The brazen gambit

chapter Thirteen

The air remained cool from the recent dawn when Akashia, Yohan, and two awestruck Quraite farmers set out afoot from the market village of Modekan, headed for the brilliant yellow walls of Urik. After four day’s travel kank-back across the wastelands, the farmers were eager to see the Lion-King’s city; Akashia wanted to finish their business quickly, uneventfully.
No one knew what Yohan was thinking—except that he didn’t approve, and he hadn’t said more than two words at a time since they left Quraite.
It wasn’t Modekan’s Day for the Urik markets; they had the road to themselves. Akashia had ample time to relax, think, and get anxious again. They took some chances bringing zarneeka to Urik on a day when it and they weren’t expected. She could hope that the Modekan registrar had reported to his superiors in the templarate, and that the repulsive dwarf they traded with would be at his procurer’s table in the customhouse.
And she could hope that the dwarf would shepherd the zarneeka powder to its proper destination: a thousand folded papers of Ral’s Breath powder. But for that hope to become real, she had to hope, above all else, that Just-Plain Pavek was wrong about his former colleagues in the civil bureau.
Akashia believed with all her heart that the chronic aches and illnesses of Urik’s common folk were important enough to justify the risks she was taking. She believed, too, that her mind-bending skills coupled with druidry would be sufficient to protect her, her companions, and the three amphorae nestled in the straw-filled cart Yohan pulled.
When she called her spells and her skills across her mind’s eye, her confidence grew; then something would catch her attention at the side of the road or she’d see the shadow of Just-Plain Pavek lurking in the corner of her memory, and her calm would shatter.
In her heart she believed Pavek was wrong about Urik’s need for zarneeka and Ral’s Breath but, try as she might as she walked, she couldn’t convince herself that he was lying about the city’s danger or the procurer’s duplicity. Grandmother had agreed that Pavek spoke what he fervently believed was the truth. He was transparent in so many ways to both mind-bending and druidry; he’d never make a master of either craft—yet he could evoke the guardian and, somehow, he’d managed to enter Ruari’s grove after Ruari had hidden himself inside it.
She thought she could have found her young friend’s grove and forced herself inside, but by every reckoning she and Grandmother had made, the challenge should have been far beyond Just-Plain Pavek’s abilities… Unless Ruari had welcomed him, in which case one of them might have slain the other, or—worse to consider—the two of them might have discovered that, where zarneeka and Urik were concerned, they were of like minds.
And that would have been the end of the zarneeka trade: Yohan would have stood with them. And the remaining Quraiters, druid and farmer alike, were already more afraid of Urik and Urik’s inhuman king than was necessary; they would have supported the recalcitrant trio. Quraite wasn’t some idyllic community where everyone’s opinion counted with equal weight and the heaviest position prevailed; such communities rarely survived a year, much less the generations that Quraite itself had endured. Grandmother’s word naturally and rightfully outweighed everyone else’s, but Grandmother would never be foolish enough to drag the community in a direction it absolutely did not want to go.
As she was dragging Yohan to Urik.
The old dwarf trod silently between the traces of the handcart. He’d resisted her attempts at conversation since they left Quraite. Yohan had spoken vehemently against Grandmother’s decision to dispatch zarneeka to Urik while Pavek and Ruari were still hidden in Ruari’s grove. But in the end, Yohan had swallowed his objections. He’d helped to separate the zarneeka powder from the sand in the ruins of the stowaway. When Grandmother invoked a diminutive whirlwind to whip up the gritty mixture, he’d held a winnowing against it until his feet were buried in grit. She’d stood behind the sieve with a tightly woven basket, collecting enough yellow powder to fill three amphorae. And then he’d harnessed the kanks—all the while looking over his shoulder at the path Ruari and Pavek would have taken if they had returned together.
But the path remained empty, and they’d left the village before sunset without knowing what had happened between the templar and the half-elf—exactly as Grandmother had wanted it.
Because Grandmother was wiser than all the rest of them together. And Grandmother knew the right thing for Quraite to do where zarneeka or anything else was concerned.
