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.“Very,” he replied, trying to sound calm.“May I—May I search him?”Pavek started to rake his hair, then remembered his fingers and looked for something to wipe them on instead.“Search, not steal, you understand? Everything you find has got to go back to Urik, or we’ll have the war bureau hunting our hides as well.” He left a dark smear on the kank’s enameled chitin.The boy pursed his lips and jutted his chin, instantly defensive, instantly belligerent.“I’m not stupid”“Yeah, well-see that you stay that way.”He headed for the next kank and another bloody, much-decorated templar: a dwarf whose lifeless body, all fifteen stones of it, started to fall the moment he touched it.Cursing and shoving for all he was worth, Pavek kept the corpse on top of the kank, but only after he’d gotten himself drenched in stinking blood.“This one’s dead, too,” Ruari shouted from the far end of the kank formation.“Is it a woman?” Pavek wiped his forearms on the trailing hem of the dwarf’s robe.“Akashia said a woman was coming.”“No, a man, a templar, and, Pavek, he’s got a damned fancy yellow shirt.You think, maybe, there’s someone else out here?”“Not a chance.The Lion’s the one who changed my rank.These are his kanks, his militants.He’s the one who’s sending Quraite a messenger.Keep looking.”So they did, with Pavek turning his attention to an empty-backed kank.When the druids traveled, they often fitted their biggest bugs with cargo harnesses, but the bug Pavek examined had been saddled for an ordinary rider, who’d met an unpleasant death: his charred hands, clinging to an equally charred pommel, were all that remained.Pavek assumed the rider had been male.He couldn’t actually be certain.The hands looked to be as large as his own but he wasn’t about to pry them free for closer examination.The saddle had been burnt down to its mix bone frame, although the chitin on which it sat was unharmed, suggesting that the incineration had been very fast, very precise.A leather sack protruded slightly from a hollowed—out place below the pommel, a stowaway of some sort that had been exposed when the padding burned.A few iridescent markings lingered on the sack.Pavek couldn’t decipher them, but with the rest, he was fairly certain Lord Hamanu had sent a defiler along with the templars.The defiler’s apparent fate confirmed his suspicion that nothing natural had befallen these travelers.There was another, larger sack attached to the rear of the saddle.The high bureau’s seven interlocking circles were stamped in gold on its side.Usually such message satchels were sealed with magic, but there was no magical glamour hovering about the leather, and thinking its contents might tell them something about Lord Hamanu’s message, Pavek looked around for a stick with which to prod it open.He’d just found one when Ruari erupted with a streak of panicky oaths.Casting the stick aside and drawing his sword in its place, Pavek raced to the half-elf’s side.“Pyreen preserve and protect!” Ruari sputtered, invoking the aid of legendary druid paladins.“What is she… it?” he asked, retreating from the rider he’d hauled down from the bug’s back.Pavek caught Ruari at the elbows from behind and steered him to one side.For all his sullenness and swagger, for all his hatred of Urik and the human templar who, in raping his elven mother, had become his father, Ruari was an innocent raised in the clean, free air of Quraite.He knew elves and dwarves and humans and their mixed-blood offspring, but nothing of the more exotic races or the impulses that might drive a woman to mark her body, or wrap it in a gown tight enough to be a second skin and cut with holes to display what the women of Quraite kept discreetly covered.A templar, though, had seen everything the underside of Urik had to offer—or Pavek thought he had until he squatted down for a better look at what Ruari had found.She was beyond doubt a woman: leaner than Ruari or a full-blooded elf, but not an elf, not at all.Her skin wasn’t painted; white-as-salt was its natural color, despite the punishment it must have taken on the journey.Pavek couldn’t say whether the marks around her eyes were paint or not, but the eyes themselves were wide-spaced and the mask that ran the length of her face between them covered no recognizable profile.He’d never seen anyone like her before, but he knew what she was—“New Race.”“What?” Ruari asked, his curiosity calming him already.