The Brazen Gambit

by Lynn Abbey

  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.

  Chapter Three

  The tongue-thickening numbness in Pavek's mouth was gone long before the bitter taste of zarneeka faded into memory, along with the jeers of Bukke and the others at the gate.

  He was accustomed to such outbursts. His pursuit of spell-craft-which he could not hope to invoke-invited ridicule. The archive scholars laughed when he mispronounced the names of the scrolls he wanted to study. His comrades in the low ranks of the civil bureau laughed because he was that most ludicrous of supposedly sentient creatures: a big, ugly, and dirt-poor templar with a romantic curiosity.

  And compassion-at least more compassion than was considered useful or wise in the templarate.

  Pavek cared about the widow and her children, now headed for the obsidian pits. He was ashamed that his scheme to catch the zarneeka itinerants had netted a clutch of hard-scrabble farmers instead. There was no reason, Pavek told himself, for the dull ache in his heart: the family was smu
ggling for the Veil. Nothing worse than the usual templar harassment would have befallen them if they had not been breaking one of Urik's cardinal laws.

  Their fate was their own damned fault, not his.

  But Pavek cared; he ached, and the family's faces joined countless others in the tiers of his conscience. The female druid, with her smoldering eyes and torn dress was headed there, too. The orphan boy who'd gut-punched him a few nights back had already claimed his place.

  Wincing under his private burden, Pavek pounded the streets between the gate and the customhouse. His size and expression cleared a path, while a small voice inside his skull warned with every stride: Forget them all. Take care of yourself. Forget them all.

  He slipped through an inconspicuous door at the rear of the customhouse and wove his way past stockpiles of those commodities King Hamanu judged both essential to his city's residents and eminently taxable. The customhouse was larger than the palace, though few guessed its true dimensions because it had been carved into the limestone beneath the streets rather than rising above them. It swalt lowed the lives of poor, patronless templars, and Pavek, already a ten-year veteran of the templarate's bottom ranks, knew every dim and twisted corridor, every rat-hole shortcut. No one could have reached the imposing procurate tables in the entry hall faster than he did, but it was Rokka's predictability rather than Pavek's luck or skill that got him where he wanted to be before it was too late.

  Rokka made everyone wait. The smarmy dwarf would make King Hamanu wait in line, even if it got him killed. Today he was making everyone wait even longer: two empty tables flanked the one where the miser had enthroned himself. A line of citizens and merchants stretched onto the sunbaked street.

  Pavek glanced at the array of trade goods heaped behind Rokka's chair. There were no amphorae, neither lacquered nor resealed with loose wax plugs. None of the hot, weary faces matched the itinerants from the gate.

  The lone procurer was a crude man. Curling bristles sprouted from his brow. Tufts of matted hair protruded from his ears and nose. Any other self-respecting dwarf would have plucked each offensive hair out by its root, but Rokka wore his hideous hair like armor. It fueled the contempt mat oozed with every word, every gesture.

  Even the proud merchant standing in front of the table when Pavek entered the hall had been reduced to a nervous pallor by the time the assessment was concluded. Rokka made a scratched entry on the tax scroll for the merchant to witness before he waved a two-fingers-extended fist in the air above his shoulder. Taking an empty pouch from a pile beside the chest, Pavek filled the pouch with two nearly level measures of salt, then-because it was Rokka sitting at the procurer's table-he let some trickle back into the chest.

  The dwarf scowled when Pavek appeared at his side to put the pouch in one pan of a balance scale and two ceramic lions in the other. All eyes were on the balance beam, which swung a few times before the pans settled as close to level as mortal eye could determine.

  Rokka smiled and nodded. Pavek simply smiled. With practiced efficiency he knotted the pouch thong and immersed it in a crucible of molten wax. He sealed the wax with the regulation customs stamp: a mekillot leg bone that had been carved into the form of a rampant lion. The customhouse entry-hall echoed with the resonant sound of the seal impressing the wax. The merchant made a hasty escape with his salt ration.

  "What brings you up here, Regulator?" Rokka asked before the next petitioner came forward. He slid the lightweight tokens off the pan.

  Pavek shrugged. He returned the bone seal to its golden stand. "The usual, great one. Pure rotted luck." There was no particular enmity between them, mostly because Pavek had been careful to avoid moments like this.

  "You know the drill?"

  "In my dreams, great one. In my dreams.''

  The procurer squinted one eye, trying to figure if Pavek and an angle and whether that angle crossed his own in any unwelcome way. Pavek transformed himself into a study of disinterest and boredom, and after a moment Rokka's face relaxed without becoming friendly. "See you stay awake. We're short-handed already-" He indicated the empty tables. "Who knows who might be waiting outside?" "Who indeed, great one? I know what's expected of me." Their gazes locked another moment, then Pavek took the empty pouch the merchant had left behind. He did know the drill and performed it flawlessly, until Rokka's smile seemed almost genuine and he began to fear that the procurer would request his assistance in the future.