“You’ll see,” Akashia assured her plodding, sullen companion. “Everything will fall into place. You’ll be headed home before sundown, I promise. There’s nothing to worry about. There won’t be any trouble at the customhouse—”
“Not there, not the customhouse,” he interrupted, the longest single string of words he’d put together since they left Quraite. “It’s too risky. If your heart’s still set on delivering zarneeka to Urik, I’d sooner take it to the elven market I’d sooner trust a cross-eyed elf than that hairy dwarf at the customhouse.”
“The elven market?” Her mind filled with the wonders she imagined among its tawdry tents and shanties. She’d heard about the market from the Moonracers since she was a little girl, but in all her fifteen trips to Urik—she’d kept careful count—she’d never done more than trek from the gate to the customhouse and back again. Except, of course, this past time when they’d encountered Pavek, and Yohan had led them to the dyers’ plaza where lengths of brightly colored cloth had threatened more than once to distract her from the interrogation.
Any excuse to visit the elven market was an almost irresistible temptation—especially if cautious Yohan was suggesting it.
Then the imagined wonders faded: “We gave our names to the Modekan registrar…”
“Three itinerant peddlers with trade for the customhouse,” Yohan recited in rhythm with his walking.
Yohan had been trekking the zarneeka to Urik since before she was born. He’d taught her what to do and say, and she never told the truth about their names or merchandise to the village registrar. “They won’t suspect? Won’t come looking for us?” He shrugged; the amphorae shifted in the cart. “Not in the elven market. Templars don’t go into the market, not alone. We’ll be on our way home, like you said, before they start looking for us. If they start looking for us.”
She pondered temptation for a little while. The dazzling yellow walls—cleaned and replastered after the Tyr-storm—lifted up in front of them, the freshly repainted portraits of the Lion-King were blurred, but colorful at this distance. The great, dark opening of the gate was visible as well, and the road was still empty ahead of them. There wouldn’t be a line. Elven market or customhouse, they’d be into the city and out again in record time.
But the inspectors would ask questions. She had to be ready to use a mind-bender’s subtle art, and that meant she had to have her words and images memorized before they reached the gate.
“Are you certain?” she asked.
“Nothing’s certain—except that Pavek knows the procurer we’ve traded with. Whatever truth Pavek’s telling us, I don’t want to come face-to-face with that procurer until we’re sure what’s already happened and what’s likely to happen next. That hairy dwarf’s got muck all over his hands; he’s not to be misted. That much is certain.”
Of all the races, dwarves were the most consciously proud, of their appearance. Yohan’s distrust of the procurer had its roots in the disgust he undoubtedly felt each time they stood before that stained yellow robe. Under different circumstances, she would have discounted her companion’s advice for that very reason. Today’s circumstances were as different as they could be, but she made one more attempt to resist temptation.
“Grandmother wants us to learn about the purity and strength of Ral’s Breath. We’ll have to visit the customhouse anyway—”
Yohan spat into the dust at the side of the road. “Wouldn’t trust a customhouse templar’s answer to that question, no matter who or what he was. We’ve got to visit an apothecary or two ourselves, Kashi, if we want to take those answers back with us.”
“Will there be apothecaries in the elven market? Will there be anyone?” she asked suddenly. “The Moonracers said they’d withdrawn—”
Another wet splatter marked the dust. “Elves! It’s not their market, just the only place where they can set up to trade. Get rid of the tribes and the market will be a little cleaner, a little safer, that’s all. There’s a little of everything in the market, including apothecaries, licensed and otherwise. The rest will come looking for us as soon as we’ve talked to the first. That’s the way of the market. We can buy and sell at the same time. I’ll do the talking.”
She twisted a thick lock of brown hair around her fingers, thinking her way through a tangle of doubts. “If we sell zarneeka in the market, we’ve got to tell them how to dilute it with flour to make Ral’s Breath.”
The portraits of Urik’s master had grown larger, clearer as they walked. Hamanu’s robes were a brilliant sapphire blue. The glass orbs of his eyes flashed with reflected sunlight, looking straight at her. Or so it seemed.
“We’ve never done that. We’re not supposed to do it. We trade zarneeka to the Lion-King’s templars and the Lion-King sells Ral’s Breath to Urik; that’s the way it’s always been, Yohan. If something goes wrong—”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong. We’ll buy and sell and be gone. If the Ral’s Breath we buy is as bitter as it’s supposed to be, we know where the liar is. We can deal with him when we get back to Quraite and then come back to Urik at our regular time, same as before, with no one the wiser. If Pavek’s told us the truth and what we buy is no good—well, Grandmother can decide what we do next.
