The brazen gambit

chapter Fifteen

“There’s no way,” Pavek muttered, shaking his head. Still in the templar quarter, on a street not far from House Escrissar, he huddled with Ruari and Yohan, Akashia slumped against his side, barely able to stand, oblivious to him and everything else. Yohan had carried her down the side of House Escrissar; the dwarf would carry her forever if he had to, but he couldn’t carry her out of the city, at least not the way they’d entered it: the passage was too narrow, too low, with too many tight corners.
“She’s got to walk on her own.”
Neither Ruari nor Yohan answered, there being no reply to the obvious. He steadied Akashia with his hands on her shoulders, then stepped back. She tottered once from side to side, then her knees gave out completely, and she would have fallen if he hadn’t gotten his arm around her quickly.
“What’s wrong with her?” Ruari demanded.
“You’re the druid. You tell me,” he replied, sharper than necessary, sharper than he’d intended.
His nerves were raw. They’d had no trouble—yet—other than the obvious problems Akashia herself had given them, and Yohan had wrestled successfully with those—so far. He didn’t trust luck, not at times like this.
The quarter echoed with the clang of brazen gongs, but: those were only domestic gongs summoning household members home from their evening activities before the great city curfew gong struck at midnight. House Escrissar itself remained dark and quiet, unaware, it seemed, that a woman lay dead on an upper-room floor and the prisoner she’d guarded was missing.
For all Pavek had a dozen worries about Akashia, it was Dovanne’s face that loomed behind his eyes: her face twisted with mortal pain and hate the instant before she died, and her face as it had been years ago. He told himself he had no regrets, that Dovanne certainly wouldn’t let his dying eyes haunt her, if events had gone the other way. They’d had no choice tonight or ever, either of them.
But he still couldn’t get that look out of his mind.
“I said: I’m no healer!” Ruari’s hand struck his arm, demanding attention. “Wind and fire, Pavek, you’re not listening. What’s wrong with you?”
He truly hadn’t heard the words the first time Ruari must have said them, but something in the words—or tone—of the repetition penetrated Akashia’s mindless daze. She whimpered and buried her face against his neck, but when he put his other arm around her, she stiffened, then began to tremble.
His own helplessness in the face of Akashia’s need drove Dovanne at last from his consciousness, replaced her death-mask with a black mask and talons. He’d come back. Escrissar would answer for what he’d done.
But first they had to get Akashia out of Urik.
“Pavek!”
“Nothing. I’m trying to think.”
“Think fast,” Yohan suggested. “Curfew’s going to ring soon. Inside or out, we can’t be here when it does. Don’t suppose you had any friends who might do you a favor? A woman, maybe?”
Dovanne returned, hard and angry, and remained with him until he shook his head so vigorously that Akashia’s trembling intensified, and she clutched his shirt in fists so cold he could feel the chill through the coarse cloth. Telhami could heal her, he was certain of that, but getting her to Telhami wasn’t going to be easy.
He saw no other choice except to go to ground for the night and hope that sleep and food—which they could buy in the morning market—would restore her enough to make the rest of the journey possible.
But go to ground where? The places of his life: the orphanage, the barracks, the archives, and even the customhouse paraded themselves before his mind’s eye. Of those, the customhouse, with its myriad maze of storerooms, might be a last-chance refuge—a very last chance.
There was Joat’s Den, near the customhouse, where he’d done his after-hours eating and drinking, but Joat wasn’t a friend to his customers, and the Den stayed open well past curfew. Besides, there was a reason he’d spent his off-time at Joat’s: they couldn’t go there without being seen by the very templars whose attention they were determined to avoid.
There was one other place, filled with such mixed memories that he’d forgotten it entirely, even though it was where he’d spent his last night in Urik: Zvain’s bolt-hole beneath Gold Street, near Yaramuke fountain. Considering his leave-taking, Zvain was likely to be less a friend now than Joat, but he would take them in—if only because with Yohan and Ruari beside him, they would be three against one.
And maybe tomorrow he could complete the circle by taking Zvain out of Urik with them. There were four kanks; they could do it—
“Now, Pavek. Now!”
“All right. I’ve… thought of a place. We’ll be safe there.”
Yohan took Akashia in his arms and lifted her to his shoulder. “Where? How far?”
