The Brazen Gambit

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.