The Brazen Gambit (2 page)

But from everything Joat had ever overheard in his taproom, a lowly civil bureau templar entreated Hamanu for
magic as seldom as possible.

And always regretted it afterward.

"You ready?" Joat repeated, holding the thong-closed spout of the sack over the templar's grungy tankard.

Before the templar could answer yea or nay, another scream shattered the night's calm. This scream wasn't
feminine or anguished or very distant. It was a sound of pure rage, nearby and coming closer. Entirely ominous.
Absently, expertly, Joat put a slip-knot in the thong before dumping the broy-sack on the studious templar's table. He
slid his hand beneath the apron again, unsheathing a talon-knife with a blade half as long as his forearm. The weapon
had scarcely cleared its sheathe when something loud and angry thrashed through the beaded curtain that served as
his door. Joat saw that the shape was mannish rather than womanish, human rather than dwarven or elven, but mostly
he saw the long, jagged-edge blade that ran with blood. The man belched nonsense about the sun eating his brain;
he'd crossed the line from rage to unreason, slashing wildly at enemies only he could see.

Joat spared a worried glance for his own knife, which looked puny compared to the opposition, but the Den was
his place. He'd go down if he had to, but he'd go down fighting. The Den was his focus, not merely the center of his
mundane life, but the uniquely dwarven center of spirit as well. When a dwarf broke faith with his focus, his spirit
found no rest after his death. It returned as a howling banshee to haunt the scene of his failure.

The last thing Joat wanted to do was bequeath a cursed tavern to his children and grandchildren. He flexed his
fingers around the leather-wrapped hilt and took a cautious step toward the beaded curtain.

But Joat wasn't the only one easing toward the raver. The templars took a proprietary interest in Joat's Den.
Though they could go wherever they wanted in the city, they weren't welcome in many other places. Any of the
dwarf's regulars would bust the jaw of anyone who accused him, or her, of friendship, or some other soft-hearted
sentiment, but there were fealties no one mentioned. Chairs, stools, and an occasional table overturned as the regulars
lurched to their feet Hesitation rippled through Joat's Den-as if every man, woman, elf, dwarf, human, or half-breed had
expected to play the solitary fool and was stunned to be part of a group instead. The templars lost their natural
advantage in that hesitation. The raver attacked the hapless musician who played dirges, but did not notice death
approaching.

The youth screamed as the long knife came down across his arms. His fragile pipes slipped from his hands and
were crushed by his own weight and that of the madman who fell atop him.
With a scream of her own, an elf templar broke ranks with her hesitant peers. The razor-sharp petals of a
punch-knife bloomed between the fingers of both fists before she dived across the floor and plunged them into the
raver's flanks below his ribs. Away from their tribe-and the templarate was as far from a tribe as an elf could get-Joat's
elven regulars usually stood aloof from any brawl, but they had notions of loyalty and friendship no non-elf could
hope to understand, and this particular one had evidently taken the musician's misfortune personally.

But the madman they all believed mortally wounded writhed like a serpent in the elf s grasp. Forgetting the
musician, who had survived the initial attack and lay moaning, curled around his blood-soaked arms, the raver brought
the spiked pommel of his long knife down on the elf's undefended neck. She groaned once and went limp.

Oblivious to the blood streaming from his wounds, the raver got to his feet, holding his weapon too high, leaving
his gut and legs unprotected. Anyone could see the inviting line of attack, but neither Joat nor any templar rushed to
accept it. Something was seriously amiss: the raver should have bled to death by now.

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 made 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.