“A bolt-hole under Gold Street.” He started walking. “Belongs to an orphan I knew—” He was going to say more, then reconsidered. “He’ll take us in, that’s all.”
Three disparate men marching through the streets with a human woman draped over a dwarf’s shoulder wasn’t uncommon in a city where marriage was frequently a matter of slavery or abduction. They drew a few stares, but the people who stared were hurrying home, even here in the templar quarter, and not inclined to ask any questions.
They had an anxious moment at the gate between the templar quarter and the rest of the city, but apparently no respectable household had reported a missing young woman. Pavek’s explanation that his sister had run off with the wrong man—along with a hasty shower of silver from Yohan’s coin pouch—saw them into the next quarter of artisans and shopkeepers with nothing more than a warning to be off the streets by curfew.

* * *

The alley where the Gold Street catacomb began had taken a beating in the most recent Tyr-storm. Most of the debris had been scavenged clean, but larger chunks of masonry covered the cistern that, in turn, had covered the catacomb entrance.
Pavek swallowed panic—he hadn’t considered what the storm might have done to Zvain’s bolt-hole; hadn’t, he realized gazing on this small disaster, truly considered what might have happened to Zvain, either. But the catacomb would have survived—the bakery attached to the alley made more money renting space dug out from its cellar than it made from its ovens, and Zvain… Zvain had managed before he’d arrived—he’d have survived his leaving as well.
Pavek glanced around quickly and spotted another cistern. It proved empty and fastened to a slate slab. He had them underground before anyone else realized things weren’t quite the way he’d expected them to be.
By night the catacomb was as dark as the Dragon’s heart They stumbled into each other, the walls, and the occasional door. There were dozens of people living here, all aware that strangers walked among them. Whispers and warnings disturbed the still air, but no one interfered. Still, Pavek stifled a relieved sigh when he finally felt the familiar wickerwork patterns beneath his fingers.
“Zvain?”
Nothing. He waited and whispered the name again.
Still nothing.
The bolt-hole might belong to someone else entirely; Zvain might have found a better place to live—he certainly hoped that was the case, but it was equally likely the boy’s luck had gone bad rather than better.
It didn’t matter. The curfew gong would clang any moment now. There was no place else for them to go. Pavek drew his sword—Dovanne’s sword; and a loud, unmistakable sound in the darkness—then, squeezing the latch-handle from habit more than hope, put his weight against the flimsy door.
The latch-bolt hadn’t been thrown; the door swung wide into a quiet, apparently empty room.
The bolt-hole was musty with the smells food made if it dried out before it completely rotted. Food… or bodies.
Swallowing hard and wishing for a torch or lamp, he went inside.
His hand found the shelf beside the door, the lamp, and a flint sparker: all as it should be, and light revealed the bolt-hole as he remembered it last—exactly the way he remembered it last, even to the slops bucket on its side a few steps from the rumpled bed.
Before he had considered the implications, Yohan brushed past with Akashia, and the moment was gone.
They put her on the bed, where she sat, knotting the frayed linens through her fingers, but she wouldn’t lie down. When Ruari asked if she was hungry and offered her a heel of bread from his belt pouch, she gave no sign she’d heard the question until he waved the bread directly in front of her eyes. Then she took it into her hands, tearing off crumbs, which she savored slowly. But she offered no conversation, no sign that she recognized them.
Just blue-green eyes staring past the lamp, seeing things Pavek was certain he didn’t want to imagine.
“She’ll be better in the morning, when she’s had time to rest,” Ruari said, as much a question as a statement.
Pavek and Yohan exchanged worried glances and otherwise ignored the half-elf’s comment. There was an outside chance Ruari was right. Physically, Akashia seemed unharmed. Her face was drawn, with dark smudges beneath her eyes and hollows beneath her cheekbones, but there were no cuts or bruises that he could see. She wasn’t starving, and her clothes were clean, as was her hair. In outward respects, Escrissar had cared well for his prisoner.
But Pavek knew how interrogators got their answers. He’d heard her moaning and, looking into her beautiful but vacant eyes, he feared that in her determination to keep Telhami’s secret, she’d sacrificed everything that had made her human.
Most templars, in a final act of brutal mercy, would slash the throat of a prisoner when they were done questioning him, but though interrogators would question the dead without hesitation, they boasted that they themselves never killed.
