[Narrowing Path 00] - The Cruel Path

by Normoyle, David J.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “If you’ll give me the sample, I won’t be long checking it out.”

  Greft looked at me, then at Frodan, frowning at both of us before handing over the vials of spice.

  I took them back into the middle room. I quickly checked the back room, and was rewarded by the sight of Sorani talking with Yuzeel, the aphrodisiac buyer.

  Sorani was trying to persuade him that we needed the payment first.

  “I insist on receiving the merchandise first,” Yuzeel said, “before I hand over any money. I still don’t understand how a Green would get any Black Lightning, never mind three barrels of it.”

  I took the two vials of spice over to a table. I quickly measured out two portions of black pepper and one portion of nutmeg, mixed it up with a pestle in a small bowl. In the dim light, it was hard to know when it was ready. I could hear voices beginning to rise on either side, so I knew both Greft and Yuzeel were getting impatient. I needed to hurry, but I had to make sure the sample was fully mixed or the whole plan would fall to pieces. It was a fine line.

  Finally happy, I took a vial of the mixed spice, which I hoped was now indistinguishable from Black Lightning, into the back room and handed it over to Yuzeel. I smiled as I did so, but inside I was quaking. This was going to be the riskiest part of the plan, and we were in too deep to abandon the deal with no repercussions. There was little margin on the Path for failure, especially at this early stage.

  Yuzeel poured some powder from the vial onto his finger. He sniffed it then tasted it with the tip of his tongue. “This is the good stuff. Sells very well coming up to the Infernam, as you could imagine. Nothing like an upcoming apocalypse to get people horny. Bring out the rest of it.”

  “We need to see that you’ve brought the money,” Sorani said.

  “Now that’s insulting. Have I ever not paid for anything in my life?”

  “Forgive us for being cautious,” I said. “But if this deal doesn’t go right for us, it means our certain deaths come the Infernam. As Greens, our lives aren’t worth much, so we are an easy target if someone chooses to cheat us.”

  Yuzeel took a pouch from his belt and threw it to Sorani. The pouch was the same common brown bag we’d seen him use in other trades. If it hadn’t been, we’d have been in trouble. Sorani opened the pouch and poured some gold coins into his hand, then nodded and poured them back into the pouch and pulled the string around the top to close it.

  “Hey, not so fast, let me see,” I said, pushing forward and reaching for the pouch. It fell to the ground.

  “Hold it there.” Yuzeel moved forward and picked the pouch up from the ground. “That’s still my money.”

  “Sorry about that.” Sorani pushed me back into the middle room. “Now go get the rest of the product.” As he released me, he slipped the pouch of gold, hidden in his sleeve, into my hand. Although he’d practiced the switch thousands of times over the last few days, I was still impressed at how well he’d done it. I was looking out for it, and I was only now sure that it was a pouch of iron pieces that had fallen to the floor and been picked up by Yuzeel.

  Sorani went back to Yuzeel and I poured the golds onto a table. I took the seven required and returned to the front room where Frodan still waited with Greft.

  “What’s going on? What were you doing back there?” Greft demanded. “If this is some trick just to steal the sample off me, then you two are in big trouble.”

  “No, not at all. Here’s your money.” I counted the seven golds into his hand.

  Greft looked suspiciously at me, then examined several of the coins in detail. “I know something strange is going on here, but I can’t put my finger on it,” he said. “The money seems real, and that’s all I really care about. But if I find I’ve been cheated in some way, I’ll come back, and it won’t be pretty.”

  He gestured to his man, who followed him out, leaving the three barrels behind.

  “Give me another gold.” Frodan watched Greft leave with a frown on his face.

  “Why?”

  “He’s leaving here with a bad taste in his mouth about the deal.”

  “Fine, there are gold coins on the table in the middle room.” There wasn’t time to argue. I picked up the barrels of spice and carried them into the middle room while Frodan took a gold coin and disappeared after Greft.

