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