Curled hair slipped off her fingertips. “Going to the elven market will be safer than going to the customhouse?”
“Remember: I’ll do the talking.”
“Once we get inside the gate,” Akashia corrected; she was the mind-bender. Dealing with templars was her responsibility.
They approached the inspectors and regulators gathered outside the gatehouse. A yellow-robed pair harassed a merchant while the rest idled in the shade. New laws, regulations, and rewards for wanted criminals were written in red on the gatehouse wall, as usual, a list of warnings and enticements for anyone who dared to read them. She stole a glance while they waited for someone to give them the onceover. Pavek’s name was still written there, still wanted for unspecified crimes against his city. The letters were fading, though, and the price on his head had not risen.
A weary-looking yellow-robed woman left the shade. She asked the usual questions; Akashia stared directly into her eyes as she answered them.
“We have trade today in the elven market.” She kept her voice low and even. “The seals on our goods are all in order. We’re no different than anyone else who’s come through the gate today. You can think of no other questions worth asking.”
The templar blinked and rubbed her eyes as if she’d suddenly acquired a headache, which was possible, though Akashia had had no difficulty planting her notions in the woman’s unimaginative mind.
“May we enter the city?” she asked after a moment.
The woman nodded. The Quraiters each dirtied their thumbs in a bowl of waxy ink and left a unique impression on the tattered scrap of parchment the templars were using for today’s tally-strip.
“Don’t forget: Come back through here before sundown, or you’ll owe six bits each, and ten for the cart.”
She smiled. Several shade-hugging inspectors whistled through their teeth. One offered to pay her poll-tax if she’d wait for him beside the Yaramuke fountain at sunset. She kept walking, never flinching or missing a step, and the whistling stopped before they reached the massive gates. The farmers gawked with their faces pointed skyward. She had to call them by their true names to get their attention and keep them close to the cart as they entered the always-crowded, always-busy streets.
They smelled the market before she saw it: a dizzying blend of spicy delicacies floating atop the sharper scents of natron, pitch, and artisans’ charcoal fires, and, of course, the ever-present sweet aromas of decay.
Yohan paused on the cobblestone verge of the market. He adjusted his grip on the cart traces and looked at each of the farmers before letting his stare come to rest on her.
“Stay close,” he warned them all. “If you’ve got to look for something, look for a signboard of a striding lion with a pestle. That’s the apothecaries’ license we’re looking for.”
“What about unlicensed—”
Yohan cut her short with a slash of his finger. “The difference between licensed and unlicensed doesn’t show on the signboard. Remember: stay close.”
And they did. She wrapped her hand lightly around one of the traces; that gave her more freedom to look for a pestle—it seemed that every hawker’s sign displayed a striding lion—as they wandered the market. Traders hailed them from every ramshackle doorway of cloth, wood, or bone. Bold, ragged children begged for ceramic bits or offered to sell pieces of bruised fruit obviously scavenged from the gutters of Urik’s more reputable markets. One child leapt into the cart and grabbed two handfuls of straw before she and the farmers could chase him away.
“What’s wrong with them? Are they that hungry? Should we offer them something?” she whispered anxiously to Yohan.
“Stay close,” was his only reply, repeated through clenched teeth as the raids became more frequent.
Every dwelling or stall in the elven market seemed equally old, equally dilapidated and despairing. There were no signposts for the streets that met at odd angles and irregular intervals. Had she not heeded Yohan’s warning and kept dose to the cart, she’d have been quickly and hopelessly lost. The tumult of noise and color, so attractive in her imagination, grew less so when it devolved into hostile stares and furtive bent-mind probes of her inmost thoughts.
She was unprepared for that Unseen onslaught from anonymous minds. In her previous visits to the city, she’d dealt only with templars—broken, mean-spirited individuals, each and every one of them, but, by their master’s order, untrained in the arts of the Unseen Way.
No stray curiosity or inquiry penetrated the defenses she’d learned from Telhami, but time and time again she caught an unwelcome glimpse into another mind. The imaginations of those who dwelt in the elven market were as foul as the sewer channel in the middle of the so-called street they followed.
