by Lynn Abbey
"Laq?"
"Seen any around?"
"Not since the deadheart disappeared and everyone connected to him went to the obsidian pits. Lord, you should have seen it—the Lion Himself marching through the quarter calling out the names. I'll tell you something: the city's cleaner than it's been since my grandfather got whelped. Rumor is we'll be at war with Nibenay this time next year, and the lion always cleans house before a war, but this time it's different. The scum he sent to the pits wasn't just Escrissar's cadre. He cast a wide net and the ones that got away left Urik."
"Not all of them. I'm looking for a halfling, Escrissar's slave—"
Nunk's eyebrows rose. It was common knowledge halfling slaves withered fast.
"When I saw him, he had Escrissar's scars on his cheeks. He's the one who cooked up the Laq poison, but he didn't go down with his master. I think he's gone to ground in Codesh. You keeping watch on any halfling troublemakers? Name's Kakzim. Even if the scars were just a mask, like Escrissar's, you'd know him if you'd seen him. You'd never forget his eyes."
"Don't know the name, but we've got a halfling lune living in rented rooms along the abattoir gallery—he'd have to be a lune to live there. He's a regular doomsayer—there seem to be more of them all the time, what with all the changes now that the Dragon's gone. He gets up on his box a couple times a day, preaching the great conflagration, but this is Codesh, and they've been preaching the downfall of Urik since Hamanu arrived a thousand years ago. A faker's got to deliver a miracle or two if he wants to keep drawing a crowd in Codesh. Can't speak about this halfling's eyes, but from what I hear, he's got a face more like yours than a slave's—no offense, Great One."
"No offense," Pavek agreed. "I'd like to get a look at him. Which way to this abattoir?"
Nunk shrugged. "Don't go inside, that's what regulators are for—or have you forgotten that?" He stuck two fingers between his teeth and whistled. An elf with very familiar patterns woven into her sleeve answered the summons. "These folk want to take a look-see through the village and abattoir."
She looked them over with narrowed, lethargic eyes, Pavek had stuffed his medallion back inside his shirt when the door opened. He left it there, letting her draw her own conclusions, letting her make her own mistakes.
"Four bits," she said. "And the ghost wears a cloak."
It was a fair price, a fair request: Kakzim might spot Mahtra long before they spotted him. Pavek dug the money out of his belt-pouch.
Her name was Giola, not a tribal name, but elves who wound up wearing yellow had little in common with their nomadic cousins. She armed herself with an obsidian mace from a rack beside the watchtower door before leading them to the village gate, which, unlike the gates of the Lion-King's city, was never wide open.
"You know how to use that sticker?" she asked and pointed at Pavek's sword.
"I won't cut off my hand."
"That's a lot of metal for a badlands boy to carry around on his hip. There're folk inside who'd slit your throat for it. Sure you wouldn't rather I carried it for you? Push comes to shove, the best weapon should be in the best hands."
"In your dreams, Great One," Pavek replied, using a phrase only templars used. Between friends, it was commiseration; between enemies, an insult. When Pavek smiled, it became a challenge Giola wisely declined.
"Have it your way," she said with a shrug. "But don't expect me to risk my neck for four lousy bits. Anything goes wrong, you're on your own."
"Fair enough," Pavek agreed. "Anything goes wrong, you're on your own." He'd never been skilled in the subtle art of extortion, which was probably why he was always skirting poverty. He didn't begrudge Giola for shaking him down, but he didn't intend to give her any more money, either. "Let's go. We're looking for a way underground, a cave, a stream, something big enough for a human—"
"A halfling," Ruari corrected, speaking up for the first time since they entered the watchtower and earning one of Pavek's sourest sneers for his unwelcome words.
"Halflings, humans, dwarves, the whole gamut," Pavek continued, barely acknowledging the half-elf's interruption. "Maybe a warehouse or catacombs—if Codesh has any."
"Not a chance, not even a public cesspit," Giola replied. "The place is built on rock. They burn what they can—" she wrinkled her nose and gestured toward the several smoky plumes that fouled Codesh's air. "The rest they either sell to the farmers or cart clear around to Modekan."
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."
Standing behind the dwarf, and half again as tall, elven Giola had a good view of the ceramic lump Pavek held in his hand. She turned pale enough to be Mahtra's sister.
"A thousand pardons, Great One. Forgive my insolence, Great One," she humbled herself, dropping to one knee and striking her breast with her fist. But for all Giola's humility, there was one flash of fire when her eyes skewed in the direction of the outer gate watchtower where Nunk, who'd gotten her into this, was waiting.
"Forgive me, also, Great One," the dwarf said quickly. "May I ask if you're Pavek... Lord Pavek who was once exiled from Urik?"
Pavek truly got no exhilaration from the embarrassment of others. "I'm the Pavek who lit out of Urik with a forty-gold piece bounty riding on my head," he said, trying to break the grim mood.
Giola stood erect. She straightened her robe and said, "Great One, it is good to see you are alive," which surprised Pavek as much as the sight of his medallion had surprised her. "There's never been a regulator dead or alive who was worth forty pieces of gold. I don't know what you did, but your name was whispered in all the shadows. You were not without friends. Luck sat on your shoulder."
