The brazen gambit

chapter Sixteen

“I told him!” Zvain shouted, his voice filled with the intense hatred of youth-betrayed. “I told him where you are. He’s seen it in my mind. He’s coming with an army of ten thousand men and giants. It doesn’t matter what you do to me. You’re all going to die. Quraite’s going to die. Everything’s going to die.”
His nose and lips bloodied by Telhami’s staff, the boy backed away from his druid accusers, directly into one of farmers who had formed a tight and solemn ring around the scene. The woman seized him and flung him back into the circle. He stumbled, but pulled himself together to stand, defiant and terrified, some four paces in front of Telhami and Akashia.
Pavek himself stood a bit to one side, not in the farmer’s constraining circle, nor among the outraged druids. Zvain had looked his way more than once with wide, unreadable eyes. He’d met the boy’s stare, figuring he owed him that much.
He still didn’t know how Zvain’s path had crossed Escrissar’s or how he’d been seduced into an alliance with the ultimate Laq-seller. Telhami hadn’t asked. Telhami wasn’t interested in such small details. Quraite had been betrayed, and Akashia had been tormented; that was all that mattered. The laws of Athas, whether in Urik or Quraite, made no exceptions for children. Mercy was a rare gift, and, looking it Akashia’s hard, unforgiving frown, not one Zvain was likely to receive.
Nor one he deserved—
“Take him to my grove,” Telhami pronounced coldly. “The guardian will make him useful again.”
“Stay away!” Zvain held one hand palm-out, then dug beneath his shirt with both hands. When his hands reappeared, a dull gray powder leaked from one small, shaking fist and a dull brown powder from the other. “I’m a—a defiler! I know a spell that will destroy you all if you touch me.”
Telhami was unmoved. “Take him to my grove,” she repeated, nodding toward Yohan.
The dwarf strode forward, his faith in Telhami apparently stronger than his fear of the magic Zvain claimed to command.
Zvain’s eyes widened, his lips trembled, then tightened into a pout as he defiantly mixed the powders together.
Telhami did nothing to stop him.
The boy’s eyes squeezed shut, and he began to recite dark spellcraft syllables from that other, unfamiliar magical tradition that, by everything Pavek understood, drew its energy and power from the life essences of green plants. Those who were called preservers somehow managed to draw small amounts of energy from many plants without damaging any of them seriously. Defilers left only ash.
Quraite was plants. The most conscientious preserver could wreak havoc without depleting its green-life essence. A defiler’s power, even with a small spell, might be unlimited.
And still, Telhami’s calm remained.
But Pavek’s breath stuck in his throat as Zvain lifted his hands, and the hot wind off the salt flats carried the powder away, and—
Nothing happened.
There was no magic.
Zvain’s defiance crumbled; all that remained was the terror. His knees buckled. Yohan caught him as he went down. “He said it would work… He gave me magic and said I was a defiler forever.” Tears began to flow, and brokenhearted sobs. “He said I’d made my choice. That I couldn’t go back.”
Zvain clung to Yohan’s arm, pleading for mercy. He might as well have pleaded with a tree or a stone. Then he twisted himself around until he could see Pavek.
“Pavek? I thought I had no choice… Pavek? I’m sorry Pavek. I’m sorry…”
Pavek turned away.
“Pavek? Help me, Pavek… please?”
But Zvain’s fate wasn’t in his hands, and for that he was grateful; ashamed because he didn’t know right from wrong where the boy was concerned; and that much more grateful that the decision belonged to Telhami, who had no similar hesitations.
“Quraite is guarded land, boy,” Telhami said, not kindly. “Your magic cannot work here. Or anywhere. Escrissar lied to you. He gave you no magic, only delusions.”
“The plants died. They turned to ash and died. I saw them!”
“You saw lies, whatever you saw.” Her voice hardened. “And you believed the lies because they spoke to the darkest corner of your heart.” For the third and final time, she ordered, “Take him to my grove.”
The circle of farmers opened, letting Yohan and the stumbling, weeping boy through. Then it sealed again. Ignoring Zvain’s cries, they listened as Telhami described the defense Quraite would mount against Escrissar’s inevitable assault.
Until Zvain’s wails could no longer be heard.

