Cinnabar Shadows

by Lynn Abbey

  By the screaming, shouting, and clash of arms, the fighting remained fierce around the abattoir gate. Ruari couldn't be certain, but he thought there might be more templars— perhaps Nunk and his companions, perhaps the other war bureau maniple—outside the gate, keeping the brawlers on the killing ground until the war bureau fighters finished their retribution. He could be certain that Pavek was safer right now with two templars and a priest watching over him than Mahtra and Zvain were, searching the gallery for Kakzim without weapons or sense.

  "I'll be back before the Lion gets here," Ruari assured the group closest to him before running to the gallery stairway, staff in hand.

  Finding Mahtra and Zvain was no more difficult than listening for Zvain's inventive swearing from the top of the charred but still serviceable stairway. Although the gallery appeared deserted, Ruari set himself silently against a door-jamb where he could see not only his friends ransacking a nearly empty room, but the rest of the gallery and killing ground where two templars stood similar watch over Pavek and the priest.

  "Find anything?" Ruari asked, all innocence within the shadows.

  Mahtra said, "No," with equal innocence, but Zvain leapt straight up and came down only a few shades darker than Mahtra.

  "You scared me!" Zvain complained once he'd stopped sputtering curses.

  Ruari countered with, "You'd be worse than scared if it weren't me standing here," and could almost hear Pavek saying the same thing. "You're damn fools, leaving the door open and making so much noise."

  "I was listening," Mahtra said. "I would've seen trouble coming; I saw you. I would've protected—"

  "What's to see? There's no one here!" Zvain interrupted. "He's scarpered. Packed up and left. Cut and run. Got out while the getting was still good—just like he did with dead-heart Escrissar."

  Ruari's spirits sank. Pavek wanted Kakzim; not catching him was going to hurt Pavek more than losing his hand. "Is there anything here? Pavek..."

  "Nothing!" Zvain said, kicking over a stool for emphasis. "Not a damn thing!"

  "There's this—" Mahtra held out a chunk of what appeared to be tree bark.

  "Garbage!" Zvain kicked the stool again.

  Ruari left his staff leaning against the doorjamb and took Mahtra's offering. It was bark, though not from any tree that grew on the Tablelands. Holding it, feeling its texture with his fingers, he got a vision of countless trees and mountains wrapped in smoke like the Smoking Crown Volcano... no, mountains wrapped in clouds, like nothing he'd seen before.

  Any other time, he'd cherish the bark simply for the vision it gave his druid spirit, but there was no time, and the bark was more than bark. Someone had covered it with straight black lines and other, irregular

  "Writing," he mused aloud.

  That gave him Zvain's swift attention. The boy grabbed the bark out of his hands. "Naw," he drawled, "that's not writing. I know writing when I see it; I can read—and there're no words here."

  "I know writing, too," Ruari insisted, although he was better at recognizing its many forms than in reading any one of them. "There's writing here, halfling writing, I'll wager. And other things—"

  "That's a mountain," Mahtra said, tapping the bark with a long, red fingernail. "And that's a tree—like the ones I saw where you live."

  "It's a map!" Zvain exalted, jumping up and throwing the bark scrap into the air. "Kakzim left us a map!"

  Ruari snatched the bark while it was still well above Zvain's head and gave him a clout behind the ear as well. "Don't be a kank-brained fool. Kakzim's not going to gather up everything else and leave a map behind."

  "What's a map?" Mahtra asked.

  "Directions for finding a place you've never been," Ruari answered quickly, not wanting to be rude to her.

  "Then maybe he left it behind because he doesn't need it anymore."

  Ruari closed his hand over Mahtra's. She was seven, younger than Zvain. She not only didn't know what a map was, she didn't understand at all the way a man's mind worked. "It's garbage, like Zvain said, or it's a trap."

  "A trap?" she asked, freeing herself and taking the scrap from his hand to examine it closely.

  She didn't understand, and Ruari was still ransacking his mind, searching for better words, when they heard, first, a gong clattering loudly and, second, a roar that belittled it to a tinkling cymbal.

  "The Lion-King!" Zvain said as they all turned toward the sound, toward Codesh's outer gate.

