Cinnabar Shadows (13 page)

Akashia was grateful that Mahtra wasn't looking at her. "There's no reason for you to stay awake."
Not anymore. Akashia swore to herself that she wouldn't tamper with Mahtra's mind again.

"No one's been killed in Quraite," she continued, "not in a long time. There's no one dying here either."

"You are," Mahtra said as she raised her head and her odd eyes bore into Akashia's. "It was your voice
I heard in my dream. I recognize it. You told me to remember what came before Urik. You told me to feel
shame and fear, because you felt shame and fear. I felt what you felt, and then, I remembered what you
remember."
"No," Akashia whispered. For one moment, one heartbeat moment, the loathing she'd been trying to
awaken in Mahtra had been awakened in her instead. She thought the touchstone pattern had protected
her. She certainly hadn't acquired any of Mahtra's memories but, in her narrow drive for judgment, it
seemed that her own had escaped. "No, that can't be."

Mahtra was a child of Urik's darkest nights, its murkiest shadows, but mostly she was a child, with a
child's cold sense of right and wrong. Akashia nodded. "Yes," she said quickly, swallowing a guilty sob.
"Yes, I believe he's dead. It's an even trade."

"Good. I'm glad. Without Father, there's no one to ask and I can't be sure if I've done the right thing.
Your memories will sleep quietly now, and I can leave here with the ugly man and not look back. Kakzim
killed Father. The ugly man and I will hunt Kakzim and kill him, too. For Father. Then all my memories will
sleep quiet."

Akashia rose and faced a corner so she didn't have to face Mahtra. The white-skinned woman's world
was so fiercely simple, so enviably simple. Mahtra's memories would sleep quietly, as perhaps Akashia's
own memories would grow quieter, if she could truly believe in Mahtra's simple justice.

"Pavek," she said after a moment, still staring at the corner, still thinking about justice. "You should call
him Pavek, if you're going to take him away. He's not an ugly man; you shouldn't call him that. He'll tell you
when you've done the right thing. You should listen to him."

"Do you?"

It was a question Akashia could not find the strength to answer aloud.

"Father said the best lessons were the hardest lessons," Mahtra said after a long silence, then—to
Akashia's heartfelt relief—walked softly out the door.

No need to worry: Mahtra could take care of herself wherever she went.

Reclaiming her bed, but not for sleeping, Akashia extinguished her lamp. She sat in the dark, thinking of
what she'd done, what Telhami had said, and all because of the extraordinary individual the Lion-King had
sent from Urik. Mahtra was like a Tyr-storm, rearranging everything she touched before disappearing.
Akashia had taken a battering since sundown. She wouldn't be sorry to see the white-skinned woman leave,
but she wasn't sorry Mahtra had come to Quraite, either. There was a bit of distance between herself now
and the yesterday of Elabon Escrissar.

Akashia still found it difficult to think of Ruari or Pavek. Ruari was the past of hot, bright, carefree
days that would never come again. Pavek was a future she wasn't ready to face. She didn't want either of
them to leave with Mahtra, but she could admit that now, at least silently to herself, and with the admission
came the strength to say good-bye before dawn, two days later.

She was proud of herself, that there were no tears, no demands for promises that they would return,
only embraces that didn't last long enough and, from Pavek, something that might have been a kiss on her
forehead just before he let go. Standing on the verge of the salt, Akashia watched and listened until the bells
were silent and the Lion-King's kanks were bright dots against the rising sun. Then she turned away and,
avoiding the village, walked to her own grove.

There were wildflowers in bloom and birds singing in the trees—all the beautiful things she'd neglected
since her return from Urik. There was a path, too, which she'd never noticed before and which she
followed... to a waterfall shrouded in rainbows.

A trek across the Athasian Tablelands was never pleasant. Pavek and his three young companions
were grateful that this one was at least uneventful. They encountered neither storms nor brigands, and all
the creatures who crossed their path appeared content to leave them alone.

Pavek was suspicious of their good fortune, but that was, he supposed, his street-scum nature coming
to the fore as he headed back to the urban cauldron where he'd been born, raised, and tempered. That and
the ceramic medallion he'd worn beneath his home-spun shirt since leaving Quraite.

The closer they came to Urik, the heavier that medallion—which he had not worn nor even touched
since Lord Hamanu strode out of Quraite—hung about both his neck and his spirit. The medallion's front
carried a bas-relief portrait of the Lion-King in full stride. The reverse bore the marks that were Pavek's
name and his rank of third-level regulator in the civil bureau, marks now bearing a lengthwise gouge where
the sorcerer-king had raked his claw through the yellow glaze. Ordinarily, high templar medallions were
cast in gold, but it was that gouge, not the precious metal, that declared a templar had risen through the
ranks of his bureau to the unranked high bureau.

