The Brazen Gambit

by Lynn Abbey

  He glanced at the debris. The shade was empty, and he was still thinking about Zvain when the dwarf's jagged fingernails pressed between the nerves and bones of his wrist.

  "Whatever happens," Yohan hissed-grim hazel eyes meeting and breaking Pavek's determined stare-"your life belongs to me."

  With his arm already weak from Bukke's prod, Pavek didn't doubt the old dwarf could finish him off, but if, by some remote chance, he survived Yohan, the half-elf s scowl promised another battle. He turned weary eyes to the dwarf.

  "We're all meat if we don't get moving," be said, not loudly enough for Bukke to overhear.

  Yohan released his wrist, and though Pavek would have preferred a moment to shake blood back down to bis fingertips, he hooked numbed fingers around the traces instead.

  "Are you ready?" the druid asked, a hint of maternal impatience in her voice, for all that she looked several years younger than Pavek himself.

  With Bukke still blinking in the dappled light, Pavek and his new companions walked past the gatehouse and the inspection sand. There were countless reasons to keep his head down as he pulled the light and well-balanced cart up the shallow slope to the open west gate of Urik. He rejected them all and stole glances in every direction, hoping to catch sight of Zvain. They were almost at the man-high feet of mighty King Hamanu when Pavek saw a dark, lithe shadow in the tail of his right eye. He turned his head toward it.

  "Something following you, city-scum?" the half-elf snarled-the first words he had spoken and full of a familiar adolescent whine.

  "No, nothing." The stones and scrub where the shadow had appeared were empty now. Maybe there'd be another chance before sundown. Maybe-but no sane man would waste spit on those dice. The cart rolled from the packed dirt of the outside to the smooth, patterned cobblestones of Urik's streets. They reached the first plaza. He veered left, toward the wide, well-traveled avenue that led directly to the customhouse. The dwarf continued straight ahead toward the tangled stalls and alleys where weavers, dyers, and cloth merchants plied their trade. They collided with each other and the cart.

  Yohan retreated a pace, giving him another measuring sweep with his eyes. The customhouse had not been mentioned since he'd joined them.

  "Is there a problem?" the druid asked.

  "He headed for the customhouse."

  She laid a reassuring hand on Yohan's shoulder before turning to Pavek. He lowered the cart traces and, belatedly, worked on the cramps in his shoulder and arm.

  "Follow Yohan, and don't cause trouble. We must attend other matters first."

  He soon discovered the substance of those 'other matters.' Once he'd dragged the cart deep into a thicket of uncut cloth and bright-dyed skeins of wool and linen-where they were screened off from prying eyes and a man's shouts for help would be absorbed by the cloth or lost in the general din of bargaining-he was pummeled by the dwarf until he lay face-up on the cobblestones, with the tapered, metal-wrapped ferrule of the half-elfs staff resting in the hollow of his throat.

  "Search him," the druid commanded, and the dwarf did so-efficiently.

  "Well now, what have we here? An interesting bit of crockery for a wage-scum to have tucked beneath his belt..."

  Yohan held up the glazed medallion.

  "A templar! Yellow-robed blood-sucker," the copper-haired youth sneered, and the pressure on Pavek's throat increased.

  "Not a templar, Ruari," the druid corrected, taking the medallion from Yohan's hand. "But the templar who gave us so much trouble last time we were here." She dangled the yellow ceramic above Pavek's face. "I am correct in that, am I not? You are that templar...? What happened to your bright yellow robe, templar-scum?"

  Pavek was not fool enough to deny the accusation. "The zarneeka-that yellow powder you bring to the customhouse-it gets made into a poison called Laq-"

  The half-elf leaned on his staff, and Pavek groaned.

  "Ease off, Ru. Let him finish."

  Between coughs and gasps, Pavek had a heartbeat to wonder if he hadn't made the biggest mistake in his soon-to-be-ended life. "Ral's Breath was sold freely and cheaply everywhere in the city. Folk who couldn't afford a healer's touch thought it eased their pain. Now your zarneeka gets simmered into a poison that rots a man's mind and turns him into a raving beast before it kills him. I thought you would want to know. I thought a druid-"

  Pressure returned with a vicious twist

  "Ruari!"

  -And eased again.