  "Pyreen preserve and protect!" Ruari took the bark map, rolled it quickly, and pushed it all the way up inside his shirt hem. "Is there anything else? Anything?"

  Zvain said, "Absolutely nothing," and Mahtra shook her head.

  Ruari grabbed his staff and headed for the killing ground with the other two close behind him.

  The first thing Ruari noticed was that the templars and Codeshites were still fighting near the gate. The second was that they'd moved Pavek out of the sun.

  Pavek was sitting on the ground with his back against one of the massive tables where the Codeshites turned carcasses into meat. His head was tilted to one side; he seemed to be resting, maybe sleeping. His face was a gray shade of pale, but Ruari wasn't concerned until he was close enough to see that Pavek's mangled left hand was inside a bucket. Water was excellent for washing a wound and keeping it clean, but submerging that bad an open wound was a good way to bleed a man to death.

  "Damn you!" he shouted and, grasping his staff by its base, swung its bronzed lion end at the three men standing by while Pavek slowly died.

  The nearest templar raised his sword to parry the staff. The templar could have attacked, could have slain Ruari, who was fighting with his heart, not his head, and his heart was breaking; but the yellow-robed warrior didn't take the easy slash or thrust. He parried the staff, beat it aside, closing the distance between them until he could loft a sandal-shod kick into Ruari's midsection. Catching the staff with one hand as it flew through the air, he tried to catch Ruari with the other.

  Ruari dodged, and landed hard, flat on the ground an arm's length from Pavek. Ignoring the pain in his own gut, the half-elf crawled forward. He plucked the frayed leather thong out of the dirt, then tried to lift Pavek's hand out of the bucket.

  "My choice," Pavek said, his voice so weak Ruari read the words on his lips more than he heard them with his ears.

  The priest held onto Zvain—barely. The burnished skin on Mahtra's shoulders was glowing again, and her bird's-egg eyes were open so wide they seemed likely to fall out of her face.

  "What's happening?" she demanded.

  "He's killing himself!" Ruari shouted. "He's bleeding himself to death!"

  "The king is coming," the priest said, as if that were an explanation.

  Pavek asked, "You couldn't find Kakzim?" before Ruari could challenge the priest.

  "No, he's scarpered," the half-elf admitted, shaking his head and turning his empty palms up. All the disappointment he'd dreaded showed in Pavek's eyes just before he closed them with a shrug, as if the big man had stayed alive this long only because he'd hoped his friends would be successful. Taking a painful breath, Ruari finished: "He got away clean, again. Didn't leave anything behind."

  But Pavek raised his good hand and turned away. "No. No, I don't want to see it. Don't tell me about it. Just—Just get out of Codesh quickly. All three of you."

  "Why?" Zvain, Mahtra, and Ruari demanded with a single voice.

  Pavek looked up at the priest.

  "Under necromancy, a dead man must tell the truth, but he can't reveal what he didn't know while he was alive."

  "Necromancy?" Ruari said slowly, as the pieces began to fall into place. "Deadhearts? Hamanu?"

  The templar who'd parried Ruari's staff nodded. "We kill our prisoners before we take them to the deadhearts. The dead don't suffer; they don't feel pain."

  "They don't remember," the other templar corrected. "Everything stops when they die. They've got no present, no future; only the past."

  "No
."

  "I can hope, Ru," Pavek said in his weak voice. "What good would I be anyway, Ru, without my right hand?"

  "No," Ruari repeated, equally soft and weak.

  "I raised a guardian, here—in Codesh, in his realm. He's not going to be happy, and he's not going to rest until he controls it or destroys it. I can't let him do that, and the only way I can stop him from trying... and succeeding is if I'm already a corpse when he finds me. It takes a druid to raise a guardian. The Lion-King's not a druid, Ru, and after I'm dead, I won't be either."

  Another roar, louder than the first, warned them all that there wasn't much time.

  "You can't raise it, Ru. I know that, and I know that you don't believe me when I tell you that—not truly—and that'll get you killed, if you don't get out of here... now."

  Pavek spoke the truth: Ruari didn't believe that he couldn't raise the Urikite guardian, and the Lion-King would use that belief. He'd die trying to raise the wrong guardian, or he'd die the moment he succeeded. He had to leave, and take Zvain and Mahtra with him, but he put his arms around Pavek instead.