She took a long-limbed stride around the dwarf and extended her open hand, which held the four ceramic bits Pavek had given her earlier. Everyone said Athas had changed in the few years since the Tynans slew the Dragon. Nunk said the bureaus had changed since Pavek left, and partly because of him. There could be no greater symbol of those changes than a regulator offering to return money. Or telling him, in the plain presence of other templars, that she'd gone to a fortune-seller and bought him a bit of luck.
A human could study the elves of Athas all his life without truly learning what an elf meant when he—or she-called someone a friend. Now two elves had called Pavek friend in as many days—if he considered Ruari an elf. There was always a gesture involved, be it a bright-colored lizard or four broken bits. Last night Pavek had known to take the lizard. Today he knew he'd spoil everything if he touched those rough-edged bits.
Giola cocked her head, pondering a moment before she decided the sentiment was acceptable. Then she touched her right-hand's index finger first to her own breast then to his. Judging by Ruari's slack-jawed astonishment, he could rely on his assumption: he'd been accorded a rare honor. The dwarf, the highest rank templar in the watchtower, save for Pavek himself, must have sensed the same thing.
He got in front of Giola. "Great One, it would be an honor to help you. Let me escort you personally."
There were some traditions that were more resistant to change than others. Giola retreated, and the dwarf led them downstairs.
The abattoir wasn't so much a building as an open space surrounded by walls and a two-tier gallery, open to the brutal sun, and filled from back to front, side to side, with the trades of death. Pavek judged the killing floor to be as large as any Urik market plaza, at least sixty parade paces square. Carcasses outnumbered people many times over. Finding Kakzim would be a challenge, but finding the twin of the building Mahtra had used to come and go from the reservoir cavern was as simple as looking at the middle of the killing floor.
Getting there was another matter. The abattoir didn't fall silent the moment one yellow-robed templar and four strangers appeared on the watchtower balcony, but their presence was noted everywhere, and not welcomed. Pavek's quick scan of the killing floor didn't reveal any scarred halflings among the faces pointed their way. And although Mahtra wore her long, black shawl and a borrowed cloak, her white-white face divided by its mask was a distinct as the silvery moon, Ral, on a clear night.
"Stay close together," Pavek whispered to his companions as they started across the floor. "Keep an eye out for Kakzim—you two especially." He indicated Mahtra and Zvain. "You know what to look for. But he's not what we're here for, not today. We'll go inside that little building, go down to the reservoir and come back up in Urik." The last was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Pavek liked the mood on the killing floor less with every step he took across it.
Mahtra reached down and took Zvain's hand in her own.
Whether that was to reassure him or her, Pavek couldn't guess; he let the gesture pass without comment. The dwarf hadn't drawn his sword, but he kept his hand on the hilt as he stomped forward with that head-down, single-minded determination that got dwarves in a world of trouble when things didn't go according to their plan.
Giola hadn't noticed a door in the little building because at first glance there wasn't one, just four plain stone walls. Then Pavek noticed the weathered remains of the indecipherable script carved into one of the walls. He thumped the seemingly solid stone below the inscription with his fist and felt it give.
The dwarf said, "False front, Great One," and added an oath. It didn't really matter what lay behind the door or who'd hung the false front. The discovery had been made on his watch, and he was the one who'd answer for it. That was another Urik tradition that wasn't likely to change. "Is it trapped, Great One?"<
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Pavek caught himself before he said something foolish. He was the high templar; he was supposed to have open call on the Lion-King's power. A little borrowed spellcraft and any magical devices associated with the door would be sprung and any warding behind it would be dissolved. The problem was, Pavek didn't want to use his high templar's privilege. Like as not, he'd forfeit his hard-earned druidry if he went back to templar ways. He'd have to make the choice eventually, but eventually wasn't now.
Their halfling enemy was an alchemist who, as far as any of them knew, had no use for magic. He could have bought a scroll or hired someone to cast a spell—Codesh looked like the sort of place where illicit magic was available for the right price. But halflings, as a rule, had no use for money and didn't buy things, either. Probably they were dealing with nothing more dangerous than a hidden latch.
Probably.
He hammered the door several times, getting a feel for its movement and the likely position of its latch and hinges.
He'd decided that it swung from the top and was tackling the latch problem when he felt the mood change behind him.
"There he is!" Mahtra shouted, pointing over everyone's head and toward a section of the two-story high wall.
The distance was too great and the shadows on the second-story balcony were too deep for Pavek to recognize a halfling's face, but the silhouette was right for one of the diminutive forest people. He had the sense that the halfling was looking at them, a sense that was confirmed when a slender arm was extended in their direction. One instant Pavek wondered what the movement meant; the next instant he knew. Kakzim had given a signal to his partisans on the killing floor. Well-fed and well-armed butchers were coming for them.
"Magic!" the dwarf cried. "Magic, Great One. The Lion-King!"
"No time!" Pavek shouted back, which was the truth and not an excuse.
He needed both hands on his sword hilt and all his concentration to parry the deadly axes massed against them. Their backs were to the false-front door; that would be an advantage for a moment, then it would become disaster as Kakzim's partisans gained the roof. They'd be under attack from all directions, including above. The slaughter would be over in a matter of heartbeats, and they'd be gone without a trace or memory left behind.