* * *

Quraite had two defenses: the power of its guardian, which only Telhami and Akashia could effectively wield, and the formidable natural barrier of the Sun’s Fist. Plant magic of the sort Zvain had tried to wield could have no effect in the Fist where nothing grew to energize it. Templar spell-craft would work, Pavek suspected, if Escrissar were foolish enough to invoke King Hamanu’s name.
On the other hand, the sorcerer-king might well destroy Quraite once he knew where it was; his power was such that no one, not even Telhami, could stand against him; and without Telhami or another druid to shape and focus it, the guardian’s great power would lie dormant no matter how great the danger.
Pavek doubted that Escrissar would invoke templar spell-craft, and told Telhami so.
“But while the king might destroy Quraite,” he concluded, “he will destroy Escrissar. The interrogator’s playing both ends against the middle. If what the Moonracers said is true, and Escrissar has sent Laq to Nibenay with Urik’s seal on it, then he’s gone much too far. Hamanu coddles his pets, but he’ll destroy them if they cross him. There’s always someone else waiting to take a favorite’s place. Unless Escrissar’s ingratiated himself with Nibenay’s Shadow-King, the only spellcraft you’ve got to worry about is your own.”
He waited for Telhami’s response. The discussion—reduced to the druid and farmer elders, Yohan and himself—had moved inside her hut. Akashia would’ve been included if she’d had the strength. As it was, she was resting reluctantly in her hut, with a pair of women posted outside her door to see that she stayed there.
Pavek hadn’t been included, either, at least not by invitation; but he hadn’t been told to leave—yet.
“And do you judge it likely that the Lion’s pet would find favor in Nibenay?” Telhami’s hat hung on its peg. She framed her question with a single upward-arching eyebrow. “The kings don’t trust the templars they themselves have raised; they certainly wouldn’t trust a templar another king raised. The Shadow-King could lie as easily to Escrissar as Escrissar lied to Zvain—and abandon him just as easily.”
“You think I was too harsh with him, don’t you?” It was not the response he’d been expecting, not a subject he wanted to consider, especially with witnesses. “I don’t think at all,” he stammered. “I shouldn’t be here ”
“Nonsense. We need to know what you think, and you need to know what I decide. The boy is nothing—part of Escrissar’s villainy. A small but important part through which Escrissar could attack your greatest weakness, and so win Quraite.”
“Weakness?”
“Your humanity, but a weakness nonetheless. Done is done, Pavek, but he won’t reach us through that one again. Despite what the boy would have us believe, Escrissar won’t come with magic, and he won’t come with ten thousand men, but he won’t likely come alone, either. For a while, weeds will grow rampant in our fields; you and Yohan will drill our farmers with hoes and flails. We must be ready for an ordinary battle, mustn’t we?”
“It won’t be ordinary, Grandmother,” Yohan interjected. “Escrissar’s a mind-bender. He doesn’t need any help to spew his nightmares.”
“But he does need help to clean up after himself and his nightmares. You deal with those minions. I’ll deal with Escrissar.” Telhami stared past them all. Her lips tightened into a thin smile. “I’ll deal with the interrogator—personally.”

* * *

A kank-back journey from Urik to the guarded lands took four days. Quraite had that long, at a minimum, to prepare for Escrissar’s assault, if they believed Zvain told the truth when he said that his master would come as quickly as he could. And in that matter, at least, no one doubted Zvain’s veracity.
Quraite might have even more time. The more men, weapons, and supplies Escrissar brought with him, the longer it would take to organize the expedition. That was an inescapable fact of military life every templar, regardless of his rank or bureau, well knew. And Escrissar could hardly assemble his supplies in public or march out of the city gates in splendid formation without Hamanu asking questions Escrissar wouldn’t want to answer. Stealth would be required, and stealth took time.
They could have a fifteen-day week before disaster struck. Or much longer. Or less, if Escrissar proved inordinately efficient.
And if Telhami had sent Zvain tumbling before he’d had enough time to reveal the secrets of the Sun’s Fist to Escrissar, as Zvain swore she had, there was a chance the interrogator would blunder onto the salt flats unaware of their breadth and unprepared for their dangers.
