Pavek felt his heart skip a beat as Ruari drew upon the guardian's power. He muttered a few words—mnemonics shaping the power and directing it—to create rapport between himself and the bugs. The now-riderless kank dropped to all six feet with a clatter of chitin and bells as Ruari began weaving his arms about. One by one the kanks began to echo his movements with their antennae. Their clashing mandibles slowed, then stopped, and high-pitched chittering faded into silence.
"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.
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."
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 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—
"New Race."
"What?" Ruari asked, his curiosity calming him already.
"Rotters," Zvain interrupted. He left off searching, but didn't come all the way over to join them. "Better be careful, they're beasts for the arena. Things that got made, not born. Claws and teeth and other things they shouldn't have. Rotters."
"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?"