by Lynn Abbey
"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—"
"You're not taking her where Kashi'll see her?"
Pavek didn't need the half-elf's indignation to tell him that it was a bad idea. He knew enough about women to know there were some you didn't put together unless you wanted to witness a tooth-and-nail fight. If he had half the wit of a stone-struck baazrag, he'd haul himself into one of the empty saddles and head south with Lord Hamanu's message and the New Race woman in tow behind him, but having only the wit of a man, he lifted the woman and started toward Quraite instead.
"What about the kanks and the corpses?" Zvain and Ruari asked together.
"What about them?" Pavek replied and kept walking. They caught up soon enough, amid a chorus of bells that alerted the village and brought everyone out to the verge. Akashia stood in front of the other farmers and druids. Between Guthay's reflection and a handful of blazing torches, there was enough light for Pavek to read her expression as he drew closer; it was worried and full of doubt. There was silence until the two of them were close enough to talk in normal voices.
"The rest are dead. This one's the one you heard. She's unconscious." Pavek glanced over his shoulder, where Ruari stood with seven kank-leads wound around his wrist. "We thought it would be best if you roused her. She's New Race."
It was going to be as bad as Pavek feared, maybe worse. Akashia's eyes widened and her nostrils flared as if she'd gotten whiff of something rotten, but she retreated toward the reed-wall hut where she lived alone and slightly apart from the others.
"What about all this?" Ruari demanded, shaking the ropes he held and making a few of the bells clatter.
Akashia gave no sign that she had a preference, so Pavek gave the orders: "Pen the kanks. Feed them and water them well. Strip the corpses before they're buried. Bundle their clothes, their possessions—everything you find—carefully. Don't get tempted to keep anything. We'll take the bundles back with us."
" 'We'll take them back'? You've already decided? Who's 'we'?" Akashia asked, walking beside him now without looking at him or what he carried.
"We: she and I, if she survives. Lord Hamanu sent her and the escort—"
" 'Lord Hamanu?' The Lion's your lord, again?"
"Have mercy, Kashi," Pavek pleaded, using her nickname as he did only when he was flustered. "He knows where Quraite is: He's proved that, and he's proved he can send a messenger safely across the Fist—"
"Safely? Is that what you call this?"
Akashia waved a hand past Pavek's elbow. Her sleeve brushed against the dark cloth in his arms, loosening it and giving her a clear view of the New Race woman's masked face. Pavek held his breath: the woman was unforgettable, if there would be recognition, it would come now, along with an explosion.
There was no explosion, only a tiny gasp as Akashia pressed her knuckles against her lips. "What manner of foul magic has
the Lion shaped and sent?"
They'd reached the flimsy, but shut, door of Akashia's hut. Pavek's arms were numb, his back burned with fatigue. He was in no mood to bargain with her outrage. "I told you: she's one of the New Races. They come from the desert, days south of Urik. The Lion has nothing to do with their making and neither did Elabon Escrissar."
Pavek waited for her to open the door, but no such gesture was forthcoming—and no surprise there, he'd been the blundering baazrag who'd dropped Escrissar's name between them.
"What's he got to do with this?"
Pavek put a foot against the door and kicked it open. "I don't"—he began as he carried the woman across the threshold—"know."
"She's a rotter," Ruari interrupted, adopting Zvain's insults as his own. Heroes didn't have to pen kanks or dig graves. He did unfold a blanket and spread it across Akashia's cot, but that was probably less courtesy than a desire to prevent contamination.
Zvain slipped through the open door behind Akashia. Timid and defiant at the same time, he found a shadow and stood in it with his back against the wall. Scorned boys didn't have chores, either. "I saw her there," he announced, then cringed when Akashia spun around to glower at him.
But there remained no recognition in her eyes when she looked down at the woman Pavek had laid on her cot.
"What did she do there?"
