The brazen gambit

chapter Seventeen

Fires had been lit in the hearths within the village’s inner rampart. A bright, crackling fire made any night seem safer—except when the flickering light reflected on Hamanu of Urik as he strode through the trees. Pavek, hard pressed to stay within ten human paces of the sorcerer-king, had neither the time nor the energy to call out a warning. Besides, nothing prepared anyone for the Lion: breathtakingly handsome in his golden armor, radiant with arcane power, cruel and terrible beyond mortal measure. After a day of loss and triumph, a handful of Quraiters simply swooned at the sight. The rest wisely dropped to their knees.
The king paused by a fire to survey this previously hidden part of his domain and its quaking inhabitants. Pavek caught up with him.
“Where is she?” Hamanu asked. “Where is Telhami?”
Not Who rules here? or some question of that sort, which Pavek had expected, but Where is Telhami? because, inexplicably, the Lion already knew who ruled Quraite. If he lived another day, Pavek promised himself he’d think through all the implications of this discovery, but for the moment—because those sulphur eyes were focused on him—he answered plainly:
“In there.” And pointed to Telhami’s hut.
Hamanu’s head rose above the roof-beam. His shoulders were wider than the doorway. Pavek held his breath, waiting for the king to call Telhami by name, fearing what he would do if she could not answer. But Hamanu solved his problems on his terms. He pierced the hut’s reed walls with his claws, seized the support poles and lifted the entire structure over his head before tossing it over the inner and middle rampart. His size was no longer a problem.
Akashia and Ruari were held motionless in panic, both looking up, slack-jawed, from the length of linen cloth they’d wrapped around Telhami’s corpse. Hamanu motioned them aside with a small gesture from his huge, clawed hand, and they hastened to obey. Telhami lay in repose on her sleeping platform, arms folded over her breast, thin gray hair spread across a linen pillow. Remembering what the king had done with Escrissar, Pavek dreaded what he might do with her.
Then the rightly feared ruler of Urik sank to one knee. While Pavek watched with the others, clawed fingers curled around Telhami’s cheek so gently that her translucent parchment skin was not creased.
“Telhami?”
Pavek had thought she was dead, but she opened her eyes and, after a moment, smiled. It seemed that not only did King Hamanu know Telhami, she knew him, and not as an adversary.
“So—” the king began, “this is Quraite.”
Telhami’s smile deepened with evident pride, but she said nothing. Perhaps she couldn’t speak, or move. Her hands seemed waxen in the light.
“It has seen better days, I think. Don’t you?”
There was a moment’s pause, then Hamanu laughed, an incandescent sound that echoed lightly from the trees.
“But I was invited!”
The king extended his hand toward Pavek, who reluctantly came closer. When he was in range, Hamanu ran a clawed finger down Pavek’s neck, hard enough that he could feel its strength and sharpness, but not—he thought—hard enough to break the skin. That, he was certain, would come later, after the king had toyed with him and tired of his fear.
“I never grow tired of fear, Pavek,” King Hamanu assured him with a grin that revealed glistening fangs. “Never.” Then he hooked the inix leather thong of Pavek’s templar medallion, which the king withdrew into the firelight. “A regulator of the civil bureau.” A claw gouged through the marks that indicated Pavek’s rank, effectively eliminating him from that rank and that bureau. Hamanu let the defaced, but intact, medallion thump against Pavek’s breast-bone, in effect proclaiming that he was a templar without a formal rank: a High Templar, if he ever chose to claim that distinction. “The best always slip away, Pavek. Remember that.”
And for a moment Hamanu seemed—he could not possibly be—less a leonine sorcerer-king with sulphur eyes and more a man, an ordinary man with clear brown eyes and a face a woman—Telhami—might find attractive.
Then King Hamanu turned back to the sleeping platform.
“Come back with me, Telhami. It’s not too late. Athas has changed. Borys is gone; the stalemate is broken. Nothing is as it was, Telhami. For the first time in a millennium, I do not know what will happen after I wake up. Come back to Urik—”
He fell silent and remained that way until Telhami closed her eyes. Then he stood up with a sigh of disappointment and age creaking in his bones. “Hold them tight or set them free, they always slip away. Always,” he said to no one in particular and stared at the moons.
“Was this your plan?” the king asked suddenly, his private rumination ended and, apparently, forgotten.
Pavek, at whom the question had been directed, was, at first, too startled to answer. When the shock faded, a single word hung in his mind: “Yohan.”
