Then he saw a templar wearing an enameled mask and the mostly-black robe of necromancy striding across the
paved courtyard. With the distance, Pavek couldn't tell if it was Escrissar or not, but the risk of exposure had suddenly
become greater than the pain warranted.
Pavek headed for the daily market where he spent a whole silver piece on a packet of Ral's Breath powder that
shouldn't have cost more than two ceramic bits. Mixed with water, it barely numbed his tongue and did nothing at all
for the throbbing in his elbow.
With grim irony Pavek recalled the moment in Metica's office when she marveled about complaints. If he hadn't
been a fugitive he would have complained himself: there was a city seal on every packet of Ral's Breath vouching for
its purity. Urik had survived for over a thousand years because its seal meant as much as its army and king.
When that seal was worthless, someone, somewhere should care.
A naked-sleeved messenger jostled Pavek while he pondered the decline of his city. Out of sheer habit, he
started to upbraid the youth, but the pain soared to new heights, and he slumped against the wall instead. The boy
grimaced, eyeing Pavek's sling and suppurating wound. Planting himself unsteadily over his feet, Pavek raised his fists
and had new, unwelcome insights about the behavior of mortally wounded animals in the gladiatorial arenas:
movement was agony, maybe death, but he'd take that messenger with him, if it was the last thing he did.
"That wants healing, unless you're looking to die," the boy said in a matter-of-fact, almost friendly tone. "You'll
pay a fortune if one of our healers looks at it, but there's an old dwarf-woman in the northwest corner of the elven
market. She's a little crazy-calls on ancient seas for her power-but she's cheap, and reliable." He dug beneath his robe-it
was so new the pleats weren't frayed-and produced an unchipped four-bit ceramic piece, which he laid atop Pavek's
trembling fist before walking away.
Gasping with astonishment, he nearly dropped the coin. What was happening to his city? Had he sunk so low
that a messenger was offering him advice and charity? Had he ever, in his messenger days, offered four precious bits
to the rabble? He couldn't answer his first question and didn't want to answer his second, but the answer to the last
was no, although he'd given as much and more to Dovanne.
* * *
Pavek found the healer right where the messenger predicted. She was the oldest dwarf he'd ever seen, sitting
cross-legged on a scrap of cloth that might once have been green. A begging bowl half-filled with water and a few
dirty coins balanced on her ankles while she chanted eyes-closed prayers to forgotten oceans.
She looked up when Pavek's shadow blocked the sun. One eye was clouded with a cataract, the other was a
radiant blue, as clear as the day she was born. She assessed his elbow with a single glance and named her price: one
silver piece.
It was cheap; and it was Sassel's last silver piece. Pavek squatted down to put it in her bowl, inadvertently giving
her a close look at his face.
With a hiss and a scowl, she put her hand over the bowl before he could dunk the coin and rose to her feet with
commendable agility for one so ancient. She rolled up her mat and led Pavek around a corner.
No word was said until they entered a cramped lean-to behind an active forge. The air shimmered with the heat.
Pavek was grateful when she pointed to a tripod stool.
"You are the one they call Pavek the Murderer? The one for whom they're offering ten gold coins?" she
demanded, looking down on him with her good eye.
He could imagine how far ten gold coins could go in this benighted quarter of Urik, but he, himself, had gone too
far for lies. "I'm no murderer," he answered, not denying his name and morbidly eager to know how she'd recognized
him.
"You are a marked man with powerful enemies, Pavek. Very powerful enemies. They have visited every healer in
the city. Even me. Even poor Josa who worships what's been lost. They told Josa to watch for a man with gouges on
his cheek. They promised Josa she would share your fate if she made you whole again."
Pavek had a raw instinct for enemies, a rudimentary mind-bending talent that the old and undoubtedly crazy
healer did not arouse. Though the instinct had failed him before, most notably with Dovanne, he trusted it with the
dwarven crone. "I have enemies because I saw things done in the templarate that our king would not tolerate. I saw
Laq-"
The healer cut Pavek off with a wave of her hand. "Whatever you saw, whatever you think-it is of no concern to
Josa. I will not turn you over to your enemies. No healer will. Think what you will of that, Pavek the Murderer: Wonder
why, and be grateful. But I dare not make you whole."