If Zvain was telling the truth. In Pavek’s opinion, the boy still had ample reason to lie.
Contrary to Telhami’s expectations, the guardian had not swallowed Zvain. The boy had already spent five long days and longer nights in Telhami’s grove. Cut off from everything familiar, twice-betrayed by Elabon Escrissar—once when the interrogator deceived him into believing he’d doomed himself to a defiler’s life, and the second time, a consequence of the first, when his carefully memorized spell had failed to kindle a destructive blast of sorcery—Zvain had spilled tales of his life in House Escrissar as freely as a poorly woven basket leaked water whenever anyone checked to see if he was still alive.
“Everything watches me,” Zvain said to Pavek on the morning of his sixth day in the grove. A day when Pavek’s increasingly sharp sense of guilt and responsibility had driven him across the barrens to visit the boy at last. “The bugs and the birds, the trees and the stones. Everything. Even the water.” The boy’s red-rimmed eyes flickered nervously, seeming unable to rest on any one object within the grove. “It all watches me and listens.”
Zvain’s gaze settled then on him, steady and accusing. “Just like at Escrissar’s. No better. Worse, maybe.”
And Pavek couldn’t forget being faced with that look, clenched fists in the night.
But then the eyes filled, the pleading note returned to the boy’s hoarse voice. “How can I make them know I’m sorry, Pavek? Tell Kashi I’m sorry, that I didn’t mean it, any of it.” And the small fingers sought his own, which clenched back of their own accord. “Please make her believe? There’re dead things here, Pavek. I can see them at night and whenever I go to the trees’ edge.”
The hand trembled with what, he suspected, was very real, fear. Zvain had made himself a lair in the middle of the grove’s largest grassland, a small hollow some seven mansized strides across. He was noticeably thinner; the druids’ assertion that no one could starve in one of their groves apparently did not apply to a prisoner too frightened to pick a handful of berries from a bush with eyes. And when those fingers slipped his and Zvain wrapped his arms around Pavek as he had done so often in the Urik bolt-hole, Pavek found he couldn’t refuse to offer the comfort so obviously needed.
“It’s not my fault, Pavek, is it? I was looking for you when he found me. He locked me up, just like this, and then he gave me things—I tried to be careful Pavek, I thought he was a slaver, but he was worse, and then it was too late.” Zvain’s arms squeezed harder. “You’ve got to believe me. You’ve got to get me out of here.”
Pavek knelt to return Zvain’s embrace, and as the boyish arms wrapped around his neck and the boyish head burrowed into his neck, he found himself wondering why it was easier to hug and hold someone he didn’t trust than to comfort Akashia, whom he did. Even now, when tears were soaking his shirt and trickling down his ribs, why should he want to reassure the boy when he knew, both in his head and his heart, that Telhami was right? It was a tragedy when an innocent youth was corrupted, but that didn’t mean that the corruption should be spared its rightful end.
He, himself, had lived in corruption all his life without succumbing to it—or so both Oelus and Telhami said. Of course, no one had ever tempted him the way Escrissar had tempted Zvain, or abandoned him quite the way he had abandoned the boy. And Zvain was his weak point, the only opening a man like Escrissar needed.
He extracted himself from Zvain’s embrace.
“Please, Pavek? Please?” The whine was back; Zvain reattached himself around Pavek’s ribs. “Don’t leave me here. Take me with you. Make them forgive me—like you made them forgive Ruari after he busted the zarneeka stowaway.”
And how had Zvain learned that?
He pushed the boy away, scowling. Zvain made no attempt to reattach, seemingly resigned to losing this battle, but threw himself instead back onto his lair and scowled up at him.
Was Ruari paying visits to the grove? It was possible. Ruari held himself apart from the farmers and druids who drilled twice every day, trying to transform themselves and their tools into fighters and weapons. Ruari wanted personal instruction from both him and Yohan and the assurance that he wouldn’t be standing in a line of hoe-toting farmers, but doing hand-to-hand hero’s work; an assurance neither he nor Yohan would give. And knowing a bit of the way Ruari’s mind worked, it was more than possible that he was sulking in Telhami’s grove rather than his own.
Ruari and Zvain together in the same thought sent a shiver down Pavek’s back.
