The Brazen Gambit Read online

  Joat flexed hi knees, sinking close to the ground-as only a dwarf could. He eased forward, brushing his bare feet in arcs that never lost contact with the dirt floor, never surrendered balance. The vital blood vessels and nerves at the top of the madman's weapon-side leg were his target, but he was careful not to give himself away by looking there. Silently invoking Rkard, last of the dwarven kings, for luck, Joat sank another handspan into bis crouch and waited for the opportunity.

  He felt himself fall, but neither saw nor remembered the blow that toppled him. The raver's long knife knocked his shorter weapon from his hand when he raised it in desperate defense. The stone-hard mekillot ribs of the bar saved his life, blocking the long knife's cut. The composite blade broke from the force of the downstroke.

  "Hamanu," someone swore and several other templars repeated the word.

  The magic student, still standing at the edge of Joat's vision, had drawn a metal knife, not long enough to pierce the madman's guard but sufficient for defense against the broken, composite blade. The student grunted at another burly human who carried an obsidian-edged sword. This second templar nodded in reply, and gripped his sword with both hands, while the student played shield for them both. Working as a team, they backed the raver from bis victims, then the swordsman dealt a swallow-tail slash that left the madman's weapon arm hanging by a mere flap of skin.

  But, the madman kept to his feet-once again roaring his nonsense about the sun burning inside his skull. He used his remaining hand to pry his broken knife from the shock-clenched fist of his dangling arm. The templar pair stood in flat-footed stupor as the raver slashed me swordsman's face with the broken blade and backhanded the student into the nearest wall.

  "Mind-bender!" another voice shouted, offering the only possible explanation for what they'd witnessed.

  No one else took up the attack. The madman remained where he was, cornered, grievously wounded, undefeated, and just possibly indefeasible. Everything that breathed on Athas had a jot of mind-bending talent, but templars wisely left theirs unnurtured. King Hamanu did not look kindly on powers that he could not bestow, or withhold.

  The blond templar with the broken teeth shoved a hand deep into the neckline of his tunic and withdrew a ceramic object Joat had sincerely never hoped to see exposed in his establishment.

  "Hamanu!" the templar cried loudly-not an oath but a prayer. "Hear me, 0 Great and Mighty One!"

  Other templars reached for the thongs around their necks. Their medallions were alike-baked slabs of yellow clay into which the sorcerer-king's leonine aspect had been carved. While Joat trembled, the medallions began to glow, and a pair of slanting golden ovals appeared above the open roof of Joat's Den.

  His blood went cold in his heart: No man could see those eyes, that way, and hope to live.

  Flameblade.

  The words of invocation exploded in Joat's skull, compounding the headache he'd already gotten from the raving mind-bender. He closed his eyes in agony and missed the moment when the sorcerer-king's magic channeled through the medallion-holding templars. Joat felt the flames' wind and heat, heard their roar and the maniacal squeals of the madman. He smelled noxious magic. He could have opened his eyes-was sorely tempted to look-but wisdom prevailed, and he kept them tightly shut until the squealing ceased, then the flames, and only the stench of charred flesh and hair lingered.

  "It is done," a quaver-voiced templar announced.

  Joat opened his eyes. His own wounds were minor, though the leather apron would have to be replaced. Another elf knelt beside the musician who would clearly survive, but never play his pipes again. The elf who'd first risen to his defense remained where she had fallen, the victim of bad luck and the unique vulnerabilities of long, light elven skeletons. Joat bent down to close her eyes as he joined the crowd around the raver's corpse.

  The blond templar who'd invoked the king's aid wore a scarlet thread in his sleeve and held authority the others respected. He knelt by the largely intact corpse, muttering as he peeled away charred strips of doth.

  Granted, Joat hadn't been watching when the spell did its work, but he'd expected a smear of ash and grease, a charred husk at most. Instead, there was an emaciated man-impossible to guess his age with his skin hanging hollow from his bones-lying dead on the taproom floor.

  "Should've cindered." One of the templars put words to Joat's misgivings. "There were five of us together. He shouldn't be more than dung in the dirt."