The market was not her grove; the confidence she’d felt when Telhami upbraided her about the dangers a city-man like Pavek posed to any solitary woman evaporated like morning dew. Her grip on the cart trace progressed from feather-light to a panicky clench.
One of the farmers shouted that his knife had been stolen. He plunged toward a twisted alley, determined to catch the culprit. Yohan intervened quickly, hauling the farmer back to the cart and staring down the hard-faced denizens who swarmed out of nowhere, ready to support the thief, not them.
“Nothing happened,” Yohan assured me grumbling mob.
“But my—” the poor farmer wailed, until Yohan pinched his wrist to quiet him.
“Everybody, move on.” Yohan used a commanding tone she’d never heard from him before.
“We ought not have come here,” she whispered.
He replied with a grunt that could have meant anything at all, then pivoted the cart sharply on its left wheel. They went down a rubbish-strewn alley to the lion-and-pestle signboard he’d somehow spotted during the fracas.
“Wait here,” he told the farmers. “Sing out if anything happens.”
His hand on her arm guided her into a dusty shop. The proprietor, a human woman of indeterminate age, pushed away from a table covered with fortune-telling cards. The long red gown she wore might once have belonged to a wealthy woman, but the silk embroidery threads had been plucked out and now the lush floral patterns were mere dots and holes across the cloth.
“What’s your pleasure?” she asked with a voice coarsened by too much wine and too little fresh air.
“You need to ask?” Yohan gestured toward the fortune-telling cards.
Akashia recognized the ritualized rudeness that passed for civility in the city. She used the style herself with the yellow-robes. It didn’t bother her, or it hadn’t until Just-Plain Pavek became a man in her mind, not a templar. And it bothered her even more with this woman who, on second glance, was only a few years older than she was herself. But the shop was filled with magic-laced things she could not name and the air itself was thick with Unseen inquiries; she held her peace, staying close by Yohan.
The proprietor lifted her shoulders in a worn-out shrug: “A love philter?”
“Ral’s Breath.” Yohan’s arm dropped quickly from hers; the old dwarf was embarrassed.
“You’ve come to the wrong place, then. Never sold the baby powders; never will.” And staring bluntly at Akashia’s belly, the woman let out a snorting, bitter and private chuckle. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”
“Why?” Akashia asked, disregarding Yohan’s admonition that she be quiet while they were in the shops.
“You won’t find any, that’s why. It’s gone. Old Breath, new Breath, good and bad: it’s all gone. Sold or confiscated by the yellow-robes.”
“Confiscated?”
“Where’ve you been, girl? S’been weeks since the orators harangued that the stuff’d been tampered with.” She swore and wiped a weepy nose against a dirty sleeve. “Never worked much anyway, ’cept with babies and old men. But it’s gone now.”
“Would you like some?” she asked gently.
Yohan’s fist clamped over her elbow like a vise.
“S’all been confiscated. Ain’t none left in the city. You got some, you keep it far and away from me. Don’t carry no stuff from the rotted-yellow customhouse. Don’t want no rotted yellow-robes bustin’ in here, roustin’ me outta house and home.”
The woman took a deep breath, staring at the single roof-beam of her establishment. Aware of her own foolishness—treating a vendor of the elven market as if she were a woman of Quraite—Akashia tightened her mind-bending defenses. But the woman was no master of the Unseen Way; her vacant expression was the product of a Tyr-storm of wildly suspicious thoughts whipping through her mind.
“You bringin’ me trouble?” she shouted. Her eyes were sharp-focused now, and filled with rage and madness. “You settin’ the yellow-robes on me? You wantin’ my place, my trade?” She swore and stalked forward, head down and shoulders raised. “I’ll give you trouble. I’ll give you more trouble than you dreamed—”
The hysterical woman came toward Akashia, Yohan sidestepped between them before harm was done.
“No trouble,” he insisted, retreating with cautious, well-balanced strides, pushing her back toward the curtain door.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized as soon as they were both in the alley.
The red-dressed woman’s shouts quieted to inarticulate muttering, but they could still hear her moving through her shop. Fingers with ragged nails appeared at the edges of the curtain, pulling it taut, lashing it to the flimsy frame.
“Go away! Go away, you hear! Take your trouble somewhere else!”
