The Brazen Gambit (29 page)

"How is she?" he asked.

"Better," Yohan answered with a disturbing lack of enthusiasm.
"How much better?"

"Akashia?'' He held out his hand.

Her gaze followed his fingers. Her hand rose toward his, then fell. And her eyes went flat and unchanging.

"She's coming back," Ruari insisted. "She sees us and hears us; she didn't before. She's coming. It's just a matter
of time."

"Do we have the time?" Yohan asked. "I don't think it would be wise to carry her all the way to Modekan, not
half-aware, the way she is. It's time or a cart. How safe is this place? Who's in charge? Templars?"

Pavek thought of the no-nonsense baker who'd collected the weekly ten-bit rent while he was here with Zvain.
The woman might be willing to let them stay as long as they needed, as long as they paid in metal coins. She hadn't
seemed the sentimental sort who'd hold a marketable room empty in the hope that an orphan boy would return to it,
and since the room had obviously remained empty since he'd left, they obviously wouldn't have a lot of competition
for it. If he could find her... talk to her

Yohan's fist rapped his forearm and gave a gesture toward the door. The latch rose, struck the bolt, and fell.
Pavek and Yohan scurried for their weapons; Ruari crouched beside the bed, one arm around Akashia. A hook-shaped
device, not unlike Ruari's lockpick, slid through a hole in the door to snag the string, but the knots Pavek had tied after
curfew meant that the string couldn't be withdrawn through the hole and that the bolt couldn't be moved from the
other side of the door.

Pavek, standing beside the door, mimed sliding the bolt free; Yohan nodded agreement and Pavek pushed it
loose and lifted the latch itself, then he retreated hastily as the door began to move. It had happened quickly enough
that he hadn't given a thought to who might appear in the doorway and was speechless when it proved to be a hale
and healthy Zvain.

"Pavek!" the youngster shouted through a gleeful smile. He spread his arms wide and, ignoring the sword, flung
himself across the room. "Pavek!"

Wiry arms locked firmly around Pavek's ribs. Tousled hair and a still-downy cheek pressed against his chest.
Stunned and vaguely perplexed by Zvain's affectionate explosions-it was hardly what he'd have expected after leaving
the boy behind, hardly the way he would have reacted were their positions reversed-Pavek draped his free arm limply
around the boy's shoulders, lowering the sword until it rested against his leg.

"Who's he?" Ruari and Yohan demanded together.

"Zvain. He-" Pavek began, but Zvain was quicker.

"Pavek saved my life after my father killed my mother and Laq killed my father. He stayed with me, right here. He
had plans. We were going to put a stop to the poison. Then he disappeared, just vanished one afternoon." Zvain
swiveled in Pavek's arms, fixing him with a wide-eyed stare that was far more open and trusting than anything Pavek
remembered seeing while they dwelt together in the bolt-hole. "But I knew you'd come back. I knew it! And you have,
haven't you? You've found a way to stop Laq, haven't you? And these people are going to help?"

"Zvain, that's not-" The truth, he wanted to say, but Ruari cut him off:

"What is he? Your son? Your son that you left here?"

Trust the half-wit scum-the oh-so-predictable half-wit scum to see everything with his own peculiar prejudice.
"Zvain's not my son-"

Zvain cut him off again. "More like a brother. Aren't you?"

Something was wrong, subtly but terribly wrong, though it would be harder to admit that the youngster was
telling a pack full of lies than to go along with the glowing portrait he created of their prickly weeks together. He was
still seeking the words that would explain the contradictions he felt when Ruari seized his sleeve.

"You left him here. You were looking all around that afternoon. You said it was templars, but it wasn't. You left
him here, all alone-"

"Can't blame him for that, Ruari," Yohan interrupted softly but urgently. "We weren't exactly gentle with Pavek
here that day. He wanted to keep the boy clear of us. Can't blame him for that, you least of all."

To his credit, Ruari relaxed his hold on Pavek's shirt and stepped back to take Zvain's measure. By temperament,
at least, they could have been brothers. Zvain released one half of his grip on Pavek's ribs and took Ruari's hand.

"Are you Pavek's friend now?"