  "He said the sun was eating bis brain, and I believe it. Be glad he was feeling generous." That from the swordsman with his fingers pressed tight against the gash in his cheek. Those words provoked a round of muttering. The templars agreed Hamanu had to be told his boon had fallen short. The blond templar wasn't volunteering, and neither was anyone else-which meant there was a bad chance Urik's templars were going to let that particular burden fall on an ordinary citizen's shoulders.

  "Laq," he said, rising to his feet and leaving the blackened, definitive symptom for all to see.

  Someone hawked into the cold hearth, spitting out evil before it took root, the way peasant farmers did. Another i swore and slapped fist against palm.

  Like the black-cloud rains, Laq had appeared in Urik after the Dragon's death and Hamanu's return. The storms, violent as they were, held out the faint promise that someday water might again be plentiful in the Tablelands. Laq left no similar optimism in its wake.

  At first no one had known what caused men and women of all races to stop eating, stop sleeping, and finally lose their; wits entirely. Earliest speculation said Laq was a disease, or possibly a parasite, like the little purple caterpillars that did eat through their host's brain.

  But the worms turned their victims into blissful idiots, not raving madmen, and they didn't turn his tongue soot-black from tip to root.

  These days the rumormongers claimed that Laq was an elixir the nobles had concocted in a futile effort to wring more work out of their slaves. Supposedly the elixir worked, after a fashion, but strong, energized slaves had a disturbing tendency to overpower their overseers; and when the slaves were deprived of their elixir, they became even more obstreperous.

  For a second coin the mongers would claim that King Hamanu had issued a secret decree banning Laq without ever defining what it was. The king, they said, promised an unpleasant death to those who traded in it.

  Joat was skeptical of two-coin mongers: the sorcerer-king didn't issue secret decrees about imaginary elixirs; he certainly didn't need a new excuse to get rid of those he didn't like, and any death at Hamanu's hands was unspeakably unpleasant. Still, something was seeping through Urik. Folk were starving themselves, going mad, and dying with dead black tongues.

  "Never been one this hard to kill before," the magic student mused, no worse for his battering and standing, once again, beside his table, collecting his parchment scraps. "If it's Laq, something's been added. Something's been changed."

  The dreaded word, more dreaded than Laq itself: change.

  Imagine telling King Hamanu that his magic had been scarcely strong enough to bring down a starving human, then imagine telling him that there was something loose in Urik that had given madmen mind-bender's strength and the ability to throw off magic.

  A sane man would make the corpse tell his own story. And it could be done. A sorcerer-king had ways of getting what he wanted from the dead, and ways of punishing them, too, but not even King Hamanu could unscramble a madman's wits.

  Failing the corpse, send that ridiculous-looking student, who'd raised the whole uncomfortable possibility....

  "Pavek!" the blond templar shouted, pointing at the table.

  But Pavek was gone, with only swaying strands of beads in the doorway to say that he'd left in a hurry. A templar rushed into the alley after him. Joat scurried to the table, worried that he'd been stiffed, but-no. Though the parchment scraps and the wax tablet were missing, two chipped, dirty ceramic coins sat in their place. Joat swept them into his belt-pouch. Then he mad
e the rounds again, chivying the regulars to pay their tabs and pleading for someone to haul the corpses to the boneyard. They took the elf, and left him with the raver.

  Joat hobbled to the bar, the ache in his head nearly balanced by the ache in his side. He probably had a few cracked ribs-nothing that wouldn't mend naturally in ten days or twenty. When it came to getting beaten up, there were advantages to being a dwarf. He felt under the mekillot rib for the sack where his wife kept the powder she smeared on their grandchildren's gums when they were cutting their teeth. Mixed with a bit of water and swallowed fast, Ral's Breath did wonders for aches that were too big to ignore but not serious enough for a sawbones or healer.

  * * *

  Pavek heard his name followed by a string of curses. He'd heard worse and kept walking at the same steady pace, confident that no one seriously considered pursuing him. Templars didn't act without orders, the smart ones didn't anyway, and Nunk, the blond Instigator with the rotten teeth, wasn't going to issue any more orders tonight. Nunk wasn't bad, for an Instigator, and he wasn't stupid. He'd guess what Pavek meant to do, and leave him alone to do it. There wasn't going to be enough glory in this night's work to warrant a share of it.

