A flaming bolt exploded from the sky. It grounded itself in the medallion Pavek still held above his head. Searing heat and pain beyond imagining transformed him. He thought he would surely die-thought Hamanu had chosen to destroy him first-but he did not even lose consciousness as lesser fire-bolts arced away from the inferno erupting at his wrist. The bolts struck true into the hearts of Escrissar's allies, and into them alone.
Howls that would haunt Pavek's sleep until he died escaped those living-dying-torches, which continued to burn erect even after they fell silent, until their substance was completely consumed and nothing, not even ash, remained.
Then, abruptly, the great gout of flame rising from his wrist fizzled. Heat and pain were reduced to memories; his flesh was unmarked and whole. The medallion shone with its own light for another instant before it, too, reverted to an ordinary ceramic lump. Pavek lowered his arm.
But it wasn't over. A scream out of Telhami's hut scattered the last remaining wits of the surviving Quraiters. Pavek crossed from the rampart to the hut in two leaps- remembering his wound only when he'd landed solidly on the threshold on a leg that should have collapsed.
A blackened weal ran from knee to hip along his thigh. The spell, he thought, though how a flamestrike spell had cauterized the gash and sewn up the muscles beneath it went beyond his knowledge of magic. His leg ached when he thought about it, but he knew better than to think about it twice, and swept aside the curtain-door.
Telhami had collapsed on her sleeping platform. Her eyes and mouth were closed, but her limbs sprawled at awkward and unmoving angles. She was unconscious at the least, and very likely dead. Akashia sat alone, now, weaving her hands randomly over an assortment of herbs and powders. Her face was twisted into a silent scream as she sought to both shape the guardian's power and maintain the mind-bending spells Telhami had begun.
Quraite's most dangerous enemy, Elabon Escrissar, still lurked somewhere in the guarded lands, apparently unscathed by King Hamanu's bounty.
"Ruari!" Pavek shouted. "Get in here!"
The half-elf appeared at his side, battered, bleeding, and filthy, but still on his feet. He glanced under Pavek's arms and-for once-needed no instructions. He pressed his palms against Akashia's moving hands before he settled on the floor.
"Hold steady, scum. You'll know when I've found him."
The interrogator could be almost anywhere. He wasn't within the tree circle around the village, and he wasn't among the trees themselves; Pavek tramped through the fields, to the line where Escrissar's allies had hobbled their kanks, but Escrissar wasn't there, either.
He looked until the sun was setting, the lavender sky turning to violet, and still he searched, until the only light was that of the stars. A half-elf couldn't see in the dark as well as a full-blooded elf, but still Escrissar would see better than Pavek.
The mind-bending interrogator should be nearly exhausted. Akashia and Ruari should be able to hold against him. But should be didn't always mean was, and in his heart Pavek felt fortune swinging away from Quraite again.
"Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy," he whispered, not an invocation, but a simple man's simple oath. The medallion hung around his neck again but he had no intention of using it. There was no spell in any of the scrolls he'd memorized that would guide him to Escrissar.
Then he heard sounds behind him, a heavy-footed tread, crushing the ripening grain as his own feet crushed grass in the groves. Drawing the sword, he spun around to face a silhouette half again his height and watching him with glowing yellow eyes.
"Hamanu?" Pavek whispered, then, realizing it could be no one else, dropped to his knees and threw his sword away. "O Great and Mighty King-"
"My pet is in the wastes yonder. You may follow."
The ground gave around him as King Hamanu strode past Pavek. No one knew the sorcerer-king's true aspect, if he had one. Tonight he was the Lion of Urik, dressed in golden armor and crowned with a mane of golden hair. A sword as long as a man's leg hung from his waist, but it was the sharp, curved claws he flexed with each step that froze Pavek's heart in his throat.
He followed, retrieving his own sword along the way and taking two strides for every one of the king's until they came to a dark low-crouching figure.
"Recount!" Hamanu demanded.
It was more than a simple command. Pavek's skull felt as if it had exploded, and he was, most definitely, not the king's target. Not yet.
Escrissar scrabbled across the ground, a scavenger surprised by a true predator. "I have found the source of Laq," he babbled, as if any mortal could lie successfully to a sorcerer-king.
"Ambition has blighted your imagination, my pet. You bore me."
Hamanu's voice was as weary as his clawed hand was swift. He seized Escrissar by the neck and, lifting him off the ground, began to squeeze. The interrogator struggled wildly, then hung limp, but the king was not finished. By the light of the Lion-King's golden eyes, Pavek watched in nauseous horror as Hamanu's fist squeezed ever tighter. The bones in Escrissar's neck snapped and crumbled; gore flowed from his lifeless mouth and nostrils.
And still Hamanu was not finished with his former favorite. He cast a spell the color of his eyes that wrapped itself around the interrogator's corpse and, layer by layer, from black robes to white bones, consumed it.
When there was nothing left, the yellow eyes found Pavek on his knees again and trying heroically not to be sick.
"I have need of a High Templar. Follow me."
The king headed for the village.
Pavek found his feet, somehow, and followed.
Chapter Seventeen
Fires had been lit in the hearths within the village's inner rampart. A bright, crackling fire made any night seem safer -except when the flickering light reflected on Hamanu of Urik as he strode through the trees. Pavek, hard pressed to stay within ten human paces of the sorcerer-king, had neither the time nor the energy to call out a warning. Besides, nothing prepared anyone for the Lion: breathtakingly handsome in his golden armor, radiant with arcane power, cruel and terrible beyond mortal measure. After a day of loss and triumph, a handful of Quraiters simply swooned at the sight. The rest wisely dropped to their knees.
"Where is she?" Hamanu asked. "Where is Telhami?"
Not Who rules here? or some question of that sort, which Pavek had expected, but Where is Telhami? because, inexplicably, the Lion already knew who ruled Quraite. If he lived another day, Pavek promised himself he'd think through all the implications of this discovery, but for the moment-because those sulphur eyes were focused on him-he answered plainly:
"In there." And pointed to Telhami's hut.
Hamanu's head rose above the roof-beam. His shoulders were wider than the doorway. Pavek held his breath, waiting for the king to call Telhami by name, fearing what he would do if she could not answer. But Hamanu solved his problems on his terms. He pierced the hut's reed walls with his claws, seized the support poles and lifted the entire structure over his head before tossing it over the inner and middle rampart. His size was no longer a problem.
Akashia and Ruari were held motionless in panic, both looking up, slack-jawed, from the length of linen cloth they'd wrapped around Telhami's corpse. Hamanu motioned them aside with a small gesture from bis huge, clawed hand, and they hastened to obey. Telhami lay in repose on her sleeping platform, arms folded over her breast, thin gray hair spread across a linen pillow. Remembering what the king had done with Escrissar, Pavek dreaded what he might do with her.
Then the rightly feared ruler of Urik sank to one knee. While Pavek watched with the others, clawed fingers curled around Telhami's cheek so gently that her translucent parchment skin was not creased.