There were those who would prefer her in this empty state: an especially vile breed of slavers traded in mind-blasted men and women, a breed scorned by their flesh-peddling peers—a sobering condemnation when he considered it. Other than keeping her from that fate, Pavek didn’t know what manner of mercy he could give Akashia if her wits didn’t come back. Right now, that wasn’t his problem, and that was mercy enough for him.
“Grab some floor and get some sleep,” he advised Ruari and Yohan. “I’ll take the first watch.”
He threw the latch-bolt and put a slip knot in the string dangling from it, to slow down anyone—the missing Zvain, included—who might try the door while they slept. Then he pinched the lamp wick, and except for a faint cast of moonlight through the isinglass stone set in the ceiling, the bolt-hole became dark. Akashia made small, panicked noises that left him sick with anger toward the interrogator who’d imprisoned and tormented her, until Yohan—Pavek assumed it was the dwarf by the way the bed creaked—whispered soft assurances that quieted her.
The sound of one person comforting another was strange to Pavek’s ears. The act simply hadn’t occurred to him. He wouldn’t have known what to say or do. Kindness had played little part in an orphan-templar’s life. It had never seemed a serious loss.
Until now.
Urik was quiet above them. An occasional foot fell across the isinglass: a mercenary patrol, exempt from curfew and paid to guard the property of Gold Street. Templars weren’t welcome here. Merchants didn’t trust them. Pavek felt safe with his back against the door and the gentle rumblings of sleep all around him.
And through that quiet darkness, Dovanne came to haunt him. He’d expected mat, with the bitter grief burning deep in his throat and behind his eyes. He wondered what if anything would have changed if he’d known how to console her as Yohan consoled Akashia, those years at the orphanage. Probably they’d both be dead—too soft and sentimental to survive in the templarate.
The bed creaked. Pavek rose into a crouch on the balls of his feet, the sword he had never sheathed angled in front of him.
“Stand down,” Yohan muttered, pushing the blade aside. He was a dwarf; he could see in the dark. “I’ll take over.”
“How is she?”
“Better, I think. She said my name, but I don’t know if she knew I was beside her. I’m coming back, Pavek.”
“So am I.”
“Thought you might be. First, there’s tomorrow. We’re going to need a cart. She’s not going to be able to walk. I could carry her to the Temple of the Sun. We’re not poor—”
“Not if you got four gold pieces every time you delivered a load of zarneeka.” Once again, Pavek heard himself speaking more harshly than he’d intended. Even a night-blind human could see—feel—the scowl suddenly creasing Yohan’s face.
“For emergencies,” the dwarf said, defensive and angry and shuffling away through the dark before adding: “Go to sleep.”
And Pavek stretched out where he was, thinking that it was easier to master druid magic than life outside the templarate, where people cared about each other and mere words held an edge sharper than steel.

* * *

Curfew ended and the day began in Urik not with sunrise but with the orator’s daily harangue from a palace balcony. Pavek was awake and listening as the first syllable of the morning laudatory prayer to Great and Mighty King Hamanu struck his ear. There were the usual admonitions and announcements, nothing at all about a death or an abduction in the templar quarter. But then, he hadn’t truly expected to hear any. The templarate cleaned its house in private; his own denunciation had been unusual—
Which reminded Pavek of the earth cleric, Oelus, who had called him ‘friend’ and who was a healer. He’d never known which aspect of earth the cleric venerated, which of the many earth temples in Urik he called his home: a large one where his talents and choices might be overlooked, or a small one where his word was law? Either way, Oelus would be worth the risks associated with finding him—if Akashia still needed a healer.
The harangue was over. Pavek stood up and stretched the night-cramps out of a body that was getting too old for sleeping on the bare ground. His companions were awake and blocking his view of Akashia.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Better,” Yohan answered with a disturbing lack of enthusiasm.
“How much better?”
He wedged his shoulder between the other two men and saw the answer for himself. Akashia reacted to the movement: looking up, staring at his face. The black pupils of her eyes grew large, then shrank to pinpoints in slow, unnerving cycles.
“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.