  "I thought a druid would care."

  "He's a templar. A liar and a spy. Let's kill him and leave him here. The quicker the better."

  The fire-hardened staff wavered in Ruari's hands, but his aim was true enough to kill a helpless man in a few, pain-filled moments. The druid steadied the staff with her own firm grip. "Why should I believe anything you say, bloodsucker?"

  "Because you kenned me already, and you know I speak the truth. You need my help, woman... if you care."

  "My name is Akashia," she said, pushing the staff aside. "And I do care. What about you? Since when does a templar care about anything that does not line his purse with gold or power?"

  It wasn't an easy question to answer, especially with that half-elf ready to send him to oblivion for every hesitation or ill-chosen word, but he tried. He described the Laq-crazed man storming into Joat's Den, and how that had led him to a woman's broke-neck corpse, an administrator's chamber, the inspection sands and, finally deep in the customhouse itself.

  He did not mention names-not Rokka, Dovanne, nor Elabon Escrissar-because he judged the key to surviving this lopsided conversation was a miserly hand on the truth (unless Akashia had kenned every thought and memory in his mind, which by all that he knew of spellcraft or mind-bending was not possible in such a short time). Nor did he mention Zvain or the round-faced, smiling cleric Oelus.

  Akashia's face, viewed from his current angle, was as hard and passionless as any templar's. He was fat gone from the pan to the fire, and it was just as well that the boy had vanished.

  "I've been outcast these last six weeks, with a forty-gold-piece price on my head, waiting for you to return-"

  "You are the Pavek written on the wall?" the druid asked, warming slightly and revealing that she, too, possessed forbidden literacy.

  He nodded. The movement drew the staff to his throat again.

  "A templar-excuse me-a renegade templar with a conscience. Let him up, Ruari."

  He got slowly to his feet, dusting his shabby shirt and tugging it smooth beneath his belt. "Pavek-" he extended his hand. "Just-Plain Pavek. I don't like what this Laq poison does before it kills. I don't claim a conscience but-" A length of rust-colored cloth rippled, though the air was still inside the cloth quarter. He stood on his toes, trying to see over the cloth. Once again he caught the impression of a dark, lithe, and fleeting shadow; nothing more-until he felt Ruari staring at him with renewed suspicion.

  "The information you'll need if you want to stop-" Pavek caught himself with Escrissar's name on his tongue. "If you want to see that your zarneeka powder isn't turned into Laq."

  "And what to you want in exchange for this information, Pavek-since you don't have a conscience to tell you right from wrong?"

  She'd insulted him. Pavek was sure of that from her arched eyebrows, but for the life of him, he didn't know how. She'd changed the rules, and he felt shame as he explained himself. "First off, I want safe passage from Urik to your bolt-hole. You must have one. Then we'll trade for my information.''

  "He can't be serious!" Ruari exclaimed, then, when the woman did not immediately support him: "Akashia-you can't be serious. He's a templar! Once a yellow-robed bloodsucker, always a yellow-robed blood-sucker. He'll betray us all-if he hasn't betrayed us already. He's been looking all around, like a scum-slime traitor who's led us into an ambush. Shifty-eyed templar-scum."

  The youth thwacked Pavek's shin with his staff, drawing blood and, very nearly, retaliation.

  "Are you looking for something, someone?" Aka
shia asked.

  His initial judgment had not changed: he wasn't sure he trusted them any more than they trusted him, and he definitely didn't want Zvain involved. Fortunately, there was another acceptable answer: "I've got forty gold coins resting on my head, woman! Of course, I'm jumping at shadows and looking over my shoulders."

  "That's a lot of gold," Yohan the dwarf mused aloud.

  "Take a very rich man not to be tempted."

  "Pyreen protect us," Ruari swore an oath Pavek had never heard before. "Let's just turn him in."

  "No," Akashia decided, and her decisions were clearly the ones that mattered. "Yohan-?"

  She turned to the dwarf, her fingers fluttering in what, for her, seemed unusual femininity. Pavek had half an instant for suspicion before Yohan's fist blasted into his gut, and the half elf's staff struck hard at the base of his skull. After that there was darkness, and after the darkness, oblivion.

