The Brazen Gambit (6 page)

Light, that simplest of all spells, was still a gift from the sorcerer-king and not worth requesting.

He started down the long corridor, stabbing his torch into every shadow. He rehearsed his excuses: Rokka had
seemed unwell. Rokka had left him, a mere regulator, in charge of the procurer's table. Rokka had not returned from the
storerooms, and he, a dutiful regulator, had not dared leave the customhouse until he'd gotten the procurer's
countersignature on the tax scroll.

Pavek saw things he would be careful not to remember. He interrupted a small number of storeroom trysts.
High-rank templars married and raised families, but low-rank templars, living their lives in barracks and competing
ruthlessly for such crumbs of patronage as slipped through the cracks, made do with empty storerooms and empty
affairs. He'd never know the number or names of his children, if he had any. A woman of similar rank could not raise an
infant. Her children wound up in the templarate orphanage or on the streets.

He muttered apologies and kept going.

Midway through the third tier, he found what he was looking for: a warding that shed more light than his torch,
and a glimpse of lacquered amphorae through the door grate. With his fingers folded thoughtfully over his mouth,
Pavek studied the warding from a safe distance. Rokka had sufficient rank to ask for such potent spellcraft, but unless
the dwarf had been spending all his spare hours in the archive, like Pavek, he shouldn't have known how to cast it.
Even templars' borrowed spells were more than invocations. Complex spells, such as warding, were as individual as
signatures or fingerprints. The warding on the amphorae storeroom was subtle and, therefore, not Rokka's style.

A High Templar would have both the rank and requirement to protect his private chambers with such an intricate
warding. Here in the customhouse catacombs, it was going to raise a lot of eyebrows come daylight.

If it hadn't been dispelled before then.

Pavek spotted a likely hiding place amid a cluster of empty barrels. He extinguished his torch in a sand-bucket,
but kept it with him as a weapon. Too bad there was no meat left on the bone. Excluding the zarneeka, he hadn't eaten
anything since breakfast, and his churning stomach was noisier than the catacombs vermin. Digging into the
belt-pouch beneath his robe, he found several sticks of stale chord sausage. The spicy, salted meat quieted his gut,
and left him half-mad with thirst.

Cursing himself, Rokka, the sorcerer-king, and everything else in Urik, Pavek hunkered down. A length of
coarse-woven canvas spilled out of one barrel. He draped the musty cloth over his bright robe and settled in for an
uncomfortable night's spying.

His mind went as blank as any overworked slave's, and stayed that way until footsteps and torchlight roused
him. At least four individuals were trooping down the stairs. They weren't talking, but from the sounds, two of them
were leather-shod and another was heavy enough to be a half-giant. Pavek had figured the worst would be a
face-to-face encounter with Rokka, or Rokka's contact; he hadn't figured on a quartet, especially a quartet with a
half-giant. He wished he were anywhere else.

Wishing didn't help. After confirming that he was still covered by the canvas, thereby obscuring his visual
shape and his heat signature from the dwarf's inhuman vision, Pavek eased forward for a better look. Rokka led with
the torch. Behind him was a tall figure whose identity was concealed by a grotesque mask.

His heart skipped a beat when he saw the mask.

Questioners sometimes hid behind masks; necromancers always did. Pavek told himself the mask might be a
low-ranked templar's clever disguise. He didn't convince himself.

Between flickering torchlight and the billowing robes, Pavek couldn't get a clear glimpse of the third member of
the quartet, but the fourth was, unmistakably, a half-giant, bent and cramped within the ten-foot corridors and lugging
two barrels virtually identical to the one behind which Pavek was hiding. He crouched lower, hoping against hope that
the quartet was headed somewhere else, but they stopped between his hiding place and the storeroom. He smelled the
bitter essence of arnica as someone, most likely the masked templar, dispelled the lock.

"Hit me again with that damned barrel and you'll finish your life in the mines!"

Pavek gasped. Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy-he'd hoped never to hear Dovanne's voice at close range again.
There was history between him and her: history back to their shared childhood days in the orphanage, when the
customhouse had been their playground. Once they'd been more than friends, now they were much, much less.

He'd sworn the disaster hadn't been his fault: they'd both been set up. Following her instructions, sent in a
signed message, he'd waited alone for hours on a dark, deserted rooftop. But Dovanne, following different instructions
bearing his signature, had gone to a catacombs storeroom where she discovered, to her lasting horror and rage, that
she wasn't at all alone.

