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

Nearby, Yohan cinched the cargo harness around the soldier-kank while the insect masticated a heap of forage. The adobe walls of the roofless hut had been reduced to muddy mounds, pocked with the deep tracks of panicked wildlife. Here and there, shards of pottery grew out of the mud: the trampled remnants of a good many of their water jugs.

There'd be more room for him on the cargo platform, less water.

Overall, it was a bad trade.

Two of the riding kanks were foraging nearby. He looked around for the third kank, and found it collapsed in the hardening mud, with Akashia crouched over its head. He wandered over for a closer look.

"It's no use," she said sadly. She'd heard someone coming, but hadn't raised her head to see who it was. "They're scarcely conscious of their own life. They shed whatever healing energy I can impart to them."

"It must be very frustrating to try so hard with such little result."

Weariness turning to wariness when Akashia craned her neck toward him.

"Just curious. Didn't mean to disturb you."

She sighed, tucked storm-tangled hair behind her ears, and faced him with the hint of a smile on her lips. "Are you sure you're not Just-Curious Pavek instead of Just-Plain Pavek?"

Embarrassed for reasons he couldn't decipher, he shook his head and retreated. Her almost-smile broadened into a grin, then faded. Ruari's shadow-long, lean, and reinforced by his longer, leaner staff-fell between them.

"It's no use," Akashia repeated. "I cannot heal it, and it begins to suffer. Help me?"

There was no mistaking the question in her voice, or the need. Pavek thought he understood. Templar healers could kill without hesitation either on the battlefield or, afterward, among the wounded. A druid, whose powers did not flow from a sorcerer-king, might feel differently. Ruari seemed to have a sufficiently cruel temperament to enjoy what others might call mercy.

But Ruari laid down his staff. He sat opposite Akashia, carefully arranging his knee with his hands as he did. The joint was functional, but obviously sore and delicate. For a moment Pavek felt sorry for the troublesome half-wit whose life he'd saved, then everything was lost in astonishment. They pressed their pains together above the kank's head.

With her eyes tightly closed, Akashia began a droning, wordless chant The complex rhythms passed through her swaying body to Ruari, who began an eerie countermelody. Pavek's mind filled with thoughts of death and desperate flight, but his curiosity was stronger, and he remained where he was while the pair wove a spell to end the kank's suffering.

The insect had no eyelids to close over glazing pupils, no proper lips or nostrils through which a dying breath might pass; nonetheless, he knew the moment when its spirit departed. An inhumanly piercing wail seemed to emerge " directly out of Akashia's heart before she went suddenly silent and limp. Ruari held her wrists until he finished the chant with another ear-splitting wail.

So, Ruari was a druid, too.

Pavek hid his slack-jawed surprise behind a hand. His thoughts leapt to a comforting conclusion: if that sullen, vengeful scum could summon Athas's latent magic, then there was hope for a determined ex-templar who'd already learned the words and lacked only the music.

And he needed a full measure of hope later that day.

Within hours of settling himself among the remaining water jugs and empty racks on the soldier-kank's cargo platform, he looked across a landscape where there were no streets or walls.

No signs of life at all.

The gentle sloshing of the water jugs was a constant reminder of mortal vulnerability to the elements. He put his faith in the wheel and closed his eyes.

* * *

They traveled steadily, uneventfully, from sunrise to sunset for two days. On the third day, for reasons Pavek could not guess and the others would not explain, they made camp early. Their journey-bread was almost gone and more than half the jugs were empty. A man could survive out here beyond the city, if he was well-prepared and cautious. But not forever, not long enough to get back to Urik, even if he knew the way.

The only creatures that thrived in the parched badlands were the carrion-eating kes'trekels, always circling high overhead, vigilant for opportunity. Maybe the druids were lost. Maybe they'd realized there wasn't enough water to get them where they were going. Maybe Akashia and Ruari would hold their hands over him as he slept, and he'd never wake up again.

He resisted sleep until the moons, Ral and Guthay, were both above the eastern horizon and his companions were snoring softly. Then, remembering that the kank had not suffered, he let his eyes close. He wandered alone through a dreamless sleep and was still alive when morning came. The druids were alive, too, though their expressions were as bleak as the land around them.

As he'd done on the other mornings, he helped Yohan secure the dwindling number of full jugs onto the cargo harness. Out of sight and earshot, on the far side of the huge soldier-kank, he asked the dwarf where they were going and when they'd get there. The dwarf answered: Quraite, and added nothing more. In frustration and rising fear, he asked Akashia the same question and got no answer at all, though Ruari, typically, had snarled an ominous: "You'll see when you get there, templar. If you get there. If the Fist of the Sun doesn't squeeze the life out of you first.''

They'd left the badlands for something worse: a natural pavement of dazzling white that extended from the claws of their kanks to every horizon. The plain was featureless, except for glittering powder swirls, fueled by the sun and darting through the utterly still air. The spirals collapsed without a sound or warning, as suddenly they'd appeared.

r /> One passed close, spattering Pavek's face with sharp-edged grains. His tongue touched his cracked lips and tasted salt.

Yohan and the druids covered their faces with thong-tied chitin shields. Each shield had a narrow slit over the eyes to reduce the glare and a chin-length veil that blocked some of the stinging dust. Pavek assumed the otherwise careful druids would have packed an extra shield somewhere, but Ruari insisted that there were none to spare. Neither Yohan nor Akashia corrected him. So he raked his hair forward and pulled his shirt up over his head.

Heat wrapped itself around him. Even the kes'trekels shunned this place: the Fist of the Sun. Precious moisture leached through every pore of his itching skin. He thought he might die and feared the druids would abandon him here with the soldier-kank, whose flesh was inedible, and a few jugs of water. All water would buy him was a few days of ever-increasing agony before he died.