The Brazen Gambit

by Lynn Abbey

Pavek caught the thong on a fingertip, and didn't allow himself to think about what might have been. He spun the inix leather around his left hand and closed his fist around the familiar ceramic lump, shouted Guard me! and raised his wrapped fist high above his head:

  "Hamanu! Hear me, your servant, 0 Great and Mighty One!"

  Everyone in Escrissar's force heard Pavek's cry and sureed toward him. Ruari would have gone down in a pair of heartbeats once they closed, but the remaining Quraiters, though they couldn't have understood what he was trying to do, saw Ruari defending him and rushed to their aid.

  The fighting was fierce and desperate around him. Pavek felt a sharp pain in his leg; then it went completely numb: the telltale sign of a serious wound. But the leg held, and he prayed as he'd never prayed before to see a pair of sulphurous eyes in the lurid sunset sky.

  Shimmering ovals glowed faintly overheard: the distance between Urik and Quraite was considerable, even for a sorcerer-king.

  Who knew what Hamanu saw when a templar invoked his name and power? Another sorcerer-king would know; certainly not Pavek, though he hoped Urik's ruler would see the agafari weapons of Nibenay creating carnage in his domain. And Pavek hoped Great and Mighty Hamanu, having seen that, would give a renegade templar one great and mighty spell...

  "Flamestrike!" ... Granted....

  The shimmering eyes flared like nearby suns, all seething reds and oranges. The air over the Quraite ramparts thickened and became very still before a wind began to blow upward from the ground itself. Will they or nil they, the men and women on both sides of the rampart lowered their weapons to stare at the sky. Urik templars, recognizing what they saw, ran for the trees-much too slowly.

  A flaming bolt exploded from the sky. It grounded itself in the medallion Pavek still held above his head. Searing heat and pain beyond imagining transformed him. He thought he would surely die-thought Hamanu had chosen to destroy him first-but he did not even lose consciousness as lesser fire-bolts arced away from the inferno erupting at his wrist. The bolts struck true into the hearts of Escrissar's allies, and into them alone.

  Howls that would haunt Pavek's sleep until he died escaped those living-dying-torches, which continued to burn erect even after they fell silent, until their substance was completely consumed and nothing, not even ash, remained.

  Then, abruptly, the great gout of flame rising from his wrist fizzled. Heat and pain were reduced to memories; his flesh was unmarked and whole. The medallion shone with its own light for another instant before it, too, reverted to an ordinary ceramic lump. Pavek lowered his arm.

  But it wasn't over. A scream out of Telhami's hut scattered the last remaining wits of the surviving Quraiters. Pavek crossed from the rampart to the hut in two leaps- remembering his wound only when he'd landed solidly on the threshold on a leg that should have collapsed.

  A blackened weal ran from knee to hip along his thigh. The spell, he thought, though how a flamestrike spell had cauterized the gash and sewn up the muscles beneath it went beyond his knowledge of magic. His leg ached when he thought about it, but he knew better than to think about it twice, and swept aside the curtain-door.

  Telhami had collapsed on her sleeping platform. Her eyes and mouth were closed, but her limbs sprawled at awkward and unmoving angles. She was unconscious at the least, and very likely dead. Akashia sat alone, now, weaving her hands randomly over an assortment of herbs and powders. Her face was twisted into a silent scream as she sought to both shape the guardian's power and maintain the mind-bending spells Telhami had begun.

  Quraite's most dangerous enemy, Elabon Escrissar, still lurked somewhere in the guarded lands, apparently unscathed by King Hamanu's bounty.

  "Ruari!" Pavek shouted. "Get in here!"

  The half-elf appeared at his side, battered, bleeding, and filthy, but still on his feet. He glanced under Pavek's arms and-for once-needed no instructions. He pressed his palms against Akashia's moving hands before he settled on the floor.

  "Hold steady, scum. You'll know when I've found him."

  * * *

  The interrogator could be almost anywhere. He wasn't within the tree circle around the village, and he wasn't among the trees themselves; Pavek tramped through the fields, to the line where Escrissar's allies had hobbled their kanks, but Escrissar wasn't there, either.

