The Brazen Gambit

Chapter Two

Hot, sun-filled days came and went. The fist-sized bruise in Pavek's groin faded; so did the memory of who'd given it to him and why. He filled his memory with scribbling from the archive, not the dreary details of his own life.

Pavek was on morning duty in the vast customhouse, transferring hock-sized sacks of salt from one barrel to another, ticking off groups of five on a wax tablet as he went. His gut reaction was anger when the adolescent messenger interrupted him. The girl dropped to her knees. Slender, trembling arms thrust through the plain yellow sleeves of her robe and stretched across the floor to touch his feet.

"Forgive me, great one." Pavek was a big man with limbs as thick-muscled as any gladiator's, but not a great one.

Who knew what Sian would say if she could see her only child now? His cronies joked that the only promotion waiting for him was the one to intimidator, for which he was so, obviously well suited.

Intimidator. Templar of the eighth rank. Not if he lived a thousand years like King Hamanu. He was just plain Pavek, a third-rank, flash-tempered fool, and he'd never be anything more.

"Get up, girl."

He tried to help her, but she scrabbled away.

"Medea wants you." The messenger hid her arms beneath the long panel at the front of her robe and regarded Pavek with a stare that was both defiant and defeated.

Pavek threw the three sacks dangling from his left hand into the barrel he was filling. He made a mark in the wax with his thumbnail and peeked into the barrel he was emptying. Ignoring the girl, he scooped up another handful of sacks.

"One... Two... Three..." He tossed them as he counted.

"She said 'now'."

"Four. Five. I'm counting, girl. 'Now' happens when I'm done." Another fingernail impression in the wax, another scoop of salt-sacks.

"I can count for you."

"Yeah-for me and who else? Rokka? Dovanne? Metica herself? I go up there and find she doesn't want to see my ugly face at all, then I come back here and find there's half a barrel missing-with my mark on the roster. No thanks, girl." Pavek tossed sacks as he spoke. "I've been down that road before."

"Metica said 'now,' great one, and I'll catch it if you're late. I'll just count, I swear it. I'll swear whatever you want. Put in a good word for me, great one?"

"Five. Pavek. Just plain Pavek, or Right-Hand Pavek- and if you think my good word will help you with Medea, you're an even greater fool than me." He clapped the salt dust from his hands and handed her the wax tablet. "If there's less than two hundred when I get back, I'll come looking for you, girl, and you'll wish you were never born."

She pushed back stringy locks of dull, brown hair, revealing a blood-crusted gouge along her hairline. "Gotta do better than that, Pavek, if you want to intimidate me."

The salt-room had only a grease-lamp for light. It was hard to tell whether she was full-human or half-elf. Pavek guessed half-elf. Whatever attraction drew elves and humans together, it didn't usually extend to their children. He'd never met a half-elf who wasn't outcast by its mother and father's kin alike. They were all orphans, and they scrambled for whatever crumbs of patronage they could get, just like him.

"Right," he said, rolling down his yellow sleeves, uncovering a slim collection of crimson and orange threads. "Two hundred, and seal the barrel when you're done."

"I could wait for you...."

"Don't bother."

Pavek left with the sound of laughter ringing in his ears. Maybe she would wait. Tomorrow was Todek's Day, so named for the largest of the outlying villages, which, according to the ten-day rotation that was as old as Urik itself, was scheduled to bring its produce into the city market.

More importantly, tomorrow was the one day in ten that he could claim for himself. He usually spent his free time in the archives, copying and memorizing spellcraft, but there were other ways to pass the time. She was only a messenger; he was a regulator. He couldn't put in a useful good word for her with Metica, but he could buy her a free day. A day with him.

Striding along the crowded streets between the custom-house and the stone-fronted civil bureau where Metica had her office, Pavek weighed the possibilities several times. Any-thing to distract him from thinking about the reasons his taskmaster want to see him.

If she did want to see him. The old adage about not trusting strangers held true in the bureaus. He didn't know the messenger.

Pavek paused at the bottom of the broad stairway leading to the administrators' chambers, mopping the sweat from his brow and shaking the dust from his robe, then started climbing.

