Cinnabar Shadows

by Lynn Abbey

  "Different," Ruari acknowledged aloud. "Maybe different enough to warrant a mask—but it's your face—the face that belongs to the rest of you."

  "Ugly," she retorted, and he saw that her mouth did not shape her voice and words.

  "No—Pavek's..." He sighed and began again. "Pavek was ugly."

  "Akashia said no. She said he wasn't an ugly man."

  Another sigh. "Kashi said that, did she?" It was too late to consider what Kashi might have meant. "What did she say about me?"

  "Nothing. Nothing at all—but we weren't talking about you."

  "Take your time," he said to Mantra, rubbing his forearm, though that wasn't the part of him that hurt. "I'll wait just up here. We can let the other two get a bit ahead."

  Ruari found himself a rock that gave Mahtra her privacy and him a good view of Zvain and Orekel as they continued up the gap. He took out Pavek's knife, and wondered whose black hair had been braided around the hilt. Not Kashi's. Not anyone Ruari had ever heard Pavek mention. Maybe they would have gotten their affections straightened out if they'd had the time; maybe not. One thing for certain: he'd made a fool of himself trying to capture Kashi's attention and affection when Pavek had already secured it.

  Mahtra reappeared with her mask in place, and together they continued up the gap, easily catching up with Zvain and Orekel. The sun came around in the middle of the afternoon, baking their bodies into numb silence. The three lowlanders—who'd never seen a mountain up close, much less climbed one—thought the gap would never end, but it did as the sun was setting. As green faded to black, they got their first look at a verdant forest that stretched ahead of them as far as they could see.

  For Ruari, the sight was a waking dream. Telhami's grove in Quraite remembered forests and offered the hope that a forest might return. This—this vastness that was everything the barren Tablelands had ceased to be, was Telhami's hopes fulfilled, Quraite's promise kept. He would have sat there staring at it all night, except the mountain cooled faster than the barrens did, and he was shivering before he knew it.

  It wasn't long until they were huddled together against the rocks, trying to keep warm and not succeeding. Orekel said it was too dangerous to descend the mountain without sunlight to show them the way. There was nothing with which to build a fire and though Ruari's druidry could wring water and a bland but nutritious paste out of the cooling air, he knew no spell that would provide them with warmth.

  Pavek might have known such a spell. Pavek claimed to have memorized as many of the spellcraft scrolls as he'd been able to read in the Urik city archives. But it seemed more likely that no one in the long history of the parchec tablelands had bothered to formulate a spell for heat, so they took turns in the middle of their huddle. When dawn reached over the mountain crest, it found them stiff, sore, and still weary.

  The descent into the forest was harder on their legs than yesterday's climb through the gap had been. Ruari discovered new muscles along his shins and across the tops of his feet. It would have been easier if his body had simply gone numb, but he felt every step from his heel to the base of his skull. He had no idea how the other three were doing; his world began and ended with the aches of his body.

  When Orekel asked to see the map, Ruari dug it out of his sleeve without a second thought.

  "Son, this here, this here's not a map, son."

  "I never said it was," Ruari countered, smiling wearily and looking for something to sit on that wouldn't be impossible to get up from afterward.

  Ruari eased himself onto the trunk of a fallen tree. He wished he didn't hurt so much. The forest was a miraculous place—the promise every druid made in his grove fulfilled to the greatest imaginable measure. There were birds and insects to complement the trees, and gray-bottomed clouds in the distance bearing the promise of real, not magic-induced, rain. The land quivered and crawled with riotous life, more life in a handful of moist, crumbly dirt than in a day's walking across the barren Tablelands.

  And Ruari couldn't appreciate it. Not only did he hurt too much, he wasn't here to immerse himself in druidry. He'd come to the forest to find a black tree, to find Kakzim and bring him to justice. For Pavek. All for Pavek, because it was Kakzim's fault that Pavek was dead. He'd take Kakzim's head back to Urik and hurl it at Hamanu's palace. Then he'd go home to Urik and plant a tree for his friend.

  "Son—" Orekel tugged on his sleeve. "Son, I say we have a problem."

