Lynn Abbey - Cinnabar Shadows

Giola stared at him with thinly disguised contempt. "It comes from the fountain."

"Where does it come from before the fountain? How is the fountain filled? Where does it drain?"

"How in the bloody, bright sun should I know? Do I look like a scholar to you? Go to the Urik archive, hire yourself a bug-eyed scribe if you want to know where water comes from or where it goes!"

Several cutting replies leapt to the front of Pavek's mind. With difficulty he rejected them all, reminding himself that most people—certainly most templars—didn't have his demanding curiosity. Things were what they appeared to be, without why or how, before or after. Giola's life was not measured in questions and doubts, as his was.

But without questions, there wasn't much to say except, "Keep moving, then. We're still looking for a way underground. Some sort of passage—"

"Or a building," Mahtra interrupted. Her strangely emotionless voice was well-suited to dealing with low-rank templars. "A very old building. Its walls are as tall as they are wide. The roof is flat. There's only one door and inside, there's a hole in the floor that goes all the way underground."

Pavek cursed himself for a fool. He'd been so clever looking for his second passage into the reservoir cavern that he'd never thought to ask if there was another building like the one Mahtra had led them to in Urik's elven market.

Giola scratched her shaggy blond hair. "Aye," she said slowly. "A little building, smack in the middle of the abattoir. A building inside a building. No use I could ever guess. I never noticed a door, but I never looked."

"The abattoir," Pavek mused aloud. The abattoir, where Nunk said the halfling lune lived. He flashed Mahtra a grin and took her by the arm. "That's it! That's the place."

Mahtra shied away from his grip, her eyes so wide-open they seemed likely to fall to the ground. "What's an abattoir? I do not know this word."

He relaxed his hold on Mahtra's arm. Like eleganta, abattoir was a word that concealed more than it revealed. And, knowing she was still a child in many ways, Pavek was instinctively reluctant to destroy its mystery with a precise definition. "It is—it is—" he groped for a phrase that would be the truth, but not too much of it. "It is the place where the animals die," then added quickly, "the place where we'll find the man we're looking for."

The abattoir was the heart of Codesh. It was an old building, similar in style to the little building they hoped to find inside it, and etched with the same angular, indecipherable script Pavek had noticed at the elven market. Shadowed patches on its time and grime-darkened walls led the eye to believe that there had once been murals, but whatever grandeur the abattoir might have possessed in the past, it was a dismal place now.

Another templar watchtower rose beside a gaping archway carved through thick limestone walls. There were as many yellow-robed men and women watching over the abattoir as Nunk kept with him at the outer gate. A rack of hook-bill spears stood on one side of the watchroom door while a stack of shields made from erdlu scales lashed to flexible rattan sat on the other. Inside the watchroom, each templar wore a sword and boiled leather armor; that was very unusual for civil bureau templars and a measure of Codesh's reputation as a thorn in Urik's foot. They greeted Giola as if hers were the first friendly—as in not belonging to the enemy—face they'd seen in a stormy quinth.

"Instigator Nunk says I'm to take these rubes onto the floor," Giola informed Nunk's counterpart, a dwarf with a bit less decoration woven through his sleeve.

The dwarf swiped the oily sweat from his bald scalp before sauntering over to greet Pavek and his companions.

"Who in blazes are you that I should let you and yours stir up trouble I don't need?"

He grabbed the front of Pavek's shirt, a gesture well within his templar's right to harass any ordinary citizen, but he caught Pavek's medallion as well, and the shock knocked him back a step or two.

"Be damned," he swore, partly fear and partly curse.

Pavek could watch the thoughts—questions, doubts and possibilities—march between the dwarf's narrowed eyes. He judged the moment had come for revelation and pulled his medallion into view, gouge and all.

"Be damned," the dwarf repeated.

This time the oath was definitely a curse and definitely directed on himself. Pavek felt a measure of sympathy; he had the same sort of rotten luck.

"Who I am is Pavek, Lord Pavek, and what I want on the killing ground is no concern of yours."

Standing behind the dwarf, and half again as tall, elven Giola had a good view of the ceramic lump Pavek held in his hand. She turned pale enough to be Mahtra's sister.

"A thousand pardons, Great One. Forgive my insolence, Great One," she humbled herself, dropping to one knee and striking her breast with her fist. But for all Giola's humility, there was one flash of fire when her eyes skewed in the direction of the outer gate watchtower where Nunk, who'd gotten her into this, was waiting.

"Forgive me, also, Great One," the dwarf said quickly. "May I ask if you're Pavek... Lord Pavek who was once exiled from Urik?"

Pavek truly got no exhilaration from the embarrassment of others. "I'm the Pavek who lit out of Urik with a forty-gold piece bounty riding on my head," he said, trying to break the grim mood.

Giola stood erect. She straightened her robe and said, "Great One, it is good to see you are alive," which surprised Pavek as much as the sight of his medallion had surprised her. "There's never been a regulator dead or alive who was worth forty pieces of gold. I don't know what you did, but your name was whispered in all the shadows. You were not without friends. Luck sat on your shoulder."

She took a long-limbed stride around the dwarf and extended her open hand, which held the four ceramic bits Pavek had given her earlier. Everyone said Athas had changed in the few years since the Tynans slew the Dragon. Nunk said the bureaus had changed since Pavek left, and partly because of him. There could be no greater symbol of those changes than a regulator offering to return money. Or telling him, in the plain presence of other templars, that she'd gone to a fortune-seller and bought him a bit of luck.

A human could study the elves of Athas all his life without truly learning what an elf meant when he—or she-called someone a friend. Now two elves had called Pavek friend in as many days—if he considered Ruari an elf. There was always a gesture involved, be it a bright-colored lizard or four broken bits. Last night Pavek had known to take the lizard. Today he knew he'd spoil everything if he touched those rough-edged bits.

Giola cocked her head, pondering a moment before she decided the sentiment was acceptable. Then she touched her right-hand's index finger first to her own breast then to his. Judging by Ruari's slack-jawed astonishment, he could rely on his assumption: he'd been accorded a rare honor. The dwarf, the highest rank templar in the watchtower, save for Pavek himself, must have sensed the same thing.

He got in front of Giola. "Great One, it would be an honor to help you. Let me escort you personally."

There were some traditions that were more resistant to change than others. Giola retreated, and the dwarf led them downstairs.

The abattoir wasn't so much a building as an open space surrounded by walls and a two-tier gallery, open to the brutal sun, and filled from back to front, side to side, with the trades of death. Pavek judged the killing floor to be as large as any Urik market plaza, at least sixty parade paces square. Carcasses outnumbered people many times over. Finding Kakzim would be a challenge, but finding the twin of the building Mahtra had used to come and go from the reservoir cavern was as simple as looking at the middle of the killing floor.