The Quraiters were eager to obey. Yohan grabbed the cart traces and, without saying a word, started for the street. Once they were milling through the crowds, Akashia insisted softly, “It was my fault,”
Yohan pursed his lips together and adjusted his grip on the traces. He was as angry as she’d ever seen him, and angry at her as well—which, she knew, was an anger he found difficult to express.
“I’m ashamed of myself.” She said the things she thought he’d want to say, that she needed to hear. “I was wrong. I made a terrible mistake, thinking because she was my age, she was like me—”
“Don’t talk, that’s all,” Yohan grumbled. “Let me do the talking. All the talking.”
“I won’t forget again,” she assured him. “We learned something, though. The Lion-King’s confiscated the remaining Ral’s Breath. He must know it’s been tampered with. Pavek’s—”
“There’s no ‘must’ with Urik or the lion. We don’t know anything, yet.”
They went along in stony silence awhile, until she spotted the distinctive signboard slung out over a cross street.
“Do we try there?” she asked. “I’ll be quiet, I swear it.”
“See to it,” Yohan replied with the same sternness he’d used in the earlier street confrontation.
Then, after rolling the cart from the street to a less-trafficked alley and leaving the two farmers to stand guard beside it, he led her into the apothecary’s shop.
This second proprietor was an elf, lean and shifty as any lifelong desert nomad, and clear-headed, as the red-dressed woman had not been. His establishment was better stocked, with neat shelves full of bowls and boxes, each labeled with a picture of its contents and the symptoms those contents were purported to relieve. One smallish box bore one picture of a yawning moon and another of a crying baby with an oversized tooth. She nudged Yohan gently and made arrowlike movements with her eyes to direct his attention to the proper place. He acknowledged with a deliberate blink.
Yohan and the elven proprietor observed all the rude forms of Urikite conversation. They traded smooth insults and sly insinuations, but the result was the same: the apothecary had no Ral’s Breath in stock—the box she’d noticed was, in his words ‘as empty as our Lord Hamanu’s tomb.’ And the elf was adamantly uninterested in purchasing anything they might have to offer.
“Too much trouble,” he insisted. “If you’re in pain, go to a sawbones healer, or buy yourself something that works—” He gestured toward a shelf of amber bottles, each labeled with a sleeping or smiling face.
“And that doesn’t attract too much attention?” Yohan inquired.
“That’s always wise, isn’t it? Who but a fool wants to attract attention?”
Yohan pointed at the empty Ral’s Breath box. “A fool with a baby that’s cutting a tooth? There’ll always be mothers with babies, and always the fathers who provide them. How does a licensed apothecary meet the demand when yellow-robe scum take away his goods?”
It seemed for a heartbeat that the elf was going to give them a useful answer, then shouts erupted outside. Akashia instantly recognized the distressed voices of the Quraite farmers and feared the worst. The elf didn’t know about the farmers or the loaded cart they guarded, but he came to the same conclusion.
“Get out!” he demanded and took one threatening step toward them and the door before clapping his hands hard against the sides of his head.
She felt the mind-bending assault too: a burning agony that lanced her eyes and roared in her ears. It threatened to engulf every mote of knowledge and identity in her mind, but it was not the worst she’d encountered: when Grandmother taught the Unseen Way she hadn’t pulled her punches. After an eyeblink of monsters from the mind-bender’s nightmares, Akashia successfully wrapped herself in a fortress of peace. The attack beat harmlessly against her defenses, which, in the nature of the Unseen Way, formed an invisible sphere around her body that extended to Yohan and the apothecary, both of whom had fallen to the floor in screaming terror.
The power of an Unseen attack was such that the invading images summoned up the victim’s direst memories that continued to wreak their havoc after the mind-bender had withdrawn. Akashia had thrown up her fortress before the invasion took root; she cast out the mind-bender’s repulsive images one by one.
Yohan’s lesser defenses had been overwhelmed. His mind radiated gore—a gathering of dwarves cut down and mutilated by mounted soldiers—until she pinched the bridge of his nose. His thoughts righted themselves quickly and he caught her hand before she could administer a similar mercy to the writhing elf.
“No time! Which way? Where’s it coming from?”
She swung her mind’s attention from the visible world to the Unseen one where an evil drone echoed everywhere. No matter what she did, she couldn’t localize the attack, which was continuing. “I—I don’t know. It’s everywhere—” Then another, more horrible thought rose from her own imagination. “We’re surrounded.”