A man got tired in the templarate. Pavek guessed he was about twenty-five years old, but he'd already accumulated a lifetime of tired. For once he thought of Metica not as a familiar adversary, but as a gray-haired half-elf, and wondered how she had survived-how anyone survived long enough to grow old. His life wasn't a choice between the half-elf girl and a day in the archives, it was a choice between any tomorrow and no tomorrow at all. Sometimes he wondered why he hadn't Mowed his mother's example, except that when templars cracked-and one did from time to time-they didn't do it quietly or alone.

All at once and without warning, his thoughts were back in Joat's Place, watching the raver suffocate, and in the squatters' quarter, looking down at a woman with a broken neck. He swallowed the thoughts and kept climbing.

"Sit," Metica said when his shadow touched the door-less threshold of her chamber. Her back was to the door. A hot afternoon wind blowing through the open window in front of her lifted tendrils of her dull, gray hair. Pavek thought he'd been quiet coming up the stairs; he guessed he'd been wrong.

Surely Metica was after his hide.

"Our Mighty King's personal necromancer extends her thanks," Metica began, fixing Pavek with a chilling smile.

"The king's-?" he stammered: "I'm grateful, great one." "The corpse, Regulator! The broke-neck corpse you found three nights' past."

"I brought her here, to the civil bureau. It was street crime, our crime. I even marked the roster-"

"Well, she wound up at the palace and-thanks to your mark in the roster-that black-hearted dead-speaker knew enough to send her pleasure to me."

Metica was after his hide, his life, and his eternal essence. The only thing that might appease her was a rounded heap of gold and silver coins, mostly gold. Pavek felt rich when he had a heap of ceramic bits.

"Thought you might like to know what she said."

Pavek lifted his head in time to see the folded parchment Metica scaled his way, but not in time to catch it. He fished it off the floor without letting his eyes drift away from the half-elf's face. Damned if she wasn't pleased about something.

He opened the parchment, scanned the script. The necromancer had gotten the woman's name, her man's, and the name of their son, Zvain, which Pavek immediately associated with the boy who'd gotten away after punching him in the groin. The report confirmed that she'd been murdered by her man and that he'd been raving mad when the crime was committed. Nothing more.

It was hard to believe Metica was pleased; Pavek certainly wasn't when he returned the parchment to her worktable.

"There should've been more," he grumbled, risking Metica's good humor.

"There was," she confirmed. "What you gave the palace was better than gold. Not that the necromancer told me, mind you. But she was happy, no doubt of that."

With a steady expression of disinterest fixed on his face, Pavek wondered how many lies Metica had just told him, and whether he dared ask her what was better than gold. "I did my duty, great one. Nothing more," he said with lowered eyes and excruciating deference.

"In your dreams, Regulator, in your bloody dreams. I don't want to know why you hauled that corpse up here. I truly don't. You were lucky, not smart, Pavek-"

He looked up again. Last time Metica called him by his name he was only sixteen. She said he'd scored well on his bureau exams, said he had rare talent. Then she said she was almost sorry he was dirt-poor and without patrons.

You'd rise with gold and connections, Pavek. As it is, you'll stay right here for as long as I want to keep you. "I don't want you pushing luck again," the half-elf continued. "You hear me? You stay smart and keep your

rock-head down in the gutter where it belongs."

"Yes, great one. I don't know what got into me."

Metica settled into a sturdy chair. She shuffled scrolls, tablets and marking pens. "I heard there was scarcely a mark on him-except for that black tongue. Believe that, if you want. But the black tongue was what they called important, Regulator Pavek: a thread toward Laq. You stay clear of it now, if you're smart. You don't want to be near that thread when it gets pulled. You understand?"

"Yes, great one," he replied with absolute sincerity. But it had worked-his simple plan had worked! The days of mind-bending, magic-resisting ravers were numbered in Urik. That was all he'd wanted. It never paid to think too much about the middle when the ends were clear. "As far away as I can get," he assured his taskmaster, then started to stand.

"You can do something for me, Regulator, since you're so good at tracking things into shadows."

Pavek's heart sank and so did his body. He barely caught himself before he broke the flimsy tripod. "Anything, great one."

"We've had complaints," Metica let that unprecedented notion hang between them. "Complaints about the Ral's Breath powder our licensed apothecaries are selling. Seems it's not doing the job it's meant to do."