  "You can't help us," Ruari said slowly. "That's the problem, isn't it? You can't find the black tree. All that talk in Ject about halfling treasure you hadn't brought out because you'd gotten 'tempted,' that was just wind in the air. You're no different than Mady: you thought we had a map we weren't smart enough to keep or follow."

  Orekel removed his cap. "You put a mite too fine a point on things, son. The black tree, she's in this forest, and she's got treasure trove buried 'neath her roots. She's not two-day's walk from here, and that's a fact. But this here—" He held out the map. "Now, you don't rightly speak Halfling, so you're not likely to read it much either. So, you got to believe me, son, this here's not a map to the black tree; it's more a map to your place, I reckon, to Urik—that's where you come from, now, isn't it?"

  Ruari tried to remember if he or Zvain or Mahtra had mentioned Urik since they'd met the dwarf, but his memory refused to cooperate. Maybe they had and Orekel was playing them for fools, or maybe he could read those marks, one of which spelled Urik. Either way, Ruari was too tired for deception.

  "Around Urik, yes."

  "Always best to be honest, son," Orekel advised, and suddenly his eyes seemed much sharper, his movements, crisper. "Now, maybe we can solve our problem—you being a druid and all—maybe you don't need a map to find the black tree. Like as not, you can just kneel down on the ground the way you did up on the crest and mumble a few words that'll show you the way."

  Ruari said no with a shake of his head.

  Zvain hobbled over. The boy looked at the tree trunk and—wiser than Ruari—chose not to sit down. "Sure you could, Ru. You've just got to try. Come on, Ru—try, please?"

  He shook his head again; he'd already tried. As soon as Orekel had made the suggestion, Ruari had—almost without thinking—put his palms against the moss-covered bark and opened himself to the aspects of the forest. The blare of life would have overwhelmed him if he'd had the wit or will to resist it. Instead, it had flowed through him like water through a hollow log—in one side and out the other.

  In the aftermath of that flow, Ruari considered it fortunate that he'd been numbed by aches and exhaustion. The guardian aspects of this forest weren't habituated to a druid's touch, weren't habituated and didn't seem to like it, not druidry in general, nor him in particular. For a moment, all the leaves had become open eyes and open mouths with teeth instead of edges.

  That moment had passed once he raised his palms and consciously shut himself off from the forest's burgeoning vitality. Leaves were simply leaves again, but the sense that they were being watched persisted. For most of his life— even in his own grove, which was mostly brush and grass with a few sparse trees—Ruari had either been within walls or looking at a horizon that was at least a day's walk away. Here in the forest, he could touch the green-leafed horizon, and the forest, which had seemed like paradise before he sat down, had become a place of hidden menace.

  He was afraid to cut himself a staff, lest he arouse something more hostile.

  "Give it a try, son." Orekel urged. "What've we got to lose?"

  "I'm too tired," Ruari replied, which was true. "Maybe later," which was a lie—but he didn't want to alarm the others.

  "So, what do we do?" Zvain asked, backsliding into the whiny, selfish tone he used when he was tired, frightened, or both. "Sit here until you're rested?"

  Orekel took Zvain's arm and gently spun him around. "Best to keep moving, son. Things that stay in one place too long attract an appetite."

  "Move where?" Zvain persisted.

  "Does it ma
tter?" Mahtra asked. The climb down hadn't bothered her any more than the climb up, any more than anything ever seemed to bother her. If the New Races were made from something, someone else, then whatever Mahtra had been, it wasn't elven, or dwarven, or human. "We don't have a map anymore. One direction's as good as another if we don't know where we're going."

  A heartbeat later, they were thrown against one another and hoisted off the ground in a net. Zvain screamed in terror; Orekel cursed, as if this had happened before, and— foolish as it was—Ruari felt better with his weight on the ropes, not his feet.

  The sizzle of Mahtra's thunderclap power passed through Ruari not once, but twice. The sound was loud enough to detach a shower of leaves from their branches and make the net sway like a bead on a string. But it wasn't enough to send them crashing to the ground, and Mahtra's third blast was much weaker than the first two. The fourth was no more than a flash without the thunder.

