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Slayer. So we lied, we took history apart and put it back together again so mortals who might remember the Cleansing Wars might never think that we had led them." Hamanu squeezed Pavek's hands tighter around the scroll case, then let go. "This, and this alone, is the truth. Keep it safe."
Pavek frowned. The gesture tugged his scar and caused a twinge of pain, which Hamanu shared.
"You should let me fix this."
"More illusions? More taking history apart and putting it back different?" Pavek asked.
"You'd be a handsome man. Women would notice."
"It's not my face that keeps Kashi away," Pavek said honestly.
And Hamanu had to agree. He traced the ugly scar with a fingertip, but left it alone. "Good-bye, Pavek, Just-Plain Pavek. It's time for me to go."
Pavek started to nod, but his chin stayed down against his chest. "I will miss you, Great One." His voice was thick. "If ever I have a son, I will name him Hamanu."
"Kashi won't stand for that," Hamanu said as he turned away.
He was halfway to the door when Pavek called him back.
"Telhami—" the templar began. His face was raised; his eyes were glistening. He had to begin again. "Telhami will be waiting for you."
Hamanu cocked an eyebrow, not trusting his own voice.
"When... if... you'll become part of the guardian after, Great One. That's what she says. And she'll be waiting for you."
He hadn't thought about after; it gave him the strength to turn away and walk out the door.
Chapter Fifteen
Ruari had wedged himself into the corner where his narrow cot met the walls of his room, the better to keep both cot and walls from swaying wildly. His eyelids were the heaviest part of his body, but he didn't dare let them close. Without the moonlight patterns on the wall to tell him up from down, he'd be overwhelmed with the sensation of falling backward, endlessly falling backward until his gut began to heave in the other direction.
The half-elf knew this because it had already happened, not once, but twice. He'd shed his reeking clothes outside the room and crawled the last distance to his cot on his hands and knees. His mind wasn't working particularly well, but it seemed fairly certain that he'd never felt quite this sick, this stupid, this drunk before. Given a choice between death right then or holding the walls up and his gut down until dawn, Ruari would have chosen death without hesitation.
"Preserve and protect," he muttered, the conclusion of a druid blessing the first few words of which he'd forgotten.
Grinding his heels into the mattress, Ruari pushed himself backward, but his legs were weak and the walls of Pavek's red-and-yellow house were made of brick, not woven reeds, like the walls of his hut back in Quraite. Terror seized him when she reached the cot and laid a surprisingly warm—for death, anyway—hand on his foot.
Terror was nothing Ruari's wine-drenched gut could handle at that moment. He made a desperate sideways lunge. Death caught him before he hit the floor.
"You shouldn't drink so much," she chided him.
Death smoothed his dank hair behind his ears—which Ruari didn't appreciate. Ears were supposed to match and his didn't. One of them was more tapering, more elven, than the other. He tried to hide the defect; she caught his hand before he caught his hair.
"Relax," she suggested, raising his hand. "You'll feel better." She pressed her lips against his knuckles.
Very warm lips.
Very warm and relaxing lips.
Ruari did feel better than he had a moment ago. His gut was calmer, and when she put her-arms around him, the room no longer threatened to spin wildly, either sideways or backward. He protested when she released him, but it was only to stand a moment while she undid the laces of her shift. It fell in a dun-colored circle about her ankles, revealing soft curves that glowed in the moonlight.
Ruari rose to his knees, balancing easily on the knotted rope mattress. No trace of his drunken unsteadiness remained in his movements when he welcomed her.
"If you're not death," he whispered in her ear, "who are—?"
"Shhh-sh," she replied, surrendering to his embrace.
Entwined around each other, they sank as one onto the bed linens.
Later, Ruari thought they were flying high above the city.
Pavek didn't try to sleep, didn't bother going to bed. After the midnight watch bells rang, when his household was at last asleep, he took a lamp and Hamanu's scroll case back to the atrium. Sitting where Urik's king had sat in a youth's disguise, Pavek cleared a place on the littered table and unrolled the vellum sheets.
He set aside the ones that he'd already read and started with the score or so of boldly scripted sheets that his king said contained the truth. Pausing only to refill the lamp when its light began to flicker, he read how Manu became a champion, how a champion cleansed Athas of trolls. The air was cold and the eastern horizon was faintly brighter than the west when Pavek came to the last words: the onus of genocide, rightfully, falls on me, on Hamanu. His heart was far colder.
Not long ago, on a night when he'd bandaged the Lion-King's hand, Hamanu had told him that no mortal could imagine or judge him. As he rolled the vellum and stuffed it into the case, Pavek tried to do both, and failed. He couldn't imagine the forces that had transformed the young man who'd come to his house into the champion who stood and watched the last trolls march silently to their deaths. More than that, he couldn't imagine how the man—and despite the vellum, Pavek thought of the Lion of Urik as a man, now, more than ever—he knew had remained sane.
And without knowing that, without being absolutely certain that Hamanu was sane, as mortals measured sanity, Pavek couldn't begin to judge his king, his master, and— Whim of the Lion—his friend. He could confidently judge Rajaat more evil than Hamanu, but that was no sound footing for judging Hamanu.
The eastern sky was definitely brighter than the west when Pavek sealed the scroll case and got to his feet. His gold medallion thumped against his breastbone. He drew it out and studied the rampant lion engraved on its shiny face. While he wore a medallion, be it gold or cheap ceramic, Pavek was a templar. A templar obeyed his king and left the judging to the guardian.
Lamp in hand, Pavek went from room to room, awakening the Quraite druids whom he'd asked to join him on the south gate tower. Twice before, he'd awakened Urik's guardian spirit and brought it from the depths of Athas to the surface where it had guided him and preserved him. Hamanu believed the city's guardian could surmount one of Rajaat's dragons. After reading the vellum sheets, Pavek was less certain than ever. He was a novice in druidry, with only his devotion to his city and—yes—his devotion to the Lion-King to sustain him. He'd try to justify Hamanu's faith in him, but didn't want to be standing alone on the south gate tower when the Dragon of Urik came calling.
Five of the six druids were awake when Pavek came looking for them. Ruari's cast-off, reeking clothes were heaped outside his door. Considering how much the slight half-elf had drunk the previous evening and how unaccustomed he was to wine's perils, Pavek expected to find his troublesome young friend curled up on the floor, still too far gone to rouse. Instead, when he opened the door, his lamp revealed an empty room.
The bed-linen was disheveled. The patterned lattice night-shutters weren't merely open, they were gone. And there was a woman's shift on the floor beside Ruari's cot.
Clutching the neck of his shirt and the gold chain beneath it, Pavek shouted Ruari's name and got no response. He levered himself over the high windowsill and peered down into a night-dark alley, two stories below.