“We’ve got to try—” Yohan towed her toward the door. “Maybe they’re not looking for us.”
But she knew, as soon as he said the words, that the attack had been directed at them—even though it caught the apothecary and a dozen street-side passersby in its net. And the Quraite farmers, as well. They’d both collapsed beside the cart. Blood seeped from the nose, mouth, and ears of the man who’d lost his knife. Akashia touched him lightly and withdrew. His life essence had been driven out; there was nothing she could do for him.
The other farmer was still alive, but his mind remained empty after she banished the ravening beasts of his nightmares. His sense of self might come back of its own, given enough time—but there wasn’t any time at all. Luckless city-dwellers lay on the ground, a few of them bleeding like the first farmer, the others wailing in their misery as the attack continued.
A ragged, half-grown boy crouched warily a short step away from one of the fallen passersby. He reached for the coin purse looped over the man’s belt and suffered no ill-effects until, in trying to tug it free, his head and shoulders leaned forward. Then he collapsed with a shriek. She thought he might roll free, but in an instant the mind-bending attack had paralyzed him and he was as helpless as the others. Still she knew how to defeat the assault.
“We can get away.” She grappled with the living, but mindless farmer, trying to lift him into the zarneeka cart. “The attack’s a sphere that’s held right here. If we can get outside it—”
Yohan pulled her away from the farmer and the cart. “No time,” he snarled. “Is he still attacking?”
“He?” She listened with her mind’s ears and heard the strident drone still battering futilely against her defenses.
“He. She. What difference does it make? Is it continuing?”
“Yes. The same as before. I can’t tell where it’s coming from. It still seems to be coming from everywhere at once.”
“Then it doesn’t matter where we go.” Yohan kept a firm left-side grip on her wrist, to keep them together and remain within the protective sphere of the mind-bending defenses she maintained. He scanned the streets and shadows beyond the apothecary. They were empty now, except for those Urikites unfortunate enough to get caught in the attack. She guessed that even the scroungers had fled once they saw the boy collapse. She thought their chances for escape were good and tried to pull back to the cart.
“Forget them. Stay close. You’re what’s important,” he snarled. “He’s out there,” the dwarf said more softly, making a slow study of the nearest rooftops. “I can feel him.”
She believed him; sometimes an individual with a wild mind-bending talent could do things, discern enemies, that a trained mind could not. They moved carefully among the stricken Urikites until they crossed an unseen boundary and the drone, but not Yohan’s wariness, diminished.
“Hide us,” he commanded as they sneaked around one corner, then another.
But hiding in Urik was not like hiding in Quraite. There was no guardian to invoke or familiar lands in which to lose themselves. She could use the Unseen Way to trick another mind into not seeing what was right before his or her eyes. But mind-bending was all illusion and completely dependent on her ability to find the one or many who were attacking them. She tried again to trace the attack to its source, now that they were beyond its range—and encountered a defensive barrier as strong as Telhami’s and darker than she’d imagined that anything could be.
Nothing she knew would pierce the mind-bender’s defense or insert an illusion behind it. She wasn’t even certain how far away the mind-bender was. Though if he—now that Yohan had planted the notion in her head, it seemed to Akashia that the attack had had a distinctly masculine aura—was not physically nearby, then he was that much more skilled, that much stronger.
And the mind-bender’s presence didn’t lessen as they walked through the market, trying not to attract attention.
“We’re being followed.” She said, with real fear in her heart and voice. “Watched.”
They were deep in the elven market now, alongside the towering yellow walls in an area where nomadic elves hoisted their tents for the days or weeks they spent inside Urik. When the Moonracers—the only nomad tribe Akashia knew by name or sight—visited Quraite, they were courteous guests, welcomed with feasting, singing, and dancing. Here in the market, though the clothes and colors were familiar, the faces were unfriendly, even cruel.
If someone was following or watching them, Akashia assumed they’d get no help here where suspicion was rampant and no one seemed interested in offering a helping hand. But, once again, she was wrong about the mysterious city and its residents. Yohan approached a sullen elf who had beads and metal braided into his long, straw-colored hair and a brace of curved obsidian knives stuck through the striped cloth that served as his belt.
“The door?” Yohan asked while making intricate movements with his hands.