  Heartbeats later, they heard movement in the underbrush, and halflings appeared on the trail beneath them. Looking down, Ruari saw a score of halflings. None looked friendly, but the one who raised his spear and prodded the half-elf sharply in the flank had a truly frightening face, with weblike burn scars covering his cheeks and eyes as black and deep as night between the stars. He gave Ruari another poke between the ribs.

  "The ugly man—Templar Paddock—where is he?"

  Chapter Fourteen

  "I've heard there's a hunters' village about a day's ride from here. They call it Ject. It's a way station for beasts on their way to the combat arenas of the cities. It's full of scoundrels, knaves, and charlatans of every stripe, some of whom'll lead a party across the mountains and into the halfling forests. It's a day's ride to the southeast, but we could hire a guide for an easier passage, if you think we should, Lord Pavek."

  Unlike the ride from Quraite to Urik, there were no bells on the huge kank Lord Pavek rode, no excuse for not hearing Commandant Javed's statement, no excuse for not answering the implied question.

  Still, under the guise of careful consideration, Pavek could take the time to shift his weight, easing strained joints and muscles. He'd been kank-back for the better part of three days, and the only parts of him that didn't hurt were the ones that had gone numb while the walls of Urik were still visible behind them.

  Pavek thought he'd set a hard pace when he'd gotten himself, Mahtra, Ruari, and Zvain from Quraite to Urik in ten days. Since leaving Khelo shortly after his conversation with Lord Hamanu, Pavek had learned new things about the bugs'—and his own—endurance.

  Together with Commandant Javed of Urik's war bureau, a double maniple of troops, and an equal number of slaves, Pavek had pushed the war bureau's biggest, toughest bugs relentlessly, following the line he saw when he suspended the strands of ensorcelled halfling hair in the draft-free box he kept lashed to the back of his saddle.

  And now, when they were almost on top of the mountains they'd been chasing since yesterday morning, the commandant was suggesting a two-day detour. More than two days: it would surely take longer to walk through the forest on the other side of the mountains than it would to ride to this Ject.

  But Pavek had learned over the past few days not to trust Commandant Javed's statements at face value.

  "Is that a recommendation, Commandant?" In that time, Pavek had learned the trick of answering Javed's questions with questions. It made him seem wiser than he was and sometimes kept him from falling into the commandant's traps.

  "A fact, Lord Pavek," Javed said with a smile and no sign of the aches that plagued Pavek. "You're the man in charge. You make the decisions; I merely provide the facts. Do we veer southeast, or do we hold steady?"

  A challenge. And another question, the same, but different.

  Hamanu had said the templars in the double maniple were all volunteers, but the Lion hadn't said anything about the commandant, whether or not he was a willing participant in this barrens-trek or not; and, if he was, why? Those facts might have helped Pavek interpret Javed's smiles.

  Commandant Javed had served Urik and the Lion-King for six decades, all of them illustrious. He was well past the age when most elves gave up their running on foot and sat quietly in the long sunset of their lives, but the only concession the commandant made to his old bones and old injuries was the kank he rode as if he'd been born in its saddle.

  There were three rubies mounted in Javed's steel medallion, one for each time he'd been designated Hamanu's Champion, and two diamonds commemorating his exploits as Hero of Urik.

  Among Pavek's cherished few memories of life before the orphanage was the day he'd stood on the King's Way, holding his mother's hand and watching the parade as the great Commandant Javed returned triumphant from a campaign against Gulg.

  The farmers and druids of Quraite nowadays called Pavek a hero; Pavek reserved that honor for the black-skinned, black-haired elf riding beside him.

  "A decision, Lord Pavek," the commandant urged. "A decision now, while the wheel can still turn freely." He gestured toward the outriding templars. "Timing is everything. Do not confuse a decision with an accident or lost opportunity, my lord."