  He looked until the sun was setting, the lavender sky turning to violet, and still he searched, until the only light was that of the stars. A half-elf couldn't see in the dark as well as a full-blooded elf, but still Escrissar would see better than Pavek.

  The mind-bending interrogator should be nearly exhausted. Akashia and Ruari should be able to hold against him. But should be didn't always mean was, and in his heart Pavek felt fortune swinging away from Quraite again.

  "Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy," he whispered, not an invocation, but a simple man's simple oath. The medallion hung around his neck again but he had no intention of using it. There was no spell in any of the scrolls he'd memorized that would guide him to Escrissar.

  Then he heard sounds behind him, a heavy-footed tread, crushing the ripening grain as his own feet crushed grass in the groves. Drawing the sword, he spun around to face a silhouette half again his height and watching him with glowing yellow eyes.

  "Hamanu?" Pavek whispered, then, realizing it could be no one else, dropped to his knees and threw his sword away. "O Great and Mighty King-"

  "My pet is in the wastes yonder. You may follow."

  The ground gave around him as King Hamanu strode past Pavek. No one knew the sorcerer-king's true aspect, if he had one. Tonight he was the Lion of Urik, dressed in golden armor and crowned with a mane of golden hair. A sword as long as a man's leg hung from his waist, but it was the sharp, curved claws he flexed with each step that froze Pavek's heart in his throat.

  He followed, retrieving his own sword along the way and taking two strides for every one of the king's until they came to a dark low-crouching figure.

  "Recount!" Hamanu demanded.

  It was more than a simple command. Pavek's skull felt as if it had exploded, and he was, most definitely, not the king's target. Not yet.

  Escrissar scrabbled across the ground, a scavenger surprised by a true predator. "I have found the source of Laq," he babbled, as if any mortal could lie successfully to a sorcerer-king.

  "Ambition has blighted your imagination, my pet. You bore me."

  Hamanu's voice was as weary as his clawed hand was swift. He seized Escrissar by the neck and, lifting him off the ground, began to squeeze. The interrogator struggled wildly, then hung limp, but the king was not finished. By the light of the Lion-King's golden eyes, Pavek watched in nauseous horror as Hamanu's fist squeezed ever tighter. The bones in Escrissar's neck snapped and crumbled; gore flowed from his lifeless mouth and nostrils.

  And still Hamanu was not finished with his former favorite. He cast a spell the color of his eyes that wrapped itself around the interrogator's corpse and, layer by layer, from black robes to white bones, consumed it.

  When there was nothing left, the yellow eyes found Pavek on his knees again and trying heroically not to be sick.

  "I have need of a High Templar. Follow me."

  The king headed for the village.

  Pavek found his feet, somehow, and followed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Fires had been lit in the hearths within the village's inner rampart. A bright, crackling fire made any night seem safer -except when the flickering light reflected on Hamanu of Urik as he strode through the trees. Pavek, hard pressed to stay within ten human paces of the sorcerer-king, had neither the time nor the energy to call out a warning. Besides, nothing prepared anyone for the Lion: breathtakingly handsome in his golden armor, radiant with arcane power, cruel and terrible beyond mortal measure. After a day of loss and triumph, a handful of Quraiters simply swooned at the sight. The rest wisely dropped to their knees.

  "Where is she?" Hamanu asked. "Where is Telhami?"

  Not Who r
ules here? or some question of that sort, which Pavek had expected, but Where is Telhami? because, inexplicably, the Lion already knew who ruled Quraite. If he lived another day, Pavek promised himself he'd think through all the implications of this discovery, but for the moment-because those sulphur eyes were focused on him-he answered plainly:

  "In there." And pointed to Telhami's hut.

  Hamanu's head rose above the roof-beam. His shoulders were wider than the doorway. Pavek held his breath, waiting for the king to call Telhami by name, fearing what he would do if she could not answer. But Hamanu solved his problems on his terms. He pierced the hut's reed walls with his claws, seized the support poles and lifted the entire structure over his head before tossing it over the inner and middle rampart. His size was no longer a problem.