The youths were talking, perhaps plotting. Telling himself that he’d have to warn Yohan, if not Telhami, he turned his back on the scowling face.
“You risked your life to save a farmer’s brat.” The voice from behind him had taken on a new maturity in the past six days, one he could hear, now with his back turned. “You defied that old woman to save a half-elf that tried to kill you; but you won’t say a word in my behalf-me, who saved your life, templar, after you took my mother’s… And left me behind.”
He almost turned, then, to defend actions he couldn’t explain to himself, but:
“Why, Pavek?” The whine was gone, and the maturity, leaving only a soft quiver.
A quiver far more dangerous to all he fought for than all Escrissar’s unknown forces. Pavek pried himself free of Zvain’s insidious influence and made a clean escape to the barren land outside Telhami’s grove.
He was still on the path between the fields when he heard frantic hammering on the hollowed log that served as Quraite’s general alarm.

* * *

Most of Quraite had assembled by Telhami’s hut by the time he got there. Telhami herself stood beside the door, waiting. Her gray hair stood out from her head in windswept wisps, and her eyes were weepy from the sun.
In the last few days, Pavek had heard her say many times that she watched over Quraite. He remembered how she’d been the first to know that Yohan was crossing the Fist, first to know that Pavek and his companions were returning with her and Zvain; but he’d assumed that she’d used some trick of the Unseen Way to accomplish that. He’d never guessed, until now, that she literally and actually hovered above her guarded lands.
“They’re coming,” she said, flatly and firmly. “From the southwest, straight out of Urik.”
“All ten thousand?” an anxious farmer asked.
“Fifty men and women, give or take a handful. They’ve lost some coming across the Fist, but those I saw will finish the journey before sundown.”
Fifty sounded better than ten thousand. The farmers sighed with relief, but Pavek didn’t. He thought of fifty fighters, probably including Rokka and other renegades from the Urik templarate, and shook his head grimly.
Any templar could take battlefield commands and carry them out. And even a desk-bound procurer like Rokka had to put in his time on the practice fields.
Pavek held himself a competent fighter with the weapons he knew—better than competent, his size, strength and Dovanne’s sword would give him a real advantage. But when the fighting was between one man and many, the wise man placed his bets on the many.
He didn’t think Escrissar could have recruited fifty renegades in Urik; Hamanu’s grip was firm, and his vengeance swift. He thought ten templars was a more reasonable number, with the rest hired rabble from the elven market, only marginally more skilled than the farmers who’d have the morale advantage of fighting for their home and their lives. The odds would still be long, but, if Telhami could contain Escrissar’s mind-bending, they’d have a chance.
Yohan had made his own analysis of what they faced:
“They’ll be parched and exhausted. Maybe they’ll make camp.” And his eyes sparkled with thoughts of an ambush. Telhami looked at Pavek.
He shook his head. “Unless it’s so dark they don’t see the trees.”
“My thought as well,” she agreed.
She took a long moment to study the Quraiters, one by one, looking straight into each pair of eyes with a confident smile. “We’ve done everything that we could do in advance,” she said. “You know what we must do now, and I know that you can do it.”
Pavek admitted to himself that for a woman who’d spent her life growing trees, Telhami did a credible job of marshalling her forces for what she, at least, had to know was going to be an all-out, to-the-last-survivor battle. His own confidence rose as he watched the farmers and lesser druids gather the long-handled tools that would serve as their weapons. Calmly determined, they laid the hoes, flails, scythes and rakes beside their stations along the waist-high dirt rampart that encircled Telhami’s hut.
In six days they had transformed the village from a cluster of comfortable dwellings and pantries to a bare ground clearing in which they had hastily created three trench-and-rampart rings. They’d hacked stakes from the sacrificed trees and homes and set the largest point-up in the outer bank of the first two ramparts to slow the enemies’ advance. Smaller stakes had become make-shift spears heaped in sheaves at each station of the innermost rampart.
The farmers and druids, everyone old enough to fling a stick or bind a length of cloth over a wound, would fight from behind the third ring’s rampart, while he and Yohan would add their skills wherever, whenever the circle threatened to break.
And while they were holding back the physical attack, inside the hut Akashia would be shaping and focusing the guardian’s power as Telhami combined druidry and the tricks of the Unseen Way to fend off whatever Escrissar sent at them.
