Lynn Abbey: The Brazen Gambit

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.