Pavek shrugged, and nearly lost his balance. "What job? Ral's Breath doesn't do anything. Tell a sick man he's getting better long enough and either you're right or he's dead." ... though he'd bought a few of the yellow powder packets himself. Work in the customhouse was usually more strenuous than tossing salt sacks, and Ral's Breath was cheap enough even he could afford it. "Stuff tastes awful until it numbs your mouth. Then you're so busy trying not to bite your tongue, you forget what else hurts."

"Well, apparently it doesn't taste as bad as it's supposed to and the rabble isn't forgetting, they're complaining. Our great and mighty king tolerates the sale of Ral's Breath because it's lucrative and because, unlike just about anything else that could be ground up and sold, the seeds it's made from can't be used to make anything else-anything

veiled"

She alluded to the Veiled Alliance, a loose-knit association of magic-users that was banned in Urik and everywhere else in the Tablelands.

Templars got the thrust for their spells directly from their sorcerer-king. Templar spells, Pavek knew from his archive research, belonged to the broad tradition of what the archive scrolls called clerical or priestly spellcraft.

And, as Metica had pointed out, since the outlawed Alliance magicians could wreak spells with just about anything, any substance that was useless to them was noteworthy. Small wonder, then, that King Hamanu allowed Ral's Breath to be sold for city profit. Except

"If these seeds are so useless, how can anyone truly tell if the Ral's Breath has been overcut?"

"Useless to the Veil, Regulator, but as you said, the zarneeka seeds have a distinctive taste and numbing texture. Someone's shrinking the amount of zarneeka that goes into every packet of Ral's Breath. You'll find out who, and why, and then you'll tell me. As a favor to me... for my inconvenience dealing with the dead-heart. Simple?"

The sinews holding the tripod together creaked protest as all the implications of Medea's "favor" sifted down through Pavek's thoughts. Harmless, practically useless Ral's Breath was a city commodity, stored in the customhouse and sold to the licensed apothecaries who resold it in their shops. If, the bitter, numbing ingredient in Ral's Breath was zarneeka-a word Pavek had never heard before-then zarneeka was also a city commodity, stored in the selfsame customhouse. Either the suppliers who sold zarneeka were shorting the city or the templars who made up the Ral's Breath packets were pilfering yellow powder. Pavek had his suspicions between the two possibilities-and his hopes.

"Where do we get zarneeka, great one?"

"Itinerants trade it directly for salt and oils."

Pavek couldn't resist a frown: itinerants weren't merchants who paid city taxes and spelled out their names with trade tokens (and probably knew city-script, just as every civil templar knew the token code). Itinerants didn't even live in market villages where their lives were lived under constant observation. Itinerants dwelt beyond civilization, deep in the wastelands, in places that had no names. They were dirt-poor and as free as a man or woman could be.

Direct trade meant no coins changed hands when the itinerants exchanged their seeds for the other commodities, and that meant procurers from the civil bureau handled the whole transaction. There were at least twenty procurers working Urik's customhouse, but when Metica wouldn't meet his eyes, Pavek knew which one handled the zarneeka trade: the dwarf, Rokka.

If Rokka's dwarven focus-that innate need dwarves had to organize their lives around a single purpose-wasn't greed for gold, it was only because Rokka'd found something more valuable.

But zarneeka? Seeds that turned a man's tongue into a useless lump? Seeds that King Hamanu himself certified were useless?

Not if gold-hungry Rokka was involved.

Had Pavek been anywhere but Metica's chamber, he would have spat the evil thought into the nearest hearth.

Instead he recited an old street rhyme as casually as he could. "Itinerants: 'Come today and gone away. Come again? Who knows when?'"

"They registered last night at Modekan."

Coincidence? Pavek felt an invisible noose settle around his neck. He gulped; it didn't budge. Modekan was another of the villages that lent its name to one of Urik's ten market days. Today, in fact, was Modekan's day.

Coincidence? Not unless his luck had suddenly gotten a lot better.

King Hamanu didn't like surprises in his city. The massive walls and gates were more than convenient places to carve his portrait. Nobody came into Urik without registering at one of the outlying villages. Nobody brought a draft beast into the city; the streets were crowded enough with people, and hard enough on that account to keep clean. Nobody stayed inside the city after the gates were closed at sunset unless they paid a poll tax or could prove residence.