And if they failed—if the circle broke and the enemy stormed Telhami’s hut, or Escrissar got around Telhami and; the guardian to flood them all with nightmare monsters… Well, every druid had wrought unique spellcraft to hide his or her grove. Escrissar would be hard-put to locate them all, and if he found them, the likelihood was that the zarneeka plants, and everything else the Quraite druids had nurtured for generations, would be dead.
It was as good a defense strategy as they’d collectively been able to devise. Pavek would have given all the gold stashed beneath Telhami’s hut for a few bows and the men to shoot them, but there was no sense longing for what they couldn’t have. Escrissar and his fifty allies would march undisturbed through the fields and the ring of trees and find an unpleasant surprise waiting for them.
Pavek only hoped the wheel of fate would give him just one opportunity to slip his sword between the interrogator’s ribs.
He felt a tug on his shirt and spun around.
“What about me, Pavek?”
Ruari, with his staff.
“You know your place.”
“Pavek, I can do better than that—”
“You can’t. Gather your weapons, your water, and the cloth for bandages. Take them and yourself to your place on the rampart and stay there!”
“I want to fight”
“You’re going to fight, scum. Now—Go!”
He and Ruari stared at each other, then Ruari stalked away. Pavek hoped-prayed to whatever nameless power might listen to a one-time templar, not-quite druid—that Ruari’s bile wouldn’t get him killed in the first assault wave. Quraite needed everyone, and Ruari was proficient with that staff of his; he set the standard for the farmers around him. They’d lose heart if Ruari went down in some fool’s burst of bravery.
He’d lose heart.
Except for Yohan, none of them were veterans, none of them had fought a pitched battle—including himself. Stalking Dovanne’s attacker or breaking the heads of petty criminals in his inspector days didn’t count. The closest he’d come to combat was skirmishes on the streets of Urik against the Tyrian hooligans years ago.
Inside, he was scared to the marrow and desperate to see another sunrise. He almost envied Ruari his blind anger and commitment.
Waiting was worse than he imagined it could be, knowing that the circle fighters were looking over their shoulders at him and curbing their fears because he looked calm. Yohan, sitting beside him on the stoop of Telhami’s hut, looked calm as he examined the edge of his obsidian sword.
But maybe, as Yohan’s eyes met his, not calm at all. Maybe Yohan’s panic went even deeper, because there was no one at all for him to turn to.
Then, without warning, the mind-bending began: a black fist thrusting through his mind. Everyone jerked backward; a few cried out in shock or terror before Telhami launched her counterattack, and the black fist became a memory.
“He knows we’re here, waiting for him.” Yohan got to his feet and stretched the dwarf-thick muscles of his arms and legs. “May Rkard guide your sword.” He held out his hand. “What do yellow-robe scum say to each other before the Lion sends them out to die?”
Pavek slapped his hand against Yohan’s and pulled himself to his feet. “Better you than me.” Which was a lie. He had no idea what templars said to each other.
But Yohan laughed and shook his hand heartily. “That’s good. I’ll remember that.”
“See that you do.”
They released each other’s hand and took a step backward toward the quadrants of the circle they’d selected for themselves. For a moment Pavek wanted to say something more, something sincere, then Yohan turned away and the moment was gone.

* * *

Escrissar brought his force through the trees in a compact group: a dozen fighters in the front rank and three or four in each of the files. If Telhami’s estimate of their enemy’s strength was correct—and Pavek saw no reason to doubt it—the interrogator was committing himself personally to a single thrust and holding nothing in reserve.
On second glance, the interrogator wasn’t committing himself to anything, unless he was the black-haired half-elf marching second-from-the-left. There wasn’t a black enamel mask to be seen, like Telhami and Akashia, Escrissar was holding himself out of the battle, mind-bending from a safe distance.
And that wasn’t the worst thing Pavek saw, or didn’t see. He spotted Rokka and a few other templars he recognized from Urik, about ten in all, just as he’d figured. They’d left their yellow robes behind—no surprise; heavy sleeves were a dangerous obstacle to a swinging sword-arm—and marched in such oddments of weaponry and armor as they’d scrounged from the templarate armory and private armorers in the elven market. Their rag-tag panoply stood in considerable contrast with the fighters who marched around them.