  Akashia and Ruari were held motionless in panic, both looking up, slack-jawed, from the length of linen cloth they'd wrapped around Telhami's corpse. Hamanu motioned them aside with a small gesture from bis huge, clawed hand, and they hastened to obey. Telhami lay in repose on her sleeping platform, arms folded over her breast, thin gray hair spread across a linen pillow. Remembering what the king had done with Escrissar, Pavek dreaded what he might do with her.

  Then the rightly feared ruler of Urik sank to one knee. While Pavek watched with the others, clawed fingers curled around Telhami's cheek so gently that her translucent parchment skin was not creased.

  "Telhami?"

  Pavek had thought she was dead, but she opened her eyes and, after a moment, smiled. It seemed that not only did King Hamanu know Telhami, she knew him, and not as an adversary.

  "So-" the king began, "this is Quraite."

  Telhami's smile deepened with evident pride, but she said nothing. Perhaps she couldn't speak, or move. Her hands seemed waxen in the light.

  "It has seen better days, I think. Don't you?"

  There was a moment's pause, then Hamanu laughed, an incandescent sound that echoed lightly from the trees.

  "But I was invited!"

  The king extended his hand toward Pavek, who reluctantly came closer. When he was in range, Hamanu ran a clawed finger down Pavek's neck, hard enough that he could feel its strength and sharpness, but not-he thought-hard enough to break the skin. That, he was certain, would come later, after the king had toyed with him and tired of his fear.

  "I never grow tired of fear, Pavek," King Hamanu assured him with a grin that revealed glistening fangs. "Never." Then he hooked the inix leather thong of Pavek's templar medallion, which the king withdrew into the firelight. "A regulator of the civil bureau." A claw gouged through the marks that indicated Pavek's rank, effectively eliminating him from that rank and that bureau. Hamanu let the defaced, but intact, medallion thump against Pavek's breast-bone, in effect proclaiming that he was a templar without a formal rank: a High Templar, if he ever chose to claim that distinction. "The best always slip away, Pavek. Remember that."

  And for a moment Hamanu seemed-he could not possibly be-less a leonine sorcerer-king with sulphur eyes and more a man, an ordinary man with clear brown eyes and a face a woman-Telhami-might find attractive.

  Then King Hamanu turned back to the sleeping platform.

  "Come back with me, Telhami. It's not too late. Athas has changed. Borys is gone; the stalemate is broken. Nothing is as it was, Telhami. For the first time in a millennium, I do not know what will happen after I wake up. Come back to Urik-"

  He fell silent and remained that way until Telhami closed her eyes. Then he stood up with a sigh of disappointment and age creaking in his bones. "Hold them tight or set them free, they always slip away. Always," he said to no one in particular and stared at the moons.

  "Was this your plan?" the king asked suddenly, his private rumination ended and, apparently, forgotten.

  Pavek, at whom the question had been directed, was, at first, too startled to answer. When the shock faded, a single word hung in his mind: "Yohan."

  But Yohan wasn't there to take the credit for his concentric ramparts. Yohan was gone, and Pavek did not feel better that he was alive instead.

  "They die, Pavek. They slip away when your eye's on something else, and you can never get them back. Learn to live with it. Think of them as flowers: a day's delight and then they die. You'll die yourself if you care about them."

  Then King Hamanu walked out through the ramparts, through the trees, and into the night.

  Pavek's gaze hadn't left the place where he'd disappeared when he felt an arm slip around his back. Silently, Akashia rested her head against his chest. Hesitantly-he didn't think such things would ever seem easy to him-Pavek put his hand on her neck and soothed the knotted muscles he found there.

  * * *

  Quraite took a final count of its losses the next day when the sun rose. More than half the adults had died fighting on the ramparts. A dozen groves would languish, unless strangers were drawn quickly across the salt flats or farmers who'd been content with the simple magic of green sprouting through broken ground began to hear the wilder call of druidry. Most of the children-the future-had survived. Akashia took them to her grove where they gathered wild-flowers to place on the shrouds of those who would never see the sun again.

  Out beyond the fields the farmers had dug a common grave where, with Pavek's help, they carried the remains of Quraite's dead. Akashia said the simple words of remembrance and peace. Each Quraiter who survived threw a shovelful of dirt into the hole. Pavek stayed with the men to finish the task. When they returned to the village center, a procession was ready to carry Telhami to her grove one last time.