  "I won't forget you," he gasped, trying to remain a man, trying not to cry.

  "Go home and plant a tree for me. A big, ugly lump of a tree. And carve my name in its bark."

  The tears came, as many as Ruari had ever shed for someone else. Zvain wormed in between them, silently demanding his moment, and getting it, before Ruari pulled him to his feet.

  "Wait—" Pavek called, and Ruari dared to hope he'd changed his mind, but Pavek only wanted to give him the coin pouch from his belt and his most prized possession: a small steel-bladed knife snug in its sheath.

  "Some of the scum have run toward that far corner," one of the templars said, pointing where he meant. "There must be a way out. We'll go with you as far as the village walls."

  The priest said he'd stay to the end, in case Pavek needed a nudge "to separate his spirit from his body before the Lion-King got too close." He said he wasn't worried about Hamanu, and that was a lie—but maybe he'd lost everything he cared about when red-haired Ediyua went down in the passage.

  Ruari didn't say good-bye, just took hold of Mahtra and Zvain and started walking fast to catch up with the templars who'd already left. He didn't look back, either.

  Not once.

  Not until they were clear of the Codesh walls.

  Chapter Twelve

  Pavek was gone.

  Pavek was dead.

  One of the many roars Ruari heard while trudging along the ring road to Farl might have marked the moment when the Lion-King found his high templar's pale corpse. Another might have marked the moment when deadheart spells animated Pavek's body one last time. The last roar, the loudest and longest that he and Mahtra and Zvain heard, could only have marked the king's frustration when he found that Pavek, Just-Plain Pavek, had outwitted him.

  Ruari brushed a knuckle quickly beneath his eye, catching a tear before it leaked out, drying the telltale moisture with an equally quick touch to his pant leg. Life went forward, he told himself, repeating the words Telhami had used every time he bemoaned the violence and hatred that had brought him into an uncaring world. There was nothing to be gained by looking back.

  Then Pavek raised a guardian spirit out of Urik, where no other druid would have dreamed to look for one. Pavek changed—tried to change—the lay of life in a sorcerer-king's domain, and Pavek had paid the price of folly.

  Life went forward. Don't look back.

  But Ruari did look back. He sneaked a peek over his shoulder every few moments. The skyline of Codesh was still there, crowned with a thin cloud of dust and smoke that grew thinner each time he looked.

  "You come from Codesh?" an overseer called from one of the roadside fields, his slave scourge folded in his hand. "What's the uproar?"

  "Damn butchers tried to slaughter their templars. Got rid of some of them, but Hamanu answered their call."

  The overseer scratched his nose thoughtfully. "They killed a few templars, and the Great Lord himself came out for vengeance. That ought to put the fear into them. High time."

  "High time," Ruari agreed, ending the conversation as they walked beyond the field.

  "Get it right, Ruari, or you'll make folk suspicious. It's Lord Hamanu or King Hamanu or Great and Mighty Lord King Hamanu when you're talking to someone who's got a scourge in their hand!" Zvain objected once they were out of the overseer's hearing. "You can't talk about Hamanu as if you've met him!"

  "But I have met him," Ruari complained. "He terrorized us, then he gave us gifts. He encouraged us, then he abandoned us. 'Hamanu answered their call'—that's the biggest lie I've ever told, Zvain: he closed his eyes!"

  "Doesn't matter. I'm telling you, you can't talk about Lord Hamanu that way. Say it the way I told you, or folk are going to get suspicious and start asking questions."

  Ruari shrugged. "All right. I'll try."

  Zvain had lived in Urik all his life, while Mahtra had lived under it and Ruari had grown up nowhere near it. The three of them together didn't have half Pavek's experience or canniness, but Pavek was gone. Dead. And Zvain had suddenly become their font of wisdom where the city and its customs were concerned. Ruari knew the responsibility weighed heavily on Zvain's shoulders and the boy was staggering under the load—

  Wind and fire! They were all staggering, putting one foot in front of the other because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant Pavek. He'd known Pavek for a year, one lousy year—and for most of that year they'd been at each other's throats.... No, he'd been at Pavek's throat, trying to rile him into a display of templar temper, trying to kill him with kivet poison because... because?

