“I don’t want you pushing luck again,” the half-elf continued. “You hear me? You stay smart and keep your 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 banned in Urik and everywhere else in the Tablelands.
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.
But there was another spell-casting tradition, just as broad and in some respects more powerful than priestly spellcraft. At its apex, it was the magic of the departed Dragon and his minion sorcerer-kings. In lesser forms it was the magic of the outlawed Veiled Alliance. This other magic was completely inimical to clerical spellcraft, and Pavek knew little about it, except that every spell required specific ingredients.
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