seen—the procurer to whom they usually traded their zarneeka—marched purposefully into sight.
“It’s over,” the procurer announced without drawing a weapon. “Give up quietly. You’ve brought a forbidden commodity into the city. There’s a fine to be paid, and a few questions to be answered. Nothing serious—if you come quietly.”
Yohan answered by spreading his feet and standing firm. “Run, Kashi,” he added softly. “I can take care of this one.”
But she stayed where she was. The procurer was dressed in a rumpled robe of regulation color, he was the smear of yellow her mind’s eye had seen, but he wasn’t the source of the mind-bending probes.
“There’s another one, the mind-bender. You’ll lose your protection if too much distance comes between us.”
“I’ll stand. You run.”
Run where? she wanted to ask. He was the one who knew Urik’s secrets and he was the one to whom the elf had promised a door…
If the elf hadn’t just turned around and sold them to the highest bidder.
The whole question became moot a moment later when a second figure emerged from the tent maze: a human woman, powerfully built, and dressed in templar yellow. Her right arm, naked from the shoulder down, was covered with a bizarre tangle of serpentine tattoos.
“You run,” Akashia whispered into Yohan’s ear. “Run all the way to Grandmother.”
He didn’t budge a step as the hairy dwarf and tattooed woman advanced. The elves of the encampment saw trouble brewing and made themselves scarce.
“I’ll manage to protect you until you can hide,” she whispered urgently. “Run!”
“Protect us both.”
“I can’t. Find your ‘friend.’ Use the ‘door.’ Debts must be paid.” She gave Yohan a shove in the small of his back, nothing that could ordinarily move a man of his brawn and determination. “I’m sorry, Yohan. I’m sorry in my heart that I brought you here, but you have to go. One of us has to get back to Quraite. Don’t look back and don’t believe what I send.” She kissed the top of his bald head, breathing out a bit of spellcraft as she did, though she was far from Quraite and her druidry was weak. She hoped to give him some protection from the attack she intended to make, but mostly she wanted him to run away.
Yohan shifted his balance and began to move. He took a few heavy-footed, short-legged strides before the other dwarf gave chase. The woman could have caught Yohan, but she’d never have brought him down; she came after Akashia instead.
Akashia counted three beats of her pounding heart then, holding back only the wherewithal to sequester Quraite’s secrets deep within her memory, launched an all-out mind-bending assault of her own. The creatures of all the nightmares she remembered shot across the void and into the imagination of any mind close enough to receive them and not trained to resist them.
Her last conscious thoughts were for Yohan’s safety and escape, then she surrendered completely to the darkest corners of her imagination. She let out hatred, fear, and vengeance: every malicious thought she’d ever had and repressed—exactly as Grandmother had told her she’d have to do if she came to a moment like this, when everything important was at stake.
And even though she risked losing herself forever in the dark.
* * *
Akashia regained consciousness in a room filled with sweet incense and soft voices. A lightweight linen sheet covered her from feet to shoulders; the air against her face was cool. Night had almost certainly fallen, and she had almost certainly fallen into the hands of the tattooed woman, the ugly dwarf, and the mind-bender, Elabon Escrissar—the very enemies Pavek had warned them about.
“Pavek’s enemies, not yours. Not yet,” a smooth, masculine voice replied, by which she understood that Escrissar was a powerful mind-bender, indeed.
Akashia opened her eyes. The mind-bender wasn’t wearing the black mask and robe Pavek had described. In plain, pale domes, he was simply a bland-looking man, a half-elf by birth and radiantly evil by temperament. A scarred halfling stood to one side, neither smiling nor scowling: the alchemist responsible for Laq. There was no sign of the ugly dwarf or the tattooed woman, but there was a dark-haired boy by the open door of the small, luxurious room where they’d brought her.
The boy smiled when he caught her looking at him. It was a smile that made Akashia’s blood freeze in her heart.
“I do not want to be your enemy, dear lady. Pavek was born a thick-skulled idiot; he’ll the a sorry hero. But not you.