"I'm not asking you to treat what Ela-"
Josa silenced him again, this time with a whiff of spellcasting. "It is of no concern to me. It can be of no concern.
Your enemy who marked your face marked you well. I cannot heal a mere part of you. He will sense any spellcraft
wrought on you within the city walls. He will sense Josa."
Pavek could name no spell that produced the effect Josa described, but he did not disbelieve her on that
account. The archives existed because magic was an evolving art. Escrissar, a mind-bender as well as a master of
necromancy, might have spelled something new. Or that halfling alchemist might have coated his master's fashionable
talons with yet another nefarious solution.
"Outside the city walls then? I've got to find a healer. Does your order practice outside the walls? Is there
someone you can recommend in the villages?"
"There is Josa, and Josa only." The crone seized Pavek's right hand and held it palm upright. "You will not leave
the city," she said with deliberate air of prophecy. "You have been marked, like Josa. You will stand alone against your
enemies." She twisted his wrist expertly, propelling the much larger man toward the gap in the wall that served as a
door.
"I need help," Pavek protested, petulant and desperate.
"Buy Ral's Breath; your enemies have not visited the apothecaries. Make a paste of it and smear it over the
wound."
The mere thought made Pavek cringe. "Ral's Breath is useless," he sputtered, but her spellcraft still hung in the
air and though he thought of Laq, the word did not find its way to his lips.
"Take your coin to Nekkinrod the apothecary. His stock is old; it will serve. Ask the smith, he'll point the way.
Tell him Josa is wise."
Josa released Pavek's hand, and he stumbled back into the light. The smith, another dwarf, looked daggers at him
when he asked the way to Nekkinrod's, but his tongue loosened when he added Josa's name and wisdom. Pavek
followed a centuries-old dirt path through the core of the elven market, where no templar went alone, until he came
face-to-face with an apothecaries's paste-board. Nekkinrod was at least as old as Josa and wreathed in the fumes of
cheap rice wine. He took Pavek's silver piece in exchange for a Ral's Bream packet that was dingy with dust In the day's
second unexpected burst of charity, Nekkinrod offered water from his own cistern for the paste and, figuring that he
was as safe in the middle of the elven market as he'd be anywhere else in the city, Pavek accepted.
He tasted a few grains of the bright yellow powder. They were breathtakingly bitter and numbed his tongue to its
root. Slathering the paste over his elbow was every bit as painful as he'd feared, but the joint deadened almost at once.
"It works! It's going to be all right," he sighed and allowed himself a glimmer of hope.
Pavek's heart sank. With the messenger's charity and every ceramic chip left in Sassel's purse, he couldn't buy
another packet. "Credit? I'll pay you when I can work again."
The elf doubled with laughter, reeling and staggering through his stock in the process. A roof board collapsed,
revealing rust-colored sky. Between Josa and Nekkinrod, Pavek had lost the entire afternoon in the elven market. The
palace bell would ring soon, signalling the moment when the gates closed. He hadn't eaten yet and the breadth of Urik
lay between him and the squatters' quarter where his moonlit silhouette was no longer so intimidating.
"If I come back tomorrow with silver, do you have four packets of Ral's Breath? Old packets like the one I just
bought."
Nekkinrod caught his breath with a rheumy cough. "Four times four, and all as old as you," he said before
succumbing to another gale of laughter.
Pavek didn't wait for a more coherent answer. He bought a loaf of bread before leaving the elven market. It was
slaves' bread, more sand than flour, and crunched loudly as he chewed; no wonder slaves were toothless by the time
they were thirty-if they lived that long.
If he lived that long.
His elbow tingled as the astringent Ral's Breath did its work, leaching the poisons from his blood. It was a start,
but not a healing, and the poultice would only make the infection worse if he didn't scrounge up four silver pieces.
Scrounge.
Pavek shook his head ruefully. There was no way he'd scrounge four silver pieces; he'd have to steal
them-one-armed and seedy with fever. His chances were nil and none, but he blended into the foot traffic milling
toward the gates, hoping to target a prosperous, careless farmer returning home after a successful market day.
