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. Anyone 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, his right hand trailing in the lukewarm water of a public fountain.
Through thoughts made thick and slow by the heat, Pavek considered each of the four elements of life: earth, air, fire, and water. Fire was straight-forward. All a man had to do was look up and he could see the epitome of fire, but worship the sun? Pray to it? Dedicate his life to Athas’ burning sun? He shook his head. Water was vital and precious, but hold a man’s head beneath its surface for any length of time and he was as dead as he’d be with his heart impaled by a steel sword. Air and earth were no different: each was a two-sided coin, life-giving and deadly. In that sense the elements were not unlike the templars’ sorcerer-king, but Hamanu was real: a tangible force to be dealt with, not worshipped in the abstract.
Swirled through drowsy, sun-dazzled philosophy and the dull ache of his elbow, a reminder came to Pavek: druids drew their magic not from the pure elements, but from the manifest spirits of Athas itself, its hills and mountains, fields and badlands, oases and deserts. Real places, tangible forces, and—he dared to assume—no more irritable and unpredictable than Urik’s mighty king.
No one in his right mind leapt for joy midway through the afternoon’s stifling heat. Pavek simply opened his eyes and took a long drink of water, but his spirit celebrated. He’d found the keystone for his future, that one odd-shaped piece which would hold all the others in place. He’d tell the druids what he knew about zameeka and Laq in exchange for protection within their community.
Then, once he was among them, he’d offer to exchange the arcane lore in his memory for initiation into their spell-crafting secrets.
It was a daring plan spun on gossamer assumptions. For all his memorization, Pavek knew very little about the mechanics of druidry. Specifically, he did not know whether it was a path that could be chosen with simple dogged discipline, or if the nameless spirits of Athas had esoteric criteria a renegade regulator could, not hope to match.
And he’d assumed that the druids would be interested in his knowledge of the illicit uses to which their zarneeka powder was being put and equally interested in the lore written on the scrolls he’d memorized.
The assumptions were bold, but necessary, and the longer he contemplated druidry—especially the beautiful druid he knew by sight, though not by name—the more vital they seemed to his future.
Sixty days, she’d said to Rokka at the customhouse just a day ago. Sixty days before we can return with untainted goods. The threat led Rokka to accept the unsealed amphorae. But did that, in turn, mean the druids would return sooner, or later?
Pavek hoped it meant sooner. Sassel’s coins wouldn’t last sixty days. He scratched his chin, feeling the stubble of a coarse, black beard. Low-rank templars went clean-shaven; high-rank ones wore their hair as they chose. The daily confrontation with rasp and razor was a ritual Pavek would not miss. In a few days no templar would recognize him, not even Rokka… or Bukke.
If Pavek was smart, he said to himself, he’d hire himself out as a day-laborer at the western gate. He knew the gate drill as well as any templar knew a workman’s task, he’d see the druids when they returned, and the pay was five bits a day-three after he paid off the regulators and inspectors—but more than enough to keep a man from starving.
Sassel’s coins would last until he was healthy enough to work. The wounds weren’t that serious. He flexed his left arm to prove the point to himself, but regretted it. Shooting pain radiated from the joint, which had become bright red and was warm to the touch. He chided himself for sitting too long in the hot sun.
* * *
But Pavek’s misery owed nothing to the sun. During the next two weeks, while his other injuries healed, his elbow swelled to twice its normal