Escrissar had filled his force not with the ill-equipped rabble from the market he’d hoped for, but with some three dozen hardened fighters, each of whom carried a polished wooden shield, a javelin, and a yard-long knobkerrie club all carved from bronze-hard agafari wood.
The agafari tree grew near Nibenay, and, as far as Pavek knew, no where else in the Tablelands. Nibenay’s templarate was composed of the Shadow-King’s wives only, so he was either looking at army conscripts—which didn’t seem likely given the way they marched—or one of the numerous mercenary companies Nibenay’s ruler employed to augment his harem.
But whether the Shadow-King knew that his mercenaries were here, far northeast of Urik, was a question only Elabon Escrissar could answer.
Nibenay’s mercenaries threw their single javelin before they descended into the trench around the outer rampart. Two farmers went down. One took a shaft through his left arm; he might recover from the shock to fight again. The other was gut-struck, and his screams were horrible to hear.
While the Quraiters hurled their first and second sharpened-stake volley, Yohan pulled every other fighter from that part of the inner circle that did not face the attack and repositioned them in the quadrant that did.
Agafari shields easily deflected those few stakes of the first Quraite volleys that were well-aimed and forceful, deflected as well the stakes of the third and fourth. Pavek hadn’t expected the stakes to inflict much damage, except, perhaps, to the enemies’ resolve. And perhaps they would have, if the bulk of Escrissar’s force had been rabble from the elven market. But the Nibenay mercenaries were laughing as they came over the outer rampart.
With luck—a monumental amount of luck—that laughter would make them careless.
He chose a place where the right flank of mercenaries would come against the inner rampart and hurled javelins himself, aiming for the Urik templars who lacked shields. He got one, too, square in the neck. She went down and a loud cheer went up from the Quraiters.
A shrieking, blood-red streak momentarily blinded Pavek, whether in the sky or in his mind’s eye, he couldn’t have said. His vision cleared in an instant and the apparition wasn’t repeated, but it wasn’t a good omen, either, if Akashia and Telhami could be so easily distracted.
But the enemy’s front rank was atop the second rampart, now, and no longer laughing. Pavek shouted for the Quraiters to take up their hand weapons. One druid, already so unnerved that she couldn’t move to attack or defend, was doomed, if she didn’t recover quickly. But her fate was hers to call; the Nibenay mercenaries in the second rank of the outside file charged forward, wailing the Shadow-King’s war-cry, and for Pavek, the battle had begun in earnest.
There was nothing skilled or subtle to his fighting, just beat or parry—with the flat of his sword when he could, because the agafari wood was more resilient than his steel and apt to bind the blade if he struck it edge-on—and attack whenever he could.
He tried to grab himself a shield after taking his first attacker down with a bone-deep slash to the man’s thigh, but the mercenaries had anchored their shields around their necks with leather thongs. Pavek only had time for a single-syllable curse before a man and a woman bearing the weapons of Nibenay surged toward him.
He beat aside both clubs, then fell back a quick half-step to survey the battle. He had room to fight only because the Quraiters around him were down and dying. The circle still held, but there were far more bodies on the inside of the rampart than on the outside.
They’d been outnumbered almost two to one from the start, and with Escrissar’s foreign fighters, it was more like ten to one.
But the female mercenary—a human: all the Nibenay mercenaries seemed to be human—left him no time to consider options. Following his retreat, she swung her club, a two-handed whirling blow that, had it landed, would have taken him out. But Pavek pushed forward into her unguarded attack, and over-balancing her, got a clean, backhand cut at her neck as she went down, insuring that she’d stay down. The other mercenary, undoubtedly her partner, came at him in blind rage.
At that same moment, a cry went up from the other end—Yohan’s end—of the battle. The cries weren’t cheers, and he could only hope the dwarf hadn’t been wounded, or worse, gone down completely, but a numbing blow to his off-weapon arm jolted his attention back to more immediate concerns.
He got lucky, catching the mercenary’s weapon hand above the wrist. The man dropped his club and ran screaming toward the trees. There was a five-heartbeat pause in the battling: long enough for him to reach down and pick up a club since he’d given up all hope of getting a shield.
