Zarneeka and Templar Politics

Chapter 3 opens with Pavek still tasting zarneeka. The numbness is gone but the bitterness lingers. So do the jeers from the other templars at the gate. He’s used to being laughed at. His pursuit of spell-craft, the way he haunts the archives studying scrolls he can never actually cast, makes him a running joke in the civil bureau. Big, ugly, dirt-poor templar with a romantic curiosity. That’s how they see him.

But Pavek also has something most templars don’t. Compassion. He still feels guilty about that farmer’s family being sent to the obsidian pits. He knows it was their own fault for smuggling. He tells himself that. It doesn’t help. Their faces join a growing collection in his conscience, right next to the druid woman and the orphan boy who gut-punched him.

He shoves it all down and heads to the customhouse.

Working With Rokka

The customhouse is massive, carved into the limestone beneath the streets. Bigger than the palace, though nobody realizes it from above. Pavek has spent ten years in its corridors. He knows every shortcut, every rat hole. He uses them now to reach the procurer’s tables before the itinerant traders arrive.

Rokka is the procurer on duty. A smarmy dwarf with bristles sprouting from his brows and tufts of matted hair poking out of his ears. Any self-respecting dwarf would pluck those hairs. Rokka wears them like armor. He makes everyone wait. He’d make King Hamanu wait in line if he thought he could survive it.

Pavek volunteers to work customs at Rokka’s table. The other two regulators on duty are happy to leave. Nobody wants to work under Rokka.

The drill is simple. Measure salt, pour oils, seal pouches with wax. Pavek does it well. He keeps his head down. Then, mid-afternoon, the druid walks in.

The Druid Plays Rokka

She brings her two companions, each carrying amphorae on their shoulders. Pavek turns away fast. Ordinary folks never look past the yellow robe, but she’s a druid. Not ordinary at all. He rakes his hair over his eyes and rolls up his sleeves to hide the templar uniform.

Rokka tries to reject the amphorae because the seals are broken. The druid woman doesn’t flinch. She describes what happened at the gate and calls Pavek a “dung-skulled baazrag masquerading as a human.” Harsh. But it leaves Rokka speechless for a moment.

She fills the silence with a quiet threat. If Rokka won’t accept the goods, they’ll take the zarneeka back. Urik won’t see another shipment for sixty days.

Rokka caves. The dwarf who never bends, bends. Pavek has never seen anything like it. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t challenge his authority. She just stood there, meek-eyed, and dismantled him.

Then Pavek catches something nobody else would notice. As he seals a salt pouch, Rokka slips three gold coins inside before knotting it shut. Three gold coins on top of an already generous salt ration.

The druid sees it too. And she sees Pavek seeing it.

She knows who he is. He waits to be called out. The moment passes quietly.

Down Into the Catacombs

Rokka sends Pavek to sit at the procurer’s table while he personally carries four heavy amphorae into the storerooms below. A procurer hauling his own cargo. That never happens.

Pavek runs the table for the rest of the afternoon. He’s actually faster than Rokka. He simplifies the negotiations by snarling at each customer until they lower their request. The line moves at record speed. But Rokka never comes back.

Night falls. The guards change. Rokka is still gone.

Pavek decides to go looking. He grabs a bone torch and descends into the catacombs. The corridors are dark and full of things he pretends not to see. Templar trysts in empty storerooms. The sad, predictable secrets of people trapped at the bottom of a system that grinds them down.

Three tiers below the surface, he finds the zarneeka. A warding spell protects the storeroom door, something far too subtle and powerful for a crude dwarf like Rokka. This is the work of a High Templar.

Pavek hides behind empty barrels and waits.

Escrissar

Four people come down the stairs. Rokka with a torch. A tall figure wearing a grotesque mask. A third person he can’t quite see. And a half-giant so big he has to duck through the ten-foot corridors.

The mask is what stops Pavek’s heart. Questioners sometimes wear masks. Necromancers always do. He tells himself it could be a disguise. He doesn’t believe it.

The masked figure senses something. “We are not alone,” he says, and Pavek realizes this isn’t just a necromancer. He’s a mind-bender too. Someone who can pluck thoughts right out of the air.

Then Rokka says the name. Lord Elabon Escrissar.

Child, grandchild, and great-grandchild of High Templars. Half-elf aristocrat with a taste for cruelty that entertains even Urik’s ancient king. And now Pavek knows he’s involved in the zarneeka trade.

The third figure turns out to be Dovanne. Pavek’s childhood friend from the orphanage. His former lover. A woman who hates him for something that wasn’t his fault but will never believe him about it. She’s a procurer now, with tattooed serpents coiling up her arm. She’s done well for herself.

She’s also the one who finds him hiding.

The Fight and the Fall

Pavek doesn’t go quietly. He swings from an overhead beam and kicks Dovanne in the face. Chops Escrissar across the neck. Dives past Rokka. The half-giant blocks the main stairs, so he plunges deeper into the catacombs.

He navigates blind through corridors he memorized over ten years. Finds a side exit. Unbars the door. Steps outside.

The half-giant catches him. Dovanne beats him with a weighted sap, asking questions he can’t answer through a mouthful of blood. They drag him back underground, back to Escrissar.

Inside the storeroom, the truth becomes clear. Rokka is cutting zarneeka powder with flour. Escrissar is folding packets with his enameled talons. And a halfling slave, branded with the Escrissar family crest, is cooking something in a crucible.

Laq.

Ral’s Breath takes the edge off a headache. Laq makes people crazy, then kills them. Escrissar has plans for all of Athas now that the Dragon is dead. And Pavek, the pathetic little regulator who stumbled into all of this, is ordered disposed of.

Escape

The half-giant, Sassel, carries him out to kill him. Pavek tries to talk his way free. Sassel turns out to be smarter than expected. Loyal, single-minded, but capable of dwarf-level deceit when it serves him. They negotiate like two merchants in a bazaar until Pavek tricks the half-giant into putting him down.

Then he runs. Grabs a chunk of masonry. Taunts Sassel into charging. Sidesteps. Slams the masonry into the back of the half-giant’s skull.

Sassel goes down. Pavek strips off his yellow templar robe, soaks it in the half-giant’s blood, and loops it around Sassel’s fingers. If the robe reaches Escrissar, maybe the interrogator will think his inconvenient regulator bled out in the night.

Cradling his shattered left arm, Pavek disappears into the dark streets of Urik. He’s no longer a templar. He’s a fugitive, a dead man walking, and he knows way too much about the wrong people.

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