Free The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend by David Gemmell Page A

swarthy man lost three silver pieces.
    The crowd parted and a young warrior eased his way to the front as Sieben glanced up. The newcomer was dressed in black, with shoulder guards of shining silver steel. He wore a helm on which was blazoned a motif of two skulls on either side of a silver axe. And he was carrying a double-headed axe. “Try your luck?” asked Sieben, gazing up into the eyes of winter blue.
    “Why not?” answered the warrior, his voice deep and cold. He placed a silver piece on the barrel head. The poet’s hands moved with bewildering speed, gliding the shells in elaborate figure eights. At last he stopped.
    “I hope you have a keen eye, my friend,” said Sieben.
    “Keen enough,” said the axeman, and leaning forward he placed a huge finger on the central shell. “It is here,” he said.
    “Let us see,” said the poet, reaching out, but the axeman pushed his hand away.
    “Indeed we shall,” he said. Slowly he flipped the shells to the left and right of the center. Both were empty. “I must be right,” he said, his pale eyes locked to Sieben’s face. “You may show us.” Lifting his finger, he gestured to the poet.
    Sieben forced a smile and palmed the crystal under the shell as he flipped it. “Well done, my friend. You are indeed hawkeyed.” The crowd applauded and drifted away.
    “Thank you for not exposing me,” said Sieben, rising and gathering his silver.
    “Fools and money are like ice and heat,” quoted the young man. “They cannot live together. You are Sieben?”
    “I might be,” answered the other cautiously. “Who is asking?”
    “Shadak sent me.”
    “For what purpose?”
    “A favor you owe him.”
    “That is between the two of us. What has it to do with you?”
    The warrior’s face darkened. “Nothing at all,” he said, then turned away and strode toward the tavern on the other side of the street. As Sieben watched him go, a young woman approached from the shadows.
    “Did you earn enough to buy me a fine necklace?” she asked. He swung and smiled. The woman was tall and shapely, raven-haired and full-lipped; her eyes were tawny brown, her smile an enchantment. She stepped into his embrace and winced. “Why do you have to wear so many knives?” she asked, moving back from him and tapping the brown leather baldric from which hung four diamond-shaped throwing-blades.
    “Affectation, my love. I’ll not wear them tonight. And as for your necklace—I’ll have it with me.” Taking her hand, he kissed it. “However, at the moment, duty calls.”
    “Duty, my poet? What would you know of duty?”
    He chuckled. “Very little—but I always pay my debts; it is my last fingerhold on the cliff of respectability. I will see you later.” He bowed, then walked across the street.
    The tavern was an old, three-storied building with a high gallery on the second floor overlooking a long room with open fires at both ends. There was a score of bench tables and seatsand a sixty-foot brass-inlaid bar behind which six tavern maids were serving ale, mead, and mulled wine. The tavern was crowded, unusually so, but this was market day, and farmers and cattlebreeders from all over the region had gathered for the auctions. Sieben stepped to the long bar, where a young tavern maid with honey-blond hair smiled and approached him. “At last you visit me,” she said.
    “Who could stay away from you for long, dear heart?” he said with a smile, straining to remember her name.
    “I will be finished here by second watch,” she told him.
    “Where’s my ale?” shouted a burly farmer, some way to the left.
    “I was before you, goat-face!” came another voice. The girl gave a shy smile to Sieben, then moved down the bar to quell the threatened row.
    “Here I am now, sirs, and I’ve only one pair of hands. Give me a moment, won’t you?”
    Sieben strolled through the crowds, seeking out the axeman, and found him sitting alone by a narrow, open window. Sieben eased on to the