“Yohan’s dead!”
The tidings he’d dreaded, delivered by the voice he wanted least to hear.
“Hold the line!” he shouted, not daring to turn around as a Urikite templar—an instigator whose face he recognized—came forward to join battle with him.
“We can’t! Not without Yohan. What do we do? Everyone’s hurt. Pavek!”
He parried quickly, using the edge against an obsidian weapon that chipped against the harder steel.
“Help us, Pavek! We’re losing!”
Fear touched Pavek’s heart then, a cold, shivery tracing—and he would have died himself if Ruari hadn’t thrust his staff between them and spun the thrust aside, exposing the instigator’s flank long enough for Pavek to pierce it with the sword. As the templar fell, his medallion slipped from beneath his shirt.
Medallion. And Ruari had his.
“Give it to me!” Pavek dropped the club and reached across the body toward Ruari.
“Give what?”
“My medallion. Give it to me!”
“What?”
“You said it, scum: We’ve lost. That medallion is all we’ve got left.”
The flow of combat had swung away from them, toward the place where Yohan no longer offered solid resistance. Pavek scrambled down the rampart, heedless of what lay beneath his feet. Ruari kept pace with him, his staff-wielding more effective than any shield. They disabled three Nibenay mercenaries in quick succession, but the tide of the battle didn’t change.
Escrissar’s force would be over the rampart at any moment.
“Now!” Pavek shouted above the din of weapons striking and men screaming.
True to form, the half-wit scum threw the medallion without warning.
Pavek caught the thong on a fingertip, and didn’t allow himself to think about what might have been. He spun the inix leather around his left hand and closed his fist around the familiar ceramic lump, shouted Guard me! and raised his wrapped fist high above his head:
“Hamanu! Hear me, your servant, O Great and Mighty One!”
Everyone in Escrissar’s force heard Pavek’s cry and surged toward him. Ruari would have gone down in a pair of heartbeats once they closed, but the remaining Quraiters, though they couldn’t have understood what he was trying to do, saw Ruari defending him and rushed to their aid.
The fighting was fierce and desperate around him. Pavek felt a sharp pain in his leg; then it went completely numb: the telltale sign of a serious wound. But the leg held, and he prayed as he’d never prayed before to see a pair of sulphurous eyes in the lurid sunset sky.
Shimmering ovals glowed faintly overheard: the distance between Urik and Quraite was considerable, even for a sorcerer-king.
Who knew what Hamanu saw when a templar invoked his name and power? Another sorcerer-king would know; certainly not Pavek, though he hoped Urik’s ruler would see the agafari weapons of Nibenay creating carnage in his domain. And Pavek hoped Great and Mighty Hamanu, having seen that, would give a renegade templar one great and mighty spell…
“Flamestrike!”
…Granted…
The shimmering eyes flared like nearby suns, all seething reds and oranges. The air over the Quraite ramparts thickened and became very still before a wind began to blow upward from the ground itself. Will they or nil they, the men and women on both sides of the rampart lowered their weapons to stare at the sky. Urik templars, recognizing what they saw, ran for the trees—much too slowly.
A flaming bolt exploded from the sky. It grounded itself in the medallion Pavek still held above his head. Searing heat and pain beyond imagining transformed him. He thought he would surely die—thought Hamanu had chosen to destroy him first—but he did not even lose consciousness as lesser fire-bolts arced away from the inferno erupting at his wrist. The bolts struck true into the hearts of Escrissar’s allies, and into them alone.
Howls that would haunt Pavek’s sleep until he died escaped those living—dying—torches, which continued to burn erect even after they fell silent, until their substance was completely consumed and nothing, not even ash, remained.
Then, abruptly, the great gout of flame rising from his wrist fizzled. Heat and pain were reduced to memories; his flesh was unmarked and whole. The medallion shone with its own light for another instant before it, too, reverted to an ordinary ceramic lump.
Pavek lowered his arm.
“It’s over,” someone whispered, and someone else cheered.
But it wasn’t over. A scream out of Telhami’s hut scattered the last remaining wits of the surviving Quraiters. Pavek crossed from the rampart to the hut in two leaps—remembering his wound only when he’d landed solidly on the threshold on a leg that should have collapsed.