Her eyes widened, and so did the elf’s, revealing a glimmer of cooperation. She thought that they’d found help, hoped and prayed that they’d found it. But he cocked his head, like a jozhal sniffing the wind; he was kenning her with the Unseen Way and sensed both her defenses and the attack that caused her to raise them.
“Sundown,” he said with a semblance of regret. “Come back at sundown and it will be opened. Live that long, my friend, and return.”
He held the first two fingers of his right hand against his chin, a gesture that conveyed silence and respect and something more that she could not interpret. Then he took a step backward and quickly disappeared into the maze of tents. “What was that?”
Yohan muttered under his breath before answering: “An old debt. Very old. But debts have to be paid, Kashi. Never forget that. We can collect at sundown.”
“He called you friend.” Friendship was not casual among elves, especially nomadic tribes. “Who was he?”
“Never met him before.”
He started back the way they’d come. Their enemy hadn’t given up. The sense that they were being watched or followed lingered throughout a long, frustrating afternoon. It ebbed occasionally—Yohan could walk in her protection without holding her hand—and intensified when they tried to return to the alley where they’d abandoned the cart and their companion. She fretted with guilt about the farmer, but, the dark pressure against her defenses never let up completely, and she understood that there were rescues she didn’t dare attempt.
And there were those she had to plan immediately.
“If he attacks again, you must get away,” she told Yohan when they were resting behind a sausager’s oven.
“No—”
“I’m serious, Yohan. Absolutely serious. Whoever is after us—” In her mind she’d begun identify the mind-bender as the templar Pavek had named Elabon Escrissar, the man who’d put a price on Pavek’s head, the man who turned their zarneeka into Laq “—whoever he is, he’s a mind-bender. A powerful mind-bender. He’d get Quraite out of you, Yohan; you know that. But I can keep the secret—to the death, if I have to.”
“Kashi—”
“I can. I must. I will. And you must get back to Quraite. You were right all along. Pavek is right; the Moonracers are right. This is about Laq, about a deadly poison and a madman—two madmen: Elabon Escrissar and that halfling alchemist. It’s not about zarneeka or Ral’s Breath. I should have listened. We should have stayed away. You must warn Grandmother. You must tell her to protect Quraite.”
Yohan stared into the heat waves shimmering above the oven. “I’d sooner die than leave you, Kashi.”
“No—”
The word slipped out as a sigh, but she knew, from way he’d said the words that the suspicions she’d had since childhood were, indeed, true. Yohan’s dwarven focus wasn’t his devotion to Quraite or his devotion to Grandmother and the other druids. It was devotion to her and her alone. She’d become the center of his life. Whatever happened to her, he took it as his personal guilt. If she died, Yohan was doomed to the half-life of a banshee, haunting the wastelands forever because he’d failed to protect the one thing above all others that was important to him.
“Then we must return to Quraite together.”
He clapped her once on the knee before rising again to his feet, a signal that their rest was done and it was time to start moving again. “That, we must.”

* * *

The sun descended, growing as large as the bulging dome tower atop King Hamanu’s palace and glowing like fresh-spilled blood. Yohan, whose sense of direction had never faltered, returned them to the nomad encampment alongside the walls. They were both exhausted, and Akashia’s mind still rang with a mind-bender’s probe, but she allowed herself to believe that they would escape through whatever door the austere elf would provide. And once they were out of Urik, she had no doubt that they could make their way safely to Quraite.
She wasn’t foolish enough to think that the danger was past, but her breath came easier, and there was new strength in her legs.
The elf with straw-colored braids was nowhere to be seen when they entered the tent-covered expanse between the market and the wall. She turned to ask Yohan a question and caught a flicker of movement among the tents. Her eyes alone saw nothing untoward: the encampment was crowded. There were movements everywhere. But her mind’s eye, made a vigilant pan of her defenses by the Unseen Way, had seen a smear of templar yellow. Not the color of the walls, but the more garish color worn every day by every templar and that, coupled with the continued mind-bending pressure against her defenses, was not to be ignored.
She shook Yohan’s wrist and pointed to the place where her mind said the yellow had appeared and disappeared. “Danger!”
Yohan swept her behind him and stood chin-out, facing the tents, ready for whatever fate blew their way. A fast heartbeat later the ugliest, hairiest dwarf she’d ever seen—the procurer to whom they usually traded their zarneeka—marched purposefully into sight.