But Yohan wasn’t there to take the credit for his concentric ramparts. Yohan was gone, and Pavek did not feel better that he was alive instead.
“They die, Pavek. They slip away when your eye’s on something else, and you can never get them back. Learn to live with it. Think of them as flowers: a day’s delight and then they die. You’ll die yourself if you care about them.”
Then King Hamanu walked out through the ramparts, through the trees, and into the night.
Pavek’s gaze hadn’t left the place where he’d disappeared when he felt an arm slip around his back. Silently, Akashia rested her head against his chest. Hesitantly—he didn’t think such things would ever seem easy to him—Pavek put his hand on her neck and soothed the knotted muscles he found there.

* * *

Quraite took a final count of its losses the next day when the sun rose. More than half the adults had died fighting on the ramparts. A dozen groves would languish, unless strangers were drawn quickly across the salt flats or farmers who’d been content with the simple magic of green sprouting through broken ground began to hear the wilder call of druidry. Most of the children—the future—had survived. Akashia took them to her grove where they gathered wild-flowers to place on the shrouds of those who would never see the sun again.
Sprigs of yellow and lavender adorned Yohan’s shroud, where Pavek stood throughout the morning. Friend, Oelus had said; Yohan was a friend. Friendship was stronger than flowers. It seemed to Pavek—though he’d never thought about it before—that a man, especially a dwarf, should take something more than flowers into the ground with him. He found Dovanne’s steel sword and placed it over the flower sprigs.
Out beyond the fields the farmers had dug a common grave where, with Pavek’s help, they carried the remains of Quraite’s dead. Akashia said the simple words of remembrance and peace. Each Quraiter who survived threw a shovelful of dirt into the hole. Pavek stayed with the men to finish the task. When they returned to the village center, a procession was ready to carry Telhami to her grove one last time.
Pavek suspected she didn’t need a half-dozen people to carry the bier they’d made from her sleeping platform across the barren land. She was light enough he could have carried her himself. Moreover, though it was clear that she was dying, she wasn’t dead. Her mind was as sharp as it had ever been. He was certain she could have invoked the guardian with no difficulty at all and whisked herself to her grove in the blink of an eye.
He heard laughter while that thought still circulated inside his head.
They need to fed needed and useful.
Shifting his hold on the platform, Pavek looked over at her face. Her eyes were closed; nothing had moved. Nothing would move. But it was Telhami, he was certain, speaking directly into his mind.
Of course it is, Just-Plain Pavek. Have you made your decision?
“What decision?” he said aloud, drawing the puzzled stares of his companions.
Your future. The Lion has made you a handsome offer. I know; I took it once. Hamanu would not have ruled for a millennium if all his favorites were like Elabon Escrissar.
Telhami’s words pressed against Pavek’s consciousness; he couldn’t absorb them. He’d hung his life around certain assumptions. What Telhami said didn’t truly threaten those assumptions. He’d known somewhere, deep within himself, that Urik could not have survived if King Hamanu was not as wise as he was cruel, if his templarate was uniformly depraved and rapacious. But she’d drawn pathways between his assumptions, and he was not ready to walk down them.
Then, decide to stay in Quraite.
She was in his thoughts. He shook his head vigorously to dislodge her, and once again drew stares.
A man was entitled to some privacy!
Laughter, followed by: You aren’t sure, are you? Urik’s your home.
His home. He remembered what he felt when he stood beside House Escrissar with his hands pressed against the rough plaster. Kashi, of course: her anguish, his desire, and more than that—the surging power of Urik, seething with life and passion, like the Lion-King’s eyes.
The essence of the ancient city. A guardian.
That gave his Unseen eavesdropper a flashing moment of surprise. So—there were some things even Telhami didn’t know.
Many things, Just-Plain Pavek. Many things. I do not know what happened to the halfling alchemist. Do you?
He didn’t, though he remembered that scarred face with its hate-filled eyes very well. There’d been half-elves among Escrissar’s allies, but no halflings, and Escrissar, himself had been alone when Hamanu found him. Perhaps the Lion-King had absorbed the interrogator’s memories when he absorbed his essence. Perhaps the problem had already been solved with the king’s customary thoroughness.
Not likely. The Lion does not notice the grass ’til it’s grown high enough to scratch his eyes.
“I must go back—”
More stares, and the realization that the trees of Telhami’s grove loomed close ahead.
