The Brazen Gambit (15 page)

There were fresh gouges all along the wood and a fractured chunk of chitin as long as his forearm wedged near
one end. He traced the jagged edge with a trembling finger.

"You saved his life, templar-Pavek."

Akashia, beside him, didn't have to shout in order to be heard. The thunder was receding, and compared to what
they'd been, the wind and rain were insignificant.

Pavek grunted, but kept his attention focused on the chitin chunk. His mind held no recollection of striking the
creature who had lost it. Its dull yellow color was wrong for a kank. The inner edge was razor-sharp. He could have lost
an arm, a leg, or his head.

"Your shoulder's bleeding, Pavek. May I tend it for you?"

Akashia knelt beside him, and noticing the gash for the first time, he began to shiver. She placed her hand on his
brow. The shivering ceased. He didn't flinch when she peeled his shirt away from the wound, though he'd been to the
infirmary often enough to know he was going to hurt worse before he felt better.

But the druid's touch was pleasantly warm. It soothed his nerves before numbing them. Maybe Oelus was right.
Maybe there was something in the nature of the power King Hamanu granted his templars that caused pain. Or, just as
likely, the infirmary butchers simply didn't care.

Curiosity got the better of him, as it often did. He observed Akashia's every move until the gash was a tidy scab
some two handspans in length. Words for thanks were hard to find in his mind, awkward on his tongue; he grunted a
few about appreciation and respect.

"I owe you that and more," Akashia assured him as she got to her feet. "I think I have misjudged you, Just-Plain
Pavek. Without hesitation or thought of reward, you risked your life to save Ruari's, after you twice swore to kill him.
There is more to you than a yellow robe. You might be a man, after all."

A hand came between them, long-fingered and lithe. It grabbed the staff and retreated.

"He's a templar, Kashi. The worst kind of templar. He pretends to be what he's not. Wash your hands after you
touch him."

The huge blood-orange disk of the sun had climbed its own height above the eastern horizon when Pavek
stretched himself awake, more refreshed than a battered man had any right to be after a half-night's sleep. No trace of
the Tyr-storm remained-except for the crusted mud and the dark angular silhouettes of kes'trekels rising through the
dawn, scouting the storm-wrack for scavenge.

Nearby, Yohan cinched the cargo harness around the soldier-kank while the insect masticated a heap of forage.
The adobe walls of the roofless hut had been reduced to muddy mounds, pocked with the deep tracks of panicked
wildlife. Here and there, shards of pottery grew out of the mud: the trampled remnants of a good many of their water
jugs.

There'd be more room for him on the cargo platform, less water.

Overall, it was a bad trade.

Two of the riding kanks were foraging nearby. He looked around for the third kank, and found it collapsed in the
hardening mud, with Akashia crouched over its head. He wandered over for a closer look.

"It's no use," she said sadly. She'd heard someone coming, but hadn't raised her head to see who it was. "They're
scarcely conscious of their own life. They shed whatever healing energy I can impart to them."

"It must be very frustrating to try so hard with such little result."

Weariness turning to wariness when Akashia craned her neck toward him.

"Just curious. Didn't mean to disturb you."

She sighed, tucked storm-tangled hair behind her ears, and faced him with the hint of a smile on her lips. "Are
you sure you're not Just-Curious Pavek instead of Just-Plain Pavek?"

Embarrassed for reasons he couldn't decipher, he shook his head and retreated. Her almost-smile broadened into
a grin, then faded. Ruari's shadow-long, lean, and reinforced by his longer, leaner staff-fell between them.

"It's no use," Akashia repeated. "I cannot heal it, and it begins to suffer. Help me?"

There was no mistaking the question in her voice, or the need. Pavek thought he understood. Templar healers
could kill without hesitation either on the battlefield or, afterward, among the wounded. A druid, whose powers did not
flow from a sorcerer-king, might feel differently. Ruari seemed to have a sufficiently cruel temperament to enjoy what
others might call mercy.

But Ruari laid down his staff. He sat opposite Akashia, carefully arranging his knee with his hands as he did. The
joint was functional, but obviously sore and delicate. For a moment Pavek felt sorry for the troublesome half-wit whose
life he'd saved, then everything was lost in astonishment. They pressed their pains together above the kank's head.

With her eyes tightly closed, Akashia began a droning, wordless chant The complex rhythms passed through
her swaying body to Ruari, who began an eerie countermelody. Pavek's mind filled with thoughts of death and
desperate flight, but his curiosity was stronger, and he remained where he was while the pair wove a spell to end the
kank's suffering.

The insect had no eyelids to close over glazing pupils, no proper lips or nostrils through which a dying breath
might pass; nonetheless, he knew the moment when its spirit departed. An inhumanly piercing wail seemed to emerge
" directly out of Akashia's heart before she went suddenly silent and limp. Ruari held her wrists until he finished the
chant with another ear-splitting wail.

