Lynn Abbey: The Brazen Gambit

Dark Sun, Chronicles Of Athas, Book One

To Carolyn and Jane for a safe haven when I really needed it and Beverly for making Persian carpets.

Nothing changed in Athas: What was would always be. The will of man or woman could leave no lasting mark upon the world. These were the laws seared into the understanding of each child born beneath the blood-red sun.

Yet Athas had changed, and recently. The dreaded Dragon, ancient beyond mortal reckoning, was gone. No more need a city-dwelling man or woman fear the Dragon's levy: the annual assessment of life, drawn without remorse from the legions of misfortune within each of the city-states.

Change had come in other ways as well. A citizen's council had replaced King Kalak in Tyr; that had happened before the Dragon died. It governed that mighty city-state and controlled its precious iron mines. The sorcerer-kings of Balic, Raam, and Draj had died with the Dragon. Anarchy ruled in their former domains. Mighty rulers still reigned in Urik, Gulg, and Nibenay, each keeping a suspicious eye on living neighbors and a covetous one on empty thrones.

And somewhere on the Tablelands during this cold crystal night the heavens raged and the bitter tears of Tithian I, fallen tyrant of Tyr and would-be successor to the Dragon himself, fell from black storm clouds, unintentionally nurturing the withered land.

But in all the Tablelands, change intruded least in the northeastern city-state of Urik.

The Sorcerer-King, Hamanu, had survived the Dragon's demise and the misfortunes that befell his fellow tyrants. In undimmed panoply, he had returned to his square city that lay within sight of the restless Smoking Crown volcano. Striding out of the shimmering wastelands, his massive body shrouded in an illusion half-human and half-lion, the king had mounted the highest tower in his domain and had addressed his subjects. His words, enhanced by the mind-bending power of the Unseen Way, had penetrated every mind, every shadowed corner of his city.

Borys the Dragon is dead.

Most of those who heard the resonant, echoing voice, had not known the Dragon had a name.

The sorcerer Rajaat is dead.

Fewer still recognized the name of that ancient human wizard, nor knew if Rajaat had been friend or foe before his death.

I, Lord Hamanu-King of the World, King of the Mountains and the Plains, Lion of Urik, the Great King, the Mighty King, the Bringer of Death and Peace-I, your king, have returned safe and whole to rule my city. You need not fear the emptiness that replaces Borys and Rajaat. Though change has thrust itself upon Athas, you need not fear it. Change will not disturb fair Urik. You need fear only me, only when you disobey me. Worship me, your sacred eternal king. Obey me and live without fear.

From the highest templars in their gilt-trimmed, yellow silk robes and the proud nobles sweating beneath their jewels to the least dung-seller and mangy street urchin, the Urikites responded with an almost spontaneous hymn of praise. Their ten thousand and more voices joined together were not so resonant as Hamanu's uncanny voice. Deep in their hearts, the Urikites knew the truth of their king's words: while the Lion of Urik held his domain in his taloned grasp, the city had nothing to fear but its own king.

In that regard, life went on in Urik exactly as it had for a millennium. It was true that fearsome storms had raged twice above the city walls in the two years since King Hamanu's return that dusty afternoon. The storms were seething, screaming monsters, with many-colored lightning that left brave citizens cowering in the corners of their homes. But the storms did not breach the towering yellow walls, and neither did anything else.

King Hamanu's word was as brutally honest as it had always been. Change in many forms might have come to the Tablelands, but it did not disturb his domain.

A cool night breeze flowed from the dark desert and across Urik's open rooftops. Folk who, before sunset, had languished in whatever scrap of shade the city afforded, pulled cloaks high around their necks and hastened along cobblestone streets toward their beds. Here and there, throughout the mile-square city, a snarl or growl erupted as someone wandered too close to someone else's guarded property.

Silhouetted sentries from the templarate's civil bureau, their spears against one shoulder and shields hung on the off-weapon arm, patrolled the broad outer rampart walls. The damage wrought seven years earlier when Rikus of Tyr had led his ragtag gladiator army in doomed assault on Urik's heart had been long since repaired and blended seamlessly now with the older fortifications.

Better-equipped guards from the templarate war bureau stood watch along the narrower inner walls that divided Urik into segregated quarters, reserved for the nobles and the templars themselves, and common quarters for the rabble. Merchants, who held themselves apart from the entanglements and protection of citizenship, set aside their sunlight rivalries to mount a common watch in their own quarter. In the elven market, near the western gate, where trade never came to a complete stop, pungent fires crackled all night between translucent tents and shanties.

When the curfew gongs rang at midnight, law-abiding folk latched and double-latched their doors, if they had doors. Despite the loud claims of the civil bureaus that the streets of Urik were always safe, regardless of the hour, wise folk knew that after midnight Urik belonged to the street scum who were always responsible for their own safety, and to the templars who, in the opinion of many of those behind latched doors, were the worst of scum themselves.

A single grease-lamp above the door shone faintly on a cracked and peeling piece of leather that, in the bright sunlight, displayed the faded portrait of a gap-toothed dwarf brandishing a tankard: Joat himself in his younger days, when he'd been trying to attract customers.

The customers Joat got, then and now, were off-duty templars. And since the yellow-robes provided a steady, if undistinguished, trade in which there was little threat of competition or hope of expansion, Joat let his sign fade. For decades the dwarf had concentrated his entrepreneurial efforts on procuring the strongest inebriants at the lowest possible price.

Tonight he was serving broy, a liquor produced when kank nectar was left to ferment in the sun for a few days, then sealed in resin-smeared leather sacks. Broy was a pungent, slightly rancid drink with a cloying sweetness that coated the drinker's tongue for hours afterward. It was, to say the least, an acquired taste.

Unlike the liquors fermented from fruits or grains, broy produced quiet, melancholy drunks who stared at the stars, lost in introspection. As such, it was not the drink of choice at Joat's Den, where templars came to forget who they were, what they did. But the templars who frequented Joat's Den acquired taste and tolerance for whatever the old dwarf could scrounge, as long as it could kick like a broody erdlu.

Joat, himself, however, preferred the nights when broy was all he had behind the mekillot rib bar. Business was good, of course; it always was: when templars drank, they drank until they achieved oblivion. But when they drank broy, the furniture didn't break and the place stayed quiet as a boneyard.

Usually.

Through some quirk of fate, from a stool beside the hearth that Joat had deliberately refused to kindle, a customer had taken it upon himself to entertain everyone. The dwarf stood ready to toss the human youth into the back alley the moment anyone complained, but the mournful tunes the boy played on a set of pipes whittled from the fragile wing-bones of unhatched erdlus suited the overall mood.