The great merchants paid the tax. For them, it was a pittance. Just about everyone else, including itinerants, stopped in a market village, stabled their beasts, announced their intent to visit the city to a civil bureau registrator conveniently assigned to the village inn, and then set out for Urik the following morning.

He assessed the angle of the morning sun streaming onto Metica's worktable. If he assumed the itinerants had set out from Modekan at dawn and weren't crippled, they should be approaching the gates right about now. He'd rather lose every thread of orange and crimson in his sleeves than poke his nose into Rokka's affairs, but he owed Metica. She'd made that perfectly dear.

"How many? Names? Descriptions?" He hoped for anything that might give him a chance to get out of this without earning the dwarf for an enemy.

"Three. One female, two males. A cart, four amphorae- large clay jugs with pointed bottoms-filled with zarneeka. They should be easy to spot coming through the gate."

Pavek supposed he should be grateful that the registrator had recorded so much extra information. He wondered, idly, how much Metica paid for that extra knowledge. And whether she'd told him everything she'd bought. "Anything else?"

The administrator pretended not to hear the question, instead of answering she selecting a stick of ordinary sap-wax from a supply in an expensive wooden box. She sparked, a little oil lamp-also expensive-and held the wax in its flame until it softened and shone. Pavek watched with morbid fascination. Metica was preparing to give him an impression of her personal seal.

He could think of worse omens... maybe... If he tried hard.

Metica rehooked her cylindrical seal onto the thong around her neck, where it hung beside her gold-edged medallion. She blew on the impressed wax to hasten its hardening, and smiled sweetly at her debtor.

Pavek held his breath.

"The amphorae are bonded-sealed at their point of origin. Be careful when you break them open. Take this to the gate-" She held out the molded lump of wax. It was about as long as Pavek's thumb and half as thick. He took it like a death sentence. "You're clever, Regulator. You'll think of something. Don't forget who you're working for. I'll be waiting for you tomorrow."

"I'm off tomorrow," he replied, feeling like a fool as the words left his mouth.

Her smile grew broader, showed teeth filed down to sharp, precise points. Pavek had never noticed his taskmaster's teeth before, but then, he'd never seen her smile like this before.

"Then the day after tomorrow. You'll know twice as much by then, won't you?"

Sap-wax didn't hold a sharp image for more than a day in the oppressive Athasian heat. The way Pavek's hands were sweating, the impression would be gone by the time he got to the gate. He quickly tucked the wax into the slit hem of his sleeve. When the wax was out of harm's way, he got to his feet. He was at the threshold when he remembered the messenger.

"The girl you sent. She asked me to put in a good word for her."

"And do you?"

"Yeah-she'll make a fine regulator someday." There was more irony in his voice than he'd intended, and more anger than was wise.

"I didn't send a messenger," Metica replied, losing her smile.

Pavek was acutely conscious of the little wax lump in his sleeve as he made his way past the customhouse-he hadn't stopped to see if the girl was waiting or if she'd stolen all the salt-to the western gate. Modekan was west of the city. Its villagers used the western gate when they brought their produce to market. So did anyone who'd registered at the Modekan inn, unless they wanted to walk the extra distance to one of the other three midwall gates.

The city's main avenues were filling quickly with the usual market-day traffic, but a templar in his yellow robes had little difficulty moving against the traffic-as long as he didn't mind the glowers of contempt and the constant splatter of hawking as his shadow passed.

A regulator had the right to answer any challenge to templarate authority with a fine or corporal punishment. But, like the right to call upon King Hamanu for magical aid, it was a right that only a fool would choose to exercise. Pavek contented himself with a purposeful scowl and kept an eye out for two men and one woman pulling a cart loaded with cone-bottomed clay pots. Unless they'd chosen to drag their heavy cart along the narrower side streets, the zarneeka traders had yet to pass through the gate.

The regulator in charge of the western gate, a grizzled human whose robe sleeves matched Pavek's except that they were frayed and threadbare, accepted Metica's wax without enthusiasm. He snapped the wax in half and tossed the pieces into a filthy bowl where they were lost in a handful of similarly broken lumps.

"What're you looking for?" he asked Pavek, hawking into a fire pit for good measure.

"The usual. I'll know them when I spot them. Give me an inspector. I'll keep him busy. Anything in particular you're on watch for?"