But mekillots would fly before prosperity and carelessness were linked on the streets of Urik. He reached the
southern gate as poor as he'd been in the market.
At least the regulators and inspectors on duty at the gate didn't recognize him.
There was a red-lettered sign on the side of gatehouse. His name was written in hand-high letters along with his
general description and the promise of twenty, not ten, gold pieces for the templar who handed him over to the High
Bureau. Escrissar roust know he was still alive and must want him in the worst way. And watching the inspectors
harass every tall, black-haired human trying to leave the city, he realized Josa was right: he wasn't going to leave Urik.
That was almost a relief. Aside from a few routine messenger assignments to the market villages, he'd never been
out of the city and had never experienced an urge to travel. Whenever he thought of the druids he hoped to join,
Pavek imagined them dwelling in the customhouse. He simply couldn't imagine living in a place without walls.
But the close scrutiny meant Pavek couldn't linger around the gates until they shut. He worked his way through
the artisan quarters instead.
* * *
Prudent citizens lived soberly above their shops and provided nothing for a desperate opportunist, but not every
citizen was prudent. Pavek took note of several raucous taverns whose patrons would eventually have to depart for
home, with, one hoped, a few coins left in their purses.
But only a few. The men and women who walked the streets after midnight with four silver pieces in their purses
dwelt in the better quarters of the city, where they were protected by bodyguards and magic. Pavek resigned himself to
committing a dozen crimes before sunrise, before me benefits of his one dose of real Ral's Breath wore off.
He made himself scarce in the borderland between the squatters' quarter and the customhouse, not far from Joat's
Place. The streets there were deserted after dark and most criminals were deterred from their trade by Joat's clientele.
Making himself comfortable in a dark, cluttered alley, Pavek had ample time between sunset and midnight to
contemplate hunger, pain, and the mysteries of fate. He figured he'd be dead by sunrise, waiting for death in a civil
bureau lockup, or saving his life in the elven market. All three seemed equally probable in bis mind when he heard the
start of a ruckus in the squatters' quarter.
Squatters were lucky when they had a ceramic bit tucked away at sunset, but when he heard someone snarl:
"Maybe you can steal it, but you can't keep it," his curiosity was roused. Testing his elbow and finding the joint could
be moved without unbearable pain, he followed the sounds.
Gumay was rising, and one of the thugs had a torch-one of maybe six or seven adolescents who'd flushed a
younger, smaller boy. The scene was easy to decipher. The boy didn't have a chance; they'd pound him senseless
sooner or later and take his treasure, but the thugs were still fools.
Maybe you can steal it, but you can't keep it, had different meanings to different thieves. The thugs had let their
prey retreat into a corner where they couldn't press their advantage in size and number. They were taking too long,
making too much noise, drawing attention to themselves.
He picked up two loose cobblestones, one for his good right hand and a second which he tucked into his sling.
The gang hadn't left a lookout at their back another example of foolishness. They were too loud to hear his approach
or hear one of their number go down without a groan when he clonked a vulnerable spot behind an ear with the
cobblestone.
But the second fool-thug had a. thicker skull. He bellowed, and Pavek found himself the center of attention. The
six human youths, four male and two female, were tough, but scrawny-no match for a man who trained two full days a
week with his fellow templars and specially selected gladiators.
No match for the templar Pavek had been, but a challenge for the injured fugitive he'd become.
They took quick note of his weakness. Pavek spent more time warding off blows aimed at his elbow than
delivering his own punches. When he connected with his fist or booted feet, a young thug went down and stayed
down. He'd have them all stretched out in the alley eventually, but not soon enough: the damned fool thugs had all
turned their backs on the boy-thief, who, being less a fool than they, was making an escape.
Maybe the thugs thought he was summoning an otherworldly power, or maybe they realized the boy had fled
and they were wasting time in a futile fight. Whichever, they headed out of the alley, hauling their wounded behind
them. Heartbeats later there were more shouts, more running footsteps and a flash of torchlit sulphur yellow at the
head of the alley.