Then, once he was among them, he'd offer to exchange the arcane lore in his memory for initiation into their spell-crafting secrets.
It was a daring plan spun on gossamer assumptions. For all his memorization, Pavek knew very little about the mechanics of druidry. Specifically, he did not know whether it was a path that could be chosen with simple dogged discipline, or if the nameless spirits of Athas had esoteric criteria a renegade regulator could, not hope to match.
And he'd assumed that the druids would be interested in his knowledge of the illicit uses to which their zarneeka powder was being put and equally interested in the lore written on the scrolls he'd memorized.
The assumptions were bold, but necessary, and the longer he contemplated druidry-especially the beautiful druid he knew by sight, though not by name-the more vital they seemed to his future.
Sixty days, she'd said to Rokka at the customhouse just a day ago. Sixty days before we can return with untainted goods. The threat led Rokka to accept the unsealed amphorae. But did that, in turn, mean the druids would return sooner, or later?
Pavek hoped it meant sooner. Sassel's coins wouldn't last sixty days. He scratched his chin, feeling the stubble of a coarse, black beard. Low-rank templars went clean-shaven; high-rank ones wore their hair as they chose. The daily confrontation with rasp and razor was a ritual Pavek would not miss. In a few days no templar would recognize him, not even Rokka... or Bukke.
If Pavek was smart, he said to himself, he'd hire himself out as a day-laborer at the western gate. He knew the gate drill as well as any templar knew a workman's task, he'd see the druids when they returned, and the pay was five bits a day-three after he paid off the regulators and inspectors- but more than enough to keep a man from starving.
Sassel's coins would last until he was healthy enough to work. The wounds weren't that serious. He flexed his left arm to prove the point to himself, but regretted it. Shooting pain radiated from the joint, which had become bright red and was warm to the touch. He chided himself for sitting too long in the hot sun.
But Pavek's misery owed nothing to the sun. During the next two weeks, while his other injuries healed, his elbow swelled to twice its normal size. The swollen flesh darkened to angry shades of red and purple, shot with oozing streaks of yellow-like the northern sky when acrid dust blew down from the Smoking Crown volcano. Sometimes his arm below the elbow was numb, but mostly it seemed that a colony of fire ants had burrowed under his skin.
The joint itself was exquisitely tender. One night Pavek scavenged a scrap of cloth from the market plaza. He bound his arm in a crude sling and continued to hope for the best.
Wage-labor of any sort was out of the question until the injury healed. Pavek grew gaunt from fever and denial; Sassel's purse grew even thinner. Examining the ugly wound by the cool light of morning-after a night in which the throbbing had never subsided enough for him to sleep-he realized the time had come for desperate measures. If he didn't find a cheap healer, he'd be dead of blood poisoning long before he starved.
He began his search with his former colleagues. Templar life had its own predictable dangers. Each bureau maintained a cadre of healers, any one of whom could have purged the poisons from his wound. They were well-paid for their work, but no templar was above a little side profit. Pavek got as far as the inner gate to the administrative quarter where the templarate bureaus maintained their red-and-yellow edifices.
Then he saw a templar wearing an enameled mask and the mostly-black robe of necromancy striding across the paved courtyard. With the distance, Pavek couldn't tell if it was Escrissar or not, but the risk of exposure had suddenly become greater than the pain warranted.
Pavek headed for the daily market where he spent a whole silver piece on a packet of Ral's Breath powder that shouldn't have cost more than two ceramic bits. Mixed with water, it barely numbed his tongue and did nothing at all for the throbbing in his elbow.
With grim irony Pavek recalled the moment in Metica's office when she marveled about complaints. If he hadn't been a fugitive he would have complained himself: there was a city seal on every packet of Ral's Breath vouching for its purity. Urik had survived for over a thousand years because its seal meant as much as its army and king.
When that seal was worthless, someone, somewhere should care.
A naked-sleeved messenger jostled Pavek while he pondered the decline of his city. Out of sheer habit, he started to upbraid the youth, but the pain soared to new heights, and he slumped against the wall instead. The boy grimaced, eyeing Pavek's sling and suppurating wound. Planting himself unsteadily over his feet, Pavek raised his fists and had new, unwelcome insights about the behavior of mortally wounded animals in the gladiatorial arenas: movement was agony, maybe death, but he'd take that messenger with him, if it was the last thing he did.
"That wants healing, unless you're looking to die," the boy said in a matter-of-fact, almost friendly tone. "You'll pay a fortune if one of our healers looks at it, but there's an old dwarf-woman in the northwest corner of the elven market. She's a little crazy-calls on ancient seas for her power-but she's cheap, and reliable." He dug beneath his robe-it was so new the pleats weren't frayed-and produced an unchipped four-bit ceramic piece, which he laid atop Pavek's trembling fist before walking away.
Gasping with astonishment, he nearly dropped the coin. What was happening to his city? Had he sunk so low that a messenger was offering him advice and charity? Had he ever, in his messenger days, offered four precious bits to the rabble? He couldn't answer his first question and didn't want to answer his second, but the answer to the last was no, although he'd given as much and more to Dovanne.
Pavek found the healer right where the messenger predicted. She was the oldest dwarf he'd ever seen, sitting cross-legged on a scrap of cloth that might once have been green. A begging bowl half-filled with water and a few dirty coins balanced on her ankles while she chanted eyes-closed prayers to forgotten oceans.
She looked up when Pavek's shadow blocked the sun. One eye was clouded with a cataract, the other was a radiant blue, as clear as the day she was born. She assessed his elbow with a single glance and named her price: one silver piece.
It was cheap; and it was Sassel's last silver piece. Pavek squatted down to put it in her bowl, inadvertently giving her a close look at his face.
With a hiss and a scowl, she put her hand over the bowl before he could dunk the coin and rose to her feet with commendable agility for one so ancient. She rolled up her mat and led Pavek around a corner.
No word was said until they entered a cramped lean-to behind an active forge. The air shimmered with the heat. Pavek was grateful when she pointed to a tripod stool.
"You are the one they call Pavek the Murderer? The one for whom they're offering ten gold coins?" she demanded, looking down on him with her good eye.
He could imagine how far ten gold coins could go in this benighted quarter of Urik, but he, himself, had gone too far for lies. "I'm no murderer," he answered, not denying his name and morbidly eager to know how she'd recognized him.
"You are a marked man with powerful enemies, Pavek. Very powerful enemies. They have visited every healer in the city. Even me. Even poor Josa who worships what's been lost. They told Josa to watch for a man with gouges on his cheek. They promised Josa she would share your fate if she made you whole again."
Pavek had a raw instinct for enemies, a rudimentary mind-bending talent that the old and undoubtedly crazy healer did not arouse. Though the instinct had failed him before, most notably with Dovanne, he trusted it with the dwarven crone. "I have enemies because I saw things done in the templarate that our king would not tolerate. I saw Laq-"