The Brazen Gambit (Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas 1)

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.