The Brazen Gambit Part 9

"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." care."

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

"But what, Just-Plain Pavek?" Akashia urged, seeming not to notice that anything was amiss. "What do you have, if it's not a conscience?"

"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 pa.s.sage 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 sc.u.m-slime traitor who's led us into an ambush. Shifty-eyed templar-sc.u.m." 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 sc.u.m-slime traitor who's led us into an ambush. Shifty-eyed templar-sc.u.m."

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

"Are you looking for something, someone?" Akashia 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 crystallized: 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 coa.r.s.e cloth had been bound over his eyes. Straw had been thrown over him as well; the sharp stalks p.r.i.c.ked 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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.

Wherever they were, the cobblestones hadn't been reset in a generation.

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 his 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 and fire!" Akashia swore. 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 ma.s.sive, 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 sc.u.m.

"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 was a fool. He slumped against the side planks of the cart. 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 pa.s.sed. "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 precious 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 a.s.sumed 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.

"-if you please, lady. There's a stone on the back of the sheath. The blade's as fine a steel as the dwarves of Kemelok ever made. It merits care."

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.

Only Ruari missed the moment completely. "You aren't going to let a mud-sc.u.m templar talk to you like that, are you? His kind never learns. He still thinks he can give orders and we'll all grovel at his filthy, stinking feet. He'll sing a different song once Telhami's through with him-"

"Ruari!" Akashia snarled.

And Pavek looked immediately at Yohan, whose face reflected unspeakable weariness in the faint light. The dwarf had the requisite experience and wisdom, but he wasn't the druids' leader, and neither was Akashia. That That honor belonged to someone named Telhami-a woman, by the name's cadence, and undoubtedly a force to be reckoned with. honor belonged to someone named Telhami-a woman, by the name's cadence, and undoubtedly a force to be reckoned with.

"Well," Pavek demanded when no one else seemed inclined to say anything, "what are you going to do with me? Hit me over the head again and dump my body where the storm will finish your dirty-work?"

Akashia finished stropping the blade but before she returned it to the sheath she took a moment-or so it seemed-to examine the elaborate knotwork along the hilt, the knotwork that concealed his mother's hair.

He wanted the knife back because the worth of its metal was measured in gold; he wanted Sian's midnight hair back because its worth was beyond all measure.

"You value this?" she asked.

Her expression went beyond calculation or suspicion. Remembering the white fire she'd seared through his mind at the gate, he feared for his life, though common-lore said any mind with enough thoughts for stealing could defend itself against a mind-bender's invasion. But he felt nothing explicitly threatening, only the elusive sense that he was still being measured and judged.

"I value it, yes."

"How much?"

"To you, or to Telhami?" he countered, letting them know he'd heard Ruari blurt out that name. "Nevermind."

She secured the valued knife in its sheath and the sheath in a fringed bag suspended from her waist.

Lightning flashed and the thunder came quicker, louder. A merchant wearing silken robes scurried toward them. He spotted the four of them and stopped suddenly, causing his tail of servants, carters, and apprentices to stumble against one another. One cart overturned completely with the sound of shattering gla.s.s.

"We're doomed!" the frantic merchant wailed. "Doomed! The inns are full. The stables. There's no place for an honest man to hide. Will you give me your place for ten pieces of gold?"

They looked at one another and at the wedge of ground where they stood. The place Yohan had selected for an urgent discussion lay between two tall, windowless walls and was as readily defensible as it was discreet. Another weight went on the balance pan in Pavek's mind with the scales tipping toward a conclusion that Yohan had seen service with one or another of the sorcerer-kings.

He knew what he'd do in similar circ.u.mstances: accept manifest good fortune, ten gold pieces, and make his stand against the storm from somewhere else. But he wasn't Yohan, and Yohan wasn't in charge.

Akashia held out her hand, palm-up. "You have so many with you, and so much more to protect. To deny your request would be to deny the principles of life itself."

The merchant extended his own, empty, hand toward her. He would have sworn he could hear both Yohan and and the half-elf muttering. But at the last moment before an agreement would have been reached without any exchange of gold, silver or ceramic bits, Akashia made a fist. the half-elf muttering. But at the last moment before an agreement would have been reached without any exchange of gold, silver or ceramic bits, Akashia made a fist.

"Was that eleven gold pieces you offered, good merchant, or twelve?"

"Good for her," Yohan whispered clearly enough for Pavek to overhear despite another clash of thunder.

Pavek let his swollen hands hang loosely in his lap, hoping not to draw attention to them. His fingers twitched uncontrollably as blood slowly, painfully, restored feeling to lifeless nerves. Yohan's concerns about his conspicuousness were valid: people would notice and people tended to remember what they noticed when gold was involved, whether it was a forty-piece bounty or the eleven pieces the merchant was dribbling slowly into Akashia's hand.

He lowered his head, avoiding eye-contact with anything but his feet, until the cart was well-away from the merchant and his company.

"Good work, Kashi!" Ruari cried. "Now we can buy a room at the inn-"

"Don't be a fool," Akashia retorted as she and Yohan turned toward the open, unguarded village gate. "If eleven pieces of gold could buy a place at an inn, that merchant wouldn't have given them to us."

The wind had picked up. It blew with enough force to set the heavy gate banging on its hinges. Yohan turned the cart toward the public kank-pen, just inside the gate. A gust caught the disc-shaped wheels and threatened to dump them all on the cobblestones.

"We're not going outside?" outside?" Ruari argued. "You've lost your wits. The storm! The kanks will go mad." Ruari argued. "You've lost your wits. The storm! The kanks will go mad."

"No madder than what's left loose in this village." Yohan stopped the cart and offered his brawny arm to Pavek.