  Good advice. Excellent advice. So why wasn't Javed leading this expedition? Never mind that high templars outranked commandants: that only proved to Pavek that Commandant Javed had been more successful at holding on to his steel medallion than he himself had been at holding on to his regulator's ceramic one.

  So why was Javed here at all? After conquering every challenge Urik's war bureau offered and successfully resisting a golden medallion, why was Commandant Javed headed into the halfling forest at a regulator's side, and looking to that regulator for orders?

  "Now, Lord Pavek." The commandant smiled again, ivory teeth gleaming through the black gash in his weathered face.

  Pavek turned from that face and looked straight ahead at the mountains.

  "No guides," he said. "We've already got our guide." He thumped the box behind him and shot a sideways glance at the commandant, whose smile had faded to a less-than-approving frown. "When we brought the cavern poison to Lord Hamanu, he said we had time to destroy it because Ral didn't 'occlude' Guthay—whatever that means—for another thirteen days. Well, we got rid of the poison, but we didn't catch Kakzim. Maybe he's gone home in defeat and we can catch him anytime, but maybe he's got something else he can unleash when the moons 'occlude' four nights from now.

  "If we go southeast and hire ourselves a guide, we're sure to lose at least two days getting back on the halfling's trail. Maybe more than two days, without kanks on the far side of the mountains. My rump would appreciate an easy passage, but not if I miss another chance to nab Kakzim."

  The commandant's frown had deepened all the while Pavek explained the thin logic of his decision. He considered reversing himself, but the stubbornness that had kept him trapped in lower ranks of the civil bureau took hold of his neck and stiffened his resolve.

  He faced Javed squarely, matching his scar-twisted smile against the elf's frown. "You wanted my decision, Commandant. Now you've got it: we hold steady, straight into those mountains ahead and the forest beyond. I want my hands on Kakzim's neck before the moons occlude."

  "Good," the commandant said softly, almost as if he were speaking to himself, though his amber eyes were locked with Pavek's. "Better than I expected. Better than I'd hoped from the Hero of Quraite. Four days left from thirteen. Let's put on some speed, Lord Pavek. I could walk faster than this. We'll sleep tonight on the mountain crest. We'll sleep on the mountain, and we'll find your halfling before Ral marches across Guthay's face. My word on it, Lord Pavek."

  * * *

  Commandant Javed's word was as good as the steel he wore around his neck. Leaving behind the kanks, the slaves, and everything else that a templar couldn't carry on his back, the elf had had them sleeping on top of the mountain ridge one night and on the forest floor the next. They'd lost two templars in the process, one going up the mountains, the other coming down.

&nbs
p; Carelessness, Javed had said both times, and refused to slacken the pace.

  At the forest-side base of the mountains, the templars, including Pavek and Javed, paused to exchange the shirts they'd been wearing for long-sleeve tunics and leather armor that was fitted from neck to waist and divided into overlapping strips from there down to the middle of their thighs.

  It was all part of the equipment Pavek had been given at the beginning of this journey, and he thought nothing of Javed's order until he touched the tunic's drab, tightly woven fabric.

  "Silk?" he asked incredulously, fingering the alien fabric, which he'd associated with fawning nobles, simpering merchants, and women he couldn't afford.

  "That's protection?" For all that the commandant had experience with the forest halflings on his side, Pavek began to remove his slippery tunic.

  "Damn sure is. The barbs on the arrowheads don't catch your guts. Ease the silk out; and you ease the arrowhead out, too—with the poison still on it."

  "Still on the arrow?"

  Javed's enigmatic smile flickered at him. "Didn't believe it myself till I was fighting belgoi north of Balic. Watched a healer work an arrow clean out of a man's gut; silk was as good as new, and so was the man ten days later. Been a believer ever since. My advice, my lord, is to keep it on. We know your man's a poisoner."

  * * *

  The protection Mahtra's makers had given her against living creatures had no effect whatsoever on woven vine net. Unfortunately, she had exhausted herself against the halfling-made net before she realized that fact. She'd had nothing left when the halflings lowered them to the ground, and so she stood helpless, barely able to stay upright, when Kakzim had personally bound her wrists behind her back and taken her mask away.