The Siege of Quraite

This chapter opens with Zvain screaming and ends with a sorcerer-king eating a man alive. It is the most intense chapter in the entire book and I am still not totally over it.

Zvain’s Confession

“I told him! I told him where you are. He’s coming with an army of ten thousand men and giants. It doesn’t matter what you do to me. You’re all going to die.”

Zvain’s nose is bloodied from Telhami’s staff. The farmers have formed a tight circle around him. Druids stand behind them, furious. The boy backs into a farmer woman who flings him right back into the middle. He stands there, defiant and terrified, four paces from Telhami and a barely-conscious Akashia.

Pavek watches from the side. Not in the farmers’ circle. Not among the druids. Somewhere in between. Zvain keeps looking at him with unreadable eyes and Pavek holds his stare, because he figures he owes the kid that much.

Telhami doesn’t ask how Zvain fell in with Escrissar. She doesn’t care about the details. Quraite was betrayed. Akashia was tortured. That’s all that matters.

“Take him to my grove,” she says. “The guardian will make him useful again.”

Zvain panics. He pulls out two handfuls of powder from under his shirt. Gray in one fist. Brown in the other. “I’m a defiler! I know a spell that will destroy you all!”

Telhami doesn’t even flinch. She tells Yohan to take the boy.

Zvain mixes the powders. Squeezes his eyes shut. Starts reciting dark spellcraft words. Defiling magic draws its power from the life force of plants. And Quraite is nothing but plants. Even a small spell could do terrible damage here.

Nothing happens. The wind carries the powder away. There is no magic. There never was. Escrissar lied. Gave the boy fake magic and convinced him he was a defiler forever. Made him believe he’d crossed a line he could never uncross.

The defiance crumbles and all that’s left is a terrified kid. He clings to Yohan’s arm and begs for mercy. Then he twists around and looks at Pavek.

“Pavek? I thought I had no choice… Pavek? I’m sorry…”

Pavek turns away. Because Zvain’s fate isn’t in his hands. And honestly? He is grateful it isn’t. He doesn’t know right from wrong where this boy is concerned, and he knows it.

Preparing for War

With Zvain taken to the grove, Telhami gets to work. Escrissar is coming. Maybe not with ten thousand, but he won’t come alone. The question is how many and how fast.

Pavek figures about ten renegade templars, the rest hired fighters from the elven market. The Sun’s Fist, that brutal salt flat surrounding Quraite, is their biggest natural defense. No plant magic works out there. Templar spellcraft could, but using it would mean invoking Hamanu’s name. And if Escrissar calls on Hamanu, the sorcerer-king will start asking questions that Escrissar very much does not want to answer.

They spend six days transforming the village. Comfortable homes get torn down for materials. Three rings of trench-and-rampart defenses go up around Telhami’s hut. Stakes driven point-up into the outer banks. Makeshift spears stacked in sheaves at every station. Everyone old enough to swing a stick has a position on the inner rampart.

Yohan drills the farmers with hoes and flails. Pavek helps. Ruari demands special treatment and a hand-to-hand combat role. Neither Pavek nor Yohan will promise him that. He sulks.

Pavek visits Zvain once, on the boy’s sixth day in the grove. The kid is thinner. Scared of the trees, the bugs, the water. Everything watches him, he says. Just like at Escrissar’s house. Worse, maybe. Zvain clings to him and begs forgiveness. Pavek holds the boy and wonders why it is easier to comfort someone he doesn’t trust than someone he does.

Then the alarm drum sounds.

The Battle

Telhami has been watching from above the village. Literally hovering over her guarded lands. “They’re coming. From the southwest, straight out of Urik. Fifty men and women.”

Fifty sounds better than ten thousand. The farmers sigh with relief. Pavek does not. Because he can see, when Escrissar’s force marches through the trees, that this is not elven market rabble. Three dozen of them carry polished wooden shields, javelins, and agafari-wood clubs. These are Nibenay mercenaries. Professional soldiers. The ten templars from Urik, Rokka among them, look ragged by comparison.

Escrissar himself is nowhere visible. No black mask in the ranks. He’s controlling the battle from a safe distance, mind-bending from the shadows while others do the dying.

The mercenaries throw javelins. Two farmers go down. The Quraiters hurl sharpened stakes. The agafari shields knock them aside like nothing. The mercenaries are laughing as they come over the first rampart.

