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"Good work!" Pavek exclaimed, pounding Ruari on the shoulder hard enough to
send him sprawling, but there was a grin on the half-elf's face when
he stood up. Pavek was as pleased with himself for remembering the
niceties of friendship as he was that Ruari had saved their lives.
With the danger past and the niceties disposed of, there were questions
to be answered. Keeping a wary eye on the huge, drowsy kank, Pavek
scabbarded his sword and knelt down beside the fallen rider.
He got his first answer when, as he rolled the body over, the
rider's heavy robe opened. There was a handspan's worth of dark thread
intricately woven into a light-colored right-side sleeve. The war
bureau wore its ranks on the right and though the patterns were difficult to
read, Pavek guessed he was looking at a militant templar, if he was lucky, a
pursuivant, if he wasn't and he usually wasn't lucky.
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The robe slipped through his suddenly stiff fingers: old habits
getting the better of him. Third-rank regulators of the civil bureau
didn't lay hands on war bureau officers. Chiding himself that he was neither
in
Urik nor a third-rank regulator, Pavek got his hands under the templar's body
to finish rolling it over. From the inert weight, he was prepared to see a
man's face, even prepared to look down at a corpse. He wasn't prepared for the
dark, foul liquid that spilled from the corpse's mouth and nose. It had
already soaked the front of his robe and shirt. Pavek's hands holding the
robe became damp and sticky.
Men died from the bright, brutal heat on the Sun's Fist Pavek had nearly died
there himself the first time he came across it but he didn't think anything
nearly so natural had killed this man.
"Is he ?" Zvain asked and Pavek, who hadn't known the boy was so close, leapt
to his feet from the shock.
"Very," he replied, trying to sound calm.
"May I May I search him?"
Pavek started to rake his hair, then remembered his fingers and looked for
something to wipe them on instead. "Search, not steal, you understand?
Everything you find has got to go back to Urik, or we'll have the war
bureau hunting our hides as well." He left a dark smear on the kank's enameled
chitin.
The boy pursed his lips and jutted his chin, instantly defensive, instantly
belligerent. "I'm not stupid"
"Yeah, well see that you stay that way."
He headed for the next kank and another bloody, much-decorated
templar: a dwarf whose lifeless body, all fifteen stones of it, started to
fall the moment he touched it. Cursing and shoving for all he was
worth, Pavek kept the corpse on top of the kank, but only after he'd
gotten himself drenched in stinking blood.
"This one's dead, too," Ruari shouted from the far end of the kank formation.
"Is it a woman?" Pavek wiped his forearms on the trailing hem of the dwarf's
robe. "Akashia said a woman was coming."
"No, a man, a templar, and, Pavek, he's got a damned fancy yellow shirt.
You think, maybe, there's someone else out here?"
"Not a chance. The Lion's the one who changed my rank. These are his kanks,
his militants. He's the one who's sending Quraite a messenger. Keep looking."
So they did, with Pavek turning his attention to an empty-backed kank. When
the druids traveled, they often fitted their biggest bugs with cargo
harnesses, but the bug Pavek examined had been saddled for an ordinary rider,
who'd met an unpleasant death: his charred hands, clinging to an equally
charred pommel, were all that remained. Pavek assumed the rider had been
male. He couldn't actually be certain. The hands looked to be as large as his
own but he wasn't about to pry them free for closer examination.
The saddle had been burnt down to its mix bone frame, although the
chitin on which it sat was unharmed, suggesting that the incineration
had been very fast, very precise. A leather sack protruded slightly
from a hollowed-out place below the pommel, a stowaway of some sort
that had been exposed when the padding burned. A few iridescent markings
lingered on the sack. Pavek couldn't decipher them, but with the rest, he
was fairly certain Lord Hamanu had sent a defiler along with the
templars. The defiler's apparent fate confirmed his suspicion that nothing
natural had befallen these travelers.
There was another, larger sack attached to the rear of the saddle. The high
bureau's seven interlocking circles were stamped in gold on its side. Usually
such message satchels were sealed with magic, but there was no magical
glamour hovering about the leather, and thinking its contents might
tell them something about Lord Hamanu's message, Pavek looked around for a
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stick with which to prod it open.
He'd just found one when Ruari erupted with a streak of panicky oaths.
Casting the stick aside and drawing his sword in its place, Pavek raced to
the half-elf's side.
"Pyreen preserve and protect!" Ruari sputtered, invoking the aid of legendary
druid paladins. "What is she... it?" he asked, retreating from the rider he'd
hauled down from the bug's back.
Pavek caught Ruari at the elbows from behind and steered him to one side. For
all his sullenness and swagger, for all his hatred of Urik and the human
templar who, in raping his elven mother, had become his father, Ruari was an
innocent raised in the clean, free air of Quraite. He knew elves
and dwarves and humans and their mixed-blood offspring, but nothing of
the more exotic races or the impulses that might drive a woman to mark
her body, or wrap it in a gown tight enough to be a second skin and cut with
holes to display what the women of Quraite kept discreetly covered.
A templar, though, had seen everything the underside of Urik had to offer or
Pavek thought he had until he squatted down for a better look at what Ruari
had found. She was beyond doubt a woman: leaner than Ruari or a
full-blooded elf, but not an elf, not at all. Her skin wasn't
painted; white-as-salt was its natural color, despite the punishment it
must have taken on the journey. Pavek couldn't say whether the marks
around her eyes were paint or not, but the eyes themselves were wide-spaced
and the mask that ran the length of her face between them covered no
recognizable profile. He'd never seen anyone like her before, but he
knew what she was
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