  I resented Frodan for wasting time when we were in the middle of this delicate operation, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I poured the black spice into a large bucket then added the nutmeg. I used a large pole to swirl it all around, then, with a large pestle, I ground and mixed and churned it all together. I could hear the sound of raised voices in the other room, so I knew that Yuzeel was getting impatient.

  If Yuzeel decided to abort the trade, he’d soon find out that we’d stolen his money and replaced it with pieces of iron, and our lives would be worth about the same amount as those same bits of metal. But I couldn’t rush this. It had to be fully mixed, and it had to look and smell and feel exactly like the Black Lightning Yuzeel was used to. I had to rely on Sorani to delay him long enough and concentrate on my own task.

  My hands grew slick with sweat and my arms ached. Over and over, I repeated the same process: Swirl the bucket with the pole to bring the unmixed stuff to the top, then churn it with the pestle until all the powder I could see had the same consistency and color. I didn’t have time to be careful, so it didn’t take long until my clothes and all the floor around the bucket was covered in a dark gray powder.

  Sorani came in and I chased him out. “Just delay Yuzeel another few minutes,” I urged, not giving him a chance to talk.

  It took me a lot longer than I expected to get the whole batch mixed. At every moment, I was tempted to finish up and take it in as is, but I had to be sure. When I was finally happy with the result, I poured from the bucket back into the three barrels, watching carefully to make sure the consistency was the same throughout. Then I closed the three barrels, and gave each of them one last shake for luck.

  I put one barrel under each arm and picked up the last one in my hands and hurried out as quickly as my awkward load would allow. The room was empty. My heart was already racing and now it threatened to charge all the way out of my chest. Was I too late? I carried the barrels outside. Sorani stood by the door and was glaring at the back of Yuzeel, who was halfway down the street. But Frodan had returned and was now talking to Yuzeel.

  I hurried toward Frodan and Yuzeel. Yuzeel was swinging the pouch of iron pieces between his fingers. It was only when I caught up with them and heard a friendly laugh from Yuzeel that I was sure that the deal was not yet dead.

  “Here we are—three barrels of Black Lightning as promised,” I said as calmly as I could manage, placing them at Yuzeel’s feet.

  “What happened to you?” Yuzeel looked me up and down.

  I looked down and realized that I was covered in a dark gray powder. I had forgotten to clean myself off. “A minor slippage,” I said weakly, dusting down my tunic with my hands.

  “Show me.” Yuzeel nodded at the barrels.

  Frodan bent down to open one of the barrels.

  “No, that one.” Yuzeel pointed at a different barrel.

  Frodan shrugged and flipped the lid off the indicated barrel and Yuzeel dipped his finger in it. He held his finger up, twisted it around, studying the powder sticking to it. Then he wiped his finger clean on his trousers.

  “Seems good. You shouldn’t have lied to me about it, though.”

  “Lied?” I swallowed.

  “Yeah, Frodan told me all about it.”

  I forced a weak smile. What had Frodan told him?

  “We didn’t want to admit that we didn’t have the merchandise we were selling in our hands,” Frodan said.

  Yuzeel clapped me on the back. “No need to look so worried. If you’d been honest in the first place, I wouldn’t have gotten so mad with Sorani.”

  “I told him how we received the wrong barrels from the merchant,” Frodan
told me, “and how we didn’t realize it until just before he arrived.” Frodan touched my shoulder. “Eolnar and I have been running around trying to get the mix-up sorted in time to make this deal. You can see the sweat on Eolnar’s brow.”

  My smile was stronger this time. “We didn’t want to appear incompetent. We should have checked the barrels before bringing you to us.”

  “Well, it’s your first deal—you’ll learn,” Yuzeel said. He nodded to his man, who picked up the barrels.”

  I half-turned away when he stopped me.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something important?” He dangled the money pouch in front of us.

  I gave a start. It was important, but not for the reason Yuzeel thought. I took it from Yuzeel and put it in my pocket.

  “We won’t make good merchants if we forget to get paid,” Frodan said with a laugh.

  “You certainly won’t,” Yuzeel said.

