The Brazen Gambit

by Lynn Abbey

  "How is she?" he asked.

  "Better," Yohan answered with a disturbing lack of enthusiasm. "How much better?"

  "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a hole in the door to snag the string, but the knots Pavek had tied after curfew meant that the string couldn't be withdrawn through the hole and that the bolt couldn't be moved from the other side of the door.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.

  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?"

  "Trust yourself. What harm can a boy do?"

  He shrugged, recalling a bruise that took a painful-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."

  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 an
other piece of journey-bread 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-bread, 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.