"The usual," the older regulator replied with wink, then he shouted a name, "Bukke!" and an inspector joined them in the gatehouse.

The new man was human with spiked, sun-bleached hair and pale, mean-spirited eyes. There was a distinct family resemblance between the two, especially when they stared. Bukke was a big man, accustomed to looking down into another man's eyes, but he wasn't bigger than Pavek, who let his scarred lip curl and held Bukke's stare until the younger man turned away.

"I'll tell you which ones to roust out of line. You lead them aside for a shakedown, and do a thorough job of it, like I'm sure you can, while I watch from here."

"What am I looking for?"

"You're not. You do what you're told until I give you the sign to stop. Understand?"

The inspector looked around, but his father had left the gatehouse, and he was alone with someone who gave every indication of being at least as mean as he was. "Yeah. Right."

Throats grew parched and tempers frayed as the bloated red sun climbed toward noon. At the nod of Pavek's head, Bukke harassed every threesome composed of two men and a woman, every jug-filled cart, and a few hapless journeyers who didn't fit the pattern at all, just to confound any rumors that might be drifting back along the road to Modekan. Squinting toward the horizon, Pavek saw an occasional swirl of dust where someone turned around.

Three someones?

Three someones with a cart of zarneeka? They were itinerants, people who dwelt in the trackless land beyond Urik's verdant belt. They'd come a long way to register their intent at Modekan. Pavek was counting that they'd come the rest of the way no matter what rumors filtered down the road. Metica said their amphorae were bonded and sealed; by rights they had nothing to fear from King Hamanu's templars. Pavek's gaze fell upon a family of farmers-a man with a withered arm, his wife, grown children, half-grown children, and a suckling infant. They were too poor to have a cart, but carried their goods on their bent backs. It felt like a good time to vary the pattern. Pavek stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled for Bukke's attention. The inspector dismissed the carters he'd been harassing.

Pavek turned away, remembering Metica's sharp smile; he had a life, too.

A scuffle erupted in the clearing where Bukke was making his inspection. Pavek was slow to turn^slow to grasp what had happened. One of the bundles was stuffed with chameleon skins, changeable bits of leather worth their weight in gold to any sorcerer-and absolutely proscribed in Urik.

Bukke's father pronounced sentence: the man was executed on the spot-with that arm he'd be no good in the obsidian pits. The woman and walking children were condemned to sale in the slave market. Bukke seized the squalling infant by its leg.

The mother wailed loud enough to wake the dead. She offered her life for the life of her child. A poor bargain that no one would take: a slave that couldn't walk or feed itself had even less value than a man with only one good arm, while she was still strong and healthy. Bukke pressed the black edge of his blade against the infant's throat. The screams subsided into anguished moans. Then another woman broke from the line. She was a dwarf; the infant was human. She had a single silver coin.

"Please let it be enough?"

Bukke hesitated. A templar had the right to kill, but not the right to sell and, anyway, both his hands were fall.

"Take it, damn you," Pavek shouted. He surged out of the gatehouse, but stopped short of physically intervening. "We're not butchers."

That raised a few heads down the line. Some because templars didn't usually quarrel in public; but most because most nontemplars were convinced that templars had a long way to climb before they could be lumped in with honorable butchers.

Bukke released the infant's leg. He had the silver coin, and the dwarven woman had the infant in an eye-blink. The infant's mother crawled across the sand; she wrapped her arms around Pavek's ankles and called upon the immortal sorcerer-king to bless him.

Bukke tightened his grip on the gore-clotted machete. The air in the clearing was too thick to breathe and hot enough to burn of its own. Pavek gauged Bukke as an opponent, and wondered if he were good enough to take out the young inspector and his father with a small, metal knife.

He surely couldn't do anything with a hysterical woman clinging to his feet. He kicked free and went for his knife beneath the front panel of his robe.

Then Pavek saw them-it was like a gong striking behind his eyes-beyond Bukke's shoulder. Two men: a dwarf as old as Joat holding the traces of the cart and an adolescent half-elf, a scowl full of bile and vinegar, typical of his kind. And a woman...

A certain man could forget that his life was in danger looking at that woman. A certain man nearly did, but Pavek caught himself when Bukke's arm moved. The metal-blade knife had found its way into Pavek's hand without his conscious effort and, thanks-be to his nameless father, he looked like he meant to use it. Bukke lowered his machete.

