The brazen gambit

chapter Five

The air was cool on Pavek’s face and tinged with scents he could not identify. His left arm, which had been agonizing the last time thought had left an impression in his memory, was quiet. He could wiggle his fingers without pain, feel their tips with his thumb, but when he tried to lift or bend his arm he met unyielding resistance: His elbow, it seemed, had been sealed in stone.
His eyes were still closed. He opened them, hoping to resolve the mystery of his arm, but the place where he found himself was dark as a tomb. Indeed, he wondered if it was a tomb.
Pavek’s sense of who he was and how he came to be was hazy. There was an odd, metallic taste in his mouth; his ears made their own ringing music. He guessed he’d been asleep for a long time, and an unnatural sleep at that. He remembered a boy, a long walk through darkness, and a sickening collapse. The boy—Pavek could not pluck his name out of the darkness—said they were going to a safe place, but he’d collapsed before they’d arrived. He remembered the boy sobbing and the sound of his feet when he ran away.
Had the boy been death come to collect his spirit?
Had death abandoned him to the dark, demi-life of the tomb?
Some sects said death was a beautiful woman; others said it was the Dragon. Pavek couldn’t remember any sects that personified death as a wiry lad with dark eyes and tousled hair. But then, he couldn’t remember much more about himself than his name.
He lay still and, after a moment, heard the steady beat of his pulse.
Tomb or no, if he had a pulse, he was alive and should try to remain that way. He thought about food and water, the prerequisites of remaining alive, and found that, despite a heartfelt conviction he’d gone days without eating or drinking, he was neither hungry nor thirsty.
So—he was not dead, not hungry nor thirsty, and not in pain, despite the stone around his left arm. He decided he could move his other limbs and, at the same time, discovered that he was stretched out on a thick, feather mattress that was softer than any bed he’d ever slept on before. He tried to coordinate his limbs: to use their strength to free his left arm from its prison. The fingers of his right hand scraped along a packed dirt wall when words that were not his own echoed between his ears.
Drink now?
The words had not been spoken aloud: he was as certain of that as he was of anything. His first thought was that he was not alone in the dark, dirt-walled chamber. His second, more cautious, thought was simply that he was being observed. The cool air swirling faintly over his face was no longer pleasant or comforting. He thought of ghosts, spirits and otherworldly haunting. An involuntary shudder racked the length of his body. A stab of remembered pain lanced the imprisoned elbow.
Not to worry. Everything is fine. Drink now? Eat? Rest?
The slender fingers of a smallish hand brushed gently against his forearm. The boy? Possibly, though the boy had seemed fully human, with eyes no better adapted to darkness than his own.
A halfling?
“Who are you?” he asked in an expectedly hoarse whisper. His throat was tight; it had been a while since he’d spoken. “What are you? Where are you? Where am I? What’s happening to me?”
So many questions! The silent voice twinkled with bemusement. There was sickness throughout your blood and body. You were brought here to heal; you are healing. You are safe. Is that not enough, Pavek? What more do you need to know?
His head sank into the feather mattress. There was much he wanted to learn, but nothing more that he truly needed to know. He relaxed with a guilty sigh. “Water,” he asked, then added, digging deep into memories of childhood before the orphanage, “if you please.”
More merriment in his mind, like bubbles in the rare sparkling wines of Nibenay: I please.
The spout of a delicate glass pitcher pressed against his lips. A slight, but strong, hand raised his head. He had a momentary vision of his nurse: a halfling woman with an ancient child’s face and dark, diamond-shaped tattoos framing her eyes. The vision faded as the cool, sweet water trickled down his throat, but not the memory. He’d know her, if he ever saw her again, especially if she smiled.
Rest, Pavek. Sleep quietly while your body heals.
He resisted because he was a man and did not like to be compelled, however gently or wisely. Then his eyes closed and he obeyed.

* * *

There were other awakenings, some when Pavek’s left arm seethed with inner fire. His back would arch tight at those times, and he’d remember the words every drill-field instructor barked at the end of a training session: Heal quick or heal forever. Pavek had left his wounds malingering for nearly two weeks—had no choice, really. A competent healer could seal a cut with a finger’s touch, but Pavek couldn’t purge poison or regenerate muscle overnight. His body informed his mind that this healing wasn’t finished and sometimes it told him that he must open his mouth to scream.
