The Brazen Gambit

The youth was halfway handsome and dressed in plain, drab-colored clothes rather than a sulphurous yellow robe. He could have been anyone, but he was a templar. Joat was sure of that. He hadn't hired any entertainment and though nontemplars occasionally came through his doors-his place had a certain reputation for discretion, if one didn't mind the regular clientele-no nontemplar would be foolish enough to sit here, surrounded by the most reviled denizens of the city, lost in his thoughts and his music.

The young templar's fingers arched delicately over his instrument. His eyes were closed and his body swayed gently in rhythm with the music that was as beautiful as it was unexpected.

Strange, Joat mused silently in a lull between refills, listening to the pipes. Where had he learned to play like that? And why?

Joat knew the templars as well as anyone who did not wear a yellow robe knew them. More specifically, he knew the under-rank templars from the civil bureau, who had only a few threads of orange or crimson, never gold, woven into the hems of their sleeves. Such folk came to his place to celebrate their infrequent promotions, gripe about their varied failures in the ruthless bureaucracy, and to eulogize their dead. There were, of course, other kinds of templars: aristocratic High Templars who inherited their positions and seldom ventured outside their private, guarded quarter, ambitious templars who'd betray, sell, or murder not just ordinary citizens like him, but other templars, too....

And then there were Hamanu's pets: men and women to whom the ancient, jaded king gave free rein. Those pet names were whispered here, in Joat's Den, and feared above all others, even the king's.

The dwarf didn't particularly like his customers, but he knew them well enough to know that beneath the robes they were very much the same as other people. They made the compromises everyone made to survive in a world indifferent to life. He certainly didn't envy them. In his eyes their privileges couldn't outweigh the risks they took every day, clinging tightly to their little niche in Urik s grand bureaucracy.

King Hamanu decreed that nothing changed. In the larger sense, the king spoke the truth. But change was a constant in Joat's small world. He'd raised his family here, behind the customhouse. His wife still cooked all the food. His children helped in more ways than he could count. Five grandchildren slept in cozy beds beneath the pantry.

It hadn't been easy; he'd endured more hard years than he cared to recall. The templars were reliable customers, except when crop failures tightened supplies or one of Hamanu's chronic military campaigns put the whole city on war rations. Joat's Den had been burnt out twice, most recently when Tyrian hooligans had sacked the city, trying, without success, to free the slaves.

King Hamanu always got Urik set to rights, easing off on fines and taxes until trade was back on its feet again. The sorcerer-king didn't claim to have founded Urik, but he, and the templarate he had founded, nurtured the city with ferocious care. Urik survived; Urik's citizens survived. In the end, survival mattered more than the king's notorious cruelty or any individual templar's brutality.

Standing in the twilight of his life-his eyes a bit dimmer than they'd been in his youth, his hand a shade less steady when he poured from a full jug-Joat was proud of himself, of his Den, of their survival.

Or maybe it wasn't pride, just that forsaken, melancholy music.

The youth had entranced himself and everyone with his playing. He showed no sign of fatigue. Like as not, he'd pipe away until sunrise, unless someone stopped him. Melancholy music that produced melancholy customers who, in turn, produced no sales. Joat wiped his hands on the leather apron that covered him from neck to knees-and covered a variety of weapons as well. He selected a supple sand-filled sap from the apron's armory. The small weapon disappeared in a thick-fingered dwarven fist.

A quick exchange of glances around the Den said it all: Murder. No spoken words were needed, nor anything else. Even if a templar had been interested in rescuing the woman, the odds against finding her were as long as the odds against saving her were short.

Templars were cautious gamblers, especially when their own skins might be on the line.

A blond templar-handsome except for his broken teeth-hoisted his tankard upside-down. A war-hardened elf (on the other side of the room, naturally) made the same gesture; and a third templar pitched a ceramic coin into the musician's half-filled cup. She called for a happier song.

An unanticipated chorus of slurred dissent erupted. To Joat's astonishment, a fair number of his rock-headed half-drunk customers were enjoying the unpaid performance. Who knew what they might have done if he'd sapped the youth into silence? Maybe he should put the word out that he was looking for a musician with a taste for melancholy.

Sighing through his unanswered questions, Joat returned the sap to its hiding place beneath his apron. He retrieved the ripe broy-sack from its hook behind the bar and started around the room, topping off any out-held tankard. He paused a moment at a table where the solitary templar's tankard stood empty.

"You ready?" he asked the top of one man's head.

The templar straightened, covering a wax-tablet with brawny arms, but not before Joat got a glance at it. Not that Joat needed to spy. This templar-he made it a point of honor not to know his customers' names-didn't come every night, but his routine, when he did come, never varied. He'd study the marks on a scrap of parchment, then attempt to reproduce them from memory on the tablet. He'd repeated the process as many times as necessary, rarely more than twice per scrap.

Joat recognized city-writing when he saw it: most people did. But script was forbidden to anyone not noble born or templar trained and he was careful to conceal those script-secrets he'd deciphered over the years.

Still, an intelligent man made assumptions.

The brawny, intense scribbler had a very mashed nose and lips that were scar-twisted into a permanent scowl. He didn't seem the sort to be collecting love-notes from a noble lady (though Joat had seen stranger things happen in his Den), so his assumption was that the templar was studying magic.

Great Hamanu knew why a templar would commit magic scribbling into his memory. On second thought, though, if Great Hamanu knew of this would-be scholar's hobby, then this templar would likely have been converted into parchment himself. The king granted a priestly sort of spellcraft to his templars, through what means an ordinary man did not care to guess. High Bureau scholars performed the esoteric research that enabled Urik to defend itself against the other city-states and the war bureau knew how to wield what the High Bureau and the king concocted.

But from everything Joat had ever overheard in his taproom, a lowly civil bureau templar entreated Hamanu for magic as seldom as possible.

And always regretted it afterward.

"You ready?" Joat repeated, holding the thong-closed spout of the sack over the templar's grungy tankard.

Before the templar could answer yea or nay, another scream shattered the night's calm. This scream wasn't feminine or anguished or very distant. It was a sound of pure rage, nearby and coming closer. Entirely ominous. Absently, expertly, Joat put a slip-knot in the thong before dumping the broy-sack on the studious templar's table. He slid his hand beneath the apron again, unsheathing a talon-knife with a blade half as long as his forearm. The weapon had scarcely cleared its sheathe when something loud and angry thrashed through the beaded curtain that served as his door. Joat saw that the shape was ma