"She came at night. The house was full at night. All the rooms were full—"
The boy's voice grew dreamy. His eyes glazed with memories Pavek didn't want to share. "She was—" he groped for the word. "They're called the eleganta. They entertain behind closed doors."
"A freewoman?" There were gold marks on the woman's skin. Pavek hadn't seen anything like them before, but he knew they weren't slave scars, and Akashia knew it, too.
"I would die first."
Pavek smiled, as he rarely did, and let his own scar twist his lips into a sneer. "Not everyone is as determined as you, Kashi. Some of us have to stay alive, and while we live, we do what we have to do to keep on living." Ruari spat out a word that belonged in the rankest gutters of the city and implied that the New Race woman belonged there as well. Without a sound or changing his expression, Pavek spun on his heels. Before he left the city, there were those in the bureaus who said Pavek had a future as an eighth-rank intimidator, if he'd ingratiate himself sufficiently with a willing patron. He was a head shorter than the half-elf, and there was a clear path to the open door, but Ruari stayed right where he was. Once learned, the nasty tricks of the templar trade couldn't be forgotten. Pavek subjected his friend to withering scrutiny before saying:
Akashia placed her hands on his arm and tried, futilely, to turn him around. "Stop, please! You've made your point: we don't understand the city the way you do... she does. Stop. Please?"
He let himself be persuaded. The scar throbbed the way it did when he let his expression pull on it, but pain wasn't the reason he'd never have made intimidator—and not because he couldn't have found a patron, precisely as the New Race woman had found one in Escrissar.... Pavek was the one—the only one in the hut—who truly felt ill. He wanted to leave at a dead run, but couldn't because the woman had awaked.
She sat up with slow, studied and graceful movements, like those of a feral cat. After examining herself, she looked up. Her open eyes were as astonishing as the rest of her: palest blue-green, like gemstones, they showed none of the differentiation between outer white and inner color of the established races. There were only shiny black pupils that swelled dramatically as her vision adjusted to the light of a single, tiny lamp.
"Who are you? What do you want from us?" Akashia spoke first.
"I am Mahtra." Her voice was strange, too, with little expression and a deep pitch. It seemed to come from somewhere other than behind her mask. "I have a message for the high templar called Pavek."
Pavek stepped away from the others and drew her attention. "I am Pavek."
Bald brows arched beneath flesh of living gold. Her pupils grew inhumanly large, inhumanly bright, as she stared him up and down, but mostly at his scarred face. "My lord said I would find an ugly, ugly man."
He almost laughed aloud, but swallowed the sound when he saw Akashia's face darkening. "Your lord?" he asked instead. "King Hamanu? The lord of Urik is your lord?"
"Yes, he is my lord. He is lord of everything." Mahtra rose confidently to her feet, displaying no sign that she'd been unconscious rather than asleep. Extending a wickedly pointed red fingernail, she reached for Pavek's face. He flinched and dodged. "Will it always look like that? Is it painful?"
New Race, he reminded himself: not a mark on her scaly skin other than those metallic patches. Not a scratch or a scar, nor a sun blister. He recalled Zvain's warnings about the mask and didn't want to imagine what scars it might conceal. She was as tall as Ruari; her slight, strong body was almost certainly full-grown, but what of her mind?
"It aches sometimes. I would rather you didn't touch it. You can understand that, can't you?" He met the pale blue stare and held it until she blinked. He hoped that was understanding. "You have a message for me?"
"My lord says he's given you more time than a mortal man deserves. He says you've dawdled in your garden long enough. He says it's time for you to return and finish what you started."
Aware that everyone—Mahtra, Akashia, Ruari, and Zvain —was staring at him intently, Pavek asked, "Did the Lion tell you what that might be?" in an almost-normal voice.
"He said you and I would hunt the halfling called Kakzim, and I would have vengeance for the deaths of Father and Mika."
"Kakzim!" Zvain exclaimed. "Kakzim! Do you hear that, Pavek? We've got to go back now."
"Father! What Father? You said she was made, not born. She's lying—!"