Is that your decision?
Was it? Pavek asked himself. Was he ready to turn his back on Quraite? On Akashia who—without saying a word, had, last night, asked him to stay? On Ruari—?
Who will keep him in line, if you’re not here to do it? Maybe Quraite is also your home?
“I don’t know,” Pavek whispered as the grass of Telhami’s grove began to brush against his legs.
He stumbled when the procession came to an unexpected stop. Craning his neck to one side, peering around the heads in front of him, he spotted a thin, wiry arm and a patch of wild dark hair blocking their way.
Zvain, he thought with guilt and shame, which Telhami echoed. They’d forgotten their prisoner, the misguided, betrayed, and abandoned orphan whose parents’ death had brought so many consequences to them all. Especially Akashia at the procession’s head. Pavek imagined the looks that had passed between them as Zvain raced away. Belatedly, he noticed that the boy’s shirt was in tatters.
It would not have been pleasant for him here yesterday.
The procession started forward again—without Pavek.
He couldn’t imagine what the grove had been like yesterday when Telhami and Escrissar had dueled with nightmares as the skies darkened. When Telhami, apologetically—or so it seemed—offered him a glimpse of the horror and carnage, he backed away from the bier.
“He’s a boy! A child.” He continued his retreat, heedless of the branches whipping against him. “Everybody stood back and watched. What would he do? How would he grow? What mistakes would he make to doom himself? The Veil wouldn’t take him. Oelus wouldn’t take him. I left him behind. So Escrissar took him, lied to him, and turned him loose again. Who made the mistakes? We didn’t even come out here to tell him who won—”
Pavek could see everyone now, from Akashia in the lead to the druid who’d taken his place carrying the bier. None of them would answer his questions or meet his eyes. None except Ruari who, Pavek realized suddenly, had no reason to hang his head and every reason of his own to glower.
Then Akashia raised her head. “Come back, Pavek. Come with us to the pool. You’re one of us. You’re a druid now. Please? Don’t run away!”
But he did just that, turning and running to the hollow where he’d found the boy before.
Zvain was there all right, sitting in the grass, contemplating his toes.
“Go away!”
“I’m sorry, Zvain. I’m just a yellow-robe third-rank regulator at heart and I can’t say it any better than mat. I’m sorry you got left here yesterday. I’m sorry your mother died. You must have loved her, and she must have loved you—’cause you’re not bad, Zvain. You didn’t deserve any of this. And I’m sorry.”
The boy plucked and shredded a blade of grass.
Pavek sat down on his knees. There were ugly scratches on Zvain’s back and arms to match the tears in his shirt. Pavek was careful where he touched when he put his arm around the boy and pulled him closer.
“I’m sorry. No one can give you back what you’ve lost, or take away the memories. But it will get better. I promise you that. All Athas is changing. We can make it change for the better. Here or in Urik. Together.”
Zvain let his breath out with a shudder and a sigh, then he molded himself against Pavek’s arms. They were silent a long while. Pavek felt Telhami looking at them from the trees, a part of her grove now and forever.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked when his knees had, at last, grown numb. “Do you want to stay here, or go back to Urik?”
“Right here?” Zvain raised his head with horror. “Everything watches here.”
Pavek thought of Telhami all around them and chuckled softly to himself. “Not right here. In Quraite, with the druids.”
“Akashia hates me.”
He had no easy response for that. “Akashia’s not the only druid in Quraite. I’ll be here and—” fate forgive me for saying it aloud “—Ruari.”
“Ru said he’d teach me what the elves know, and show me his kivits…”
In his mind’s eye, Pavek saw the two of them, Ruari and Zvain, and whether it was brawling with the elves, or playing with the kivits, the images were pleasant and warmed his heart.
“We’ll stay, then, for a while. I’ve got to go to Urik sometime—I’ve got to find that halfling alchemist—”
“Kakzim. His name is Kakzim. He and Escrissar had a fight, and he went back to the forests.”
Pavek ruffled the dark, curly hair. “You’ll have to come with me. I can see I’ll need your help.”
Zvain smiled, then buried his face in Pavek’s shirt as he hugged him with all his strength.
You ran a fine race, all the way to the end. Your gambits played well; you’ve won it all, Just-Plain Pavek. Take care of yourself, now that the race is over. Take care of him and the others. Take care of my grove; I give it to you. Learn to run wild and free before you return to the city.