The Brazen Gambit (Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas 1)

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 die 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.

"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 singl

e 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."