“It’s over,” the procurer announced without drawing a weapon. “Give up quietly. You’ve brought a forbidden commodity into the city. There’s a fine to be paid, and a few questions to be answered. Nothing serious—if you come quietly.”
Yohan answered by spreading his feet and standing firm. “Run, Kashi,” he added softly. “I can take care of this one.”
But she stayed where she was. The procurer was dressed in a rumpled robe of regulation color, he was the smear of yellow her mind’s eye had seen, but he wasn’t the source of the mind-bending probes.
“There’s another one, the mind-bender. You’ll lose your protection if too much distance comes between us.”
“I’ll stand. You run.”
Run where? she wanted to ask. He was the one who knew Urik’s secrets and he was the one to whom the elf had promised a door…
If the elf hadn’t just turned around and sold them to the highest bidder.
The whole question became moot a moment later when a second figure emerged from the tent maze: a human woman, powerfully built, and dressed in templar yellow. Her right arm, naked from the shoulder down, was covered with a bizarre tangle of serpentine tattoos.
“You run,” Akashia whispered into Yohan’s ear. “Run all the way to Grandmother.”
He didn’t budge a step as the hairy dwarf and tattooed woman advanced. The elves of the encampment saw trouble brewing and made themselves scarce.
“I’ll manage to protect you until you can hide,” she whispered urgently. “Run!”
“Protect us both.”
“I can’t. Find your ‘friend.’ Use the ‘door.’ Debts must be paid.” She gave Yohan a shove in the small of his back, nothing that could ordinarily move a man of his brawn and determination. “I’m sorry, Yohan. I’m sorry in my heart that I brought you here, but you have to go. One of us has to get back to Quraite. Don’t look back and don’t believe what I send.” She kissed the top of his bald head, breathing out a bit of spellcraft as she did, though she was far from Quraite and her druidry was weak. She hoped to give him some protection from the attack she intended to make, but mostly she wanted him to run away.
Yohan shifted his balance and began to move. He took a few heavy-footed, short-legged strides before the other dwarf gave chase. The woman could have caught Yohan, but she’d never have brought him down; she came after Akashia instead.
Akashia counted three beats of her pounding heart then, holding back only the wherewithal to sequester Quraite’s secrets deep within her memory, launched an all-out mind-bending assault of her own. The creatures of all the nightmares she remembered shot across the void and into the imagination of any mind close enough to receive them and not trained to resist them.
Her last conscious thoughts were for Yohan’s safety and escape, then she surrendered completely to the darkest corners of her imagination. She let out hatred, fear, and vengeance: every malicious thought she’d ever had and repressed—exactly as Grandmother had told her she’d have to do if she came to a moment like this, when everything important was at stake.
And even though she risked losing herself forever in the dark.

* * *

Akashia regained consciousness in a room filled with sweet incense and soft voices. A lightweight linen sheet covered her from feet to shoulders; the air against her face was cool. Night had almost certainly fallen, and she had almost certainly fallen into the hands of the tattooed woman, the ugly dwarf, and the mind-bender, Elabon Escrissar—the very enemies Pavek had warned them about.
“Pavek’s enemies, not yours. Not yet,” a smooth, masculine voice replied, by which she understood that Escrissar was a powerful mind-bender, indeed.
Akashia opened her eyes. The mind-bender wasn’t wearing the black mask and robe Pavek had described. In plain, pale domes, he was simply a bland-looking man, a half-elf by birth and radiantly evil by temperament. A scarred halfling stood to one side, neither smiling nor scowling: the alchemist responsible for Laq. There was no sign of the ugly dwarf or the tattooed woman, but there was a dark-haired boy by the open door of the small, luxurious room where they’d brought her.
The boy smiled when he caught her looking at him. It was a smile that made Akashia’s blood freeze in her heart.
“I do not want to be your enemy, dear lady. Pavek was born a thick-skulled idiot; he’ll the a sorry hero. But not you. You understand. You’ve held power yourself. You have ambitions.”
He came up the shadowed, twisted pathways she had blasted through her defenses, through her very self. All silk and seduction, he touched the tender, aching places of her mind, of her body, offering her things she had scarcely imagined before this horrifying moment.
She drew a shuddering breath, closed her eyes, and fought with all her might to throw him out.