"No-"
"I'm serious, Yohan. Absolutely serious. Whoever is after us-" In her mind she'd begun identify the mind-bender as the templar Pavek had named Elabon Escrissar, the man who'd put a price on Pavek's head, the man who turned their zarneeka into Laq "-whoever he is, he's a mind-bender. A powerful mind-bender. He'd get Quraite out of you, Yohan; you know that. But I can keep the secret-to the death, if I have to."
"Kashi-"
"I can. I must. I will. And you must get back to Quraite. You were right all along. Pavek is right; the Moonracers are right. This is about Laq, about a deadly poison and a madman-two madmen: Elabon Escrissar and that halfling alchemist. It's not about zarneeka or Ral's Breath. I should have listened. We should have stayed away. You must warn Grandmother. You must tell her to protect Quraite."
Yohan stared into the heat waves shimmering above the oven. "I'd sooner die than leave you, Kashi."
"No-"
The word slipped out as a sigh, but she knew, from way he'd said the words that the suspicions she'd had since childhood were, indeed, true. Yohan's dwarven focus wasn't his devotion to Quraite or his devotion to Grandmother and the other druids. It was devotion to her and her alone. She'd become the center of his life. Whatever happened to her, he took it as bis personal guilt. If she died, Yohan was doomed to the half-life of a banshee, haunting the wastelands forever because he'd failed to protect the one thing above all others that was important to him.
"Then we must return to Quraite together."
He clapped her once on the knee before rising again to his feet, a signal that their rest was done and it was time to start moving again. "That, we must."
The sun descended, growing as large as the bulging dome tower atop King Hamanu's palace and glowing like fresh-spilled blood. Yohan, whose sense of direction had never faltered, returned them to the nomad encampment alongside the walls. They were both exhausted, and Akashia's mind still rang with a mind-bender's probe, but she allowed herself to believe that they would escape through whatever door the austere elf would provide. And once they were out of Urik, she had no doubt that they could make their way safely to Quraite.
She wasn't foolish enough to think that the danger was past, but her breath came easier, and there was new strength in her legs.
The elf with straw-colored braids was nowhere to be seen when they entered the tent-covered expanse between the market and the wall. She turned to ask Yohan a question and caught a flicker of movement among the tents. Her eyes alone saw nothing untoward: the encampment was crowded. There were movements everywhere. But her mind's eye, made a vigilant pan of her defenses by the Unseen Way, had seen a smear of templar yellow. Not the color of the walls, but the more garish color worn every day by every templar and that, coupled with the continued mind-bending pressure against her defenses, was not to be ignored.
She shook Yohan's wrist and pointed to the place where her mind said the yellow had appeared and disappeared. "Danger!"
Yohan swept her behind him and stood chin-out, facing the tents, ready for whatever fate blew their way. A fast heartbeat later the ugliest, hairiest dwarf she'd ever seen- the procurer to whom they usually traded their zarneekamarched purposefully into sight. "It's over," the procurer announced without drawing a weapon. "Give up quietly. You've brought a forbidden commodity into the city. There's a fine to be paid, and a few questions to be answered. Nothing serious-if you come quietly."
But she stayed where she was. The procurer was dressed in a rumpled robe of regulation color, he was the smear of yellow her mind's eye had seen, but he wasn't the source of the mind-bending probes.
"There's another one, the mind-bender. You'll lose your protection if too much distance comes between us."
"I'll stand. You run."
Run where? she wanted to ask. He was the one who knew Urik's secrets and he was the one to whom the elf had promised a door....
If the elf hadn't just turned around and sold them to the highest bidder.
The whole question became moot a moment later when a second figure emerged from the tent maze: a human woman, powerfully built, and dressed in templar yellow. Her right arm, naked from the shoulder down, was covered with a bizarre tangle of serpentine tattoos.
"You run," Akashia whispered into Yohan's ear. "Run all the way to Grandmother."
He didn't budge a step as the hairy dwarf and tattooed woman advanced. The elves of the encampment saw trouble brewing and made themselves scarce.
"I'll manage to protect you until you can hide," she whispered urgently. "Run!"
"Protect us both."
"I can't. Find your 'friend.' Use the 'door.' Debts must be paid." She gave Yohan a shove in the small of his back, nothing that could ordinarily move a man of his brawn and determination. "I'm sorry, Yohan. I'm sorry in my heart that I brought you here, but you have to go. One of us has to get back to Quraite. Don't look back and don't believe what I send." She kissed the top of his bald head, breathing out a bit of spellcraft as she did, though she was far from Quraite and her druidry was weak. She hoped to give him some protection from the attack she intended to make, but mostly she wanted him to run away.
Yohan shifted his balance and began to move. He took a few heavy-footed, short-legged strides before the other dwarf gave chase. The woman could have caught Yohan, but she'd never have brought him down; she came after Akashia instead.
Akashia counted three beats of her pounding heart then, holding back only the wherewithal to sequester Quraite's secrets deep within her memory, launched an all-out mind-bending assault of her own. The creatures of all the nightmares she remembered shot across the void and into the imagination of any mind close enough to receive them and not trained to resist them.
Her last conscious thoughts were for Yohan's safety and escape, then she surrendered completely to the darkest corners of her imagination. She let out hatred, fear, and vengeance: every malicious thought she'd ever had and repressed-exactly as Grandmother had told her she'd have to do if she came to a moment like this, when everything important was at stake.
And even though she risked losing herself forever in the dark.
Akashia regained consciousness in a room filled with sweet incense and soft voices. A lightweight linen sheet covered her from feet to shoulders; the air against her face was cool. Night had almost certainly fallen, and she had almost certainly fallen into the hands of the tattooed woman, the ugly dwarf, and the mind-bender, Elabon Escrissar-the very enemies Pavek had warned them about.
"Pavek's enemies, not yours. Not yet," a smooth, masculine voice replied, by which she understood that Escrissar was a powerful mind-bender, indeed.
Akashia opened her eyes. The mind-bender wasn't wearing the black mask and robe Pavek had described. In plain, pale domes, he was simply a bland-looking man, a half-elf by birth and radiantly evil by temperament. A scarred halfling stood to one side, neither smiling nor scowling: the alchemist responsible for Laq. There was no sign of the ugly dwarf or the tattooed woman, but there was a dark-haired boy by the open door of the small, luxurious room where they'd brought her.
The boy smiled when he caught her looking at him. It was a smile that made Akashia's blood freeze in her heart.
"I do not want to be your enemy, dear lady. Pavek was born a thick-skulled idiot; he'll the a sorry hero. But not you. You understand. You've held power yourself. You have ambitions."
He came up the shadowed, twisted pathways she had blasted through her defenses, through her very self. All silk and seduction, he touched the tender, aching places of her mind, of her body, offering her things she had scarcely imagined before this horrifying moment.