  Pavek suspected she didn't need a half-dozen people to carry the bier they'd made from her sleeping platform across the barren land. She was light enough he could have carried her himself. Moreover, though it was clear that she was dying, she wasn't dead. Her mind was as sharp as it had ever been. He was certain she could have invoked the guardian with no difficulty at all and whisked herself to her grove in the blink of an eye.

  He heard laughter while that thought still circulated inside his head.

  They need to fed needed and useful.

  Shifting his hold on the platform, Pavek looked over at her face. Her eyes were closed; nothing had moved. Nothing would move. But it was Telhami, he was certain, speaking directly into his mind.

  Of course it is, Just-Plain Pavek. Have you made your decision?

  "What decision?" he said aloud, drawing the puzzled stares of his companions.

  Your future. The Lion has made you a handsome offer. I know; I took it once. Hamanu would not have ruled for a millennium if all his favorites were like Elabon Escrissar.

  Telhami's words pressed against Pavek's consciousness; he couldn't absorb them. He'd hung his life around certain assumptions. What Telhami said didn't truly threaten those assumptions. He'd known somewhere, deep within himself, that Urik could not have survived if King Hamanu was not as wise as he was cruel, if his templarate was uniformly depraved and rapacious. But she'd drawn pathways between his assumptions, and he was not ready to walk down them.

  Then, decide to stay in Quraite.

  She was in his thoughts. He shook his head vigorously to dislodge her, and once again drew stares.

  A man was entitled to some privacy!

  Laughter, followed by: You aren't sure, are you? Urik's your home.

  His home. He remembered what he felt when he stood beside House Escrissar with his hands pressed against the rough plaster. Kashi, of course: her anguish, his desire, and more than that-the surging power of Urik, seething with life and passion, like the Lion-King's eyes.

  The essence of the ancient city. A guardian.

  That gave his Unseen eavesdropper a flashing moment of surprise. So-there were some things even Telhami didn't know.

  Many things, Just-Plain Pavek. Many things. I do not know what happened to the halfling alchemist. Do you?

  He didn't, though he remembered that scarred face with its hate-filled eyes very well. There'd been half-elves among Escr
issar's allies, but no halflings, and Escrissar, himself had been alone when Hamanu found him. Perhaps the Lion-King had absorbed the interrogator's memories when he absorbed his essence. Perhaps the problem had already been solved with the king's customary thoroughness.

  Not likely. The Lion does not notice the grass 'til it's grown high enough to scratch his eyes.

  "I must go back-"

  More stares, and the realization that the trees of Telhami's grove loomed close ahead.

  Is that your decision?

  Was it? Pavek asked himself. Was he ready to turn his back on Quraite? On Akashia who-without saying a word, had, last night, asked him to stay? On Ruari-?

  Who will keep him in line, if you're not here to do it? Maybe Quraite is also your home?

  "I don't know," Pavek whispered as the grass of Telhami's grove began to brush against his legs.

  He stumbled when the procession came to an unexpected stop. Craning his neck to one side, peering around the heads in front of him, he spotted a thin, wiry arm and a patch of wild dark hair blocking their way.

  Zvain, he thought with guilt and shame, which Telhami echoed. They'd forgotten their prisoner, the misguided, betrayed, and abandoned orphan whose parents' death had brought so many consequences to them all. Especially Akashia at the procession's head. Pavek imagined the looks that had passed between them as Zvain raced away. Belatedly, he noticed that the boy's shirt was in tatters.

  It would not have been pleasant for him here yesterday.

  The procession started forward again-without Pavek.

  He couldn't imagine what the grove had been like yesterday when Telhami and Escrissar had dueled with nightmares as the skies darkened. When Telhami, apologetically-or so it seemed-offered him a glimpse of the horror and carnage, he backed away from the bier.'

  "He's a boy! A child." He continued his retreat, heedless of the branches whipping against him. "Everybody stood back and watched. What would he do? How would he grow? What mistakes would he make to doom himself? The Veil wouldn't take him. Oelus wouldn't take him. I left him behind. So Escrissar took him, lied to him, and turned him loose again. Who made the mistakes? We didn't even come out here to tell him who won-"