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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
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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.
The younger children started crying, but the family shuffled forward. Their
eyes showed hollow despair when
Bukke slashed their bundles with his obsidian-edged machete. They were people;
they had lives. If they were freemen, those bundles were everything valuable
they owned. If they were slaves, they'd have to answer to their master for the
loss.
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.
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"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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]