Strangely, even with his own anguished sounds filling his ears, Pavek was unafraid. After that first awakening, when his thoughts had swirled with questions and doubts, he did not worry about anything. Hands would slip beneath his neck to raise his head for a sip of water or a thick broth that tasted pleasantly of honey and meat. Only the halfling woman with the diamond tattoos spoke directly into his mind; the others ministered in total silence.
There was never light, never a clear memory of the healcraft that must be taking place while he slept. And mostly he did sleep, without dreams, without time. He was grateful, but it wasn’t natural; nothing about this underground chamber was natural. The water tasted pristine, but the broth could hide a dozen concoctions beneath its robust flavor, including one that left him in calm and blissful acceptance of very strange circumstances.

* * *

Pavek awoke again and found the chamber awash in the shadowy light of a small oil-lamp. The drowse that had insulated him from worry was gone, as was the stone weight around his elbow. He needed no help to raise his head or sit—though he regretted the latter. He’d been on his back too long. Blood drained from his head. The chamber spun in spirals, dimmed to a charcoal fog.
“Easy there, Pavek my friend. Be a bit more considerate of my hard work.”
A man’s voice, probably human and speaking with a familiar Urik accent, drifted through the fog. A man’s hand, big-knuckled and callused, clapped between his shoulders, pushing his head forward and down until his forehead banged against his knee. Blood reversed its flow, and he got an odd-angled look at the cleric who’d healed him: unruly hair atop a round, soft-featured face, ropes of mottled clay beads clattering against a barrel chest, and a robe the exact color of the chamber walls.
Pavek shrugged free of the helping hand. He sat up with no further ill effects, looking straight into guileless brown eyes. “Are we friends? I don’t know you. You know my name; what else do you know about me?” His neck was naked; the medallion was missing, where or when he couldn’t begin to guess. The rest of him was naked, too, although a linen sheet allowed the pretext of decency.
“Everything mat’s worth knowing.” The cleric’s grin was as merry as any Pavek had seen on a sober man. “Oelus,” he added, offering his hand, which Pavek regarded with undisguised suspicion.
“You are a healer, a cleric bound to some temple or sanctuary? You aren’t… hidden?”
“Veiled?” Oelus spoke the word with raised eyebrows; his hand remained outstretched. “No more than you. But, if you’re asking if the Alliance knows where you are, the answer is yes.”
“I remember a boy. Was there a boy?”
“Very definitely—and scared out of his wits. He’d got you halfway to safety, then had to leave you where you fell. Worst place to be, my friend, halfway to safety. Very exposed and a risk to all concerned. You can be sure our veiled friends moved quick to get you here, no questions asked ’til much later.”
Oelus’s words percolated through Pavek’s skull. By implication, the boy had, indeed, been leading him to an Alliance bolt-hole, which wouldn’t have been safety—not for a templar. The templarate hunted Veiled mages as vermin, and the vermin returned the favor. No quarter was asked or given from either side. He wouldn’t have drawn two breaths inside an Alliance bolt-hole; the boy, himself, would have needed luck to get out alive.
Making a mistake like that, the boy couldn’t be an initiate. Pavek had no idea where he’d collapsed, but the hand of fortune had tripped him just in time: to protect their bolt-hole, the magicians must have spirited him into the hands of an amenable sanctuary and the competent hands of an earth-worshipping cleric, Oelus.
“And the boy? Zvain, Zvain—that’s his name, isn’t it? I can remember his face. What of him? Did he suffer for what he did? For what he meant to do?”
The cleric’s eyes narrowed—thinking, analyzing—then the merry grin returned. “He’s worried, angry—all the things boys get when they think they’re old enough to be included in adult affairs, but aren’t. Nothing worse.”
“Free to come and go as he wills?”
Another calculating glance. “Very definitely. The path that lies before Zvain must be freely chosen. There is no other way.”
There was more here than Pavek’s freshly awakened mind could decipher. He raked his hair and felt matted tangles and grease. Cleanliness was far from mandatory in the templarate, but Pavek had savored the tile-lined baths beneath the barracks. He was appalled that he’d grown so rank and wondered how the cleric could stand so close without gagging. Perhaps it was part of a healer’s training as it was, to a certain extent, part of a templar’s.