"You should've told us, Pavek," Ruari said through clenched teeth and looking at Pavek, not Zvain. "Once you
knew we were safe in-" He blinked and cocked his head; Telhami had worked her mind-bending spellcraft on him, too,
leaving that gray hole in his memory where the name of that safety should lie.

"Safe?-Where?" Zvain asked, looking from Ruari to him. "Where've you been. You weren't in Urik. I know. I
looked everywhere."

"Once we were safe at home," Ruari finished. The interruption gave Pavek a necessary half-moment to think.
"Where have you been?" He looked down into the open, trusting face, which blinked once and returned to the
wariness he remembered. "Not here. No one's been in this room since I left. And you've changed, Zvain-"

Ruari seized his shirt again. "Of course the boy's changed! You left him. He couldn't live here, not alone. You
should rejoice that he survived and that he doesn't hate you for abandoning him. You should swear that you won't
leave him behind ever again. -Ever!"

Pavek supposed Ruari was right, supposed he should swear the very oath Ruari was suggesting. He wanted to.
Zvain's face was guileless again, offering him a new beginning, if he'd take it. And he wanted to take it. Wanted to
believe the boyish candor.

Akashia. For the first time since Zvain had entered the room, he looked to the far side of the room where he'd last
seen Akashia staring blank-eyed and listless.

But no longer.

She was crouched on the bed, flattened against the dirt wall, her mouth working silently, while her hands wrung
the linen sheet that trailed down in front of her. Yohan and Ruari leapt past him to her assistance.

"What's wrong with her?" Zvain asked, and pressed tighter still against Pavek, forcing him to stand there,
helpless. "Has she been eating Laq?"

It was a possibility Pavek hadn't considered. Escrissar was capable of feeding her poison with the meals that kept
her strength up for his interrogations. But Laq was a poison that some people-Zvain's father among them-ate willingly
until it killed them. Kashi would starve in the condition she was in, and he could see, as her mouth moved, that her
tongue wasn't black.

"No," he answered Zvain distractedly, "but bad things have happened to her-"

"She's not a Laq-seller, is she?" The boy's voice shook ever-so-slightly.

Pavek glanced down into eyes wide with contained fear, and suddenly, his ingratiating affection no longer
seemed inexplicable: the boy didn't want to be left behind again. He'd turn himself inside-out to avoid that happening
again.

Even the unchanged emptiness of the bolt-hole itself could be explained, along with Zvain's appearance this
morning. There were, after all, other families living in the catacombs, families that had known Zvain's family and might
have been willing to take him in.

"Is she?" Zvain repeated. "Is she someone you're trying to rescue?"

"In a way." Pavek found the tension sliding down his spine, found he could ruffle Zvain's hair and squeeze the
narrow shoulders with a smile on his face-a sincere smile, not a templar's sneer that set the scar throbbing. "She's a
friend-"

Keeping his arm around the boy's shoulders, he guided Zvain toward the bed where Yohan and Ruari had gotten
Akashia calmed and sitting again. It seemed understandable to Pavek that, after what she'd been through among
strangers, any strange face could push her to the edge of hysteria, but once she saw Zvain, learned to recognize him
for the youth he was, he thought she'd be able to see him as a friend. She seemed to have ample patience for Ruari.

But before they reached her, Akashia's eyes locked onto Zvain's face, and she began to scream. Zvain shrugged
free of Pavek's arm and got behind him instead, where Akashia couldn't see him.

"It is Laq! It is!" he shouted into the din. "She's seeing things that aren't there-just like my father did when the
light was in his eyes!"

Things that aren't there. Perhaps Zvain was right. Perhaps it wasn't the boy at all. Sunlight beamed through the
isinglass in the ceiling and struck the bed like so many arrows, and Zvain was an appealing youth with a warm smile
when he chose to use it.

"You should cover her eyes 'til she gets better," Zvain said with the confidence born of experience. "That's what
we did with my father, when we could, until he couldn't see us at all."

And he proceeded to tear at the hem of his own shirt, a generous gesture Pavek interrupted by wrapping him in a
hug. But the notion itself was sound, and he told Yohan: "Try it. The boy knows what he's talking about, and I
wouldn't put it past Escrissar to put Laq in the food he fed her."

