Free The Brazen Gambit by Lynn Abbey Page B

man's life was written in his scars. Last night, his life had changed forever; it was fitting that he'd acquired a new set of
scars. He left the courtyard filled with a dead man's confidence.
    * * *
    It was Todek's Day, his day off-the first of many. He wandered to the open-air market where the most
enterprising farmers and day-traders were already setting up their stalls. Todek was justly praised for its vegetables
and a particular type of spicy, sun-dried sausage. Pavek boldly squandered two of Sassel's ceramic bits on a steaming
breakfast. He gave another four bits to the first man he saw whose clothes looked big enough for him to wear and
whose luck looked worse than his own.
    The dun-colored garments were stiff with dirt and stank of stale wine. Folk kept their distance, as if he were still a
yellow-robed templar.
    He found a corner of the market where grandparents watched their youngest grandchildren while able-bodied
parents and older grandchildren labored for their daily wage. The codgers eyed him warily; he looked disreputable
enough to be a slave-merchant's scrounger. Slavers could sell their merchandise in the squalid plaza assigned to their
use, but they and their minions were excluded by law from other parts of the city.
    But, like most of King Hamanu's laws, the law against child-snatching could be disregarded for a price, and a
mother's warning about the fate of careless children was no idle threat. Pavek ignored the old and young alike-after he
used their fears to clear the sturdiest public bench for himself alone.
    An idea had come to him while he ate breakfast. As the sun climbed toward sweltering noon, he built that idea
into a plan.
    Zarneeka had been his downfall; it would be his deliverance as well. Or, rather, the druids would become his
deliverance. Druids weren't subversives or revolutionaries like the Veiled Alliance fanatics, but by everything Pavek
knew, they wouldn't approve of Laq. That proud young woman with the smoldering eyes could not be a willing partner
with the hate-filled halfling or dead-heart Escrissar. She would listen to the start of his tale and pay willingly to hear the
end.
    Briefly Pavek entertained an intricate vengeance underwritten with druid gold and culminating with Escrissar's
literal unmasking, but the small stubborn voice of his deepest self asked a single question: Then what? and the whole
idea unraveled. No amount of vengeance or gold could buy his way back into his lowly but familiar regulator's life, and
he was fit for no other trade. The orphanage had prepared him well for the templarate, but everything he'd ever learned
there was useless now that he was cut off from the sorcerer-king.
    He could imagine the reaction of any clerical order if he showed up at their altar-school saying that he only
needed to be taught how to pray because he already knew the spell-craft. They'd laugh him clear around the city walls,
if they didn't pound him to holy mush for insolence first. Yet his days in the archive were his only other asset.
Through patient, methodical curiosity, he'd managed to read and memorize several dozen lengthy arcane scrolls. The
archive scholars tried to avoid him and cowered like rabble when he cornered them with his questions, but eventually
they had conceded that he understood the theories of elemental providence and the complex geometry of the celestial
spheres of influence.
    Pavek knew better than most practicing clerics how clerical magic worked, but except for wrapping his hand
around King Hamanu's medallion and calling out the king's name, no templar understood the nature of faith or prayer.
    The midday sun hammered the plaza. Farmers protected their produce beneath drab, bleached awnings.
Merchants did the same for their wares with more colorful cloth. Any-one who had an excuse to leave the
light-drenched market took it. Grandparents and their charges napped in whatever shade they found, leaving Pavek
alone on his bench,