A templar’s lifelong training.
His hand began to tremble. Without warning, an abyss opened within his mind, separating what he was from what he’d been. Perhaps he hadn’t been so lucky, after all. He covered his right hand with his left and noticed the fresh crimson scar winding around his elbow like one of Dovanne’s serpents. Oelus had done a hero’s work: the left arm was notably leaner than his right, but pain-free and fully flexible. Strength would return quickly enough, a few days on the practice fields—
The abyss widened. Pavek shook his head helplessly.
“Something wrong?” Oelus asked, taking Pavek’s left hand between his own. He poked, prodded, twisted, and flexed until his patient yelped. “Pain? Expect a little stiffness. Your muscles had rotted, Pavek. Would’ve been easier to lop it off right here—” He pressed the edge of his palm into the muscle below Pavek’s shoulder. “But I figured to let you make the decision for yourself: fight for your arm and keep it; languish and lose it.”
Pavek considered the prospect of one-armed life and cringed. “I fought,” he assured himself. “What happens now, healer? I know what the Veil would have done, what about you? Your peers? Superiors?”
“You’re my problem, Pavek. Mine alone,” Oelus stated firmly. “You were my patient; now you’re my problem.”
“And your solution to that problem? Do I walk out of here or have I been buried forever?”
“Neither. Oh, you could walk out of here, and you might even find your way back to the sun before you starved, but your name, Regulator Pavek, is still written in red on the gatehouse walls. You should be honored: The reward is up to forty gold pieces and, from what I hear, many have died trying to collect it.”
He sucked his teeth, but was otherwise speechless.
“It’s no great secret that the templarate consumes itself. No secret and no loss. But to be so noisy about it!” Oelus chuckled and shook his head. “I wondered myself: How did a mere third-rank, civil bureau regulator gain so many enemies? And why were his enemies having such trouble reeling him in? You roused curiosity underground, Pavek, as surely as you roused your enemies above it. The weather-eye was out for you, but you slipped through every net until the boy stumbled on you, by chance. Or so I heard.”
“Zvain,” Pavek repeated the boy’s name with a sigh and experimented with a fist. “If you know everything about me, you know his name, and you know it wasn’t by chance.”
“A slight exaggeration,” Oelus admitted. “You raved a bit those first few days, and I know how to read a body’s tale. You’re basically too healthy for a slave or peasant, too much muscle for a nobleman—not enough for a gladiator. The wrong calluses and scars for any artisan. And you’ve got all your teeth. Add that up and it comes out yellow, even though you weren’t wearing yellow and you had a putrid wound. I read the walls and listen to the morning harangues. I figured the boy was coincidence.”
“A coincidence who just happened to know a short path toward the Veil?”
Oelus gave an open-handed smile. “To be sure, that’s what he was doing—but did he know it? I don’t think so, and neither do you. The boy’s his own mystery: not my problem or yours, agreed? If the Veil’s got a weather-eye on him, at his oh-so-innocent, oh-so-corruptible age, I don’t want to know any more about him, do you? Better he remain a coincidence, don’t you think? Or maybe you have an interest in him yourself?”
Time was—time when there was a medallion around his neck—that he would have slain the cleric on the spot for the insult. That time was past. “Someone’s taught him to read the walls.”
“No one from the Veil,” Oelus said, weighing his clay beads between his fingers. “If they know your boy can read, they’ll keep him at a double arm’s length until he’s old enough to keep a vow with his life. Too much risk otherwise.”
Pavek bristled. “He’s not my boy. He’s an orphan. Lost his mother and father the same night not long ago. If the Veil’s interested in Zvain, they’re risking his life leaving him alone on the streets. If they wouldn’t take him in, they should’ve killed him outright. This way, they’ve got no more mercy than Hamanu’s dead-heart necromancers.”
“None whatsoever,” Oelus agreed. “No room for sentiment behind the Veil. They feed on their own, too. Best be glad that boy’s not your problem.” Oelus uncannily echoed the thoughts swirling in Pavek’s head. “Or mine. You’re enough of a problem for me. What should I do with a 40 spelled gold-piece regulator?”
