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Seth was on the verge of telling him to take both his rugs and his information to Hasa, goddess of the Underworld, where he could feed it to her crocodiles, when a man’s voice called from the front.
“Where are you, Yusef, you old son of a goat?”
A sudden, greedy light sparked in Yusef’s eyes. Without sparing Seth a further glance, he practically dove through the curtain, setting the colorful glass beads tinkling.
“Raider, my honored friend!” Yusef greeted the man. “The sun rises in your footsteps. Come, drink kahve with me.”
“Kahve! Raaki would go down better.”
“Alas, I do not partake of spirits.”
“Uh-huh,” came the sardonic reply in a smooth, rolling voice. “Pour the kahve, then, and take a look at the treasures I brought back from il-Kemsa.”
Seth peered through the bead curtain into the shop’s front room. A man was thumping down a stack of cloth with the same telltale luster of silk as the red kaftan he wore, though his own garment was dusty and travel stained. A kaffiyeh of darker red had been thrown back from his head to rest on his broad shoulders, baring a striking bronze face with hollow cheeks, a fine, straight nose, and startling amber eyes. A scruffy dark beard marred the otherwise-handsome face. Wavy dark hair, roughly scraped back, came to the man’s nape.
Picking through the stack of silks, Yusef hedged, “I do not know that I would call these treasures.”
The man in the red kaftan—Raider?—grinned at the game, white teeth flashing and amber eyes dancing with humor.
With a fluid motion, he swept his dusty red kaftan open, making its gold trim gleam in the light. The move exposed a leanly muscled torso and loose shalvar pants of dark blue silk. A violet sash encircled his waist. From this he drew a curved dagger in a jeweled sheath.
“That is either fake or stolen,” judged Yusef, an assessment with which Seth entirely agreed.
Raider’s flashy looks and flamboyant manner marked him as an opportunist and rogue. Seth knew the type.
Raider gave a careless shrug. “If you’re not interested, I’ll talk to Jamil.”
“Jamil is a cheat, sand seeker,” protested Yusef, laying a possessive hand over the silks. “How else could he have so profited from one trade? Sit. The kahve cools as we speak.”
Throwing his red kaftan out behind him, Raider settled on a cushion as Yusef poured steaming kahve into a glass cup.
“All right then,” Raider said, “eighty denari for the silk.”
“You jest, my honored friend.”
As Yusef and Raider haggled with obvious enjoyment across the low table, it took Seth longer than it should have to draw himself away from the bead curtain. He didn’t know what held him there, watching the desert trader smile as he flicked away Yusef’s counteroffer, listening to his smooth, rolling voice recount the trouble he’d had bringing that silk from il-Kemsa.
Raider showed off a slash in his kaftan sleeve, which he claimed had been made by a bandit’s scimitar. He took Yusef’s skepticism in stride, the humor never leaving his eyes as he laughed, “It’s true!”
“Then Roth must smile upon you that there should be no blood.”
The light seemed to catch Raider’s right eye, making it flash. The laugher in his face briefly took on a sharp edge. Then, his easy manner returning so quickly that Seth wondered if he’d imagined the shift in mood, Raider casually pointed to what Seth supposed must be a small bloodstain on his kaftan. Yusef rolled his eyes.
Mastering himself, Seth withdrew to look for a back door. The dusty trader, handsome or not, was of no consequence, and Seth would not pay Yusef an obscene price for information on Jamil, a man clearly notorious in the town. Someone else would tell him.
No exit presented itself, only Yusef’s living quarters and workroom, where a scroll was in the process of being artificially aged and a statuette awaited its final coat of gold paint. No wonder Yusef had been so quick to suspect the dagger was fake, given that he himself was clearly a counterfeiter.
Humble and honest merchant indeed.
Seth returned to Yusef’s back room of valuables. (Assuming the term “valuables” even applied after the revelations of the workroom.) He scanned the wall beside the shelf of vases and bowls. A back door was likely hidden to prevent people from slipping out.
Seth had just decided to give it up and tromp out the front when the bead curtain rattled and a smooth voice inquired, “You’re considering a vase?”
The roguish man, Raider—yes, the name spoke volumes—slid past the bead curtain, his amber eyes running up and down Seth in undisguised appraisal. Seth was used to being sized up, but this felt like something else entirely. It felt … well, it felt sexual, and it had Seth bristling even before the man stepped rudely close. They were nearly the same height, which meant Seth could see the exact shape of Raider’s lips as he smirked.
“Such … receptacles don’t look like your style,” Raider said in that rolling voice of his.
He held out the sheathed dagger that he’d tried to sell. He held it not quite at his groin but pretty damned close, which meant that it almost brushed Seth’s groin. “Don’t you think this might be more to your liking?”