So, Ruari was a druid, too.

Pavek hid his slack-jawed surprise behind a hand. His thoughts leapt to a comforting conclusion: if that sullen,
vengeful scum could summon Athas's latent magic, then there was hope for a determined ex-templar who'd already
learned the words and lacked only the music.

And he needed a full measure of hope later that day.

Within hours of settling himself among the remaining water jugs and empty racks on the soldier-kank's cargo
platform, he looked across a landscape where there were no streets or walls.

No signs of life at all.

The gentle sloshing of the water jugs was a constant reminder of mortal vulnerability to the elements. He put his
faith in the wheel and closed his eyes.

They traveled steadily, uneventfully, from sunrise to sunset for two days. On the third day, for reasons Pavek
could not guess and the others would not explain, they made camp early. Their journey-bread was almost gone and
more than half the jugs were empty. A man could survive out here beyond the city, if he was well-prepared and
cautious. But not forever, not long enough to get back to Urik, even if he knew the way.

The only creatures that thrived in the parched badlands were the carrion-eating kes'trekels, always circling high
overhead, vigilant for opportunity. Maybe the druids were lost. Maybe they'd realized there wasn't enough water to
get them where they were going. Maybe Akashia and Ruari would hold their hands over him as he slept, and he'd
never wake up again.

He resisted sleep until the moons, Ral and Guthay, were both above the eastern horizon and his companions
were snoring softly. Then, remembering that the kank had not suffered, he let his eyes close. He wandered alone
through a dreamless sleep and was still alive when morning came. The druids were alive, too, though their expressions
were as bleak as the land around them.

As he'd done on the other mornings, he helped Yohan secure the dwindling number of full jugs onto the cargo
harness. Out of sight and earshot, on the far side of the huge soldier-kank, he asked the dwarf where they were going
and when they'd get there. The dwarf answered: Quraite, and added nothing more. In frustration and rising fear, he
asked Akashia the same question and got no answer at all, though Ruari, typically, had snarled an ominous: "You'll
see when you get there, templar. If you get there. If the Fist of the Sun doesn't squeeze the life out of you first.''

They'd left the badlands for something worse: a natural pavement of dazzling white that extended from the claws
of their kanks to every horizon. The plain was featureless, except for glittering powder swirls, fueled by the sun and
darting through the utterly still air. The spirals collapsed without a sound or warning, as suddenly they'd appeared.

One passed close, spattering Pavek's face with sharp-edged grains. His tongue touched his cracked lips and
tasted salt.

Yohan and the druids covered their faces with thong-tied chitin shields. Each shield had a narrow slit over the
eyes to reduce the glare and a chin-length veil that blocked some of the stinging dust. Pavek assumed the otherwise
careful druids would have packed an extra shield somewhere, but Ruari insisted that there were none to spare. Neither
Yohan nor Akashia corrected him. So he raked his hair forward and pulled his shirt up over his head.

Heat wrapped itself around him. Even the kes'trekels shunned this place: the Fist of the Sun. Precious moisture
leached through every pore of his itching skin. He thought he might die and feared the druids would abandon him here
with the soldier-kank, whose flesh was inedible, and a few jugs of water. All water would buy him was a few days of
ever-increasing agony before he died.

When the air cooled, he thought that he had died, but it was only the sun setting.

They watered the kanks, ate the last of the journey-bread, and filled the waterskins that Akashia, Ruari, and
Yohan carried with them on their smaller kanks, leaving the last water-jug half-empty. Then, as the first bright stars
appeared in the lavender twilight, they remounted and continued their trek. Pavek didn't need to ask why they hadn't
made camp on the salt plain: either they escaped the Fist of the Sun before it rose again, or they died. He cradled the
last water-jug in his lap, listening to the precious liquid slap against the clay, a counter-point to the six-beat rhythm of
the kanks' claws and the pounding of his heart.

Pale silver Ral and golden Guthay made their nightly journey through the stars. The faintest stars faded, the
eastern horizon took on an ominous glow, and the crusty salt plain still stretched endlessly in all directions. He
allowed himself two sips from the jug before pulling his shirt over his head.

He wished he'd stayed in Urik: King Hamanu's wrath could be no worse than the next few hours would be. He
prayed that his mind died before his body. Then his mind emptied, and he waited to die.

"As ever and always-a sight to make your heart sing in your breast!"

Yohan's voice drifted through the emptiness. The heat was gone, and with it, the scrunch of salt beneath the
kanks' claws. Had his final wish been granted? Had his parched spirit slipped through the cracks in the Sun's Fist? But,
surely, the veteran dwarf would not have chosen to accompany him into the trackless afterlife.