Pavek’s wits had steadied. He was not the disoriented man he’d been when he’d awakened, and Oelus, though round-faced and smiling, was not a jovial fool. The beads and the color of his robe proclaimed his devotion to the element of earth; otherwise, there was nothing about him to connect him with any particular sect or sanctuary, or his position within it. But there was a good chance Oelus stood near the top of his hierarchy rather than at its bottom: A renegade regulator with a 40-gold-piece reward, was, however, a very real problem.
For which Pavek had an inspired solution.
“Initiate me into your order. Let me become one of you. I know—”
Oelus silenced him with a look of genuine astonishment. “Templars have no talent. Mekillots will fly before the elemental spirits hear a templar’s prayer, or heed it. It’s beyond question.”
He hadn’t expected the path to true mastery to be an easy climb, but neither had he expected it to be summarily blocked from the start. Pavek responded to the disappointment as he’d responded to it throughout his life: with a jut-jawed scowl and a brazen disregard for consequences.
“Be damned! Templars aren’t questioned for talent. For all you know, friend, I might have more than you, but you’re too dead-heart cowardly to find out.”
The cleric had the decency to look embarrassed. “You might well have had, Pavek. Have had—that’s the important part. I think you were cut from a decent length of cloth, but you were sewn up as a templar all the same. The king’s magic corrupts all who use it, Pavek. That’s the simple truth. Find that orphan boy, instead, Pavek; stand him in your shade. Your former friends might still be looking for you, but they’ll never recognize you sheltering a youngster. You’ve got a strong back and a clever mind—you’ll make way enough for two in Urik.”
“And if I refuse?” he flexed muscles that, though less impressive than a dwarf-human half-breed mul’s, were more than sufficient to smash a cleric’s round skull against the nearest wall. “Do you have another solution to your problem? What if I refuse to leave your sanctuary?”
Oelus matched his tone without physical display. “You don’t remember arriving here; you won’t remember leaving. I’m not often wrong about a man; I don’t want to be wrong about you. Listen to your heart. The poor, parched earth of Athas knows how you’ve managed to keep it alive where you’ve been. Listen to it…”
An amber flame danced hypnotically on the wick of the oil lamp. Pavek stared and cursed inwardly.
Suppose Oelus was right; suppose his templar’s life had placed all spellcraft beyond his reach? Could he still barter his knowledge of the zarneeka misappropriation to the druids in exchange for… what?
For an itinerant’s life?
But compare that with life scrounging in the city. What good was a clever mind or a strong back when he’d always be looking over his shoulder for a flash of yellow?
And why not take a wiry, orphan boy with him? Was he a dead-heart, too—no different from Elabon Escrissar or the fanatics behind the Veil?
“Damn your eyes, priest,” Pavek said aloud, his own way of conceding the wisdom of Oelus’s suggestions.
The radiant smile reappeared on the cleric’s face. He pumped Pavek’s hand and clapped him on the back. “You are a good man. I predict good fortune for you, and for the boy. A woman will come later with your supper. Eat heartily, without fear. Tomorrow you’ll greet the sun as a new man with a new life.”
Pavek shook off the camaraderie. “Naked as the day I was born and just as poor. Spare me, priest. I grew up in a templar orphanage; I’ve heard it all before. Bring me your potions in a plain cup—”
“All that you came with will be returned,” Oelus insisted, his smile undimmed. “Saving the shirt, which was not fit for rags. We’ll give you another—and a few bits for your purse, enough to see you and the boy started.”
“I had a knife, a gray steel knife—”
“With human hair wound beneath the hilt leather? Yes, it’s kept and safe.”
A fist Pavek did not remember making relaxed. Air filled his lungs in a sigh. The hair was Sian’s, cut from her corpse in the boneyard, more cherished than any single memory of their few years together, before the orphanage. He held a hand against his naked neck.
“My medallion?” like her hair, it belonged to a lost time. Twenty years of time now lost as completely as Sian.
Oelus frowned. “You have no need of it—”
“Nor have you,” he interjected sharply and saw deceit on the cleric’s face. “Was that the Veil’s price? Will they use my medallion to attack the king?” Strangely, the notion offended him. Mages who left children to fend for themselves on the streets of Urik were, to borrow Oelus’s expression, cut from the same cloth as King Hamanu, but without the king’s experience and, yes, wisdom in ruling the city.
