Then that, too, crumbled and was borne away on the intangible wind.
"Vengeance..." the whispered word echoed against the walls of the deserted dyers' plaza.
He opened his hands and stared at them a moment. He'd imagined vengeance would be gratifying; instead he was as empty as his hands.
"Will he serve?" an unexpected, unfamiliar voice said from behind his left shoulder.
Without thought Or hesitation, he turned toward the sound. He saw painted walls, draperies, and a wild-haired halfling. The halfling's face had been brutally marked with slave-scars that seemed both old and unhealed. There was, however, nothing servile in the halfling's posture or his voice when he repeated his question.
Zvain shook his head, unable to comprehend the question until he'd sorted out where he was from where he'd been.
"Oh, yes, Kakzim. Beyond our wildest dreams-"
This time the voice and face were familiar: the elegantly pale slave-master with taloned fingertips. Elabon Escrissar without his mask or the inner light of wisdom.
Or the illusion of magic.
He'd destroyed Pavek in the theater of his mind, not reality and took a moment's comfort from that-until he noticed the wall behind the interrogator. It was barren; the thick vines and cloying flowers were gone. Fearing the worst, he looked at the floor, where a thin layer of ash dulled the carpet.
It didn't matter whether he'd killed Pavek in the dyers' plaza or in his mind; he'd drawn real magic to do it. His greed for vengeance had consumed the life of Athas and left nothing in return. He'd become a defiler, irrevocably doomed and condemned by a single, thoughtless and futile act.
"-Zvain's one of us, now."
Pavek had begun to run as soon as he saw the vast green-crowned grove on the horizon, and he'd run himself to exhaustion before he realized that no amount of racing would get him there. Gasping and feeling like an utter fool- again-he dropped to his knees. He could only wait, lapping up the sweat that fell from his face into his cupped hands, and wait for the cool wind from the center to blow again.
He was confident that it would. From what he'd seen so far, Telhami wouldn't miss the opportunity to mock him face-to-face in her grove. He didn't have to wait long. This time he followed the breeze obediently, even when it curled away from the grove, and set his foot on soft green grass when the sun was only a few handspans above the treetops. The druid's grove was alive with pattering sound. Pavek flinched left and right at each step before he observed water drops falling through the trees, striking leaves and branches before they dived into the grass. He'd heard or seen nothing like it before. Face up toward the trees, he stumbled through the gentle rain, paying more attention to the foliage than his feet.
"However did you survive as a templar in the lion's city?" He demonstrated his survival skills, bounding into the air like a startled erdlu, but landing, fists clenched and teeth bared, in a compact, wary crouch.
Telhami reclined on the far bank of a spring-fed stream. At least, he assumed it was Telhami. Quraite's chief druid had discarded her veil. The sunlight filtered through the trees revealed her as a woman no longer young, but hardly a withered crone. Prejudiced by a lifetime of dealing with templars, he took her relaxed presence and ironic tone as intimidation ploys and countered with insolence: immersing his face in the surprisingly cold water, as if it were something he'd done ten thousand times before.
"Yes, yes, Pavek. Take your time. You already know everything that I could teach you."
More intimidation, and successful this time-which left him that much more determined to conceal how decisively she'd stung him. He sauntered across the stream.
"I knew enough to get here, didn't I?" he asked as he sat. "You and Ruari thought I'd wander forever. Well, I followed your cool wind from the center, and now I'm ready to be taught whatever it is that you have to teach."
Telhami responded with a solitary arched eyebrow. "You run a good race, Just-Plain Pavek, but you don't know how to win. It doesn't matter if you're growing trees or trying to get another scarlet thread for your sleeve-in the end it's not the power that matters, it's the will behind it. Here, as you noticed, power drips down from the trees. Hold out your hand and it flows over you, but can you catch it, Just-Plain Pavek? Can you speak its silent language? Can you bend it with your will?"
"That's what I'm here to be taught."
The druid flicked her hand, and a water-plume splattered his cheek. "I can't teach you how to wield your own will! What do you take me for-? Another sorcerer-king? An incubating dragon? I tell you: the spirit of Athas surrounds us. Speak to it. Bargain widi it. Invoke it. Either you can do it, or you can't. Forget your scrolls. Start with light; that's the simplest spell. Make light, Just-Plain Pavek, while the sun still shines. Make water while it flows beside you. Call a bird or bee down from the treetops. You know the invocations. They're the same for a druid, a sun-cleric, or a Lion's templar-you did know that, didn't you, Just-Plain Pavek? So, make something happen. Something. Anything. Show me what you can do."
Telhami sat back to watch and wait. She'd been prepared to wait several days; this stranger had done well to reach her grove the same afternoon he'd set out to find it. Though she'd decided, considering what he'd been, mat she wouldn't add her voice to the cool wind. She'd done that for Yohan who, even so, had needed three days to find her grove his first time.
Yohan had dreamed of magic, like this youthful templar.
Yohan had tried his best, but not as dramatically as Pavek, who grunted, groaned, and knotted every muscle with his efforts. He put forth a prodigious amount of sweat and tweaked the consciousness of Quraite's guardian spirit. It was not impressed and certainly not compelled, but it was aware.
Once a stranger roused the guardian-which Yohan had never done-she desperately wanted him or her to succeed. The price of failure here, where Quraite was strongest, was invariably death. If Pavek could not shape the guardian's will with his own, the ground would open around him and his corpse would join several dozen others shrouded in the myriad roots. And although that was a fate that served her purpose-adding lifeforce to Quraite-Telhami preferred to nurture Quraite with living druids rather than strangers' corpses.
On the other hand, Pavek was not the only disenfranchised templar wandering the Tablelands. The sullen broods of several city-states had been cut loose when their sorcerer-kings died or disappeared. Surely Pavek was not the only one who missed his borrowed power. She knew she'd sleep more easily if Pavek demonstrated that once a mind had become a conduit for a sorcerer-king's corruption, it could never master a more honest invocation of Quraite's guardian.
"It's impossible!" he explained with a disgusted snarl, tearing out a handful of grass and flinging it across the stream. "There's no silent voice for me to listen to. Not even that damned 'cool wind' of yours to follow. I know what I'm supposed to be looking for, and it's not there. You lied to me, old woman. Cheated and deceived me. You knew it couldn't be done, but you wanted to watch me burst apart trying. You wanted me to break my own spirit, to keep your own hands lily-clean. Well, I've seen your kind before: they're all over the templarate. And I've learned not to play your games. I won't make a fool of myself for your amusement. I quit instead!"