“Rotters,” Zvain interrupted.He left off searching, but didn’t come all the way over to join them.“Better be careful, they’re beasts for the arena.Things that got made, not born.Claws and teeth and other things they shouldn’t have.Rotters.”“Most of em,” Pavek agreed, sounding wiser than he felt and wondering if the boy knew something that he didn’t.The white-skinned woman with her mask and torn gown appeared more fragile than ferocious.As the wheels of fate’s chariot spun, he knew that appearances meant nothing, but if this was the woman Akashia had sensed, he wanted to preserve the peace as long as he could.“They stay beasts, if they start out beasts.If they start as men and women, that’s what they come out as, but different.And they don’t all choose to go to the Tower.Some do; they’ve got their reasons, I guess.Mostly it’s slavers that take a coffle chain south and bring back the few that come out again.” Time and time again during Pavek’s years as a templar, the civil bureau had swept through the slave markets in search of the lowest of the low who supplied the mysterious Tower.Maybe they saved a few slaves from transformation, but they did nothing for the ones who’d been transformed.“Come from where? Come out how? What Tower?” Ruari pressed.“I know elves and half-elves; she’s neither.Wind and fire, Pavek, her skin—She’s got scales! I felt them.What race of man and woman has scales?”Pavek shook his head.“Just her, I imagine.Haven’t seen many of them, but I never saw two that were alike—”“But you said ‘New Race’.”“They’re New Race because, man, woman, or beast, they all come from the same place, ’way to the south.Somewhere south there’s a place—the Tower—that takes what it finds and changes it into something else—”“Made, not born,” Zvain echoed.Pavek sighed.They were young.One of them had seen too much; the other, not enough.All men were made, women, too.Talk to any templar.“Made, not born.All by themselves, no mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers.They die, though.Just like the rest of us.”Ruari shuddered.“She’s not dead.I heard her—felt her—breathing.” He shuddered a second time and wraped his arms over his chest [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.“Very,” he replied, trying to sound calm.“May I—May I search him?”Pavek started to rake his hair, then remembered his fingers and looked for something to wipe them on instead.“Search, not steal, you understand? Everything you find has got to go back to Urik, or we’ll have the war bureau hunting our hides as well.” He left a dark smear on the kank’s enameled chitin.The boy pursed his lips and jutted his chin, instantly defensive, instantly belligerent.“I’m not stupid”“Yeah, well-see that you stay that way.”He headed for the next kank and another bloody, much-decorated templar: a dwarf whose lifeless body, all fifteen stones of it, started to fall the moment he touched it.Cursing and shoving for all he was worth, Pavek kept the corpse on top of the kank, but only after he’d gotten himself drenched in stinking blood.“This one’s dead, too,” Ruari shouted from the far end of the kank formation.“Is it a woman?” Pavek wiped his forearms on the trailing hem of the dwarf’s robe.“Akashia said a woman was coming.”“No, a man, a templar, and, Pavek, he’s got a damned fancy yellow shirt.You think, maybe, there’s someone else out here?”“Not a chance.The Lion’s the one who changed my rank.These are his kanks, his militants.He’s the one who’s sending Quraite a messenger.Keep looking.”So they did, with Pavek turning his attention to an empty-backed kank.When the druids traveled, they often fitted their biggest bugs with cargo harnesses, but the bug Pavek examined had been saddled for an ordinary rider, who’d met an unpleasant death: his charred hands, clinging to an equally charred pommel, were all that remained.Pavek assumed the rider had been male.He couldn’t actually be certain.The hands looked to be as large as his own but he wasn’t about to pry them free for closer examination.The saddle had been burnt down to its mix bone frame, although the chitin on which it sat was unharmed, suggesting that the incineration had been very fast, very precise.A leather sack protruded slightly from a hollowed—out place below the pommel, a stowaway of some sort that had been exposed when the padding burned.A few iridescent markings lingered on the sack.Pavek couldn’t decipher them, but with the