  Chapter Seven

  Pavek awoke empty-headed and floating in air. An instant later he landed hard on splintery wood. His mind crystalized: the last thing he'd remembered was being hit over the head in the dyers' plaza. Now he was knotted up inside the handcart as it rolled over rough pavement.

  Whoever had spit-tied him was a master of the craft. His wrists and ankles were bound tightly together some immeasurable distance behind his back and anchored from there to the cart itself. His limbs were stretched, strained, and throbbing. His hands and feet were numb. In the midst of his discomfort, he spared a moment to wonder who, besides another templar, would bind a man tight enough to cripple him.

  Another jolt brought him back to immediate concerns. He couldn't stifle a moan, but no one noticed. There were other voices, near and far. The words were lost in the wheels' clattering. He couldn't see anything, either. A piece of coarse cloth had been bound over his eyes. Straw had been thrown over him as well; the sharp stalks pricked through his clothes to his skin, which, he realized, was chilled.

  The sun had set. The gates of Urik were closed. The druids must have consigned their zarneeka to the city-the cart wasn't large enough for both him and the amphorae- after which they'd hauled him, bound and unconscious, out; of the only home he'd ever known.

  Pain-fogged as he was, Pavek didn't know whether to be relieved or terrified: he was out of the city where his life was worth forty gold pieces and into the care of druids who didn't care if they crippled him. At least they'd protected his eyes; a man could go blind through his eyelids if he lay faceup in the sun all afternoon. Then his nose reminded him that the sun hadn't been visible this past afternoon. The air he breathed through a layer of straw was gritty with smoke and sulphur.

  So, the druids had tied him cruelly, and then they'd covered him with straw to conceal him while they smuggled him out of the city. They wanted him, or more of his story, but they didn't trust him.

  Pavek sighed. He could understand that: no templar took trust for granted.

  He considered announcing that he was conscious, but thought better of that impulse. Better to wait while his senses sharpened and his mind snared snatches of conversation from the world beyond his ears.

  "What now?" An adolescent whine.

  His mind struggled to find a name and threw up two: Zvain and Ruari. Ruari was correct; Zvain brought a different ache. He could tell himself everything had gone for the best, that an orphan's chances on the streets of Urik were better than a bound templar's in a handcart. Probably it wasn't a lie. The boy and he had squared whatever debts had stood between them. But there was an ache, distinct from the myriad body aches, and the half-elf's grousing only made it worse.

  "I've never seen this place so crowded," Ruari continued when no one answered his question. "There's hardly a corner that doesn't have someone camped in it."

  "No one wants to go farther, not tonight," a woman's voice-Akashia, the druid, the leader of his captors. "Not with that cloud lighting up the sky. There's a Tyr-storm brewing, Ru." Brown-haired Akashia was beautiful in a way no hardened templar woman could ever be, but just as tough. The half-elf was smart enough to keep his mouth shut, and the cart jolted forward again.

  A Tyr-storm. He hadn't heard that phrase before, but guessed its meaning. Tyr was the city that sent heroes, or fools-the barroom ballads he knew equated the two-out to challenge the Dragon. And, against all odds, the hero-fools had succeeded. Now the storms came, about as frequently as the Dragon had come for bis toll of mortal life.

  The Dragon's toll had been paid in slaves; anyone with a bit of luck or coin had nothing to fear. But the storms ravaged everything equally with wind, hail, and rain. No one could buy luck when blue-green lightning filled the sky.

  So why not name the storms after Tyr? Someone had to take the blame. Smoking Crown had been belching as long as anyone could remember, but the smoke hadn't bred storms until the fools of Tyr had slain the Dragon.

  Between the blindfold-bandage and the straw, he couldn't see the blue-green lightning, but, straining his ears, he heard the now-and-again rumble of thunder. Dread greater than any pain filled his heart: he'd sooner be dead than confront a Tyr-storm trussed-up as he was.

  "This is as far as we can go without a decision," Yohan, the third member of the trio said with a sigh.

  The cart tipped as the old dwarf lowered the traces. Pavek slid forward, helplessly, toward the dwarf and the ground. Bolts of agony, sharper and brighter than the unseen lightning, racked his joints as the rope between his bound limbs and cart snapped taut. His ribs contracted and, with his not-inconsiderable weight suspended halfway in, halfway out of the cart, he tried to howl, but the sound strangled in his throat.