He'd tracked down the ringleader: the one and only time he'd had killed with his bare hands. He'd brought proof
to Dovanne in a basket, but she never believed him, never forgave him.

So they learned to steer around each other. Pavek had heard she'd found a patron and hauled herself up a few
ranks. Now, he didn't know which was worse: the thought of her hooked up with Rokka or with a dead-heart. Dire
curiosity lured his eyes above the barrel rim a second time.

Lord yes, it was Dovanne: bronzed skin, human features, hair cropped short and bleached by the sun, eyes the
color of amber and twice as hard. Metallic thread glinted in her left sleeve (a procurer, just like Rokka; the masked
templar her patron), the right one was torn off at the shoulder.

Tattooed and coiled serpents spiraled up her exposed arm. Pavek recalled Dovanne's first visit to the skin-dyer:
She swore she wasn't afraid of the leering goat, or his sharp quills, and he pretended to believe her while she clutched
his hand in a frigid death-grip.

It had taken every coin they both possessed to buy a single, slender, monochrome, serpent to circle her right
wrist.

"We are not alone." A surprisingly commonplace voice came from the mask that spoke to Dovanne, not Rokka.
"A friend of yours, perhaps. Or perhaps not. This place holds memories for you?"

She shrugged. The serpents writhed. "Nothing worth holding, great one."

"Then it was a thought-"

Pavek trembled. Necromancers dealt with all manner of death, but only mind-benders plucked thoughts out of the
air.

Who was beneath the mask? A necromancer or a mind-bender? Or a master of both arts? An interrogator.

Basic mind-bending defense was instinctive in humans, like closing one's eyes when an object came too close.
Pavek thought himself small while he considered the stranger. Measured against Dovanne, the masked templar would
stand eye-to-eye with Pavek, but he was much leaner. His hands were obscured by supple learner gloves and
lengthened with talons that continued the enameled patterns of the mask. Even so, the fingers seemed long and
narrow for human hands. And though Pavek had encountered runty elves, his best guess was half-elf. Before he could
recall the names of any half-elf necromancers, Rokka ended the mystery.

"Is there a spy, Lord Elabon?"

Lord was a courtesy title. There were no nobles in Urik's templarate, but Elabon Escrissar was an aristocrat in
every other sense. The child, grandchild and great-grandchild of High Templars, for all that he was of a mixed and
outcast breed, he had a flair for cruelty that, according to rumor, entertained Urik's ancient, jaded king. Metica wasn't
going to be happy when she heard her regulator say that not only was Escrissar involved in the zarneeka trade, he was
a mind-bender as well.

"Take a look around," the mask said. "See that we're alone."

Unless Metica already knew. She'd said High Bureau dead-hearts had performed the interrogation. She and I
Elabon were both half-elves. Half-elves weren't as clannish as full-blooded elves, but Pavek was ready to wager his
last ceramic bit that Escrissar bad gone to Metica after the interrogation and she had sold him to save herself.

Rokka searched the corridor where nothing could be hiding; Dovanne came straight at the barrels. Pavek's
chances were slim, nil, and none; but he couldn't surrender without a fight. Abandoning the bone torch, he leapt
straight up. Both hands grasped an overhead beam, and he swung his heels forward, into Dovanne's face. She
collapsed with a growl. Pavek landed within arm's reach of Escrissar, and, with nothing to lose, chopped the
black-wrapped neck with the callused edge of his hand. Escrissar went down like a market-place puppet.

The half-giant blocked the stairway up, so Pavek dived past Rokka. The dwarf, reasonably expecting Elabon to
end the chase with spellcraft, flattened against the wall. He shared Rokka's expectation, but had to keep going until a
spell dropped him in his tracks. But that didn't happen. Vaulting over a stair-rail, he made his escape into the depths of
the catacombs.

He ran around the next corner, careened down another flight of stairs, and ran along a lock-lit corridor. Rokka was
a coward at heart, but Dovanne had surely recognized his face. She'd track him to the end of time, with or without her
patron's permission. Sound was Pavek's greatest enemy: he sank into each stride to minimize the noise, thinking that if
he could get behind Dovanne, he'd have a chance at climbing one of the other stairways to the street level.

And then what? Trust himself to Metica?

