The Brazen Gambit

"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, sca

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 co

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 ba

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.