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He could imagine the reaction of any clerical order if he showed up at their altar-school saying that he only needed to be taught how to pray because he already knew the spell-craft. They'd laugh him clear around the city walls, if they didn't pound him to holy mush for insolence first. Yet his days in the archive were his only other asset. Through patient, methodical curiosity, he'd managed to read and memorize several dozen lengthy arcane scrolls. The archive scholars tried to avoid him and cowered like rabble when he cornered them with his questions, but eventually they had conceded that he understood the theories of elemental providence and the complex geometry of the celestial spheres of influence.

Pavek knew better than most practicing clerics how clerical magic worked, but except for wrapping his hand around King Hamanu's medallion and calling out the king's name, no templar understood the nature of faith or prayer.

The midday sun hammered the plaza. Farmers protected their produce beneath drab, bleached awnings. Merchants did the same for their wares with more colorful cloth. Any-one who had an excuse to leave the light-drenched market took it. Grandparents and their charges napped in whatever shade they found, leaving Pavek alone on his bench, his right hand trailing in the lukewarm water of a public fountain.

Through thoughts made thick and slow by the heat, Pavek considered each of the four elements of life: earth, air, fire, and water. Fire was straight-forward. All a man had to do was look up and he could see the epitome of fire, but worship the sun? Pray to it? Dedicate his life to Athas' burning sun? He shook his head. Water was vital and precious, but hold a man's head beneath its surface for any length of time and he was as dead as he'd be with his heart impaled by a steel sword. Air and earth were no different: each was a two-sided coin, life-giving and deadly. In that sense the elements were not unlike the templars' sorcerer-king, but Hamanu was real: a tangible force to be dealt with, not worshipped in the abstract.

Swirled through drowsy, sun-dazzled philosophy and the dull ache of his elbow, a reminder came to Pavek: druids drew their magic not from the pure elements, but from the manifest spirits of Athas itself, its hills and mountains, fields and badlands, oases and deserts. Real places, tangible forces, and-he dared to assume-no more irritable and unpredictable than Urik's mighty king.

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 thi

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 i

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.