  Frodan took a gold coin out of his pocket and handed it to Yuzeel. “As you can see, there was some spillage, so the barrels might be light. Plus, for your trouble in being kept waiting.”

  “No.” Yuzeel held up his hand. “My time isn’t worth that much.”

  “That much and more.” Frodan took Yuzeel’s hand, put the coin in it, and curled his fingers around it. “I insist.”

  “Very well.” Yuzeel walked away, shaking his head.

  I grabbed Frodan’s wrist. “Why did you give away a gold to each of them? You’ve nearly halved our profits.” I wasn’t mad with him; I couldn’t be angry after the crazy plan we’d come up with had actually succeeded. I just wanted to understand.

  “It’s our first deal, and Greft and Yuzeel are influential with other merchants. It’ll make it easier to get future deals if they spread the word that we’re good trading partners.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t care about anything at that moment except celebrating our improbable victory. We returned to where Sorani waited for us.

  “Sorry I let him get away,” Sorani said. “I ended up getting angry and getting in a shouting match with him. I then thought it best to let you two finish the deal.”

  “Well done in getting him to wait that long,” I said, throwing my arm around his shoulder. “Frodan came up with a clever explanation for the delay. The merchant ended up happy.”

  “Most importantly, he never figured out that he paid for the goods before he received them,” Frodan said.

  Sorani linked his arm around my shoulder and Frodan did the same on the other side. We began to walk back into the shop, then realized we wouldn’t fit three abreast like this. We laughed but did not separate. Instead, we turned around and walked in sideways. It must have looked foolish, but we always solved problems by going at them sideways together, rather than separating.

  We’d bought a small bottle of liquor and I don’t think such a small amount of liquid ever caused the same amount of merriment before or since. We were unused to alcohol and already drunk on the success of our plan. We laughed until tears came to our eyes and then laughed some more. I didn’t know it was possible to be that happy, but I know I will never be as happy again.

  Chapter 5

  The way score was kept on the Path was through the lists. These were the lists of all the Greens ranked according to their chance of survival as determined by the bet-takers. Many people from all parts of society liked to follow what was happening on Path and sometimes even bet on their favorite Greens. Although the lists were not official, the bet-takers conferred with the ascor families so that they knew more or less where each Green stood. In addition to the lists, the other way to find out what was happening on the Path was via the newsbards. They occupied the squares and the taverns, delivering news and gossip in return for tips, and during the Path, most of their stories involved the exploits of the Greens.

  We would have liked to reveal the secrets of the deal we had pulled off, but we decided that we shouldn’t. This was unfortunate, because newsbards spreading word of our clever trade would have pushed us high up the lists. But if we revealed the secret formula behind Black Lightning, it would become worthless. Yuzeel would feel cheated and even if he didn’t come looking for his money back or set his men on us, our trading reputation would suffer.

  So we used the golds we had earned on that deal to make more trades, and over time our money multiplied and we gradually moved up the lists. Frodan had been right about those extra golds given back to Yuzeel and Greft—we more than made up for the loss with the good reputation they earned. We worked well as a team. Frodan had a knack for making our trading partners happy with their deal, Sorani was as hard a bargainer as you could imagine, and I loved to analyze prices and information and figure out what should be traded and where.

  Weeks went by. We allowed ourselves to forget about the Path whenever we could and just enjoy each other’s company and the experience of becoming good at trading. But with every newsbard talking about it, it was impossible to forget about the Path for long. Plus, we needed to know where we stood.

  With ten days to go before the Infernam, the lists showed four Elects in the top five: one from each of the Lessard and Bellanger families, and two from the Raine family. The last person in the top five was a Wolfling from the Grenier family who had already killed three men in the Eye. The chief Defender of the Bellanger Elect was number six. The rest of the top twenty was made up of Defenders of those Elects, plus one other Wolfling and two Shadows.

  We three had been nicknamed “the Triplets” and were grouped between twenty and thirty on the lists. No-hoper Greens were called Deadbeats, and we were far from being one of those, but also not close to the main contenders. Without a designated leader, the bet-takers found it hard to rank us individually, so they always listed us consecutively, or sometimes just as “the Triplets,” as though we were one person.