Pavek watched those jewel-like eyes brighten as the New Race taunt came out of Ruari's mouth. "Shut up—both of you!" he shouted.
All along, while Escrissar was his enemy and Laq the scourge Pavek sought to eliminate, Escrissar's halfling slave had lurked in the background. The Lion-King had come to Quraite to destroy Escrissar, but the Lion didn't know about the slave. Among the last things the living Telhami had said to him was that Hamanu didn't notice a problem until it scratched him in the eye. Kakzim—whose name Pavek had gotten from Zvain that same day when Telhami died—had finally caught the Lion's attention. Pavek wondered how and, though he didn't truly want to know the answer, asked the necessary questions:
"How do you know of Kakzim? What has he done?" Bright eyes studied Ruari first, then Zvain before returning to Pavek. "He is a murderer. His face was the last face Father saw before he was killed...." Mahtra's composure failed. She looked down at her hands and contorted her fingers into tangles that had to hurt her knuckles. "I turned to Lord Escrissar, but he never returned. Another high templar sent me to Lord Hamanu, and he sent me here to you. Aren't you also a high templar? Don't you already know Kakzim?"
"Escrissar." Her loathing made a curse of the name. "You turned to that foul nightmare disguised as a man? What was he—your friend, your lover? Is that why you wear a mask? Rotter. Is it your face that's rotten, or your spirit?"
He'd never heard such venom in Akashia's voice. It rocked Pavek back a step and made him wonder if he knew Akashia at all. Were a handful of days, however tortured and terrible, enough to sour Kashi's spirit? What did she see when she looked at Mahtra? A mask, long and menacing fingernails, black cloth wrapped tightly around a slender body. Were those similarities enough to summon Escrissar's memory to her eyes?
Without warning, Akashia lunged toward Mahtra. She wanted vengeance, and failed to get a taste of it when Pavek and Zvain together seized her and held her back. The golden patches around Mahtra's eyes and on her shoulders glistened in the lamplight, distorting the air around them as sunlight distorts the air above the salt flats.
"Kakzim was Escrissar's slave," Pavek shouted, wanting to avert disaster but pushing closer to the brink instead. "His house would be the first place anyone w
ould look."
"Get her out of here," Akashia warned, wresting free from them, no longer out of control but angrier and colder than she'd been ten heartbeats before. "Get out of here!" she snarled at Mantra.
"I go with High Templar Pavek," the New Race woman replied without flinching. She was eleganta. She made her life in the darkest shadows of the high templar quarter. There was nothing Akashia could do to frighten her. "With him alone or with any others who desire vengeance. Do you desire vengeance, green-eyed woman?"
Confronted by an honesty she couldn't deny and a coldness equal to her own, it was Akashia who retreated, shaking her head as she went. Pavek thought they'd gotten through the narrows, but he hadn't reckoned on Ruari, who'd come to Akashia's defense no matter how badly she treated him—or how little she needed it.
"She can't talk to Kashi that way. Take her to the grove, Pavek!" he demanded—the same demand he'd made when Pavek had arrived here, and for roughly the same reason. "Let the guardian judge her, and
her Father and her vengeance."
"No," he replied simply.
"No? It's the way of Quraite, Pavek. You don't have a choice: the guardian judges strangers."
"No," he repeated. "No—for the same reason we'll bury the templars and return their belongings. The Lion will know what we do to his messengers, and he knows how to find us. And, more than that, this isn't about Quraite or the guardian of Quraite. This is about Urik and Kakzim. I saw Kakzim making Laq, but I didn't go back to find him because I thought when he couldn't make Laq anymore, he couldn't harm anyone either. I was wrong; he's become a murderer with his own hands. Hamanu's right, it's time for me to go back. We'll leave as soon as the kanks and Mahtra are rested—"
"Now," Mahtra interrupted. "I need no rest."
And maybe she didn't. There was nothing weary in her strange eyes or weak in the hand she wrapped around Pavek's forearm.