They looked at one another and at the wedge of ground where they stood. The place Yohan had selected for an urgent discussion lay between two tall, windowless walls and was as readily defensible as it was discreet. Another weight went on the balance pan in Pavek's mind with the scales tipping toward a conclusion that Yohan had seen service with one or another of the sorcerer-longs.
He knew what he'd do in similar circumstances: accept manifest good fortune, ten gold pieces, and make his stand against the storm from somewhere else. But he wasn't Yohan, and Yohan wasn't in charge.
Akashia held out her hand, palm-up. "You have so many with you, and so much more to protect. To deny your request would be to deny the principles of life itself."
The merchant extended his own, empty, hand toward her. He would have sworn he could hear both Yohan and the half-elf muttering. But at the last moment before an agreement would have been reached without any exchange of gold, silver or ceramic bits, Akashia made a fist.
"Was that eleven gold pieces you offered, good merchant, or twelve?"
"Good for her," Yohan whispered clearly enough for Pavek to overhear despite another clash of thunder.
Pavek let his swollen hands hang loosely in his lap, hoping not to draw attention to them. His fingers twitched uncontrollably as blood slowly, painfully, restored feeling to lifeless nerves. Yohan's concerns about his conspicuousness were valid: people would notice and people tended to remember what they noticed when gold was involved, whether it was a forty-piece bounty or the eleven pieces the merchant was dribbling slowly into Akashia's hand.
He lowered his head, avoiding eye-contact with anything but his feet, until the cart was well-away from the merchant and his company.
"Good work, Kashi!" Ruari cried. "Now we can buy a room at the inn-"
"Don't be a fool," Akashia retorted as she and Yohan turned toward the open, unguarded village gate. "If eleven pieces of gold could buy a place at an inn, that merchant wouldn't have given them to us."
The wind had picked up. It blew with enough force to set the heavy gate banging on its hinges. Yohan turned the cart toward the public kank-pen, just inside the gate. A gust caught the disc-shaped wheels and threatened to dump them all on the cobblestones.
"We're not going outside?" Ruari argued. "You've lost your wits. The storm! The kanks will go mad."
"No madder than what's left loose in this village." Yohan stopped the cart and offered his brawny arm to Pavek.
Privately, Pavek sympathized with the half-elf. The kanks' high-pitched droning raised the short hairs at the base of bis neck. He'd never been so close to the big, black bugs before; kanks were banned within Urik's walls and restricted to high-ranked templars at other times. Though they were considered docile creatures under ordinary circumstances, the storm bearing down on them was far from ordinary. Already the kanks inside the pen were milling in frantic circles. Every lightning flash illuminated their gnashing pincers, and in the darkness that followed, their mandibles shimmered with a faintly yellowish, liquid light.
The thought of riding a crazed kank into the teeth of a Tyr-storm scared him to the marrow, but he'd do it, if the druids gave him the opportunity, because Yohan was more right than Ruari. The cerulean storms went beyond natural elements. The wind and the icy hail-which had just begun to pelt the ground with nut-sized chunks-were only the harbingers. When the storm's full fury was above them, it would drive some unfortunate men and women into madness.
Pavek recalled only too well the mobs outside the templar barracks during his two previous storms. Their screams were louder than the howling winds and their fists left bloody streaks on the plaster-covered stone walls. He doubted there was a wall or door in Modekan that could withstand such punishment.
He reached for Yohan's arm, but though he could feel the leathery texture of the dwarf's skin beneath his palm-a sure sign that he'd suffered no permanent damage while his limbs were bound together-his grip had no strength. Muttering words that were lost in the storm, Yohan hauled him out of the cart. Through great effort and an equal amount of luck, he managed to land on his nearly useless feet with his back braced against a fence post.
Before he could congratulate himself, the kanks crowded around him, palpitating his face with their flexible, sticky antennae.
"They like you, templar," Akashia chuckled.
He cursed and batted at the hovering antennae. The bugs retaliated by spraying him with their foul, poisonous drool. Fighting nausea, he shuddered uncontrollably, and chitinous pincers probed the backs of his knees. In a mindless panic, he tried to run, but his feet didn't cooperate, and he fell to his knees. He dragged himself beyond the kanks' reach, then, after assuring himself that they hadn't broken his skin, he uprooted a handful of scraggly grass and, with no regard for what was left of his dignity, swiped the radiant slime from his legs.
Several pulse-pounding moments passed before he heard Ruari laughing. It was one insult too many. He hurled the soggy grass in the half-elf's direction. His aim was off: the faintly glowing wad missed that wide-open mouth and splattered against bis chest instead.
Ruari's laughter died in his throat. "You're dead, templar!" His teeth were visible in the lightning as he cleaned the mess from his shirt. When he was done, his fingers were curled into claws. "Because I'm going to kill you-"
But Akashia thrust her open hand between them. Her wrist waggled slightly. First, Ruari staggered backward, then a gust of wind punched Favek's chest, knocking the fight out of him, too. Magic or mind-bending had somehow redirected the storm's gusty winds. The display was all the more impressive in its subtlety and casualness.
Pavek let go of his injured dignity. A templar knew when to lay low. A half-elf, apparently, did not.
"You saw what he did-"
Akashia's hand flicked again. Ruari sat down hard, wide-eyed with astonishment.
"Enough! Both of you. Behave yourselves or we'll leave you both behind... together."
"Kashi-"
"Don't 'Kashi' me," she warned. "Just stay here and stay out of trouble. Can you manage that?"
Ruari scrambled to his feet. "He's a templar, Ah-ka-she-a," he snarled each syllable of her name. "He's no good, and you know it. He's lying and deceit disguised as a human man. Look what he's done to us already. I say we leave him right here. Let the storm take care of him."
Through the tail of his eye, Pavek watched Akashia's hand fall slowly to her side and a variety of soft emotions parade across her face. She might be a druid and a mind-bender, but she wouldn't survive a single day or night in the templarate. Ruari, with his back to the storm and everything else, wouldn't last an hour. That left only the dwarf, at whom he dared a glance.
Yohan stood between the traces of the cart. His expression was properly opaque. If the dwarf had not been a templar, he'd spent enough time around them to learn their ways. Still, Yohan was waiting, not doing. He might be the shrewdest and wisest of his new companions, but he was the third of three in rank.
"What about you, templar?" Akashia asked. "Is Ruari right, are you lying and deceit disguised as a man, or can we trust you?"
He shook his head and chuckled. "That's a foolish question. Why would I say no? Why would you believe me if I said yes? You've got to decide for yourself."
"He's right," Yohan added, to Pavek's surprise. "And we don't have much time, if we're going to get ourselves out of this place before the storm's on top of us."
Akashia flattened her wind-swept hair against her skull and closed her eyes. Pavek braced himself for another mind-bending onslaught, but none came-at least not into his mind. When the druid reopened her eyes her calm and confidence had been restored.