  Mostly Pavek measured short-weights of salt, an especially precious commodity in the hot, arid Tablelands; but sometimes he poured volatile oils into glazed ceramic flasks, and once he filled a sack with caustic soda from the obsidian mines for the gluemaker who transformed all manner of rubbish into his sticky wares. No apothecaries came to Rokka's table for Ral's Breath packets, but around midafternoon the beautiful, brown-haired druid led her two male companions, each balancing a brace of amphorae on his shoulders, to the far side of Rokka's table.

  Pavek looked the other way as soon as he spotted them, although there was little chance he'd be recognized. Ordinary folks seldom looked farther than the detested yellow robe every templar wore while on duty. Still, the woman was a druid and, therefore, not at all ordinary.

  Hovering by the commodity chests with his back to the procurer's table, he finger-raked his hair until it hung in front of his eyes, then rolled up the tell-tale sleeves of his robe.

  The druid woman didn't wilt in Rokka's scorn. When the dwarf tried to reject the amphorae because their seals were obviously broken, she described what had happened at the gate. Her description of him as a "dung-skulled baazrag masquerading as a human" seemed excessively insulting, but it did leave Rokka at a momentary loss for words. She issued a soft-spoken ultimatum in the silence.

  "If you won't accept the trade your fellow templars tainted, then we shall be compelled to take it back with us when we leave Urik. You will understand, of course, that it will be another sixty days before we can possibly return."

  Every mote of curiosity in Pavek"s mind craved a glance at her face. He wanted a good look at anyone who could play the procurer's game and win. Previously his only knowledge of druidry had come from such druid-written scrolls as the archive scholars had acquired over the ages. He knew they used the latent power of Adias itself in their spellcraft, which' was, in essence, identical to the priestly spellcraft the sorcerer-king permitted his templars. For that reason alone, he'd assumed they were like templars in other ways.

  He succumbed to curiosity's temptations. The druid wasn't overtly defiant or proud; the lowliest messenger could conquer defiance or pride. Her voice was meek, her eyes lowered, never challenging the dwarfs authority.

  And she had Rokka rattled. The dwarf drummed on the table and squirmed in his chair. By law, Pavek should have intervened: he knew what she was. One word whispered in Rokka's ear and the druid would wish she'd been sent to the obsidian pits before the dwarf was done with her.

  Templars were, however, only responsible for enforcing Urik's laws, not obeying them. Pavek stayed right where he was, listening to Rokka's threats and insinuations, while the woman's expression never changed. He thought the procurer would reach for his medallion, but incredibly, Rokka caved in. The dwarf said Urik needed what was in those amphorae, sealed or tainted; he accepted the unsealed amphorae. After the woman's companions had laid down their burdens, Rokka held up four fingers for salt, then three for the volatile oil.

  Pavek considered upright measurement: he was that impressed by the woman's accomplishment, but he rejected the notion. Rokka's weights were light. Any honest efforts on his own part would only focus the procurer's frustration on his own head. And the dwarf was undoubtedly looking for someone to blame.

  Pavek had come away from Metica's chamber convinced that if Rokka wasn't skimming the zarneeka, the itinerants were: one or the other, not both in collusion. But the itinerants weren't simple nomadic traders, and Rokka was slipping gold into an already generous ration of salt. Maybe they were working tog
ether, playing a dangerous game against Urik?

  He pulled his hands back from the scale, allowing the pans to swing free.

  If it was a ruse, the whole confrontation had been an elaborate ruse. Pavek didn't know if dissembling was a common skill among druids, but it wasn't among dwarves or procurers. When the brown-haired druid threatened to take her zarneeka away with her, Rokka had been mad enough to kill. Then he'd capitulated.

  Urik's inhabitants needed Ral's Breath, but Rokka wouldn't give a gith's thumb for Urik or its inhabitants. Rokka needed zarneeka, and not, Pavek guessed with certainty, for Urik's sake.

  The pans leveled. Pavek sealed the flasks with wax, then pushed them toward the woman without meeting her eyes. He'd gotten two steps toward the lacquered clay jugs lying on the floor when Rokka called him back.

  "I'll handle that, Regulator," he said, rising too quickly from his chair. "You take my place here."

  It was unheard of: A regulator standing a procurer's duty,

  Rokka toting four heavy amphorae on his own broad shoulders.

  "Never think of it, great one. It's not my place."

  "Make it your place and maybe you'll keep it, Regulator. You're so good with writing-all that practice. Scribble-scrape. Scribble-scrape. What else you got to show for it? Ink stains on your fingers? Or has our Great and Mighty King promised you a place in the archives-? Scholar Pavek-sweeping bug-dung off the floor."

  As dwarves went, Rokka was soft-muscled. Maybe Pavek could best him hand-to-hand, maybe he'd need a heavy stick. But the risks were unacceptable, and King Hamanu frowned on templars brawling in front of the rabble, and the king's frowns were often fatal. So, Pavek let the procurer pass. He settled himself on the chair's leather cushion, still warm and molded to the dwarf's differently shaped anatomy.