The Brazen Gambit (4 page)

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.