The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas 5)

"Rest you, both," the stranger insisted. "The child is safe with me."

"Safe," Cissa repeated. The stranger's smile wrapped its arms around her and vanquished her panic. "Safe. Yes, safe."

"None in Urik is safer," the stranger agreed, and Cissa, at last, believed.

She returned to the rumpled bed where her man's warm shadow beckoned.

The radiant, gray-eyed stranger gave her attention back to the infant. She was not one for gurgly noises or nonsense syllables or mimicking a kank's jointed antennae with her fingers. She charmed the pained and weary child with a wordless lullaby.

The infant's fists unclenched. Her little furrowed face relaxed when the stranger stroked her down-covered scalp. The child reached for a thick lock of the stranger's midnight hair. They shared a trilling note of laughter, and then the stranger sang again—an eight-tone trope, four ascending, then the lowest, then a three-tone cascade through the mid

dle range—theme and variations until the tooth had risen and the infant slept easy in a stranger's arms.

* * *

He began his journey when the air was cool and the day no more than a bright promise above the eastern rooftops. With his bowl tucked inside his tattered, skimpy tunic and his crutch wedged beneath his shoulder, he made his way from the alley where he slept, safe and warm beneath a year's accumulation of rubbish, to the northwest corner of Joiner's Square. The baker's shop on that corner had a stoop that was shaded all day and wider than its door—wide enough for a crippled beggar to sit, plying the trade he'd never chosen to master. He inconvenienced no one, especially Nouri, the baker, who sometimes let him scrounge crumbs off the floor at the end of the day.

It was a long journey from his alley to the baker's shop, and a treacherous one. The least mistake planting his crutch among the cobblestones would throw him off his unsteady feet. He was careful, wriggling the crutch a bit each time he set it down before entrusting it with his weight and balance.

When he was sure of it, he'd grip the shaft in both hands and then—holding his breath, always holding his breath for that risky moment—hop his good leg forward. Then he'd drag his crippled leg, his aching, useless leg, afterward.

His shoulder hurt worse than the leg by the time he could see the baker's stoop ahead of him. The beggar-king to whom he paid his dues said he should forego the crutch, said he'd live longer and earn more if he dragged himself along with his arms. And it might come to that. Some days the sun was noon-high before the numbness in his arm subsided from his morning journey. He had pride, though. He'd stand and walk as best he could until he had no choice, and then, maybe, he'd simply choose to die.

But not today.

"Hey, cripple-boy! Slow down, cripple-boy."

A handful of gravel came with the greeting. He shook it off and planted his crutch in the next likely spot. He couldn't slow down, not without stopping entirely; didn't dare twist around to count his tormentors. Bullies, he knew from long experience, seldom went alone.

"Hey, cripple-boy! I'm talkin' to you, cripple-boy!"

"Cripple-boy—what's the difference between you an' a snake?"

There were three of them, he had that knowledge before a meaty hand clamped across the back of his neck and shook him hard.

"Snakes don't die till sundown, cripple-boy, but you're gonna die now." He hit the cobblestones with his crutch in his hands, for all the good it would do him. He didn't recognize them, certainly hadn't ever done them any harm. That wouldn't matter. They were predators; he was prey. It was as simple as that, and as quick. There was an alley behind him, and though a whole man would undoubtedly say that its shadows and debris would work to a predator's advantage, not his, he dragged himself toward it, still clinging to his crutch.

* * *

Nouri couldn't have said what drew him out of his shop's oven-filled courtyard and put him at the counter at just that moment. Perhaps he'd had a reason and forgotten it. Dawn was the end of his day. His customers were workmen, laborers who bought their bread first thing in the morning, ate what they needed, and took the crusts home to feed their families when their work was done. Perhaps, though, it was the Lion's whim: an urge of fortune best blamed on Urik's mighty king. Either way, or something else entirely, Nouri was behind the counter, staring out the open door, when the adolescent thugs seized the beggar.

His beggar.

Father had always said a beggar was good for business—a polite and clean beggar with an obvious but not hideous deformity. The crippled boy was all that, and more: His wits weren't afflicted. He kept an eye on the street, an open ear for passing conversation, for thieves and thugs and, on occasion, profit.

If the boy had ever asked, Nouri would have given him a nighttime place beneath the counter. But the boy was proud, in his way; he wouldn't take charity, not above his place on the stoop or a few broken crusts of bread.

Nouri was always a bit relieved when he heard the boy thump and settle on the stoop. Urik was a dangerous place for anyone who didn't have a door to lock himself behind. In his heart, Nouri had known that the morning would come when the beggar wouldn't appear. But he hadn't imagined the boy would come to his end not fifty paces from his shop's stoop.

The tools of Nouri's trade hung on the wall behind him. Not least among them was the wedge-shaped mallet he used to beat down the risen dough between kneadings; it could be used for beating down other things... murderous young thugs who thought a crippled boy was fair game.

Nouri's wife, Maya, and his three journeymen were in courtyard unloading the oven. Maya would have stopped him if she'd seen him with the mallet in his hand, heading out the door. And the journeymen would have been some assurance of his own safety: he was bigger than any of the youths, but not all of them together. If he'd taken the time to think at all, he might well have thought better of justice. Urik had enough beggars, and his stoop was an attractive place for their trade; he'd have another soon enough. Nouri wasn't a templar or a thug; he'd never struck a man in anger, not even his apprentices, who deserved a beating now and again.

But Nouri didn't stop to think. He crossed the street and charged down the alley at a flat-out run. With a backhand swing of the mallet, he caught the laggard of the trio from behind. The youth went down with a shout that alerted his companions, the biggest of whom was also the closest. Paste-faced with fear, the thug tried to defend himself with the crippled boy's crutch, but the weight of Nouri's mallet swept the lighter shaft aside.

The baker delivered a blow that shattered teeth and released a spray of blood and saliva from the thug's mouth. Nouri was defenseless and vulnerable in the wake of the violence he'd done, but the third thug didn't linger to press his advantage. The last youth hied himself out of the alley without a backward glance for his bloodied and fallen companions.

"Get out," Nouri suggested in a voice he scarcely recognized as his own. "Get out now, and don't show your faces around here again." It was good advice, and Bloodymouth retained the wit to take it. He hauled his stunned companion to his feet, and with arms linked around each other for support, they beat a clumsy retreat to the street.