  On the dusty road to Farl, midway through the longest afternoon of his life, Ruari couldn't remember why he'd poisoned Pavek's dinner. But not so long ago he'd wanted Pavek's death so badly it made him blind. Now he could scarcely see for another reason and hurriedly sopped up another tear before it betrayed him.

  "What are we going to do when we get to Farl?" Mahtra asked when another stretch of hot, dusty road had passed beneath their feet. "Will we stay there? Overnight? Longer? Where will we get our supper? How many coins do we have?"

  Ruari didn't know if Mahtra grieved at all. She couldn't cry the way he and Zvain tried not to cry. Her eyes weren't right for tears, she said, and the tone of her voice never varied, no matter how many questions she asked. Ruari didn't care about anything, including Farl, which was where they were headed. They were only going there because the two templars who got them out of Codesh said they shouldn't go back to Urik and the road to Farl was right there in front of them when the templars said it. Without Mahtra's questions, Ruari wouldn't have given a single thought to where they'd stay once they got to the village, or whether he ever ate another meal.

  Mahtra was living proof that life went forward and that there was no use looking back. Her questions demanded answers—his answers. If Zvain had become their wisdom, Ruari discovered that he'd become their leader.

  "We're poor," he said. "Not so poor that we'll starve right away, but—it's this way: I know the supplies we'd need to have to get back to Quraite: three riding kanks, at least seven water jugs, food for ten days, some other stuff, for safety's sake. That's what Kashi, Yohan, and I always had, but we had our own bugs, our own jugs, and Kashi did the buying when we needed food. I don't know how much going home will cost, or whether we have enough to get there."

  Zvain offered a different idea before Ruari could answer. "I could—well—lift a bit. I got good at that." The boy dug deep in the wide hem of his shirt. He produced a little lion carved from rusty-red stone. "I lifted this right under Hamanu's nose!"

  "Lord Hamanu," Ruari insisted, then, more seriously: "Wind and fire, Zvain—think of the trouble you could have gotten us into!"

  "We'd be better off if I had," the boy replied, and there was nothing either one of them could say after that.

  But nothing seemed to stanch Mahtra's questions. "Can I hold it? Keep it?"<
br />
  "What for?" Ruari asked. "We get caught with something from Hamanu's palace and—" He mimed the drawing of a knife blade across his throat.

  Mahtra took the figurine from Zvain's hand and held it up to her mask. "We won't get caught with it, if it's cinnabar."

  Ruari cocked his head, asking a silent question of his own.

  "I'll chew it up and swallow it," she replied. "If it's cinnabar. I can't tell through my mask. If it is, the more I swallow, the better I can protect myself. Lord Hamanu gave me plenty—" she parted a little pouch at her waist. "But, without Pavek, I don't think I can have too much cinnabar."

  Zvain made disgusted, gagging noises, and Ruari's first instinct was to do the same thing. But he couldn't act on his first instincts, not anymore, no more than Pavek had.

  Ruari's throat tightened, but he beat back that instinct, too, and all the memories. He forced himself to think of the crunching sounds he'd heard before the power passed through him and the passage caved in. If they had to choose between selling the staff Hamanu had given him or the red lion Zvain had stolen, Ruari supposed they should keep the lion. He could fashion himself another staff, he had a good carving knife now, thanks to Pavek, but Mahtra's ability to transform the air around them into a mighty, sweeping fist was a better weapon.

  "Keep it, then. Do whatever you do with it."

  "If it's cinnabar."

  He nodded. He'd taken ten strides, maybe twenty, without mourning Pavek. He'd strung his thoughts together and made a decision—the decision Pavek would have made, he hoped, and with that hope his defenses crumbled. The grief, the aching emptiness, overwhelmed him ten times, maybe twenty, stronger than before.

  Unable to hide or halt the sudden flow of tears, Ruari sat down on the edge of the road. He wanted to be alone, but Zvain was beside him in an instant, leaning against his shoulder, dampening his sleeve. He wanted to be alone, but he put his arm around the human boy instead, thinking that was what Pavek would have done. If Mahtra had knelt or sat beside him, Ruari would have comforted her the same way, but she stood behind them, keeping watch.