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Giola led them through the gate after the boy and his animals.
Codesh was a tangled place, squeezed tight against its outer walls. Its streets were scarcely wide enough for two men to pass without touching. Greedy buildings angled off their foundations, reaching for the sun, condemning the narrow streets to perpetual, stifling twilight. When one of the slops carts Giola had described rumbled past, bystanders scrambled for safety, shrinking into a doorway, if they were lucky; grabbing the overhanging eaves and lifting themselves out of harm's way, if they had the strength; or racing ahead of the cart to the next intersection, which was rarely more than twenty paces away.
Every cobblestone and wall was stained to the color of dried blood. The dust was dark red, the garments the Code-shites wore were dark red, their skin, too. The smell of death and decay was a tangible presence, made worse by the occasional whiff of roasting sausage. The sounds of death mingled with the sights and smells. There was no place were they didn't hear the bleats, wails, and whines of the beasts waiting for slaughter, the truncated screams as the axe came down.
Pavek thought of the sausage he'd paid good money for at Urik's west gate and felt his gut sour. For a moment he believed that he'd never eat meat again, but that was nonsense. In parched Athas, food was survival. A man ate what he could get his hands on; he ate it raw and kicking, if he had to. The fastidious or delicate died young. Pavek swallowed his nausea, and with it his despair.
He gave greater attention to the places Giola showed them—he was paying for the tour after all. They came to a Codesh plaza: an intersection where five streets came together and a man-high fountain provided water to the neighborhood. For all its bloody gloom and squalor, Codesh was a community like any other. Women came to the fountain with their empty water jugs and dirty laundry. They knelt beside the curb stones, scrubbing stains with bone-bleach and pounding wet cloth with curving rib bones. Water splashed and dripped all around the women. It puddled around their knees and flowed between the street cobblestones until it disappeared.
"The water. Where does the water come from? Where does it go?" Pavek asked.
Giola stared at him with thinly disguised contempt. "It comes from the fountain."
"Where does it come from before the fountain? How is the fountain filled? Where does it drain?"
"How in the bloody, bright sun should I know? Do I look like a scholar to you? Go to the Urik archive, hire yourself a bug-eyed scribe if you want to know where water comes from or where it goes!"
Several cutting replies leapt to the front of Pavek's mind. With difficulty he rejected them all, reminding himself that most people—certainly most templars—didn't have his demanding curiosity. Things were what they appeared to be, without why or how, before or after. Giola's life was not measured in questions and doubts, as his was.
But without questions, there wasn't much to say except, "Keep moving, then. We're still looking for a way underground. Some sort of passage—"
"Or a building," Mahtra interrupted. Her strangely emotionless voice was well-suited to dealing with low-rank templars. "A very old building. Its walls are as tall as they are wide. The roof is flat. There's only one door and inside, there's a hole in the floor that goes all the way underground."
Pavek cursed himself for a fool. He'd been so clever looking for his second passage into the reservoir cavern that he'd never thought to ask if there was another building like the one Mahtra had led them to in Urik's elven market.
Giola scratched her shaggy blond hair. "Aye," she said slowly. "A little building, smack in the mid
dle of the abattoir. A building inside a building. No use I could ever guess. I never noticed a door, but I never looked."
"The abattoir," Pavek mused aloud. The abattoir, where Nunk said the halfling lune lived. He flashed Mahtra a grin and took her by the arm. "That's it! That's the place."
Mahtra shied away from his grip, her eyes so wide-open they seemed likely to fall to the ground. "What's an abattoir? I do not know this word."
He relaxed his hold on Mahtra's arm. Like eleganta, abattoir was a word that concealed more than it revealed. And, knowing she was still a child in many ways, Pavek was instinctively reluctant to destroy its mystery with a precise definition. "It is—it is—" he groped for a phrase that would be the truth, but not too much of it. "It is the place where the animals die," then added quickly, "the place where we'll find the man we're looking for."
* * *
The abattoir was the heart of Codesh. It was an old building, similar in style to the little building they hoped to find inside it, and etched with the same angular, indecipherable script Pavek had noticed at the elven market. Shadowed patches on its time and grime-darkened walls led the eye to believe that there had once been murals, but whatever grandeur the abattoir might have possessed in the past, it was a dismal place now.
Another templar watchtower rose beside a gaping archway carved through thick limestone walls. There were as many yellow-robed men and women watching over the abattoir as Nunk kept with him at the outer gate. A rack of hook-bill spears stood on one side of the watchroom door while a stack of shields made from erdlu scales lashed to flexible rattan sat on the other. Inside the watchroom, each templar wore a sword and boiled leather armor; that was very unusual for civil bureau templars and a measure of Codesh's reputation as a thorn in Urik's foot. They greeted Giola as if hers were the first friendly—as in not belonging to the enemy—face they'd seen in a stormy quinth.
"Instigator Nunk says I'm to take these rubes onto the floor," Giola informed Nunk's counterpart, a dwarf with a bit less decoration woven through his sleeve.
The dwarf swiped the oily sweat from his bald scalp before sauntering over to greet Pavek and his companions.
"Who in blazes are you that I should let you and yours stir up trouble I don't need?"
He grabbed the front of Pavek's shirt, a gesture well within his templar's right to harass any ordinary citizen, but he caught Pavek's medallion as well, and the shock knocked him back a step or two.
"Be damned," he swore, partly fear and partly curse.
Pavek could watch the thoughts—questions, doubts and possibilities—march between the dwarf's narrowed eyes. He judged the moment had come for revelation and pulled his medallion into view, gouge and all.
"Be damned," the dwarf repeated.
This time the oath was definitely a curse and definitely directed on himself. Pavek felt a measure of sympathy; he had the same sort of rotten luck.
"Who I am is Pavek, Lord Pavek, and what I want on the killing ground is no concern of yours."