  "Earth, wind, rain, and fire!" Akashia swore.

  Yohan put a hob-nailed sole against his chest, shoving him backward as the cart leveled. Pavek could breathe again, and scream as the wheels swiveled, bounced, and rolled rapidly through the darkness.

  "Hold these!" the dwarf barked, and the two-wheeled cart tottered as one of the others took his place between the trace-poles.

  Straw was swept aside, and a massive, strong hand clamped over his forearm to haul him out of agony with the rude courtesy one veteran expected of another, even when they were on opposite sides.

  "Look at his hands," Akashia whispered from somewhere near his head.

  Her tone, midway between horror and disgust, was enough set him struggling, but Yohan's grip was firm.

  "You've come close to crippling him," Yohan snarled, not toward the woman, so it was the half-elf, the whiner, who'd spit-tied him. "Give me that knife of his, Kashi-"

  A moment later, he felt cold steel against his right arm. He heard the unmistakable snap of stretched leather as steel sliced through his bonds and guessed that Ruari had tied him up with wet thongs. It was a templar tactic: leather shrank as it dried. He couldn't control his arms or legs as, one after another, they went from freedom to spasms. He ground his teeth together in a vain attempt to remain quiet, and when he could not, he swore vengeance against the half-elf scum.

  "Easy," Yohan counseled, shoving and pulling until he was sitting erect. "Water?"

  Another pair of hands, Akashia's, unwound the cloth from his eyes. He blinked a moment, adjusting to the twilight, and gasped when he saw his swollen, discolored hands. Growling like a maddened beast, he lurched toward the lean silhouette at the corner of his vision. Yohan stopped him with one hand.

  "Don't be a fool," the dwarf hissed.

  He let the fight go out of him. With no control over his fists, no strength in his legs, he was a fool. He slumped against the side planks of the cart.

  "It's going to tip!" Ruari shouted, grappling with the traces-though whether to help or hinder was beyond Pavek's guessing.

  Yohan planted his foot against the opposite side. The danger passed. "Water?" he repeated.

  Of his three captors, the dwarf was clearly the most dangerous, but the two of them were playing by the same rules, by templar rules: victor and vanquished, power and prisoner. Right now water was more pr
ecious than life itself, but accepting it would establish the hierarchy between them, with him inescapably on the bottom. Pavek hesitated. The dwarf uncorked a jug and, tilting it recklessly, allowed water to trickle along his chin as he drank deep and loud.

  "Yes-water." Pavek surrendered. With effort and concentration, he got his jelly-boned arms to move, but Yohan had to steady the jug as he drank. The liquid restored his will and cleared his thoughts.

  Lightning lit the heavens with cool brilliance. Pavek braced for the gut-punch crack of thunder, which did not arrive for several moments and was distant-sounding when it did. The Tyr-storm would be violent when it arrived, but he, his trio of captors, and the other scurrying denizens of Modekan-he assumed they'd come to that village-still had ample time to prepare and dread.

  "Can we trust him? Do we dare take him into the inn?" Akashia asked when the thunder had rumbled past.

  Thrusting out his lower lip, Yohan blinked and shook his head. Pavek started to protest this judgment against his character, but the dwarf silenced him with a scowl.

  "It's not a question of trust; it's those hands and feet. It'll be midnight before he can use his hands, longer before he can walk. Anybody who sees him will think a question or two and somebody may guess the answer. Forty pieces is a lot of gold, Kashi. It's not my decision, but if it were, I'd keep moving and go to ground when we reach the barrens." Another flash of lightning-the same color as the druid's eyes, or perhaps that was merely an illusion. Either way, her nose wrinkled as she looked from him to the storm and back again. Without offering a word, much less the decision they were all waiting for, she reversed the knife and aimed it for its sheath.

  Pavek murmured, "Wipe it first-" Akashia glowered as thunder rumbled and Yohan made a fist.

  He had no idea who'd forged his knife, but any steel was worthy of respect, and mention of the last dwarven stronghold got Yohan's attention, as he'd hoped it would. Akashia, seeing something like awe on the veteran's face, swirled the blade carefully across the whetstone attached to the sheath.