“No, it is with your other possessions. But, surely, you do not wish to be tempted to wield its power in your new life?”
“You know Hamanu’s magic corrupts, but you don’t know how it works, do you? Believe me, priest, there’s less temptation to me than there is to you.”
“But if you’re discovered with it—?”
“Then my ‘new life’ is over. It’s mine, cleric, will you return it to me?”
“That medallion will bring you grief, Pavek.”
“Do you read the stars or scry the future? Don’t harry me with vague threats, priest. Tell me what you know, or tell me that you’ll return my possessions, as you promised.”
The cleric exhibited a moment of doubt, then, visibly reluctant, nodded. “I would have you remember me as a man of my word, whatever the danger that medallion brings you.”
Light appeared in the passageway beyond the chamber and, moments later, a shadow and a woman bearing a steaming loaf of bread on a tray.
“Your supper,” Oelus explained. “May the earth lie gentle beneath your feet all the days of your life, Pavek, and give you rest at the end of it.” He touched Pavek’s forehead with the fingers of his right hand. “It is not every man who gets to start over. Take care of yourself and that boy.”
Despite his protests that he wanted his draught in a plain, bitter cup, the aromas seeping through the bread set his mouth watering and blunted his appreciation of the cleric’s blessing. Matching Oelus’s bow with a curt nod of his head, he’d retrieved the tray before the sounds of Oelus’s sandals faded.
The door remained open—a challenge he ignored.
Securing the linen at his waist, he lifted the upper portion of the crusted bread from the hollowed loaf beneath it. The stew was thick with roots and tubers and other things that grew in the earth, but tasty nonetheless. He consumed it, the upper crust, and was tearing the bowl itself into bite-sized pieces when lassitude struck, and he fell asleep where he sat.
Pavek awoke with the warmth of sunlight on his face and the inimitable sounds of the Urik streets in his ears. He remembered Oelus, the stew, and the moment when his eyelids became too heavy to hold open. Before he opened his eyes, his hand moved to his neck. The inix leather thong was in its familiar place.
“A man of his word,” he whispered.
“Are you awake, Pavek? They said you’d wake up when the sun came ’round.”
He recognized the young, reedy voice. Oelus was definitely a man of his word—not the first Pavek had met, but with the others, the epithet was not entirely a compliment. He stretched himself upright, knocking his bands against a low ceiling in the process. Zvain’s bolt-hole was another underground chamber. Sunlight filtered in through a yellowed slab of isinglass set between the lashed-together bones shoring up the roof and walls. Pavek blinked as oblong darkness landed in the center of the isinglass, and felt foolish as his hearing made sense of the background noises: The translucent isinglass replaced one of Urik’s countless paving stones. Zvain’s chamber had been carved beneath a street or market plaza.
The ex-templar shook his head and succumbed to a rueful grin. Not once during all the years he’d descended into the customhouse galleries or to his own bunk in the barracks had he suspected that ordinary citizens—and noncitizens—had also solved Urik’s joint problems of oppressive heat and limited building materials by digging into the rock-hard ground.
“Why’re you laughing?”
“Where are we?”
“Near the head of Gold Street, near the Yaramuke fountain.”
Pavek calculated the location: Zvain lived under one of the merchant quarters of the city. It seemed incongruous for a moment, then less so. Templars left the safety of the merchant quarters to the merchants.
“How’d you find this place, Zvain?” Pavek ducked under a bone rafter, heading for the door. How many—?”
The boy stood firm on the threshold. Neither Zvain nor the flimsy door of cloth and sticks behind him represented a meaningful barrier, but he halted all the same.
“You are a templar. You’ve got no manners.”
Away from the isinglass the chamber was in permanent twilight. Zvain had the stature and slenderness of a boy midway through childhood, but his eyes—large, dark, and without passion—were older.
“Do I owe you anything? Last I remember, you said we’d be even if you saved my life. Did you save my life, boy, or did someone else?” Pavek countered, taking Zvain’s measure with typically harsh templar tones and accusations. He could justly claim that he needed to know the boy’s mettle and knew no other way to assess it, but he regretted his words when Zvain’s expression melted into silent grief. “I guess you’re right, boy: I’ve got no manners.”