  The customhouse bordered one of the few neighborhoods that hadn't been rebuilt since the Tyrian gladiators sacked the city. It might be, eventually, but in the meantime its broken buildings swarmed with squatters. All sorts of folk wound up there. Some were hiding from creditors or templars, some were only temporarily down on their luck, but for most of them, the quarter was the last stop before the boneyard. They were too poor to be robbed and too desperate to risk robbing someone else.

  Pavek paused on the brink of the rubble. He cocked his head, using the stars to fix his position relative to Joat's Den, then recalling the first scream, the murdered woman's scream.

  There was little doubt in his mind that the raver had killed her before bursting into Joat's: the timing was right, the raver would have killed anything that crossed his path, and, witless as the madman was, the squatter's quarter was probably where he'd been living.

  By Hamanu's decree, Urik was a square city. Streets were supposed to intersect at squared angles, but the king's order had broken down in the squatter's quarter. The old streets were blocked with fallen walls, new paths wove drunkenly through the ruins.

  Pavek took his bearings again and reconsidered his whole plan. This wasn't his job. He was a customs guard: third-rank Regulator in link's third-rate civil bureau, who spent his days making sure no one stole the city's bonded property without the proper signatures. He wasn't authorized to haul corpses up to the necromancers for interrogation, and he wasn't authorized to worry about Laq.

  But he'd gotten a glimpse into the fire of the raver's mind just as he'd gone flying rump-first into the wall, and he'd seen the face of a woman torn apart with terror.

  Find the woman, find some answers about Laq-that was his entire plan. Urik was all the home he'd ever have, and he didn't like the thought of its being overrun with ravers, especially mind-bending, magic-resistant ravers. Pavek had been face-to-face with King Hamanu just once in his life, when he'd gotten his first yellow robe. He'd have sworn there wasn't anything he feared more than his king, until he watched five templars focus flameblade spells on a black-tongued raver, without reducing him to ash.

  Eventually, Pavek found what he was looking for: human, lying on her back, half in shadow, half in the pale starlight, one leg tucked demurely beneath the other, her neck so brutally torn and twisted that her face was pressed against the ground. Pavek moved her gently into the full starlight; his hands trembled as he turned her head back to a normal angle. The face matched the one the raver had blasted into his memory. The bureau necromancers would be pleased: a sudden death-alive one heartbeat and dead the next-meant the dead-heart sorcerers would get useful answers to their questions.

  Pavek closed her mouth and eyes, then closed his own, waiting for his nausea to pass before he tried to hoist her across his shoulder for the long hike back to the civil bureau's headquarters.

  A scraping sound emerged from the nearby shadow: a leather sandal grinding on sand and broken bricks, but a smaller sound than anything full-grown would make. Pavek lunged low and caught himself an armful of human boy that he dragged into the starlight for closer inspection.

  "Leave her alone!" the boy sobbed, pummelling Pavek ineffectively with bis fists.

  "I can't. She's been murdered. Questions have to be asked, answered. The man who did it can't help. His mind was gone before he died."

  The boy went limp in the templar's arms as all his strength flowed into wails of anguish. Pavek thought he understood. He'd never known his father. His mother had done the best she could, buying him a bed in the templarate orphanage when he was about five years old. He'd hardly seen her after that, but he'd cried when they told him her crumpled body had been found at the base of the highest wall. There was a lock of her black hair beneath the leather-wrapped hilt of his metal knife.

  But Pavek had forgotten the words for compassion, if he'd ever known them. Ten years in the orphanage, another ten in the barracks had erased such simple things from his mind. He squeezed the boy against his chest and thumped him on the head. He thought that was what his mother had done, once or twice, and the boy did grow quiet

  "Give me a hand. We'll take her to the civil bureau, then I'll find you a place-"

  "The bureau!" Shocked out of his tears, the boy wriggled free. "Who are you?"

