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 would 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.