brazen gambit, The - Lynn Abbey Page 0,3

knew what they might have done if he’d sapped the youth into silence? Maybe he should put the word out that he was looking for a musician with a taste for melancholy.

Sighing through his unanswered questions, Joat returned the sap to its hiding place beneath his apron. He retrieved the ripe broy-sack from its hook behind the bar and started around the room, topping off any out-held tankard. He paused a moment at a table where the solitary templar’s tankard stood empty.

“You ready?” he asked the top of one man’s head.

The templar straightened, covering a wax-tablet with brawny arms, but not before Joat got a glance at it. Not that Joat needed to spy. This templar—he made it a point of honor not to know his customers’ names—didn’t come every night, but his routine, when he did come, never varied. He’d study the marks on a scrap of parchment, then attempt to reproduce them from memory on the tablet. He’d repeated the process as many times as necessary, rarely more than twice per scrap.

Joat recognized city-writing when he saw it: most people did. But script was forbidden to anyone not noble born or templar trained and he was careful to conceal those script—secrets he’d deciphered over the years.

Still, an intelligent man made assumptions.

The brawny, intense scribbler had a very mashed nose and lips that were scar-twisted into a permanent scowl. He didn’t seem the sort to be collecting love-notes from a noble lady (though Joat had seen stranger things happen in his Den), so his assumption was that the templar was studying magic.

Great Hamanu knew why a templar would commit magic scribbling into his memory. On second thought, though, if Great Hamanu knew of this would-be scholar’s hobby, then this templar would likely have been converted into parchment himself. The king granted a priestly sort of spellcraft to his templars, through what means an ordinary man did not care to guess. High Bureau scholars performed the esoteric research that enabled Urik to defend itself against the other city-states and the war bureau knew how to wield what the High Bureau and the king concocted.

But from everything Joat had ever overheard in his taproom, a lowly civil bureau templar entreated Hamanu for magic as seldom as possible.

And always regretted it afterward.

“You ready?” Joat repeated, holding the thong-closed spout of the sack over the templar’s grungy tankard.

Before the templar could answer yea or nay, another scream shattered the night’s calm. This scream wasn’t feminine or anguished or very distant. It was a sound of pure rage, nearby and coming closer. Entirely ominous. Absently, expertly, Joat put a slip-knot in the thong before dumping the broy-sack on the studious templar’s table. He slid his hand beneath the apron again, unsheathing a talon-knife with a blade half as long as his forearm. The weapon had scarcely cleared its sheathe when something loud and angry thrashed through the beaded curtain that served as his door. Joat saw that the shape was mannish rather than womanish, human rather than dwarven or elven, but mostly he saw the long, jagged-edge blade that ran with blood. The man belched nonsense about the sun eating his brain; he’d crossed the line from rage to unreason, slashing wildly at enemies only he could see.

Joat spared a worried glance for his own knife, which looked puny compared to the opposition, but the Den was his place. He’d go down if he had to, but he’d go down fighting. The Den was his focus, not merely the center of his mundane life, but the uniquely dwarven center of spirit as well. When a dwarf broke faith with his focus, his spirit found no rest after his death. It returned as a howling banshee to haunt the scene of his failure.

The last thing Joat wanted to do was bequeath a cursed tavern to his children and grandchildren. He flexed his fingers around the leather-wrapped hilt and took a cautious step toward the beaded curtain.

But Joat wasn’t the only one easing toward the raver. The templars took a proprietary interest in Joat’s Den. Though they could go wherever they wanted in the city, they weren’t welcome in many other places. Any of the dwarf’s regulars would bust the jaw of anyone who accused him, or her, of friendship, or some other soft-hearted sentiment, but there were fealties no one mentioned. Chairs, stools, and an occasional table overturned as the regulars lurched to their feet Hesitation rippled through Joat’s Den—as if every man, woman, elf,