The door bumped once against the outer wall, then was still and silent Pavek counted to fifty again and crossed the threshold.
Arms as thick as a man's thighs dropped around his shoulders before he'd taken his third step. Half-giants were massive and strong, but their bodies were put together the same as any human's. Pavek crashed a boot-heel into his captor's knee and dug his fingertips into sensitive gaps in the half-giant's huge wrists. A pained bellow shattered the night as the brute's muscles spasmed. A second good crack into the half-giant's kneecap might have produced both freedom and a head start down the alley, but a well-thrown punch hit his jaw before he got his foot up.
"Damn you. Damn you to life everlasting," Dovanne hissed as she clouted him again.
Pavek's neck snapped against the half-giant's hard chest. He was stunned: unable to feel anything, but clear-headed enough to wonder what she had concealed in her fist. Then the pain started, and he was grateful for the next weighted blow. Thought you'd sneak away again, didn't you?"
"Get up," Dovanne demanded, jabbing her boot into his flank. "He wants to talk to you."
Groaning and retching, Pavek hauled himself to his knees. His last-ditch defiance, which had broken his nose so many times, sent disastrous words to his mouth: Elabon Escrissar can wait until I'm dead. But fortunately, his mouth was full of blood and he couldn't say anything. Dovanne yanked her one-time lover to his feet.
"Carry him," she told the half-giant.
That was more indignity than a living man could endure. Pavek spat blood. "I... can... walk."
"Then start walking." Dovanne pointed a slender sap at the open door.
Pavek took one unsteady step after another. He clung to the handrail and pretty much fell down the first flight of stairs. It got easier after that. Dovanne delivered a solid wallop, but she and her sap hadn't broken any bones. He wondered if that was an accident or the lingering scar of affection.
The pain was down to dull aches and he was moving fairly well by the time they got to the zarneeka corridor. The locked door was open. Dovanne gave him a shove between the shoulder blades.
A trestle table had been set up in the center of the storeroom. Rokka stood behind it, busily mixing tiny scoops of zarneeka powder with much larger dollops of plain flour from the half-giant's barrels. He dumped the combination onto scraps of crude paper. Escrissar himself folded the scraps into self-sealing Ral's Breath packets with elegant movements of his taloned fingers.
The mask tilted upward. Their arrival had been noticed. Sharp eyes appraised him coldly from the depths of the mask. He turned away.
There was a halfling in the storeroom as well; he must have been behind the half-giant earlier. A hideous scar in the form of the Escrissar family crest had been burned into the halfling's face. The slave worked alone in a corner, blending zarneeka powder in a bowl with what looked and smelled like golden wine. A similar bowl bubbled on a tripod set over a blue-flamed lamp.
The implication was clear enough, even to a punch-drunk regulator: zarneeka was the necessary ingredient in Ral's breath, but, contrary to Metica-and King Hamanu's assertion-it was also the necessary ingredient in something else. "Pavek, Pavek, Pavek," Escrissar chanted, sucking his teeth and shaking his head between each repetition of Pavek's name. "Whatever are we going to do with you? You've made quite a nuisance of yourself. Too bad you weren't born in Tyr; there they might call you a hero, but here you're just a pathetic little man. A jozhal nipping at the Dragon's heel."
The question was pure rhetoric. Pavek knew what they intended to do with him. He had nothing left to lose or defend. That realization made him reckless. "Haven't you heard-the Dragon's dead-brought down by a pack of jozhals."
Escrissar's enameled talons flashed in the lamplight. They were razor-sharp near the tips and opened Pavek's cheek despite his belated efforts to dodge them. He caught his balance dangerously close to the halfling's tripod. The scarred slave's eyes were dead-black and filled with contempt; that expression did not change when the slave looked past Pavek to his master. Pavek let the wall do the hard work of keeping him upright while he sorted through what he saw.
Slaves did not cherish their masters. Hatred, intense and justified, seethed just below the most obsequious smile. Insolence that fell just short of disobedience had to be tolerated, even in Urik, but no slave should have survived the look the halfling gave his master.
Yet, like Rokka with the druid woman, Escrissar didn't retaliate.
Through the aches and haze, Pavek slowly understood that Escrissar didn't know the secret of the simmering decoction. He stared at the tripod, envisioning his foot thrust through the tripod's legs, overturning the crucible, and blatantly daring Escrissar to pluck his thoughts. The mask chuckled.
"Try it, if it will make you feel better before you die, but heroics will buy you nothing. We already have enough Laq to delude all Urik. We have plans, Pavek, plans for all Athas now that the Dragon, as you said, has been brought down by a pack of jozhals."
Laq.
Pavek's foot stayed where it was. Ral's Breath took the ache out of a strained muscle or throbbing head. Laq made people crazy, then it killed them. It didn't add cleanly, but then, he wasn't an alchemist. That halfling undoubtedly was; and that halfling was making Laq in his crucible. With those hate-filled eyes, the slave was closer to pure evil than Elabon Escrissar could hope to be; closer, even, than the sorcerer-king, Hamanu.
Maybe death now, before Escrissar's alchemist spread his poison across the Tablelands, would be a blessing.
"King Hamanu will take you apart." He spat out the words before he thought to censor them.
"Who will tell him? You? Our mighty king will never know-until it's too late. The rains have come; Athas will belong to us." Escrissar's voice was tired; he'd grown bored with the game. "Get rid of him!"
Pavek glanced at the alchemist before Dovanne and Rokka seized his arms. The halfling's expression had not changed. A tiny thrill of victory beat against Pavek's ribs: slaves were still slaves. This one, he decided, would slit his master's throat when the moment was right and take Escrissar completely by surprise when he did.
Then Dovanne shoved him through the door. The half-giant gathered him into a death-hug.
"Sassel!" Dovanne shouted, treating the half-giant as if he were deaf as well as impressionable. "Let go of him." So, she wasn't going to give anyone else the honor of getting rid of him.
The half-giant clamped his great hands on either side of Pavek's skull and began to squeeze.
"Not here!" the interrogator said quickly. "Take him outside. Take him where no one will notice another corpse."
Pavek wasn't as resigned to death as he thought. His mind was racing as Sassel carried him through the catacombs to the street. The problem with half-giants wasn't their lack of intelligence, but their single-mindedness. In Sassel's mind "outside" might be outside the customhouse, or it might be outside the city walls. If it was the latter, there might still be hope for a battered and bleeding regulator.
"There's no need to get rid of me, Sassel. Take me outside the city walls, and I'll get rid of myself. You'll never see me again, and neither will anyone else in Urik."
"Not going outside the walls. 'Take him where no one will notice another corpse.' Corpses get noticed outside the walls. Going to the boneyard. No one will notice another corpse in the boneyard."