The Brazen Gambit

Gasping with astonishment, he nearly dropped the coin. What was happening to his city? Had he sunk so low that a messenger was offering him advice and charity? Had he ever, in his messenger days, offered four precious bits to the rabble? He couldn't answer his first question and didn't want to answer his second, but the answer to the last was no, although he'd given as much and more to Dova

Pavek found the healer right where the messenger predicted. She was the oldest dwarf he'd ever seen, sitting cross-legged on a scrap of cloth that might once have been green. A begging bowl half-filled with water and a few dirty coins balanced on her ankles while she chanted eyes-closed prayers to forgotten oceans.

She looked up when Pavek's shadow blocked the sun. One eye was clouded with a cataract, the other was a radiant blue, as clear as the day she was born. She assessed his elbow with a single glance and named her price: one silver piece.

It was cheap; and it was Sassel's last silver piece. Pavek squatted down to put it in her bowl, inadvertently giving her a close look at his face.

With a hiss and a scowl, she put her hand over the bowl before he could dunk the coin and rose to her feet with commendable agility for one so ancient. She rolled up her mat and led Pavek around a corner.

No word was said until they entered a cramped lean-to behind an active forge. The air shimmered with the heat. Pavek was grateful when she pointed to a tripod stool.

"You are the one they call Pavek the Murderer? The one for whom they're offering ten gold coins?" she demanded, looking down on him with her good eye.

He could imagine how far ten gold coins could go in this benighted quarter of Urik, but he, himself, had gone too far for lies. "I'm no murderer," he answered, not denying his name and morbidly eager to know how she'd recognized him.

"You are a marked man with powerful enemies, Pavek. Very powerful enemies. They have visited every healer in the city. Even me. Even poor Josa who worships what's been lost. They told Josa to watch for a man with gouges on his cheek. They promised Josa she would share your fate if she made you whole again."

Pavek had a raw instinct for enemies, a rudimentary mind-bending talent that the old and undoubtedly crazy healer did not arouse. Though the instinct had failed him before, most notably with Dova

The healer cut Pavek off with a wave of her hand. "Whatever you saw, whatever you think-it is of no concern to Josa. I will not turn you over to your enemies. No healer will. Think what you will of that, Pavek the Murderer: Wonder why, and be grateful. But I dare not make you whole."

"I'm not asking you to treat what Ela-"

Josa silenced him again, this time with a whiff of spellcasting. "It is of no concern to me. It can be of no concern. Your enemy who marked your face marked you well. I ca

Pavek could name no spell that produced the effect Josa described, but he did not disbelieve her on that account. The archives existed because magic was an evolving art. Escrissar, a mind-bender as well as a master of necromancy, might have spelled something new. Or that halfling alchemist might have coated his master's fashionable talons with yet another nefarious solution.

"Outside the city walls then? I've got to find a healer. Does your order practice outside the walls? Is there someone you can recommend in the villages?"

"There is Josa, and Josa only." The crone seized Pavek's right hand and held it palm upright. "You will not leave the city," she said with deliberate air of prophecy. "You have been marked, like Josa. You will stand alone against your enemies." She twisted his wrist expertly, propelling the much larger man toward the gap in the wall that served as a door.

"I need help," Pavek protested, petulant and desperate.

"Buy Ral's Breath; your enemies have not visited the apothecaries. Make a paste of it and smear it over the wound."

The mere thought made Pavek cringe. "Ral's Breath is useless," he sputtered, but her spellcraft still hung in the air and though he thought of Laq, the word did not find its way to his lips.

"Take your coin to Nekkinrod the apothecary. His stock is old; it will serve. Ask the smith, he'll point the way. Tell him Josa is wise."

Josa released Pavek's hand, and he stumbled back into the light. The smith, another dwarf, looked daggers at him when he asked the way to Nekkinrod's, but his tongue loosened when he added Josa's name and wisdom. Pavek followed a centuries-old dirt path through the core of the elven market, where no templar went alone, until he came face-to-face with an apothecaries's paste-board. Nekkinrod was at least as old as Josa and wreathed in the fumes of cheap rice wine. He took Pavek's silver piece in exchange for a Ral's Bream packet that was dingy with dust In the day's second unexpected burst of charity, Nekkinrod offered water from his own cistern for the paste and, figuring that he was as safe in the middle of the elven market as he'd be anywhere else in the city, Pavek accepted.

He tasted a few grains of the bright yellow powder. They were breathtakingly bitter and numbed his tongue to its root. Slathering the paste over his elbow was every bit as painful as he'd feared, but the joint deadened almost at once. "It works! It's going to be all right," he sighed and allowed himself a glimmer of hope.

Pavek's heart sank. With the messenger's charity and every ceramic chip left in Sassel's purse, he couldn't buy another packet. "Credit? I'll pay you when I can work again."

The elf doubled with laughter, reeling and staggering through his stock in the process. A roof board collapsed, revealing rust-colored sky. Between Josa and Nekkinrod, Pavek had lost the entire afternoon in the elven market. The palace bell would ring soon, signalling the moment when the gates closed. He hadn't eaten yet and the breadth of Urik lay between him and the squatters' quarter where his moonlit silhouette was no longer so intimidating.

"If I come back tomorrow with silver, do you have four packets of Ral's Breath? Old packets like the one I just bought."

Nekkinrod caught his breath with a rheumy cough. "Four times four, and all as old as you," he said before succumbing to another gale of laughter.

Pavek didn't wait for a more coherent answer. He bought a loaf of bread before leaving the elven market. It was slaves' bread, more sand than flour, and crunched loudly as he chewed; no wonder slaves were toothless by the time they were thirty-if they lived that long.

If he lived that long.

His elbow tingled as the astringent Ral's Breath did its work, leaching the poisons from his blood. It was a start, but not a healing, and the poultice would only make the infection worse if he didn't scrounge up four silver pieces. Scrounge.

Pavek shook his head ruefully. There was no way he'd scrounge four silver pieces; he'd have to steal them-one-armed and seedy with fever. His chances were nil and none, but he blended into the foot traffic milling toward the gates, hoping to target a prosperous, careless farmer returning home after a successful market day.

But mekillots would fly before prosperity and carelessness were linked on the streets of Urik. He reached the southern gate as poor as he'd been in the market.

At least the regulators and inspectors on duty at the gate didn't recognize him.

There was a red-lettered sign on the side of gatehouse. His name was written in hand-high letters along with his general description and the promise of twenty, not ten, gold pieces for the templar who handed him over to the High Bureau. Escrissar roust know he was still alive and must want him in the worst way. And watching the inspectors harass every tall, black-haired human trying to leave the city, he realized Josa was right: he wasn't going to leave Urik.