'What are you looking for, demons?' Krispos asked when he saw the guardsmen set out one morning. He laughed nervously. If the frozen sea was as much Skotos' country as it appeared, demons might indeed dwell there.
The patrol leader laughed, too. He thought Krispos had been joking. 'Worse than demons,' he said, and gave Krispos a moment to stew before he finished: 'Khatrishers.'
'In this weather?' Krispos wore a squirrelskin cap with ear-flaps. It was pulled down low on his forehead. A thick wool scarf covered his mouth and nose. The few square inches of skin between the one and the other had long since turned numb.
The patrol leader was similarly muffled. His breath made a steaming cloud around him. 'Grab a spear and come see for yourself,' he urged. 'You're with the chap from the city, right? Well, you can tell him some of what we see around here.'
'Why not?' A quick trip back to the armory gave Krispos a spear and a white-painted shield. Soon he was stumbling along the icy surface of the sea with the troopers. It was rougher, more irregular ice than he'd expected, almost as if the waves had frozen instead of breaking.
'Always keep two men in sight,' said the patrol leader, whose name, Krispos learned, was Saborios. 'You get lost out here by yourself—well, you're already on the ice, so where will your soul end up?' Krispos blew out a smoky sigh of relief to discover he was not the only one who had heretical thoughts.
The guardsmen paid attention to what they were doing, but it was a routine attention, making sure they did nothing they knew to be foolish. It left plenty of room for banter and horseplay. Krispos trudged on grimly in the middle of the line. With neither terrain nor risks familiar to him, he had all he could do just to keep pace.
'Good thing it's not snowing,' one of the troopers said. 'If it was snowing, the Khatrishers could sneak an army past us and we'd never know the difference.'
'We would when we got back,' another answered. The first guard chuckled.
Everything looked the same to Krispos; sky and frozen sea and distant land all were shades of white and gray. Anything colorful, he thought, should have been visible for miles. What had not occurred to him was how uncolorful a smuggler could become.
Had the trooper to Krispos' left not almost literally stumbled over the man, they never would have spied him. Even then, had he stayed still, he might have escaped notice: he wore white foxskins and, when still, was invisible past twenty paces. But he lost his head and tried to run. He was no better at it on the slippery ice than his pursuers, who soon ran him down.
Saborios held out a hand to the Khatrisher, who had gone so far as to daub white greasepaint on his beard and face. 'You don't by any chance have your import license along, do you?' the patrol leader asked pleasantly. The Khatrisher stood in glum silence. 'No, eh?' Saborios said, almost as if really surprised. 'Then let's have your goods.'
The smuggler reached under his jacket, drew out a leather pouch.
The patrol leader opened it. 'Amber, is it? Very fine, too. Did you give me all of it? Complete confiscation, you know, is the penalty for unlicensed import.'
''That's everything, curse you,' the Khatrisher said sullenly.
'Good.' Saborios nodded his understanding. 'Then you won't mind Domentzios and Bonosos stripping you. If they find you've told the truth, they'll even give you back your clothes.'
Krispos was shivering in his furs. He wondered how long a naked man would last on the ice. Not long enough to get off it again, he was sure. He watched the smuggler make the same unhappy calculation. The fellow took a pouch from each boot. The patrol leader pocketed them, then motioned forward the two troopers he had named. They were tugging off the Khatrisher's coat when he exclaimed, 'Wait!'
The imperials looked to the patrol leader, who nodded. The smuggler shed his white fox cap. 'I need my knife, all right?' he said. Saborios nodded again. The smuggler cut into the lining, extracted yet another pouch. He threw down the dagger. 'Now you can search me.'
The troopers did. They found nothing. Shivering and swearing, the Khatrisher dove back into his clothes. 'You might have got that last one by us,' Saborios remarked.
'That's what I thought,' the smuggler said through chattering teeth. 'Then I thought I might not have, too.'
'Sensible,' Saborios said. 'Well, let's take you in. We've earned our pay for today, I think.'
'What will you do with him?' Krispos asked as the patrol turned back toward Opsikion.
'Hold him for ransom,' Saborios answered. 'Nothing else we can do, now that I've seen he's smuggling amber. Gumush will pay to have him back, never fear.' Krispos made a questioning noise. Saborios explained, 'Amber's a royal monopoly in Khatrish. The khagan likes to see if he can avoid paying our tariffs every so often, that's all. This time he didn't, so we get some for free.'
'Does he sneak in enough to make it worth his while?'
'That's a sharp question—I thought you were Iakovitzes' groom, not his bookkeeper. The only answer I know is, he must think so or he wouldn't keep doing it. But not this run, though.' The patrol leader's eyes, almost the only part of his face visible, narrowed in satisfaction.
Iakovitzes howled with glee when Krispos told him the story that evening. They were sitting much closer than usual to Bolkanes' big fire; Krispos had a mug of hot spiced wine close at hand. He smiled gratefully when one of the barmaids refilled it. Iakovitzes said. 'It'll serve Gumush right. Nothing I enjoy more than a thief having to pay for his own thievery.'
'Won't he just raise the price later on to make up for it?' Krispos asked. 'The legitimate price, I mean.'
'Probably, probably,' Iakovitzes admitted. 'But what do I care? I don't much fancy amber. And no matter how hard hesqueezes, the world doesn't hold enough gold for him to buy his way out of embarrassment.' Contemplating someone else's discomfiture would put Iakovitzes in a good mood if anything would.
A couple of nights later, Tanilis proved coldly furious that the amber had been seized. 'I made the