  "Pavek. Just plain Pavek. Regulator-"

  "A templar!"

  The boy's fist shot forward, a small hard object striking just below Pavek's groin. He folded inward, barely staying on his feet as the boy scampered into the shadow. Not far. The footsteps didn't fade; they stopped. Pavek cursed beneath his breath as he slowly straightened his back and his legs.

  "Boy-come back here. Urik's no place for a boy alone."

  Pavek knew he was right, but words gasped through clenched teeth lost something of their effectiveness, and the orphan stayed where he was. When he was confident of his balance, Pavek removed a few ceramic coins from his belt purse, displaying them in the starlight.

  "Look-you'll need these."

  The boy didn't take the bait. Well, Pavek reckoned he wouldn't have taken it either, under similar circumstances. He dribbled the coins into the dirt for the boy to retrieve later, then, with a stab of pain through his midsection and a loud groan, he hoisted the corpse across his shoulders and headed back the way he'd come.

  Chapter Two

  Hot, sun-filled days came and went. The fist-sized bruise in Pavek's groin faded; so did the memory of who'd given it to him and why. He filled his memory with scribbling from the archive, not the dreary details of his own life.

  Pavek was on morning duty in the vast customhouse, transferring hock-sized sacks of salt from one barrel to another, ticking off groups of five on a wax tablet as he went. His gut reaction was anger when the adolescent messenger interrupted him. The girl dropped to her knees. Slender, trembling arms thrust through the plain yellow sleeves of her robe and stretched across the floor to touch his feet.

  "Forgive me, great one." Pavek was a big man with limbs as thick-muscled as any gladiator's, but not a great one.

  Who knew what Sian would say if she could see her only child now? His cronies joked that the only promotion waiting for him was the one to intimidator, for which he was so, obviously well suited.

  Intimidator. Templar of the eighth rank. Not if he lived a thousand years like King Hamanu. He was just plain Pavek, a third-rank, flash-tempered fool, and he'd never be anything more.

  "Get up, girl."

  He tried to help her, but she scrabbled away.

  "Medea wants you." The messenger hid her arms beneath the long panel at the front of her robe and regarded Pavek with a stare that was both defiant and defeated.

  Pavek threw the three sacks dangling from his left hand into the barrel he was filling. He made a mark in the wax with
his thumbnail and peeked into the barrel he was emptying. Ignoring the girl, he scooped up another handful of sacks.

  "One... Two... Three..." He tossed them as he counted.

  "She said 'now'."

  "Four. Five. I'm counting, girl. 'Now' happens when I'm done." Another fingernail impression in the wax, another scoop of salt-sacks.

  "I can count for you."

  "Yeah-for me and who else? Rokka? Dovanne? Metica herself? I go up there and find she doesn't want to see my ugly face at all, then I come back here and find there's half a barrel missing-with my mark on the roster. No thanks, girl." Pavek tossed sacks as he spoke. "I've been down that road before."

  "Metica said 'now,' great one, and I'll catch it if you're late. I'll just count, I swear it. I'll swear whatever you want. Put in a good word for me, great one?"

  "Five. Pavek. Just plain Pavek, or Right-Hand Pavek- and if you think my good word will help you with Medea, you're an even greater fool than me." He clapped the salt dust from his hands and handed her the wax tablet. "If there's less than two hundred when I get back, I'll come looking for you, girl, and you'll wish you were never born."

  She pushed back stringy locks of dull, brown hair, revealing a blood-crusted gouge along her hairline. "Gotta do better than that, Pavek, if you want to intimidate me."

  The salt-room had only a grease-lamp for light. It was hard to tell whether she was full-human or half-elf. Pavek guessed half-elf. Whatever attraction drew elves and humans together, it didn't usually extend to their children. He'd never met a half-elf who wasn't outcast by its mother and father's kin alike. They were all orphans, and they scrambled for whatever crumbs of patronage they could get, just like him.

  "Right," he said, rolling down his yellow sleeves, uncovering a slim collection of crimson and orange threads. "Two hundred, and seal the barrel when you're done."