Throw himself before King Hamanu's mercy? King Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy?

Fear tightened his chest and he stumbled to a halt in the near-darkness. Gasping for air, he swore he wouldn't
worry about the future until he reached the street. His ribs relaxed. He spared a heartbeat to listen for Dovanne's
footsteps. There was only silence, and he started off at a fast, quiet, walk.

There was method in the catacombs. Corridors crossed at predictable places. Pavek approached each one with
caution, working his way across the man-made cavern, far below the room where the zarneeka powder was stored. He
allowed himself to believe that he'd gotten behind Dovanne and to hope mat her hunger for revenge would lead her
back to the places they had explored years ago while he headed for a stairway that hadn't been built until after the
Tyrian raid.

Pavek climbed the steps soundlessly on the balls of his feet. The street door was bolted from the inside, which
he judged a good omen. With his weight against the wood, he withdrew the bolt from its slot. It squeaked loud enough
to wake the dead. He hid in the shadows, counted to fifty, then pushed the door outward. A band of moonlight
widened into a rectangle through which he discerned no movement.

The door bumped once against the outer wall, then was still and silent Pavek counted to fifty again and crossed
the threshold.

Arms as thick as a man's thighs dropped around his shoulders before he'd taken his third step. Half-giants were
massive and strong, but their bodies were put together the same as any human's. Pavek crashed a boot-heel into his
captor's knee and dug his fingertips into sensitive gaps in the half-giant's huge wrists. A pained bellow shattered the
night as the brute's muscles spasmed. A second good crack into the half-giant's kneecap might have produced both
freedom and a head start down the alley, but a well-thrown punch hit his jaw before he got his foot up.

"Damn you. Damn you to life everlasting," Dovanne hissed as she clouted him again.

Pavek's neck snapped against the half-giant's hard chest. He was stunned: unable to feel anything, but
clear-headed enough to wonder what she had concealed in her fist. Then the pain started, and he was grateful for the
next weighted blow.
Thought you'd sneak away again, didn't you?"

"Get up," Dovanne demanded, jabbing her boot into his flank. "He wants to talk to you."

Groaning and retching, Pavek hauled himself to his knees. His last-ditch defiance, which had broken his nose so
many times, sent disastrous words to his mouth: Elabon Escrissar can wait until I'm dead. But fortunately, his mouth
was full of blood and he couldn't say anything. Dovanne yanked her one-time lover to his feet.

"Carry him," she told the half-giant.

That was more indignity than a living man could endure. Pavek spat blood. "I... can... walk."

"Then start walking." Dovanne pointed a slender sap at the open door.

Pavek took one unsteady step after another. He clung to the handrail and pretty much fell down the first flight of
stairs. It got easier after that. Dovanne delivered a solid wallop, but she and her sap hadn't broken any bones. He
wondered if that was an accident or the lingering scar of affection.

The pain was down to dull aches and he was moving fairly well by the time they got to the zarneeka corridor. The
locked door was open. Dovanne gave him a shove between the shoulder blades.

A trestle table had been set up in the center of the storeroom. Rokka stood behind it, busily mixing tiny scoops
of zarneeka powder with much larger dollops of plain flour from the half-giant's barrels. He dumped the combination
onto scraps of crude paper. Escrissar himself folded the scraps into self-sealing Ral's Breath packets with elegant
movements of his taloned fingers.

The mask tilted upward. Their arrival had been noticed. Sharp eyes appraised him coldly from the depths of the
mask. He turned away.

There was a halfling in the storeroom as well; he must have been behind the half-giant earlier. A hideous scar in
the form of the Escrissar family crest had been burned into the halfling's face. The slave worked alone in a corner,
blending zarneeka powder in a bowl with what looked and smelled like golden wine. A similar bowl bubbled on a tripod
set over a blue-flamed lamp.

The implication was clear enough, even to a punch-drunk regulator: zarneeka was the necessary ingredient in
Ral's breath, but, contrary to Metica-and King Hamanu's assertion-it was also the necessary ingredient in something
else. "Pavek, Pavek, Pavek," Escrissar chanted, sucking his teeth and shaking his head between each repetition of
Pavek's name. "Whatever are we going to do with you? You've made quite a nuisance of yourself. Too bad you
weren't born in Tyr; there they might call you a hero, but here you're just a pathetic little man. A jozhal nipping at the
Dragon's heel."