His hands separated in a palms-up gesture of frustration that the boy saw as an invitation. Zvain threw himself against his chest, locking arms around his waist, trembling with tears. Feeling frustrated and helpless, he wrapped an arm around Zvain’s thin shoulders and rested the other hand atop his head. While pent-up tears dampened his shirt, he swayed on his hips, surveying the chamber that had become his new home.
The bed where he’d awakened was wide enough for a husband and wife. A corner filled with rags and blankets marked the nest where Zvain slept. A single straight-backed chair and a tiny table completed the furnishings, except for shelves hammered into the dirt walls on which a meager assortment of domestic utensils and—yes—a tattered alphabet scroll were neatly arranged. The merchants upstairs would burn the lot for cooking fuel, but he knew better. He knew how the rabble lived. Life with Sian had been a succession of crowded rooms and reeking alleys, each one a little worse than the last. Zvain had lost much more when he became an orphan than he’d ever had.
He patted the tangled hair and squeezed the boy tight. There was a single, strangled wail as seeping tears became a torrent, but the virtue of silence was a lesson Zvain had apparently learned in his heart. The boy shuddered from head to toes without making a sound.
“We’ll manage,” Pavek whispered, wishing he believed his own words.
Pavek closed his eyes and found the benign, round face of the cleric, Oelus, smiling in the darkness of his mind’s eye. Well and good for Oelus: Oelus was tucked away in his sanctuary. Oelus’s robe was dry and his meals were served by women who knew how to cook. Oelus had nothing to worry about.
Pavek banished the cleric with a hard-edged thought, but there was something else hovering dimly in his memory. He called it closer and it became a woman’s face—not the battered, broken face of Sian or Zvain’s mother, but beautiful, proud, and, at first, unrecognized. He could understand why he’d see Oelus within his mind’s eye; the cleric’s smile could easily have been real spellcraft, and not the product of his beleaguered imagination. But the zarneeka druid? Why had he called her out of his memory?
“You’ll stay?” Zvain asked, not daring to lift his head.
The druid’s face remained in Pavek’s vision after he opened his eyes, daring him and judging him as she’d dared and judged him in the gateyard.
“I’ll stay,” he agreed. “We’ll manage.”
He expected the image to smile. Oelus’s image would be bursting with an ear-to-ear grin, but the druid of his imagination did not change expression. Pavek’s anger surged at her, at himself. He barely knew how he was going to manage, much less manage for himself and a boy. Raising children was women’s work—not that Sian had mastered the art. Then inspiration came to him on a cool breeze.
Women’s work indeed, and a woman who faced down templars without breaking a sweat should be willing to do it. Perhaps he had been corrupted, had no hope of learning a purer sort of spellcraft—but here was Zvain, orphaned by Laq, which had been corrupted from the druids’ precious zarneeka powder. She couldn’t turn her back on an orphan, wouldn’t turn her back on a man that orphan trusted, even if he were a dung-skulled baazrag.
“We’ll manage,” Pavek repeated more confidently. “I have apian—”
Zvain shifted within Pavek’s hands. His face tilted upward, the dark eyes glinted with unshed tears. “I’ll help, Pavek,” he promised. “I’ll learn whatever you teach me, I swear it. I’m ready now. Look—” The boy squirmed free, rummaged through his blankets, coming up with a vicious object slightly longer than his forearm. Bent obliquely in the middle, it had a lump of dark stone lashed to one end and an obsidian crescent at the other. “I stole it from a gladiator. I’m ready, Pavek. We’ll hunt Laq-sellers together.”
The boy mimed a move that in the arena might have split an opponent from gullet to gut.
“Damn King Hamanu and all the templars.” Zvain slashed again. “Damn the Veil who let him kill her to save their own precious hides! You and me, Pavek, we’ll do what needs to be done!”
Zvain’s eyes were still bright with tears, but otherwise the fragile, grief-stricken orphan had vanished.
“We will, won’t we?” Zvain paused with the weapon cocked above his shoulder.
Words failed.
“Won’t we?”
“We’ll try, Zvain,” Pavek answered softly. His attention was fixed on the jagged, sharp curve of the obsidian crescent. The druid’s face had returned to the depths of his memory, and where was Oelus when he was needed? What would the pious cleric say to a reckless, vengeful child?