"Them," Pavek said, pointing to the threesome. "Inspect them."

The half-elf, an exotic specimen with coppery hair a few shades darker than his skin, fairly glowed with rage. He had his walking staff raised for an attack-a coherent well-directed attack, Pavek noted in the back of his mind: someone had taught this boy stick-work. Still, he would have been cut in two if the woman hadn't gotten her arms around him in a hurry. She wasn't old enough to be his mother and didn't look to be his sister-though kinship between humans and half-elves was sometimes hard to catch in a single glance, and that was all Pavek got as the dwarf dragged the cart into the clearing. Pavek caught the dwarfs eye for less than a heartbeat-long enough to see a wariness that had nothing to do with surprise or fear.

He knew who had taught the kid, and he knew he had the right threesome even though the cart was topped with straw and rags.

"Search it!" he commanded, and Bukke did, with vengeance.

Four amphorae, their baked clay walls made waterproof with a layer of glistening lacquer, soon lay exposed in the dust. Their necks were plugged with deep-red wax into which a carved seal bearing a familiar leonine profile had been impressed.

"Bust 'em open?" Bukke asked.

Pavek took a deep breath. His plan-the plan Metica implied in her chamber-required breaking tie seals, not the vessels themselves. Some seals were simply wax; anyone could break them, but some were spiked with sorcery. They could leave a man with stumps where his hands had been and leave an image of his agonized face where the sorcerer could find it. Pavek knew the risks, so did Bukke. Breaking the amphorae would scatter the powder in the sand. If it was Rokka rather than the itinerants who were responsible for overcutting Ral's Breath, there'd be no way to prove it.

"Have the woman break the seals," Pavek said, the inspiration bursting into his thoughts.

The woman strode past Bukke, calmly adjusting the shoulder of her gown where Bukke had torn it in his determination to do a thorough inspection. Her eyes, and her anger, never left Pavek's face, but she said nothing as she knelt down beside the amphorae.

Pavek saw it all as a blur; his clear vision never left the woman. He watched her hands, even when the torn cloth at her shoulder came loose again. He couldn't have said what he expected to see: a flash of light, perhaps, some other sorcerous signature-something he could pass along to Metica when he saw her. With the half-elf still cursing up a storm, the woman placed her palms on the ground. She closed her eyes and nothing happened. Just as nothing happened when she took the ribbons locked inside the deep-red wax and pulled the plugs out, one after another, as if they were no more dangerous than the sap-wax Metica kept in the box on her work-table.

As if, but not hardly.

All those off-duty days spent in the bureau archives weren't a complete loss. Pavek couldn't put a name to what he'd seen, not a specific spell name, but that woman kneeling there, looking at him with just a trace of real anxiety in her eyes now, was no common itinerant. She'd called upon the land of Athas to take back the spellcraft she or someone else had placed in those seals.

She was a druid.

"Do you want a closer look?" she asked, sitting back on her heels, leaving the torn doth of her gown as it had fallen.

He did and he didn't, in more ways than one. He thought of ordering Bukke to shove his hand into one of the amphorae, but one look at that young man's face and Pavek put the notion out of his mind. Returning his knife to its sheath, he knelt opposite the druid. Her breathing was deep and even; she didn't blink when he reached as deep as he could into the powder. He brought up a handful. It was as yellow as the powder showing in the other three. Pavek touched his tongue to the little mound in his palm, then sprang to his feet retching for all he was worth, and to no avail.

Everyone-templars and travelers alike-got a good laugh at Pavek's expense. The only ones who didn't laugh were the forsaken, almost forgotten, slaves kneeling near the farmer's corpse, and their despair was worse than laughter. Pavek had his hands against his throat. He'd coughed so hard he was sure he was bleeding from the mouth, but he couldn't feel anything from his lips down to his gut.

"Find what you were looking for, regulator?" Bukke asked sarcastically.

Pavek's eyes were watering. He couldn't talk; he could hardly breathe.

"Do we have your permission to go on about our business?" the druid asked. She'd already replaced the wax plugs, probably re-spelled them, too.

The best Pavek could manage was a nod and a wave in the general direction of the open gate before he staggered to the cistern and thrust his whole head into the stagnant water.