Free Evil for Evil by K. J. Parker Page A

didn’t say what you wanted to see me about. I can guess, though.”
    Vaatzes nodded. “Go on, then,” he said.
    “You’re an engineer, aren’t you?” she said, wiping her mouth on her left forefinger. “Blacksmith, metalworker, whatever. You
     need materials. Someone told you I used to be in business, trading east with the Cure Doce.” She shook her head. “Whoever
     told you that’s way behind the times. I retired. Bad knee,” she added, squeezing her right kneecap. “So, sorry, can’t help
     you.”
    “Actually,” Vaatzes smiled, “the man at the Poverty and Justice did tell me you’d retired, but it wasn’t business I wanted
     to talk to you about. At least,” he added, “not directly.”
    “Oh.” She looked at him as though he’d just slithered out of check and taken her queen. “Well, in that case, what can I do
     for you?”
    Vaatzes edged a little closer. “Your late husband,” he said.
    “Oh. Him.”
    “Yes.” He picked up the wine cup but didn’t drink anything. “I understand that he used to lead a mule-train out along the
     southern border occasionally. Is that right?”
    She pulled a face, as though trying to remember something unimportant from a long time ago. It was a reasonable performance,
     but she held it just a fraction too long. “Salt,” she said. “There’s some place in the desert where they dig it out of the
     ground. A couple of times he went down there to the market, where they take the stuff to sell it off. Thought he could make
     a profit but the margins were too tight. Mind you,” she added, “that’s got to be, what, twenty years ago, and we weren’t living
     here then, it was while we were still in Chora. Lost a fair bit of money, one way and another.”
    Vaatzes nodded. “That’s more or less what I’d heard,” he said.
    She looked up at him. “Why?” she asked. “You thinking of going into the salt business?”
    “It had crossed my mind.”
    “Forget it.” She waved her hand, as though swatting a fat, blind fly. “The salt trade’s all tied up, has been for years. Your
     lot, mostly, the Mezentines. They run everything now.”
    “But not twenty years ago,” Vaatzes said quietly, and that made her look at him again. “And besides, even now they mostly
     buy through intermediaries. Cure Doce, as I understand.”
    “Could be.” She yawned, revealing an unexpectedly pristine set of teeth. “I never got into that particular venture very much.
     Knew from the outset it was a dead end. If he’d listened to me, maybe things’d be very different now.” She tilted the bottle
     over her cup, but Vaatzes could see it was already three-quarters full. “When we were living in Chora —”
    “I expect you had something to do with it,” he said mildly. “Presumably you were buying the stock he took with him to trade
     for the salt.”
    “Could be. Can’t remember.” She yawned again, but she was picking at a loose thread on her sleeve. “That was my side of the
     business back then, yes. I’d buy the stuff in Chora, he’d take it out to wherever he was trading that year. Never worked out.
     Any margin I managed to make at home, he’d blow it all out in the wilderness somewhere. That’s what made me throw him out,
     eventually.”
    “I can see it must’ve been frustrating for you,” Vaatzes said. “But to get back to the salt. Can you remember who it was he
     used to buy it from? The miners, I mean, the people who dug it out of the ground.”
    She looked at him, and she most certainly wasn’t drunk or rambling. “I don’t think he ever mentioned it,” she said. “Just
     salt-miners, that’s all.”
    “Are you sure?” Vaatzes raised his eyebrows. “I’d have thought that if you were trading with them, you’d have known a bit
     about them. So as to know what they’d be likely to want, in exchange for the salt.”
    “You’d have thought.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s how come we lost so much money.”
    Vaatzes