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

She smiled. Several shade-hugging inspectors whistled through their teeth. One offered to pay her poll-tax if she'd wait for him beside the Yaramuke fountain at sunset. She kept walking, never flinching or missing a step, and the whistling stopped before they reached the massive gates. The farmers gawked with their faces pointed skyward. She had to call them by their true names to get their attention and keep them close to the cart as they entered the always-crowded, always-busy streets.

They smelled the market before she saw it: a dizzying blend of spicy delicacies floating atop the sharper scents of natron, pitch, and artisans' charcoal fires, and, of course, the ever-present sweet aromas of decay.

Yohan paused on the cobblestone verge of the market. He adjusted his grip on the cart traces and looked at each of the farmers before letting his stare come to rest on her.

"Stay close," he warned them all. "If you've got to look for something, look for a signboard of a striding lion with a pestle. That's the apothecaries' license we're looking for."

"What about unlicensed-"

Yohan cut her short with a slash of his finger. "The difference between licensed and unlicensed doesn't show on the signboard. Remember: stay close."

And they did. She wrapped her hand lightly around one of the traces; that gave her more freedom to look for a pestle-it seemed that every hawker's sign displayed a striding lion-as they wandered the market. Traders hailed them from every ramshackle doorway of cloth, wood, or bone. Bold, ragged children begged for ceramic bits or offered to sell pieces of bruised fruit obviously scavenged from the gutters of Urik's more reputable markets. One child leapt into the cart and grabbed two handfuls of straw before she and the fanners could chase him away.

"What's wrong with them? Are they that hungry? Should we offer them something?" she whispered anxiously to Yohan.

"Stay close," was his only reply, repeated through clenched teeth as the raids became more frequent.

Every dwelling or stall in the elven market seemed equally old, equally dilapidated and despairing. There were no signposts for the streets that met at odd angles and irregular intervals. Had she not heeded Yohan's warning and kept dose to the cart, she'd have been quickly and hopelessly lost. The tumult of noise and color, so attractive in her imagination, grew less so when it devolved into hostile stares and furtive bent-mind probes of her inmost thoughts.

She was unprepared for that Unseen onslaught from anonymous minds. In her previous visits to the city, she'd dealt only with templars-broken, mean-spirited individuals, each and every one of them, but, by their master's order, untrained in the arts of the Unseen Way.

No stray curiosity or inquiry penetrated the defenses she'd learned from Telhami, but time and time again she caught an unwelcome glimpse into another mind. The imaginations of those who dwelt in the elven market were as foul as the sewer channel in the middle of the so-called street they followed.

The market was not her grove; the confidence she'd felt when Telhami upbraided her about the dangers a city-man like Pavek posed to any solitary woman evaporated like morning dew. Her grip on the cart trace progressed from feather-light to a panicky clench.

One of the fanners shouted that his knife had been stolen. He plunged toward a twisted alley, determined to catch the culprit. Yohan intervened quickly, hauling the farmer back to the cart and staring down the hard-faced denizens who swarmed out of nowhere, ready to support the thief, not them.

"Nothing happened," Yohan assured me grumbling mob.

"But my-" the poor farmer wailed, until Yohan pinched bis wrist to quiet him.

"Everybody, move on." Yohan used a commanding tone she'd never heard from him before.

"We ought not have come here," she whispered.

He replied with a grunt that could have meant anything at all, then pivoted the cart sharply on its left wheel. They went down a rubbish-strewn alley to the lion-and-pestle signboard he'd somehow spotted during the fracas.

"Wait here," he told the farmers. "Sing out if anything happens."

His hand on her arm guided her into a dusty shop. The proprietor, a human woman of indeterminate age, pushed away from a table covered with fortune-telling c

ards. The long red gown she wore might once have belonged to a wealthy woman, but the silk embroidery threads had been plucked out and now the lush floral patterns were mere dots and holes across the cloth.

"What's your pleasure?" she asked with a voice coarsened by too much wine and too little fresh air.

"You need to ask?" Yohan gestured toward the fortune-telling cards.

Akashia recognized the ritualized rudeness that passed for civility in the city. She used the style herself with the yellow-robes. It didn't bother her, or it hadn't until Just-Plain Pavek became a man in her mind, not a templar. And it bothered her even more with this woman who, on second glance, was only a few years older than she was herself. But the shop was filled with magic-laced things she could not name and the air itself was thick with Unseen inquiries; she held her peace, staying close by Yohan.

"Ral's Breath." Yohan's arm dropped quickly from hers; the old dwarf was embarrassed.

"You've come to the wrong place, then. Never sold the baby powders; never will." And staring bluntly at Akashia's belly, the woman let out a snorting, bitter and private chuckle. "Good luck. You'll need it."

"Why?" Akashia asked, disregarding Yohan's admonition that she be quiet while they were in the shops.

"You won't find any, that's why. It's gone. Old Breath, new Breath, good and bad: it's all gone. Sold or confiscated by the yellow-robes."

"Confiscated?"