The fighting is brutal and fast. Pavek plants himself where the right flank hits the inner rampart and throws javelins at the unshielded Urik templars. Gets one in the neck. The Quraiters cheer. Then a blood-red streak rips through his vision. Some kind of mind-bending attack. He can see Akashia and Telhami are struggling to hold Escrissar off while the physical battle rages.

It gets worse. The Nibenay mercenaries are too good. Farmers are going down faster than the attackers. The circle holds, but only barely. Yohan is fighting at the other end.

Then: “Yohan’s dead!”

Ruari’s voice. The one he didn’t want to hear.

“Hold the line!” Pavek shouts.

“We can’t! Not without Yohan! We’re losing!”

Ruari saves Pavek’s life right there, thrusting his staff between Pavek and a templar’s blade. They take the man down together. And that’s when Pavek sees the templar’s medallion slip from beneath his shirt.

Medallion. Ruari has his.

“Give it to me! My medallion! Now!”

Ruari throws it without warning, because of course he does. Pavek catches the thong on a fingertip and wraps the inix leather around his fist. He raises it high and calls on the one power that no one on Athas can ignore.

“Hamanu! Hear me, your servant, O Great and Mighty One!”

Hamanu Answers

Shimmering oval eyes glow in the sunset sky. Distant. The distance between Urik and Quraite is considerable, even for a sorcerer-king. But Hamanu sees. And Pavek prays that what the king sees is Nibenay’s mercenaries carving up Urik’s domain.

“Flamestrike!”

The sky explodes. A flaming bolt grounds itself in the medallion Pavek holds above his head. Searing heat transforms him. He thinks he will die. He does not even lose consciousness. Lesser fire-bolts arc from his wrist and strike true into the hearts of every single one of Escrissar’s allies. Only them. The Quraiters are untouched.

Living torches. Howling pillars of fire that burn upright even after they fall silent. When nothing remains, not even ash, the flame at Pavek’s wrist fizzles. His flesh is unmarked. The medallion dims back to ordinary ceramic.

But it is not over. A scream from Telhami’s hut scatters the last of their nerves. Pavek crosses two ramparts in two leaps on a leg that has somehow been cauterized and stitched shut by the flamestrike spell. Inside the hut, Telhami is collapsed and probably dead. Akashia is alone, weaving her hands over herbs and powders, keeping up the mind-bending defense by herself with her face twisted in a silent scream.

Escrissar is still out there. Still alive.

Pavek gets Ruari inside to help Akashia hold the guardian’s power. Then he goes hunting.

Hamanu Arrives

He searches until dark. Fields, trees, the line where the kanks were hobbled. No Escrissar. The night closes in and Pavek, who can’t see in the dark the way a half-elf can, starts to feel fortune swinging away from Quraite.

Then heavy footsteps behind him. Crushing grain. Glowing yellow eyes eight feet off the ground.

Hamanu. In person. Golden armor. A mane of golden hair. Claws flexing with each step.

Pavek drops to his knees and throws his sword away.

“My pet is in the wastes yonder. You may follow.”

They find Escrissar crouching in the dark. The interrogator babbles about finding the source of Laq. As if any mortal could lie to a sorcerer-king.

“Ambition has blighted your imagination, my pet. You bore me.”

Hamanu seizes Escrissar by the neck and lifts him off the ground. What follows is the most disturbing scene in the entire book. The king squeezes. Bones snap. Gore flows. But he doesn’t stop. He casts a spell the color of his eyes that wraps around the corpse and, layer by layer, from black robes to white bones, consumes it. Dissolves it. Eats it down to nothing.

Pavek watches the whole thing on his knees, trying heroically not to throw up. This is what a sorcerer-king does with a favorite who crosses him. Not execution. Erasure. Like Escrissar never existed at all.

When there is nothing left, those yellow eyes find Pavek.

“I have need of a High Templar. Follow me.”

And somehow, on legs that should not be working, Pavek stands up and follows.

I need to talk about what Lynn Abbey does in this chapter. She builds the entire book toward this moment. Pavek has been growing. Learning druidry. Making friends. Becoming human. And then she puts him in a situation where the only way to save everything is to call on the sorcerer-king who represents everything he left behind. He becomes the bridge between two worlds that should never touch. And the cost is standing three feet away while a god devours a man like a snake eating a rat.

That image of Hamanu consuming Escrissar layer by layer is burned into my brain. Absolutely terrifying. And the quiet “Follow me” at the end is somehow worse.

The Brazen Gambit by Lynn Abbey. Dark Sun, Chronicles of Athas, Book One. ISBN 1-56076-872-X.

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