“Try isn’t good enough,” Zvain protested, his lips beginning to tremble as grief regained the upper hand on vengeance. “It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. She’s dead forever. Somebody’s got to care. Somebody’s got to do something.” His hand was trembling along with his lips and voice. He might drop the weapon, or he might launch himself at Pavek’s throat.
“We will, Zvain. We’ll do something, I promise you that.” It wasn’t a lie. Pavek believed the druids would refuse to trade at the customhouse once they knew about Rokka, Escrissar, and the halfling. Without zarneeka, Laq would have to disappear. “Give that here. You can’t kill all of them, Zvain—why even start?” Pavek held out his hand and held in his breath.
Zvain’s eyes narrowed beneath thoughtful brows. His fingers rippled along the bone shaft, making the weapon wobble in rhythm with his own doubts. Then the decision was reached. He lowered his arm; the weapon slipped from his grasp. Pavek snatched it with one hand and the boy with the other. He lifted Zvain into a snug embrace while he stowed the weapon on the highest shelf.
“You listen to me, you hear?” He gave the clinging weight a gentle shake. “You do what I tell you to do. No more stealing from gladiators. No more talk about hunting men, no matter what they sell. This is Urik—King Hamanu’s city. Break his laws and you die.”
“Templars break his laws all the time. They don’t die. You broke his laws. You didn’t die.”
Pavek scratched his itchy scalp with his free hand. He’d forgotten what little he knew about children the day he donned the yellow robe and ceased to be one himself. “Don’t argue with me, Zvain,” he said wearily, letting the boy slide back to the floor. “Just do what I tell you, or I’ll leave. You understand that?”
The boy went wide-eyed and passionless again. Nodding solemnly, he hid his hands beneath his shirt. “I understand that, Pavek. I’ll do what you tell me. I promise.”

* * *

Zvain tried, but he wasn’t the half-grown boy Pavek had taken him for. Though slight and slender, he was on the cusp of adulthood. One moment he’d be clinging to Pavek’s arm as they walked familiar streets. The next, he’d spin away, all snarls and hisses, determined to have his own way, whatever the cost. He was too clever by half and suspicious by nature. Pavek still judged the Veil harshly for leaving him to fend for himself—if that’s what they’d done—but before they’d eaten breakfast and made their way to the western gate, he could understand their reasoning.
He didn’t dare tell Zvain what he had in mind, why he wanted to scout the gate or why, when he learned that it was the 160th day of the Descending Sun, he approached the inspector.
“The boy and me want to work, great one,” he said, meeting Bukke’s eyes, putting Oelus’s assumptions to their hardest test.
Bukke seized Pavek’s arm, giving it a brutal wrench. Pavek dropped to his knees. “Big, strong man like you—why haven’t I seen you before? Why don’t I know your name? Don’t you know what happens to runaways, scum?”
“No runaway, great one—just down on my luck, a bit. Heard you could always get work with a strong back loading and unloading at the gates. That’s all, great one.” Pavek hung his head ’til his beard brushed his chest and let his fear show as well.
His medallion was stowed in the bolt-hole beside the weapon, nothing else could give away, unless Bukke made an association between the crude, weathered drawing on the wall and the man kneeling in the dust at his feet. Actually, the gate inspectors wouldn’t care whether a man was free, slave, or runaway, so long as he could stand the pace, which on the appropriate market day could be brutal. Bukke gave his arm a final twist, then released it.
“What’s your name, scum?”
“Oelus, great one.” It was a common enough name in Urik.
“Well, Oelus, you’re too late for today, but come back at dawn, and we’ll put you to work.”
He rose slowly to his feet, draping his hands over Zvain’s shoulders, grateful that the boy had kept quiet. The disparity in their sizes and coloring was great.
“My boy, great one? He can run water, great one. I’m a bit down on my luck, great one.”
Bukke laughed coarsely. “More than a bit down, if he’s the best you’ve got, scum. What’s your name, little scum?”
“Inas, great one. Can I run water, great one?” Zvain asked with a quavering voice. “Please—O great one?”
He pinched the narrow shoulders hard; no good could come from overdoing things. Bukke laughed at them both but entered their names on the roll for the morning, Inas at one-quarter wages. Zvain remained docile and obedient until they were out of sight and earshot of the gate, then he kicked Pavek’s ankle and would have punched him in the groin again—if he hadn’t been expecting the move.