Keif

An addictive narcotic, sold in small rolled parcels, and across Idir as good as coin, which is why so much of it moves through the people paid to stop it. A Loshev dock guard took it to look past cargo and lost her post for it; a jailer of the same town kept his cut in a hollow dock post and in a mushroom log north of the bridge, and the whole of it went to Tariq al-Mahir as evidence in a trafficking case. Jhessail Vintree put the constabulary’s position more bluntly still: the keif crossing Loshev crosses it in the guardsmen’s own hands.

It gives an alchemical turn of strength for a time, leaves the taker open to illusion after, and it addicts. The golden grade is the potent one, cut with urea and other things, and gives itself away by smell and by the nausea that follows; a black grade and a wizard’s blue are named in the same breath and have not been seen since. It moves through Haudh-Gwenn off the Waterfront, and at The Rusty Nail the way to buy it is to ask for Tony. What that means was never settled: Mikhail took it for the trade’s word for a dealer, and Aldo, who knew, would say only that Tony is a common name among orcs out of Garia and let the rest go.

Its Peren name is parin, near enough sorcerer of sleep. Smoked, it opens the smoker briefly to enchantment, lengthening what he casts, at the cost of his footing against illusion, and then the fatigue arrives.