The idea momentarily overwhelmed Yohan, whose face froze in a raging grimace, while his arms shook. Ruari,
however, closed Akashia's eyes with his hands. At first that made her more frantic, then slowly, as Ruari whispered
softly into her ear, she relaxed, though tears seeped between the half-elfs fingers. He lowered his hands, and sheltered
her face against his shirt. Her arm worked its way across his back, holding on to him as she sobbed his name
repeatedly.

Zvain went to work on his shirt-seams again. "We've got to keep the light from her eyes," he insisted. "It's the
light that makes her see things."

Yohan had recovered. "We can use this," he said, tearing off a strip from the linen bedding.

"No!" Zvain lunged forward and pulled the cloth from the dwarf's hands. "It's dirty! Filthy! Let me rinse it out."

And Pavek, suddenly remembering the slops bucket Zvain had once emptied on that linen, was inclined to agree.
The boy darted past him and carried the linen out of the room- once again the clever, impulsive, and willful boy Pavek
had remembered.

He sheathed the sword he'd been holding all this time. Yohan, who had dropped his obsidian knife when Akashia
first screamed, retrieved it as well.

"Seems a good lad," the dwarf said for Pavek's ears alone. "You never mentioned saving his life."

"I didn't. He saved mine. I owed him."

"You owe him again."

"If we can trust him. If he's telling the truth."
"I ken nothing amiss in him. Do you?"

"Trust yourself. What harm can a boy do?"

He shrugged, recalling a bruise that took a painful-long time to fade, but accepted the dwarf's assessment with
some relief.

Akashia was still huddled in Ruari's arms when Zvain returned with the damp cloth, which he returned to Yohan.
•

"You put it over her eyes, please. She knows you; she doesn't know me. I think she's afraid of me."

And with Ruari's help, Yohan did. "We've got to find a healer," the dwarf said when they were done. "Got to get
the poison drawn out of her."

"Healers can't help," Zvain said solemnly. "We tried healers. There's nothing they can do. They said to keep my
father quiet, keep the sun from hurting his eyes. But when his eyes were burning, the only thing that would stop the
pain was more Laq. We've got to get her away from Urik. You've got to take her home."

Pavek looked from Yohan to Ruari and back again. "Zvain knows more about Laq than any of us."

"We'll need a cart-" Yohan began.

"I can get a cart," Zvain said, moving close to Yohan and his visible coin purse again. He and the dwarf were
about the same height and appraised each other evenly. "There's always carts left in the village market after the
farmers sell their crops. I can get you one for a silver piece."

"What do you think, Pavek?"

"Hadn't thought about it, but I imagine he's right. You can go with him, or I can-"

"I can go myself! I've been doing everything for myself since you left."

... A thought that gave Pavek one more pause as the boy slipped silently out the door with a pair of Yohan's
silver coins.

Zvain wasn't gone long and came back with a typical village handcart plus a basket of food-and a scant handful
of ceramic bit coins that he counted carefully into the dwarf's powerful hand, a degree of honesty that gave Pavek
another twinge of doubt. A twinge that faded abruptly when he saw a final bit palmed.

Akashia had fallen asleep while Zvain was scrounging in the market. They tried, and failed to awaken her.

"It's a good thing," Yohan said as he prepared to hoist her over his shoulder. "She feels safe enough now to
sleep. She couldn't very well let herself sleep where she was."

But it was disconcerting to see her arms dangling down Yohan's back, limp and lifeless, as he carried her from the
bolt-hole to the alley where the cart was waiting.

In the weeks following a Tyr-storm it wasn't uncommon to see people who'd been blinded by the blue-green
lightning or maddened by the howling winds. Akashia seemed no different than any other storm victim-or a Laq victim.
Passersby averted their eyes and twisted their fingers into luck signs as the cart rolled past, but they approached the
walls without attracting significant attention.

"You said getting into Urik was the easy part and getting out again would be more difficult. Now, how're we
going to get out?" Ruari whispered anxiously to Pavek when the western gate and its complement of templar guards
loomed before them. "We didn't register at a village. We didn't come in through a gate so we didn't give our
thumb-prints to the guards?"

"We're citizens of Urik, aren't we?" Pavek asked with a grin. "We have the right to visit any village we choose,
whenever we choose, for whatever purpose we choose. We'll just smile at the templars as we leave the city, and then
just not come back."