A blackened weal ran from knee to hip along his thigh. The spell, he thought, though how a flamestrike spell had cauterized the gash and sewn up the muscles beneath it went beyond his knowledge of magic. His leg ached when he thought about it, but he knew better than to think about it twice, and swept aside the curtain-door.
Telhami had collapsed on her sleeping platform. Her eyes and mouth were closed, but her limbs sprawled at awkward and unmoving angles. She was unconscious at the least, and very likely dead. Akashia sat alone, now, weaving her hands randomly over an assortment of herbs and powders. Her face was twisted into a silent scream as she sought to both shape the guardian’s power and maintain the mind-bending spells Telhami had begun.
Quraite’s most dangerous enemy, Elabon Escrissar, still lurked somewhere in the guarded lands, apparently unscathed by King Hamanu’s bounty.
“Ruari!” Pavek shouted. “Get in here!”
The half-elf appeared at his side, battered, bleeding, and filthy, but still on his feet. He glanced under Pavek’s arms and—for once—needed no instructions. He pressed his palms against Akashia’s moving hands before he settled on the floor.
“Hold steady, scum. You’ll know when I’ve found him.”

* * *

The interrogator could be almost anywhere. He wasn’t within the tree circle around the village, and he wasn’t among the trees themselves; Pavek tramped through the fields, to the line where Escrissar’s allies had hobbled their kanks, but Escrissar wasn’t there, either.
He looked until the sun was setting, the lavender sky turning to violet, and still he searched, until the only light was that of the stars. A half-elf couldn’t see in the dark as well as a full-blooded elf, but still Escrissar would see better than Pavek.
The mind-bending interrogator should be nearly exhausted. Akashia and Ruari should be able to hold against him. But should be didn’t always mean was, and in his heart Pavek felt fortune swinging away from Quraite again.
“Hamanu’s infinitesimal mercy,” he whispered, not an invocation, but a simple man’s simple oath. The medallion hung around his neck again but he had no intention of using it. There was no spell in any of the scrolls he’d memorized that would guide him to Escrissar.
Then he heard sounds behind him, a heavy-footed tread, crushing the ripening grain as his own feet crushed grass in the groves. Drawing the sword, he spun around to face a silhouette half again his height and watching him with glowing yellow eyes.
“Hamanu?” Pavek whispered, then, realizing it could be no one else, dropped to his knees and threw his sword away. “O Great and Mighty King—”
“My pet is in the wastes yonder. You may follow.”
The ground gave around him as King Hamanu strode past Pavek. No one knew the sorcerer-king’s true aspect, if he had one. Tonight he was the Lion of Urik, dressed in golden armor and crowned with a mane of golden hair. A sword as long as a man’s leg hung from his waist, but it was the sharp, curved claws he flexed with each step that froze Pavek’s heart in his throat.
He followed, retrieving his own sword along the way and taking two strides for every one of the king’s until they came to a dark low-crouching figure.
“Recount!” Hamanu demanded.
It was more than a simple command. Pavek’s skull felt as if it had exploded, and he was, most definitely, not the king’s target. Not yet.
Escrissar scrabbled across the ground, a scavenger surprised by a true predator. “I have found the source of Laq,” he babbled, as if any mortal could lie successfully to a sorcerer-king.
“Ambition has blighted your imagination, my pet. You bore me.”
Hamanu’s voice was as weary as his clawed hand was swift. He seized Escrissar by the neck and, lifting him off the ground, began to squeeze. The interrogator struggled wildly, then hung limp, but the king was not finished. By the light of the Lion-King’s golden eyes, Pavek watched in nauseous horror as Hamanu’s fist squeezed ever tighter. The bones in Escrissar’s neck snapped and crumbled; gore flowed from his lifeless mouth and nostrils.
And still Hamanu was not finished with his former favorite. He cast a spell the color of his eyes that wrapped itself around the interrogator’s corpse and, layer by layer, from black robes to white bones, consumed it.
When there was nothing left, the yellow eyes found Pavek on his knees again and trying heroically not to be sick.
“I have need of a High Templar. Follow me.”
The king headed for the village.
Pavek found his feet, somehow, and followed.