult.
As for Mahtra... the made-woman was an enigma. Younger than Zvain by several years, she wasn't so much a child—though she had a child's notion of cause and effect— as a wild creature, full-grown and unpredictable. She was much stronger than she appeared, and, or so she claimed, had the capacity to 'protect herself'.
Mahtra said she'd ridden out of Khelo, the market village most nearly aligned with Quraite's true location and the one where Lord Hamanu maintained his kank stables. But Pavek held to the Quraite tradition of entering Urik from a deceptive direction.
They circled the city, camping one final night on the barrens, and joined the city's southern road shortly after dawn the next morning.