  Although technically Greens were no longer considered part of the family they came from, it was easier to think of them that way. Guardians were free to select any Green, but because Greens were more likely to have the skills that the house they grew up in valued, the Guardians were more likely to select them. Grenier Greens were the best at fighting, and Lessard Greens tended to set up trading enterprises like we did. We felt we needed to overtake the other Lessards on the lists to give ourselves a chance.

  Grayer was the Lessard Elect and had been in the top four on the lists since the first day. He had seven Defenders, with three—Tullop, Jepher, and Vainn—reasonably high on the lists. There was no clear chief Defender, which didn’t surprise me, for I knew that Grayer would play them against each other and keep them guessing until the last day. Grayer had given each of his Defenders a part of Arcandis city, with the job of visiting the trading shops and marketplaces there. They looked for price differences that could be exploited. It had worked so far—they’d made more money than we had, though there were more of them, of course.

  One of the top Shadows was also a Lessard and also well known to my brothers and myself: Arion. And it turned out the childhood incident had affected him as much as it did us, only in a completely different way. His assassinations were done with poison via Paradise Givers.

  For Shadows, it wasn’t just about the killing of other Greens. Given the nature of the Path, it might seem that killing other Greens until you were one of the last few left would be an obvious way to go about things. But it wasn’t possible for one person to kill everyone else, especially with the large Elect/Defender groupings. For Shadows, it was about whom they killed and how they killed. They had to demonstrate extraordinary skills to make one of the families select them. Just killing a random Deadbeat with a knife in the back wouldn’t count for much—it might actually count against them, because it didn’t show the qualities that the Guardians were looking for in their family’s ascor. If an Elect turned up dead with his room guarded by Defenders and no one with any clue of how the Shadow even got in, that was the kind of thing that shot a Shadow up the lists.

  So Arion chose notable Greens to
kill. So far he’d killed two—one of the top Defenders of the Bellanger Elect and another Shadow. It was how he’d done it that was most remarkable, though. That was what had the newsbards talking about him much more than the other high-ranked Shadow who had killed four Greens. Arion captured or cornered a victim—he’d always been one of the best with the sword among the Lessard Greens—and then offered them a chance to save their life in a duel of wits. He had two Paradise Givers, one with poison, one empty. The other party chose which ring they wanted and both Arion and his intended victim simultaneously injected each other. On each occasion, Arion had ended up unharmed and the other had received a lethal dose of Paradise’s Kiss.

  No one knew how he did it. Some people said that he just allowed luck to decide—and that he’d been lucky so far. They couldn’t see how else he could do it. But I’d watched Arion for a long time. I mightn’t have known him well when he handed Grayer the Paradise Giver that day, but I’d watched him since then. He had dry skin, perpetually chapped lips, and he blinked a lot. He didn’t talk much, but listened and observed constantly. He had a small mole under his chin and a cowlick behind his right ear. When he decided to become good at something, he practiced relentlessly—that was how he was so good with the sword despite having neither remarkable speed nor strength. He was always calculating, always planning. Whenever he sparred, he’d know his opponents weaknesses and have a plan to exploit them. He wasn’t someone who left something up to luck, but instead was someone who’d been planning for how to survive the Path for many years. He was someone whose plan presently had everyone fooled.

  But we were more worried about Grayer than Arion. Grayer was higher on the lists and the specialty of House Lessard was trading, and we both had trading operations. If we could overtake Grayer, we had a good chance of getting selected by the Lessard Guardian. Without that...well, things were going to get mighty hot for us around Infernam time, and we’d end up welcoming Arion and his Paradise Givers with open arms.

  But Grayer hadn’t looked like he was faltering on his own and had made more money than us and been more impressive than us. We needed to do something to actively bring him down. There was nothing the Guardians liked to see more than a clever scheme that brought low a high-ranked Elect—the schemer tended to fly up the rankings. That was what we needed to do, and many evenings were wasted straining our brains trying to come up with a plan.