“You won’t leave me behind again, will you, Pavek? You’ll take me with you, won’t you? The way Ruari says you can?” Every muscle in Pavek’s body tightened simultaneously: Zvain knew Ruari’s name. It seemed a significant mote of knowledge, somehow, until he recalled that Yohan had used it. He’d learned their names the very same way. Of course, Ruari wasn’t in charge, any more than he was. If anyone in the bolt-hole was authorized to make such a decision, it was Akashia.
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?”
A wry smile made his scar twinge. “No. But then, he’s fooled me before. Perhaps I want too badly to trust him.”
“Trust yourself. What harm can a boy do?”
He shrugged, recalling a bruise that took a painfully 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.”
Ruari’s eyes widened. “That’s all? That’s all? Why does anybody going in either direction ever bother to register? Just say you’re a citizen and be done with id”
“Well, well have to bribe them, too,” Pavek admitted and fell back a pace to walk beside Yohan. “How much silver have you got left?”
“How much do we need?”
Pavek rubbed his chin. “One silver piece for each of us should be enough. One silver piece for each of them—” he indicated the knot of templars, “and an inspector’s likely to offer to pull the cart for us.”
Yohan grumbled but dug out seven silver pieces. “I can pull the cart”

* * *

The coin purse was nearly flat when four loaded kanks left the open pen of the borderland homestead. Zvain proudly, but somewhat anxiously, rode by himself with the provisions on the fourth kank. Akashia rode behind Ruari. She had not awakened at all during the long, hot walk from the city to the homestead, nor when they lifted her onto the kank’s back and contrived to tie her to the saddle like so much precious cargo. With her cloth-bound head resting against Ruari’s back and her hands resting limply against his thighs, she was no trouble at all.
And no help either.
“Which way?” Pavek asked.
The sun was sinking in front of them; Urik and the homestead were behind them. They’d gotten this far simply by retracing their steps along the Urik roads. Now Pavek looked out at the wilderness. Nothing looked wrong—how could it when everything looked the same? Nothing felt quite right either, and there was a dark hole in his memory where his home—Akashia’s home—should have been.
“You don’t know the way?” Zvain sputtered. “You’re taking me out into the middle of nowhere to die?”
Ruari answered first: “We know the way. We just can’t remember all of it. Grandmother hid the knowledge away when we left for Urik. When we get to the Sun’s Fist, then we’ll remember.”
Zvain seemed satisfied with that answer. Pavek wasn’t. He thought Telhami could have trusted him at least as much as she’d trusted a half-wit scum who’d tried to poison him and then destroyed the zarneeka stowaway.
They guided the kanks in a wide arc to the north and east. The sun set and they made camp. A crackling fire kept the night chill away and turned the food Zvain had provided into a simple feast. Yohan untied the cloth covering Akashia’s eyes—over Zvain’s objections that firelight would be enough to start the Laq burning behind her eyes again. But the savory aromas that set their mouths watering and made them impatient with each other and the cookpots had no effect on Akashia. Her eyes were open again, but she didn’t seem to see the fire or anything else.
“She ate bread last night when I gave it to her,” Ruari grumbled when another piece of journey-break slipped unnoticed to the ground between her feet. “She’s getting worse, not better.”
Zvain nodded. “Laq,” he said. “It doesn’t take much sometimes. How far do we have to go? How much longer until we get there?”
“A few days.” Yohan picked up the journey-break, then threw it in the fire. He put another piece in her hand and, holding her fingers together, maneuvered the food to her lips. Her eyelids fluttered, she took a small bite and, very slowly, began to chew. “We’ll make it, Kashi. Grandmother will be waiting for us. She’ll take care of you.”
Zvain nudged Pavek with his elbow. “Who’s this ‘Grandmother?’”
“The high druid.” He couldn’t think of a better description. “She’s the one who says when it’s time to take zarneeka seeds to Urik. She’s the one who can cut the poison off at its root.”
“She can heal Akashia?”
“In—” Once again he looked for the word and found darkness instead. “At home, Telhami can do just about anything she wants, Zvain.”
“I don’t think I want to meet her. I don’t think she’s going to like me.”
“She doesn’t like me very much either, but she’s teaching me druid magic.”
Zvain’s mouth dropped open—from awe, Pavek thought, or possibly envy. They’d never talked about such things in the Gold Street bolt-hole. He didn’t know if Zvain was one of those who dreamt of magic or one of those who feared it. When Zvain edged away from him and lapsed into morose silence, he decided it must be the latter and wondered if bringing the youth to… home was a good idea. Faced with a choice between druidry and farming, Zvain might have preferred to remain in Urik. He’d been doing all right for himself mere, apparently.
