She led them to a squat stone building northwest of the fountain. The stone was gray, contrasting with the ubiquitous yellow of Urik's streets and walls. There were rows of angular marks above a leather-hinged grating. Writing, Pavek guessed, but none that he was familiar with. After spending all his free time breathing dust and copying scrolls in the city archive, he thought he'd deciphered every variant script in the Tablelands cities. He'd have liked a few moments to study the marks, but Mahtra had opened a grate.
"Wind and fire," Ruari exclaimed as he crossed the threshold. "We're flat out of luck, Pavek."
Zvain used more inventive language to say the same thing. Mahtra said nothing until Pavek was inside the stone building.
That was possible. The warding was as thick and bright as any Pavek had seen before; thicker by far than the wardings the civil bureau maintained on the various postern passages through the city walls. He'd guess a high templar had hung the shimmering curtain.
"There was some light before, but there was a passage here, too." Mahtra indicated a place now hidden by the warding. "We'd use the passage. Now—They showed me what would happen if I touched the light."
"It must be twice as powerful as the one under the walls," Ruari said, making a pensive face. He remembered warding from when Pavek had led them through a postern passage on their way to rescue Akashia from House Escrissar. "At least twice as powerful. I can feel it; it makes my teeth hurt and my hair stand up. The other one didn't. Don't think your medallion trick's going to work like it did last year."
Pavek shouldered his way to the front. He took his medallion from his neck and grasped it carefully by the edges, with the striding lion to the front. "You forget: I'm at least twice the templar I was then."
A cascade of blue-green sparks leapt to the medallion, leaving a black, wardless space in the curtain. Pavek moved the ceramic in an outward-growing spiral, collecting more sparks, making a bigger hole. His arm was numb and faintly blue-green by the time he had a hole large enough to let them through. He went last; it closed behind him, leaving them in darkness. Pavek sucked his teeth and swore under his breath.
"What's the matter?" Ruari asked.
"One-sided warding."
"So? Then we've got no problem getting out—"
The half-elf would have walked headlong into oblivion if Pavek hadn't seized his arm and shoved him against the rough stone wall.
"Death-trap, fool! Warding to keep curious folk out, but a blind trap for anyone who was already inside when the wards were set."
Ruari went limp against Pavek's grip on his shirt. "Can we get out?"
"Same way we got in—just have to make certain I'm in front and my medallion's in front of me," Pavek said with more good-humor and optimism than he felt. "Wish I had a bit of chalk to mark the walls. Wish I had a torch to see the walls..."
"There're torches on the other side," Mahtra volunteered, then added: "There used to be."
"I can see," Ruari informed them, relying on the night-vision he'd inherited from his elven mother. "I've marked these rocks in my mind. I'll know this place when we're here again. Swear it."
"See that you do," Pavek said, and Zvain tittered nervously somewhere on his left. "Still wish I had a torch."
"The path's not hard," Mahtra assured them. "I never carried a torch, and I can't see in the dark. Hold hands; I'll lead."
And she did, without a hint of her earlier trepidations. Her grip was cool and dry around Pavek's fingers, while Zvain, behind Pavek, had a sweaty hand that threatened to slip away with every hesitant step the boy took. Ruari brought up the rear, or Pavek assumed he did. Between his druid training and his innate talents, the half-elf could be utterly silent when he chose.
The air in the passage was nighttime cool and heavy with moisture, like the air in Telhami's grove. It had a faintly musty scent, but nothing approaching the stench Pavek would have expected from the carnage Mahtra had described. He'd believed her since she appeared on the salt flats. He'd trusted her unquestioningly, as he trusted no one else, certainly not the Lion-King who'd sent her. A thousand ominous thoughts broke his mind's surface.
"There's light ahead," Ruari announced in an excited whisper.
Light meant magic or fire. Pavek took a deep breath through his nose. He couldn't smell anything, but he couldn't see anything, either.
"Let me go first," he said to Mahtra, striding past her.
The passage was wide enough for two good-sized humans and high enough that he hadn't bumped his head. They'd come through a few narrower spots, but none that made Pavek feel as if the ground had swallowed him whole. He didn't suggest that Mahtra stay behind or that Ruari stay behind with her. He didn't sense danger ahead, not in that almost-magical way a man could sometimes sense a trap or ambush before it was too late, but if things did go bad, he wanted Ruari and his staff where they could be of some use—not to mention the 'protection' Mahtra claimed to possess but hadn't ever described or demonstrated.
He thumbed the guard that held his steel sword—scavenged from the battlefield after the battle with Escrissar's mercenaries for Quraite—in its scabbard. "Stay close. Stay quiet," he ordered his troops. "Keep balanced. If I stop short, I don't want to hear you grunting and stumbling."
The enclosed passage ended at the top of a curving ramp. Overhead, there was open air filled with the dim light, solid rock on his left, and a slowly diminishing wall on his right. Pavek edged along the wall, keeping his head down, until the wall was low enough for him to see over while still providing him with something to hide behind. After taking a deep breath for courage, he peeked over the top—
And was so amazed by what he saw that he forgot to hunker down again.
Urik's reservoir was larger than any druid's pool, larger than anything Pavek could have imagined on his own. It was a dark mirror reflecting the glow from its far shore, flawless, except for circular ripples that appeared and faded as he gazed across it. The glow came from five huge bowls that seemed at first to hover in the still air, though when he squinted, Pavek could make out a faint, silvery scaffolding beneath them.
Other than the bowls, there was nothing: no corpses, no burnt-out huts, none of the debris a veteran templar expected to find in the aftermath of carnage.
But the bowls themselves...
Pavek didn't have the words to describe their delicate, subtly shifting color or the aura that shone steadily around them. They were beautiful, identical, perfect in every imaginable way, and now that he'd seen them, the foreboding he hadn't felt when Ruari first saw light ahead fell on him like burning oil.
Mahtra wasn't a liar. Lord Hamanu was trustworthy. And someone—Kakzim—had contrived the deaths of countless innocents and misfits so these bowls could be set in their places above the water.
Set there and left alone.
By everything Pavek could see or hear, there wasn't another living creature in the cavern. He gave the agreed-upon signal, and Ruari brought the other two down the ramp.
Mahtra gasped.
Zvain began a curse: "Hamanu's great, greasy—" which he didn't finish because Pavek clouted him hard on the floating ribs. Notwithstanding an eleganta's trade or the things Mahtra must have seen in House Escrissar, there were some things honest men did not say in the presence of women. The boy folded himself around the ache. Tears ran from his eyes, but he kept his lips sealed and soundless.
"What do you think?" Pavek gave his attention to Ruari, who was his superior where magic was concerned.
The half-elf rolled his lower lip out. "I don't like it. Doesn't feel..." He closed his eyes and opened them again. "Doesn't feel healthy."
Pavek sighed. He'd had the same sensation. He'd hoped Ruari could be more specific.
They stayed where they were, waiting for a sound, a flicker of movement to tell them they weren't alone. There was nothing—unless the most disciplined ambushers on the Tablelands were waiting for them. When Pavek's instincts said walk or scream, he started down the ramp, slow and quiet, but convinced that they were in no immediate danger. The cavern was too vast for the sort of one-sided warding they'd encountered earlier; it was too vast for any warding at all. Ruari prodded the reservoir's gravelly shore with his staff, searching for more traditional traps. He overturned a few charred lumps that might have been parts of huts or humans, but nothing that would tell anyone what had happened here less than two quinths ago, if Mahtra hadn't told them.