Fugitive in Urik

Chapter 4 hits different. Up until now Pavek has been a templar with problems. Now he’s just a man with nothing.

His first hours as a fugitive are pure panic. Every sound is a pursuer. Every flash of yellow in the corner of his eye is a templar robe he no longer wears. Escrissar’s talon cuts on his cheek keep reopening every time he swallows his fear.

He crouches in an airless alley and bangs his head against the wall. Twenty years as a templar. Always above the law. Never once outside it. Now the streets he’s known his entire life feel like a foreign city.

A memory surfaces. Childhood. Getting separated from his mother near the elven market. For a moment he’s that lost boy again, tears stinging his eyes.

Shame forces him to choose between surrender and fight. He fights. The panic breaks. He remembers the squatters’ quarter.

The Squatters’ Quarter

He finds a ruined courtyard after moonset. A handful of people sit along the walls, their eyes catching starlight like opals. Nobody challenges the big man with one arm pressed against his side.

He drinks from a cistern. The water tastes like resin and grit. He drinks it anyway. In all of Athas, nothing is more precious than water.

He claims an empty patch of wall. His neighbors watch until they decide he’s one of them, then sleep. Pavek doesn’t. He replays the previous day, mourning his lost robe, his hidden coins, his barracks cot. All the small things that made up a small life, gone.

Hunted

Dawn comes with the daily harangue. The orator’s voice, amplified by magic, reaches every corner of the city.

Then the orator names him. “Pavek. Former regulator. Grave crimes against the city. Ten gold coins for his capture.”

A year’s wages for an average citizen. He forces his face calm, tries to yank the medallion off his neck, but the inix-hide thong won’t break. He studies his neighbors through his hair. Nobody seems to be listening.

But somebody in Urik heard that announcement.

He talks himself down. The orator gave his name but no physical description. No mention of the slashes on his face. Maybe the blood-soaked robe worked. Maybe Escrissar thinks he’s dead.

He tucks the medallion into Sassel’s coin purse and leaves with a dead man’s confidence.

A Plan Takes Shape

It’s Todek’s Day. His day off. The first of many.

He buys breakfast with Sassel’s ceramic bits. Trades four more for clothes off a man whose luck looks worse than his own. The clothes stink of old wine. People keep their distance. Just like when he wore the yellow robe.

Sitting alone on a bench in the midday heat, he builds a plan. Zarneeka brought him down. Zarneeka will be his way out. The druids won’t approve of Laq. That proud woman can’t be a willing partner to Escrissar’s poison. She’ll want to hear what Pavek knows. He’ll trade information for protection, then offer his archive knowledge in exchange for initiation into druid magic.

Bold plan. Gossamer assumptions. But it’s all he’s got.

Then his elbow starts to swell.

Poison

Over two weeks, while his other injuries heal, the elbow gets worse. Twice its normal size. Dark red and purple, shot through with yellow streaks that ooze. The skin is hot to the touch. Sometimes numb, mostly burning, like fire ants burrowed under his flesh.

He can’t work. He can barely sleep. Sassel’s purse gets thinner. He binds the arm in a rag sling and hopes for the best.

The best doesn’t come. He needs a healer.

He tries the templar quarter first. But when he sees a masked necromancer striding through the courtyard, he turns and walks the other way.

He buys Ral’s Breath at the market for a whole silver piece. It barely numbs his tongue. The zarneeka has been cut so badly it’s worthless. The corruption he tried to expose is now killing him.

A young messenger bumps into him, sees the wound, and does something shocking. Gives him advice and four ceramic bits. Charity from a stranger. Pavek can barely process it. The boy tells him about an old dwarf woman in the elven market. Cheap. Reliable. A little crazy.

Josa

Josa sits cross-legged on a scrap of cloth, chanting prayers to forgotten oceans, a begging bowl on her ankles. One eye is clouded. The other is radiant blue.

She looks at his elbow once and names her price. One silver. It’s Sassel’s last silver.

But when Pavek squats down to pay, she gets a look at his face. She hisses. Covers the bowl. Pulls him around a corner into a cramped lean-to behind a forge.

She knows who he is. Pavek the Murderer. Twenty gold coins. But she won’t turn him in. No healer will, she says. She won’t explain why.

She also won’t heal him. Escrissar marked his face with those talons on purpose. Any spellcraft worked on Pavek inside the city walls will be sensed by the interrogator. He’ll trace it back to Josa.

All she can offer is a workaround. Buy old Ral’s Breath from an apothecary named Nekkinrod. The old stock still has real zarneeka in it. Make a paste and pack the wound.

It works. Barely. But he needs four more doses, and he’s flat broke.

Zvain Returns

Night falls. Pavek stalks the streets looking for someone to rob. He’s terrible at crime.

A ruckus breaks out. A gang of teenage thugs has cornered a smaller boy. Pavek wades in with cobblestones. One-armed, feverish, running on fury. He’s still a trained templar underneath the rags. But the boy escapes during the brawl, and the thugs scatter when templars show up.

The templars see a man in rags with a sling. Not worth their time. They leave.

Pavek collapses. He pulls out his medallion. One last spell. Simple healing, granted to every templar. King Hamanu will sense it and trace it back to him. But the future no longer matters.

“You’re the one.”

Pavek drops the medallion. The voice belongs to the boy from the alley. The thief who came back.

It’s Zvain. The orphan whose mother died of Laq. The same kid who gut-punched Pavek weeks ago. Now he’s standing in the moonlight holding Pavek’s templar medallion.

“You’re the one they’re looking for. Twenty pieces of gold.”

Pavek looks at the boy and sees himself. The same lost kid who was told his own mother was dead. He stops reaching for the medallion.

Zvain says he knows people who can help. A bed. Food. Somewhere cool during the day. It sounds too good to be true. But Pavek is out of options, out of coins, out of blood.

He follows the boy into the night.

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