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"Spread out. Keep your wits and swords ready!" Javed shouted his orders before he stopped running.
In pairs, as always, the men and women of the war bureau did as they were told.
"Mahtra! Mahtra, where are you?" Pavek set Cerk down without protest and spun on his heels as he called her name again: "Mahtra!"
"Pavek?" Her familiar, faintly inflected voice came from the black center of the clearing. "Pavek!" He heard her coming toward him before her pale skin appeared in the moonlit. Javed took a brand from the nearest hearth. Her mask was gone. Another time, her face would have astonished him—he would have made a rude fool of himself gaping and staring. Tonight, he blinked once and saw the blood on Mahtra's neck, shoulder, and arm instead; her own blood, from her stiff, uncertain movements. Then he noticed the bodies. There were bodies everywhere: halflings on the ground, felled by thunder and just starting to move; halflings overhead, dangling from the branches of the biggest tree Pavek had ever seen, halflings whom Mahtra might have stunned, halflings who'd died long ago, and—scattered in the torchlight—bodies that weren't halflings, including a lean, lanky half-elf he recognized between two heartbeats.
"Hamanu's mercy," Pavek's voice was soft, his lungs were empty, and his heart. "Cut him down." He couldn't breathe. His sword slipped through his fingers. "Zvain?" he whispered, starting another sweep of the bodies in the tree and those on the ground, looking for a halfling who wasn't a halfling.
"Alive," Mahtra said. "Hurt. Cut him down?"
All of which confirmed Pavek's dire guess that Ruari was neither hurt, nor alive. His mouth worked silently; the commandant gave the order. Two templars ran where the hanging ropes led, into the dark, toward the great tree's trunk. Their obsidian swords sang as they hacked through the ropes. Bodies fell like heavy, reeking rain, Ruari's among them, completely limp... deadweight... dead.
Pavek started toward his friend's lifeless body; the emptiness beneath his ribs had become an ache.
Mahtra stopped him. "Kakzim's gone. He grabbed me; he was touching me when the thunder happened. Another mistake. He got away."
"Which way?" Rage banished Pavek's grief and got his blood flowing again. "Which way, Mahtra?"
"I don't know. He got away before I could see again."
Pavek swore. His rage was fading without a target; grief threatened. "Couldn't you hear something?" he demanded harshly, more harshly than Mahtra deserved.
Her neck twisted, bringing one ear down to her bloody shoulder: her best impression of misery and apology. "A sound, maybe—over there?" She pointed with her bloody arm.
A sound, that was all the help Mahtra could give him; it would have to be enough. Retrieving his sword, Pavek jogged into the moonlit forest. Javed called him a fool. Cerk warned him his chase was futile and doomed. He could live with doom and futility—anything was better than facing Ruari's corpse.
Kakzim left no trail. There was a path, but it petered out on the bank of a little brook. Kakzim could have crossed the water or followed it upstream or down—if he'd come this way at all. The chase was futile and doomed, and Pavek knew himself for a fool.
A sweating, overheated fool.
The forest was cooler than the Tablelands, but not by much, and its moist air had glued Pavek's silk shirt to his skin. He knelt on the bank, his sword at his side, and plunged his head beneath the surface, as he would have done after a day's work in Telhami's grove. The forest spoke to him while he drank, an undisciplined babble, each rock and tree, every drop of water and every creature larger than a worm trumpeting its own existence: wild life at its purest, without a druid to teach it a communal song.
Pavek raised his dripping head. The moons had risen above the treetops. Javed was right: little Ral was slipping, silently and safely, across Guthay's larger sphere. Silver light mixed with gold. He could feel it on his face, not unlike the sensations a yellow-robe templar felt when Hamanu's sulphur eyes loomed overhead and magic quickened the air.
Insight fell upon him. Templars reached to Hamanu for their magic. Druids reached to the guardian aspects of the land for their magic. Kakzim had wanted the power of two moons when he aimed to poison Urik or sacrifice Ruari. It was a useless parade of insights: Magicians reached for magic to work their magic. Different magicians reached to different sources. A magician reached to the source that worked for him, and magic happened.
Anyone could reach, but if a man grabbed and held on with all his strength, all his will, magic might happen. And if you were already a doomed fool, you might as well reach for the moons, and the sparkling stars, too.
Pavek reached with his hands and his thoughts. He drew the silver-gold moonlight into himself and used it to summon the voices of the forest. When he held them all-moons and voices together—and his head seemed likely to burst from the strain, he shaped a single image.
Kakzim.
Kakzim with slave-scars, Kakzim without them. Black-eyed Kakzim, hate-eyed Kakzim. Kakzim who had come this way. Who had seen Kakzim pass? What had felt him?
He wasn't a fast runner, even measured against other humans, but Pavek was steady and endowed with all the endurance and stamina the templar orphanage could beat into a youngster's bones. One of his strides equalled two of Kakzim's, and one stride at a time, Pavek narrowed the gap between himself and his quarry.
The moment finally came when merely human ears heard movement up ahead and merely human eyes spied a halfling's silhouette between the trees. Releasing the forest voices and the silver-gold magical moonlight, Pavek drew his sword. Still and silent, he planned his moves carefully, borrowing every trick Ruari had ever shown him. But physical stealth wasn't enough.
Kakzim struck first with a mind-bender's might. The halfling's initial strike stripped Pavek of his confidence, but that wasn't a significant loss: Pavek truly believ
ed he was an ugly, clumsy, dung-skulled oaf—and unlucky, besides. Relieved of those burdens, Pavek was alert and centered behind his sword as he approached the trees where Kakzim lurked. Next, Kakzim sent his mind-bending thoughts after Pavek's bravery and courage, which was a waste of the halfling's time. Pavek had never been a brave man, and his courage was the same as a tree's when it stood through a storm.
"You are an honest man!" Kakzim muttered in disgust, but loud enough for Pavek to hear the halfling judge him as Hamanu had judged him. "You have no illusions."
And with that, Kakzim shrouded himself in an illusion of his own. Instead of bringing his sword down on a halfling's unprotected neck, Pavek found himself suddenly nose-to-nose with an enemy who wore Elabon Escrissar's gold-enameled black mask and took the stance of a Codesh brawler with a poleaxe braced in both hands.
It was a poor illusion, in certain respects. Pavek could see moonlight through the mask and did not believe, for one heartbeat, that he faced either Escrissar or a butcher. It was, however, an effective illusion because he couldn't see Kakzim, and he didn't see the knife Kakzim wielded against him, even when it sliced across his left thigh. Reeling backward in pain and shock, Pavek instinctively slashed the illusionary Escrissar from the left shoulder to the right hip and was stunned when he met no resistance.
