Salt Measures and Druid Traders
Chapter 2 picks up a few days later. The bruise from the orphan boy’s punch has faded. Pavek is back to his regular duties, transferring salt sacks in the customhouse, ticking off counts on a wax tablet. Just another day of grunt work for a third-rank Regulator.
Then a teenage messenger shows up, drops to her knees, and calls him “great one.”
Pavek is not a great one. He’s a big, ugly man with a mashed nose, scarred lips, and no connections. His cronies joke that the only promotion waiting for him is to Intimidator, and they’re not wrong. He tells the girl to get up. She flinches away from his hand.
She says Metica wants to see him. Right now.
Metica’s Office
Metica is Pavek’s taskmaster. A gray-haired half-elf who’s survived the templarate long enough to grow old, which is an achievement in itself. She’s the person who told sixteen-year-old Pavek that he scored well on his bureau exams, that he had rare talent, and then said she was almost sorry he was dirt-poor and without patrons.
Cold. But honest.
She calls him up to her office, makes him sit on a flimsy tripod stool so low his shoulders barely clear her worktable. It’s a power move. Classic templar stuff. Then she tells him something unexpected: the king’s personal necromancer was happy about the dead woman Pavek brought in.
That corpse he hauled across his shoulders from the squatter’s quarter? It wound up at the palace. The necromancer got the woman’s name, her man’s name, and the name of their son. Zvain. Pavek immediately connects that to the boy who punched him in the groin.
But the real news is that whatever the necromancer learned was “better than gold.” Metica doesn’t know the details. She just knows the dead-heart was pleased, and pleasure from the palace means somebody scored points.
Points that Metica intends to spend.
The Zarneeka Problem
Metica has a favor to ask. Ral’s Breath, this common painkiller sold across Urik, has been getting complaints. It’s not working like it should. The numbing powder is weaker than it used to be.
This might sound small, but in Athas, it’s a big deal. Ral’s Breath is made from zarneeka seeds. King Hamanu personally allows its sale because the seeds are supposedly useless for real magic. They can’t be used by the Veiled Alliance, the outlawed network of wizards. So the king lets the city profit from it.
But someone is cutting the zarneeka content. Either the suppliers are shorting the city, or the templars making the packets are skimming. Metica wants Pavek to find out who and why.
She gives him a wax impression of her personal seal and tells him itinerant traders registered at Modekan village last night. Three of them. One woman, two men. A cart with four large clay jugs filled with zarneeka.
He doesn’t have a choice. He owes Metica for covering him with the palace. So he goes.
The Gate Hustle
Pavek sets up at the western gate with an inspector named Bukke, a mean-spirited brute whose father runs the gate. The plan is simple: harass every group of two men and a woman coming through, along with random others to keep things unpredictable, until the zarneeka traders show up.
Hours pass under the brutal sun. Then something awful happens.
Bukke shakes down a family of farmers. A man with a withered arm, his wife, their children. They’re carrying everything they own on their backs. One of the bundles turns out to be stuffed with chameleon skins, which are illegal contraband in Urik. The man is executed on the spot. The woman and older children are condemned to slavery. And Bukke grabs the baby by its leg and puts a blade to its throat.
The mother screams. A dwarf woman breaks from the line with a single silver coin, begging for the infant’s life.
“Take it, damn you,” Pavek shouts. “We’re not butchers.”
That line raised heads all down the queue. Not because templars don’t usually argue in public (they don’t), but because most people figure templars have a long way to climb before they rank alongside honorable butchers.
Bukke takes the coin. The infant lives. The mother crawls across the sand and wraps her arms around Pavek’s ankles, calling on the sorcerer-king to bless him.
And then, over Bukke’s shoulder, Pavek sees them. Two men and a woman. A cart. And the woman…
He almost forgets his life is in danger looking at her.
The Druid
The threesome is exactly who he’s looking for. An old dwarf holding the cart traces. An adolescent half-elf bristling with rage and trained stick-work. And a brown-haired woman who’s clearly in charge.
Bukke searches the cart. Four lacquered amphorae with deep-red wax seals bearing Hamanu’s profile. Pavek needs the seals broken to check the zarneeka, but some seals are spiked with sorcery that can leave a man with stumps for hands.
He has the woman break them.
She kneels by the amphorae. Places her palms on the ground. Closes her eyes. And the seals just… come apart in her hands, like they were never more dangerous than candle wax.
Pavek recognizes what she did. She called upon the land itself to take back the spellcraft locked in those seals. She’s a druid.
He shoves his hand into the zarneeka and touches a handful to his tongue. And immediately regrets every decision that led to this moment. The stuff is so violently bitter and numbing that he springs to his feet retching, eyes watering, unable to talk or breathe properly.
Everyone laughs at him. Everyone except the slaves kneeling by the dead farmer’s body.
The druid calmly reseals the amphorae and asks if she has permission to go. Pavek can only nod and wave before staggering to the nearest cistern to stick his entire head in the water.
I really like what this chapter does with Pavek. He’s not a good person by any heroic standard. He set up that gate operation knowing people would get hurt. He watched a man get executed and a family get enslaved. But he’s also the guy who screamed at Bukke to spare the baby. He’s the templar who can’t stop caring even when caring makes his life worse.
And now he’s seen a druid who can stare down the system and walk away clean. That’s going to stick with him.
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