“What did you do after I left?” he asked, curiosity getting the better of him. “Not stealing every day, I hope.”
“No, not stealing.” The boy stared at his feet a long time, then looked up and said: “I’m tired. I want to go to sleep now.”
He curled up in a blanket with his face toward the fire, eyes wide and staring at the flames. He was still staring when they wrapped Akashia in the thickest blanket and settled her between Ruari and Yohan, to keep her warm and to keep her from wandering off in the night.
Pavek laid Dovanne’s sword across his lap and took the first watch. Guthay set early. The skies became darker and a handful of shooting stars streaked across the sky.
He leaned over to tell Zvain, to share this small magic with the city-raised boy, but Zvain’s eyes were closed now, asleep with his fists tucked childlike beneath his chin and cheek.
The blanket had slipped. Pavek picked up a corner to pull it taut, but Zvain cringed and whimpered when he tried to tuck the cloth beneath those clenched fists.
Not stealing, he’d said. How many ways were there for an orphan youth to survive in Urik? Between what he’d known as a templar and what he’d lived as an orphan himself, Pavek figured he knew them all, and promised himself that he wouldn’t ask any more questions.
Recalling Yohan with Akashia, he stroked Zvain’s hair, murmuring a soft reassurance. But it seemed that his touch wasn’t comforting. The boy started shivering, and Pavek simply left him alone.

* * *

They made their way home as steadily as they could when none of them knew exactly where home was. Akashia was a growing concern, for all, but thanks to Yohan’s patience and determination, she neither starved nor grew parched from thirst. Otherwise her condition remained the same: unaware of everything, except sunlight if it chanced to touch her eyes. Then she would flail and scream.
At last, however, the dazzling white expanse of the Sun’s Fist flooded their vision with shimmering heat waves, whirlwinds, and a beautiful mirage: a tree-crowned village in the middle of a swaying, green-grass sea. As the mirage drifted through Pavek’s thoughts, into the dark hole, which it filled precisely, he breathed out the single word: “Quraite,” He realized he had not spoken alone.
“Quraite?” Zvain asked. “What? Where?”
And they all realized that Telhami had left the mirage strictly for them, to restore their strength and faith, and guide them across the featureless salt flats.
The heat and brilliance of the Sun’s Fist was brutal, though not, by his memory, as brutal as it had been the first time Pavek had crossed it, when he hadn’t known what lay on the other side. To spare Zvain that anxiety, he’d asked both Ruari and Yohan to describe the guarded lands to a city-bred boy before they set foot on the salt.
But nothing they said erased the shadows of panic that rimmed Zvain’s eyes. When they made a quick camp at sundown to water the kanks and themselves, he asked an exhausted-looking Zvain if he would prefer to ride the last leg of the journey with him or Yohan.
“I’ll be all right. I’ll be fine once I see Quraite with my own eyes.”
Zvain got that chance not long after dawn when the mirage and the village merged. The whole village, druids and farmers alike, had turned out to greet them as they approached the fertile green fields.
“This is home,” Ruari cried eagerly. “This is Quraite. It can’t hurt Kashi’s eyes!” And he tugged the cloth down until it hung below her chin and circled her neck.
The half-elf was wrong. Akashia shrieked with pain and terror, but they were within the larger expanse of Quraite now, where the land itself was a living thing, and where the guardian would carry Telhami wherever she wished in an instant.
The kank skittered when Telhami materialized at its side. But a bug’s panic was no match for Telhami’s determination to see Akashia for herself. The creature trilled once, then stood stock-still. The claws of all six feet dug into the ground as Telhami approached.
Kashi’s screams had ceased. She sat motionless in front of Ruari, face buried in her hands, and moaned. Pavek and Yohan jumped down from their kanks and with Ruari’s help lowered Akashia to the ground.
“Let me see her,” Telhami commanded, and dropped down beside Akashia.
There was no druidry in the old woman’s movements as she gathered Akashia in her arms and held her against her ancient breasts. No magic or mind-bending at all until, in her gentle efforts to move Kashi’s fists, she brushed against the knotted cloth around Kashi’s neck.
