Good advice. Excellent advice. So why wasn't Javed leading this expedition? Never mind that high templars outranked commandants: that only proved to Pavek that Commandant Javed had been more successful at holding on to his steel medallion than he himself had been at holding on to his regulator's ceramic one.
So why was Javed here at all? After conquering every challenge Urik's war bureau offered and successfully resisting a golden medallion, why was Commandant Javed headed into the halfling forest at a regulator's side, and looking to that regulator for orders?
"Now, Lord Pavek." The commandant smiled again, ivory teeth gleaming through the black gash in his weathered face.
Pavek turned from that face and looked straight ahead at the mountains.
"No guides," he said. "We've already got our guide." He thumped the box behind him and shot a sideways glance at the commandant, whose smile had faded to a less-than-approving frown. "When we brought the cavern poison to Lord Hamanu, he said we had time to destroy it because Ral didn't 'occlude' Guthay—whatever that means—for another thirteen days. Well, we got rid of the poison, but we didn't catch Kakzim. Maybe he's gone home in defeat and we can catch him anytime, but maybe he's got something else he can unleash when the moons 'occlude' four nights from now.
"If we go southeast and hire ourselves a guide, we're sure to lose at least two days getting back on the halfling's trail. Maybe more than two days, without kanks on the far side of the mountains. My rump would appreciate an easy passage, but not if I miss another chance to nab Kakzim."
The commandant's frown had deepened all the while Pavek explained the thin logic of his decision. He considered reversing himself, but the stubbornness that had kept him trapped in lower ranks of the civil bureau took hold of his neck and stiffened his resolve.
He faced Javed squarely, matching his scar-twisted smile against the elf's frown. "You wanted my decision, Commandant. Now you've got it: we hold steady, straight into those mountains ahead and the forest beyond. I want my hands on Kakzim's neck before the moons occlude."
"Good," the commandant said softly, almost as if he were speaking to himself, though his amber eyes were locked with Pavek's. "Better than I expected. Better than I'd hoped from the Hero of Quraite. Four days left from thirteen. Let's put on some speed, Lord Pavek. I could walk faster than this. We'll sleep tonight on the mountain crest. We'll sleep on the mountain, and we'll find your halfling before Ral marches across Guthay's face. My word on it, Lord Pavek."
Commandant Javed's word was as good as the steel he wore around his neck. Leaving behind the kanks, the slaves, and everything else that a templar couldn't carry on his back, the elf had had them sleeping on top of the mountain ridge one night and on the forest floor the next. They'd lost two templars in the process, one going up the mountains, the other coming down.
Carelessness, Javed had said both times, and refused to slacken the pace.
At the forest-side base of the mountains, the templars, including Pavek and Javed, paused to exchange the shirts they'd been wearing for long-sleeve tunics and leather armor that was fitted from neck to waist and divided into overlapping strips from there down to the middle of their thighs.
It was all part of the equipment Pavek had been given at the beginning of this journey, and he thought nothing of Javed's order until he touched the tunic's drab, tightly woven fabric.
"Silk?" he asked incredulously, fingering the alien fabric, which he'd associated with fawning nobles, simpering merchants, and women he couldn't afford.
"That's protection?" For all that the commandant had experience with the forest halflings on his side, Pavek began to remove his slippery tunic.
"Damn sure is. The barbs on the arrowheads don't catch your guts. Ease the silk out; and you ease the arrowhead out, too—with the poison still on it."
"Still on the arrow?"
Javed's enigmatic smile flickered at him. "Didn't believe it myself till I was fighting belgoi north of Balic. Watched a healer work an arrow clean out of a man's gut; silk was as good as new, and so was the man ten days later. Been a believer ever since. My advice, my lord, is to keep it on. We know your man's a poisoner."
The protection Mahtra's makers had given her against living creatures had no effect whatsoever on woven vine net. Unfortunately, she had exhausted herself against the halfling-made net before she realized that fact. She'd had nothing left when the halflings lowered them to the ground, and so she stood helpless, barely able to stay upright, when Kakzim had personally bound her wrists behind her back and taken her mask away.
Five days later, imprisoned beneath the great BlackTree, surrounded by dank, dark dirt, with Zvain and Orekel little more than voices in the blackness, she still shuddered at the memory.
That theft had been Kakzim's personal vengeance against her. He'd humiliated the others, too, especially Ruari. When the half-elf told Kakzim that Pavek was already dead, the former slave had reeled backward as if Ruari had landed a blow in a particularly vulnerable place, and then transferred all his vicious hatred from Pavek, who was beyond his reach, to Ruari, who had no defense.
Throughout their two-day-long, stumbling, starving walk through the mazelike forest, Kakzim had harried Ruari with taunts and petty but vicious physical attacks. The half-elf was badly bruised and bleeding from a score of cuts, and barely able to stand by the time they reached their destination: the BlackTree.
Nothing in her spiraling memory could have prepared Mahtra for her first sight of the halfling stronghold. The crude bark map they'd found in Codesh depicted a single tree as large as the Smoking Crown Volcano, which they'd ridden near on their way to the forest. But coming upon it suddenly in this arm's-length world of trees everywhere, the black tree seemed exactly as big as the volcano.
Ten of her standing with arms extended could not have encircled its trunk. Roots as big around as Orekel's dwarven torso breached the dim, moss-covered clearing around the tree's trunk before returning into the ground.
But it wasn't the black tree's trunk or roots that lingered in Mahtra's memory, sitting here in the darkness between those roots. It was the moment she'd raised her head, hoping to see the sky through branches as big around as a kank's body. There'd been no sky, only the soles of a dead-man's feet.
She'd cried out. Kakzim had laughed, and—worse—the feet had moved, and Mantra had realized that a living man, a halfling, hung above her, suspended from a mighty branch by a rope wound tight beneath his arms.
Worse still, the living, hanging halfling was not alone. There were other halflings dangling from other branches, more than she could easily count. Some of them were alive, like the halfling whose feet were directly above her head, but others were rotting corpses, barely recognizable.
Worst of all—the memory Mahtra could not escape even now in her prison beneath the tree—was the great drop of blood that had struck between her eyes as she stood, transfixed by the horror above her. With her hands bound behind her back, she hadn't been able to wipe the blood off, and her pleas for help, for mercy, brought only laughter from her captors.
Her skin was still wet when Kakzim ordered his fellow halflings to drive her, Zvain, and Orekel through a narrow hole between the roots. Prodded by sharp spears, they'd wriggled like serpents through the hole, a narrow tunnel, and—blindly at the end—tumbled into the dank, dirt pit that now imprisoned them.
Orekel had gone first; he'd hurt his leg falling several times his own height into the pit. Then Zvain, who'd landed on top of the dwarf, and finally her. She'd landed on them both.