of yellow clay into which the sorcerer-king’s leonine aspect had been carved. While Joat trembled, the medallions began to glow, and a pair of slanting golden ovals appeared above the open roof of Joat’s Den.
His blood went cold in his heart: No man could see those eyes, that way, and hope to live.
Flameblade.
The words of invocation exploded in Joat’s skull, compounding the headache he’d already gotten from the raving mind-bender. He closed his eyes in agony and missed the moment when the sorcerer-king’s magic channeled through the medallion-holding templars. Joat felt the flames’ wind and heat, heard their roar and the maniacal squeals of the madman. He smelled noxious magic. He could have opened his eyes—was sorely tempted to look—but wisdom prevailed, and he kept them tightly shut until the squealing ceased, then the flames, and only the stench of charred flesh and hair lingered.
“It is done,” a quaver-voiced templar announced.
Joat opened his eyes. His own wounds were minor, though the leather apron would have to be replaced. Another elf knelt beside the musician who would clearly survive, but never play his pipes again. The elf who’d first risen to his defense remained where she had fallen, the victim of bad luck and the unique vulnerabilities of long, light elven skeletons. Joat bent down to close her eyes as he joined the crowd around the raver’s corpse.
The blond templar who’d invoked the king’s aid wore a scarlet thread in his sleeve and held authority the others respected. He knelt by the largely intact corpse, muttering as he peeled away charred strips of doth.
Granted, Joat hadn’t been watching when the spell did its work, but he’d expected a smear of ash and grease, a charred husk at most. Instead, there was an emaciated man—impossible to guess his age with his skin hanging hollow from his bones—lying dead on the taproom floor.
“Should’ve cindered.” One of the templars put words to Joat’s misgivings. “There were five of us together. He shouldn’t be more than dung in the dirt.”
“He said the sun was eating his brain, and I believe it. Be glad he was feeling generous.” That from the swordsman with his fingers pressed tight against the gash in his cheek.
Those words provoked a round of muttering. The templars agreed Hamanu had to be told his boon had fallen short. The blond templar wasn’t volunteering, and neither was anyone else—which meant there was a bad chance Urik’s templars were going to let that particular burden fall on an ordinary citizen’s shoulders.
Weighing the alternatives, Joat squatted down beside the corpse. Between the shock and his aching head, he’d forgotten the words the madman had been shouting. Sometimes an ordinary citizen, scouring the markets for the cheapest liquors available, heard things before the templars heard them. Gritting his teeth, Joat pried the corpse’s mouth open and pulled out his tongue.
“Laq,” he said, rising to his feet and leaving the blackened, definitive symptom for all to see.
Someone hawked into the cold hearth, spitting out evil before it took root, the way peasant farmers did. Another swore and slapped fist against palm.
Like the black-cloud rains, Laq had appeared in Urik after the Dragon’s death and Hamanu’s return. The storms, violent as they were, held out the faint promise that someday water might again be plentiful in the Tablelands. Laq left no similar optimism in its wake.
At first no one had known what caused men and women of all races to stop eating, stop sleeping, and finally lose their; wits entirely. Earliest speculation said Laq was a disease, or possibly a parasite, like the little purple caterpillars that did eat through their host’s brain.
But the worms turned their victims into blissful idiots, not raving madmen, and they didn’t turn his tongue soot-black from tip to root.
These days the rumormongers claimed that Laq was an elixir the nobles had concocted in a futile effort to wring more work out of their slaves. Supposedly the elixir worked, after a fashion, but strong, energized slaves had a disturbing tendency to overpower their overseers; and when the slaves were deprived of their elixir, they became even more obstreperous.
For a second coin the mongers would claim that King Hamanu had issued a secret decree banning Laq without ever defining what it was. The king, they said, promised an unpleasant death to those who traded in it.
Joat was skeptical of two-coin mongers: the sorcerer-king didn’t issue secret decrees about imaginary elixirs; he certainly didn’t need a new excuse to get rid of those he didn’t