“What is this?”
Telhami’s voice was barely audible, though Pavek stood opposite her with Ruari and Yohan flanking him. Taking the linen strip in both hands, she yanked once and the knot undid itself. The ends of the cloth fluttered in a breeze Pavek couldn’t feel, then Telhami tossed it aside. With absent-minded curiosity, Pavek bent down to retrieve it.
“Later.”
Her voice was still a whisper, but the most powerful and frightening whisper he’d ever heard. The hat turned toward his hand, and he was grateful for the veil that hid Telhami’s face. “Help me,” she said in the same awesome voice, this time to Ruari, who fell to his knees opposite her and held out his hands.
She called upon the guardian in a series of short, powerful invocations, and it came like a whirlwind rising out of the ground. Pavek’s legs vibrated from the force surging through Ruari. Ruari himself cried out as the power whipped through his body, but his hands held steady and, just before it seemed the copper-haired youth would burst, Telhami began a different invocation, and the guardian’s shaped energy leapt from their clasped hands to Akashia.
For a heartbeat it seemed that the land itself would open to engulf them all, then, as suddenly as the spellcraft had begun, it was over. Ruari slumped against Pavek’s leg—hard—he needed all his strength and determination to keep his balance against the weight.
Telhami sat back on her heels, her hands resting palms-up in her lap, each fingertip shiny with blood. But for all their efforts—hers, Ruari’s, and the guardian’s—Akashia lay still, peaceful as a corpse.
Squatting on one knee, Yohan extended his hand slowly toward her face and traced the curve of her cheek and jaw. Blue-green eyes blinked open once, twice, and focused.
“Yohan,” Kashi said, raising her hand to clasp his before he could withdraw it. “Yohan.”
The celebration ended before it had begun. Telhami seized the linen cloth.
“Who did this? Who soaked this cloth in halfling poisons?” That terrible hollow sound was back in her voice. “Who tied this around her eyes?”
“I—I did, Grandmother,” Ruari stammered, still sitting on the ground and clearly too terrified to lie.
The half-elf had tied the cloth each morning, but he wasn’t the one who made it. Pavek stood, taller even than the kanks, while the others sat or knelt. He could see farthest, and he began to look for the dark-haired boy—who wasn’t beside them.
“Zvain made it.” He spotted the boy, then, doubled over; on the ground a hundred or so paces away. Zvain’s arms were outstretched on the ground beyond his head, pointing toward the trees of Quraite. He seemed to be praying, as well he should.
He shouted the boy’s name.
Kashi echoed him and added another name “Escrissar!” as she struggled to rise. She couldn’t stand, but she could crawl and growl like some enraged beast in the arena.
Time itself slowed as Pavek’s thoughts charged toward a single inescapable, yet incomprehensible conclusion. Zvain wasn’t praying. Zvain was doing his desperate best to establish a mind-bending linkage between himself and Elabon Escrissar.
It had to be Escrissar; it accounted, justified, explained why Akashia recognized him, why the sight of him filled her with such fear at first and such vengeful determination now.
And it explained the boy’s behavior since he’d appeared in the bolt-hole—so eager to please, to be helpful, to make certain that they’d bring him to Quraite, the secret Akashia had suffered so grievously to protect.
And as the toes of his sandals dug into the hard ground, driving him toward that corruption in the form of innocent youth, he had time to dunk, time to remember his now-and-again suspicions, and to remember how expertly Zvain had transformed those suspicions into guilt.
They’d learn soon enough how Zvain had fallen in with Escrissar: for the sluggish moment, all that mattered was that Zvain had mastered the interrogator’s insidious craft, and that he be stopped before the connection between his mind and Escrissar’s was complete.
Air burned in Pavek’s lungs as time’s slow movement corrected himself.
He was running recklessly, over-reaching with every stride. Zvain had risen to his knees, his hands clenched high above him.
And Pavek was only halfway there.
He stretched himself to his limit and beyond. The sole of his left sandal skidded on a loose stone; he lurched and twisted to keep his balance—felt muscles tear deep in his side—but his right foot landed solidly, and he kept going until a blast of hot, dry air exploded in his face.
The last thing he saw before his chin struck the ground was Zvain collapsing in a boneless heap under the whirling force that was Telhami’s staff.