rest, he was fairly certain Lord Hamanu had sent a defiler along with the templars.The defiler’s apparent fate confirmed his suspicion that nothing natural had befallen these travelers.There was another, larger sack attached to the rear of the saddle.The high bureau’s seven interlocking circles were stamped in gold on its side.Usually such message satchels were sealed with magic, but there was no magical glamour hovering about the leather, and thinking its contents might tell them something about Lord Hamanu’s message, Pavek looked around for a stick with which to prod it open.He’d just found one when Ruari erupted with a streak of panicky oaths.Casting the stick aside and drawing his sword in its place, Pavek raced to the half-elf’s side.“Pyreen preserve and protect!” Ruari sputtered, invoking the aid of legendary druid paladins.“What is she… it?” he asked, retreating from the rider he’d hauled down from the bug’s back.Pavek caught Ruari at the elbows from behind and steered him to one side.For all his sullenness and swagger, for all his hatred of Urik and the human templar who, in raping his elven mother, had become his father, Ruari was an innocent raised in the clean, free air of Quraite.He knew elves and dwarves and humans and their mixed-blood offspring, but nothing of the more exotic races or the impulses that might drive a woman to mark her body, or wrap it in a gown tight enough to be a second skin and cut with holes to display what the women of Quraite kept discreetly covered.A templar, though, had seen everything the underside of Urik had to offer—or Pavek thought he had until he squatted down for a better look at what Ruari had found.She was beyond doubt a woman: leaner than Ruari or a full-blooded elf, but not an elf, not at all.Her skin wasn’t painted; white-as-salt was its natural color, despite the punishment it must have taken on the journey.Pavek couldn’t say whether the marks around her eyes were paint or not, but the eyes themselves were wide-spaced and the mask that ran the length of her face between them covered no recognizable profile.He’d never seen anyone like her before, but he knew what she was—“New Race.”“What?” Ruari asked, his curiosity calming him already.“Rotters,” Zvain interrupted.He left off searching, but didn’t come all the way over to join them.“Better be careful, they’re beasts for the arena.Things that got made, not born.Claws and teeth and other things they shouldn’t have.Rotters.”“Most of em,” Pavek agreed, sounding wiser than he felt and wondering if the boy knew something that he didn’t.The white-skinned woman with her mask and torn gown appeared more fragile than ferocious.As the wheels of fate’s chariot spun, he knew that appearances meant nothing, but if this was the woman Akashia had sensed, he wanted to preserve the peace as long as he could.“They stay beasts, if they start out beasts.If they start as men and women, that’s what they come out as, but different.And they don’t all choose to go to the Tower.Some do; they’ve got their reasons, I guess.Mostly it’s slavers that take a coffle chain south and bring back the few that come out again.” Time and time again during Pavek’s years as a templar, the civil bureau had swept through the slave markets in search of the lowest of the low who supplied the mysterious Tower.Maybe they saved a few slaves from transformation, but they did nothing for the ones who’d been transformed.“Come from where? Come out how? What Tower?” Ruari pressed.“I know elves and half-elves; she’s neither.Wind and fire, Pavek, her skin—She’s got scales! I felt them.What race of man and woman has scales?”Pavek shook his head.“Just her, I imagine.Haven’t seen many of them, but I never saw two that were alike—”“But you said ‘New Race’.”“They’re New Race because, man, woman, or beast, they all come from the same place, ’way to the south.Somewhere south there’s a place—the Tower—that takes what it finds and changes it into something else—”“Made, not born,” Zvain echoed.Pavek sighed.They were young.One of them had seen too much; the other, not enough.All men were made, women, too.Talk to any templar.“Made, not born.All by themselves, no mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers.They die, though.Just like the rest of us.”Ruari shuddered.“She’s not dead.I heard her—felt her—breathing.” He shuddered a second time and wraped his arms over his chest [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]