Shrugging his shirt back to his shoulders, he shook the hair from his eyes, looked up, blinked and blinked again.
Scrublands with their dusty grasses and waxy, thick-leaved shrubs had never looked so vibrant, and full of life, but the
scrub paled before a swathe of rich, deep green directly ahead of them, as large, he guessed, as mighty Urik and
crowned with clouds. Not the ugly, mottled harbingers of a Tyr-storm, but rounded hills as white as the salt plain
behind them. Or was it behind them?

The forbidding waste was nowhere to be seen on either side or straight behind, and the sun, shining bright but
mild, though in the right place overhead, seemed scarcely familiar. Reflexively, he clutched the empty space beneath
his shirt where King Hamanu's medallion had hung.

"Quraite?" he whispered, rubbing his eyes and expecting to see something altogether different when he
reopened them.

Akashia, riding behind Ruari now, heard his disbelief and turned around with a smile. "Home."

Carefully tended fields of grain marked Quraite's perimeter. Brick wells with wooden windlasses stood in the
center of each field. The druids' oasis sat atop a reservoir large enough, reliable enough to send water to individual
fields.

Within the fields a ring of trees grew to such density that whatever lay at the center remained hidden.

Trees.

In Urik, during the Festival of Flowers at the start of Rising Sun, ordinary citizens were permitted onto the streets
of the royal quarter. Winding in long, slow lines, they'd wait all day for a chance to peek through the iron gates of King
Hamanu's palatial garden where the fabled Trees of Life unfurled fragrant, short-lived blossoms. At other odd times
during the years the fruit-trees nurtured in the atrium recesses of their wealthy houses would send clouds of perfume
onto the nearby streets. Sometimes the aromas incited riots among those who would never savor sweet nectar on their
tongues.

Templars ate fruit regularly-it was one of their many privileges. But in all his life, Pavek had never seen a tree that
was not surrounded by guards and walls.
The druids might call Quraite their home, but to Pavek, dizzy from heat, thirst, and days of traveling, it had the
look of paradise.

Breezes shivered the surface of a clear-flowing stream. Each ripple reflected the sky, creating a vast herd of
cloud-creatures that raced westward, toward the setting sun. Telhami swirled her hand through the water, destroying
the image. Every sunset, no matter how beautiful, was a moment of dying, and she did not like to dream of death. She
moved her dream to the ever-growing grass on the stream bank.

A delicate flower the color of sunrise-bright yellow blushed with pink and amber-poked through the grass. Drops
of nectar shimmered in its heart.

Long ago, the flower had had a name. Now it bloomed only in her dreams where memory ruled and names were
unnecessary.

A crimson bee whirred out of nowhere. It drank the shimmering nectar, then rode the breeze to Telhami's ear.

"Akashia returns," it whispered. "She's got a stranger with her!"

The dreamscape vanished, replaced by a dry wind: the best Athas had to offer anymore, even here in guarded
Quraite where druid spellcraft held the land and memory together.

"Grandmother, did you hear me? Are you awake?"

The voice belonged to a child, not a bee.

"Yes, I heard you, little one," Telhami replied, her eyes still closed. "Go fetch me a bowl of water. I'll be awake
when you return."

She heard the light patter of bare feet running to the well. Children ran, grown folk walked, and she, herself, made
the simple journey from dreams to wakefulness no faster than a tree grew. Then again, she'd made the journey so many
times that it was no longer simple.

Everyone who dwelt in Quraite called her Grandmother, as had their parents before them. She'd been
Grandmother to their grandmothers and though she was not as old as Quraite, she remembered the scents of
vanished, nameless yellow flowers better than she remembered the loves and laughter of her youth.

She wasn't condemned to frailty. Druid lore offered many detours around the vicissitudes of aging, and many
druids availed themselves of restorative spellcraft both directly and through the strength of their followers. In the
misty years between then and now, Telhami had purged years, even decades, in a single moonlit night of
spellcasting-until she'd acquired wisdom to understand that the way of life was age and, eventually, death. Pursuing
immortality would eventually leave her no different than a Dragon or a sorcerer-king, and so, finally, she'd let the years
accumulate.

Still, Quraite sustained her as she sustained, guarded, and protected Quraite. She was frail and tired easily. But
she was also the master of her small, green world and grateful to be alive.

"I've brought your water, Grandmother. Are you awake yet? Are you ready to sit up?"

The folk of Quraite, including a dusky girl-child with solemn, watchful eyes and a translucent alabaster bowl
carefully balanced on her outstretched palm, tended her, their beloved Grandmother, as carefully as she tended
Quraite. "Yes, little one, I'm ready. How far away are they?"