Still, with nothing but the relentless sun, the clanging kank bells that limited conversation among the
travelers, and the mesmerizing sway of the saddle to distract him, Pavek let his imagination run wilder each
day of the ten-day journey from Quraite to Urik.

There were no more than fifty high templars in Urik— men and women; interrogators, scholars, or
commandants—whose power was second only to Lord Hamanu's. Pavek considered paying a visit to his
old barracks, the training fields, or the customs house where he'd worked nine days out of ten. Not that he'd
left any friends behind who might congratulate him; he simply wanted to witness the reaction when he
unslung the medallion and made the gouge visible.

There'd be laughter, at first. No one in his right mind would believe any templar could rise from third
rank to the top, especially not within the civil bureau where the ranks weren't regularly thinned by war.

But that laughter would cease as soon as someone dared touch his medallion. That lengthwise gouge
couldn't be forged. Even now, quinths after the Lion-King had touched it, the medallion was still slightly
warm against Pavek's chest. Anyone else would feel a sharp prickling: high templars had an open call on
their patron's power and protection.

Once convinced of the mark's authenticity, he'd have more friends than he knew what to do with. In
his mind's eye, Pavek watched the taskmasters, administrators, and procurers who'd run his life since his
mother bought him a pallet in the templar orphanage trample each other in their eagerness to curry his
favor.

Pavek had countless fantasies beneath the scorching sun, but he indulged them only because he knew
that many of those whose comeuppance he most wished to witness were already dead, and that he'd never
act on the rest. He'd had too much personal acquaintance with humiliation to enjoy in any form.

Besides, in his calmer moments Pavek wasn't certain he wanted to be a high templar. He certainly
didn't want to have regular encounters with Urik's sorcerer-king. On the other hand, the more he learned
from Mahtra, frequent encounters of any kind were a decreasing possibility. First he had to survive this, his
first high-templar assignment. Night after night as they sat around a small fire, Pavek quizzed the
white-skinned woman about the disaster that had eventually brought her to Quraite.

Mahtra had told him about a huge cavern beneath the city and the huge water reservoir it supposedly
contained. When he gave the matter thought, it seemed reasonable enough. The fountains and wells that
slaked Urik's daily thirst never ran dry, and although the creation of water from air was one of the most
elementary feats of magic—he'd mastered the spell himself—it was unlikely that the city's water had an
unnatural origin. That a community of misfits dwelt on the shores of this underground lake also seemed
reasonable. For many people, life anywhere in the city, even in the total darkness beneath it, was preferable
to life anywhere else.

Not much more than a year ago, Pavek would have thought the same thing.

And he could imagine a mob of thugs descending on that community with extermination on their minds.
It wasn't a pleasant image, but riots happened in Urik, despite King Hamanu's iron fist and the readiness of
templars to enforce their king's justice. While he wore the yellow, Pavek had swept through many an
erupting market plaza, side-by-side with his fellow templars, bashing heads and restoring order with brutal
efficiency that kept the bureaus more feared than hated.

It was the sort of work that drove him to a melancholy two-day drunk, but there were a good many
templars who enjoyed it, even volunteered for it.

Templars were certainly capable of causing the carnage in Mahtra's cavern, but it seemed this was one
civic outrage for which they weren't responsible. With all the time she'd spent in the templar quarter,
Mahtra would know a templar if she'd gleaned one from the dying memories of the mind-bender she called
Father. But there wasn't a snatch of yellow in the images she'd received from Father's dying mind and,
even off-duty, the kind of templars who might have ravaged the cavern wore their robes as a sort of armor.

What Mahtra had gleaned from inherited memories was the face of a slave-scarred halfling who she
insisted was Escrissar's alchemist. Pavek had seen Kakzim just once, when he stood beside his master,
Escrissar, in the customs-house warrens. It had struck Pavek then that the alchemist had enough hate in his
eyes to destroy the world. He could believe that the mad halfling was the force behind the rampage. What
he couldn't figure was Kakzim's purpose in slaughtering a community Lord Hamanu would have executed
anyway.

If Lord Hamanu wanted Kakzim dead, Kakzim would be dead. Simply and efficiently.

Try as he might, Pavek could find only one satisfactory explanation for the summons Mahtra carried to
Quraite: Lord Hamanu was bored. That was the usual explanation when sudden, strange orders filtered
down through the bureau hierarchies; orders that once put an adolescent orphan on the outer walls
repainting the images of the Lion-King for a twenty-five day quinth, changing all the kilts to a different
color.

Lord Hamanu made war to alleviate his boredom and indulged his high templar pets for the same
reason. He'd turned Pavek into a high templar, and now it was Pavek's turn to provide a day's amusement
before Lord Hamanu hunted down the halfling himself.

Pavek dreamt of sulphur eyes among the stars, eyes narrowing with laughter, and razor claws
descending through the night to rip out his heart. The heavens were naturally dark each time he awoke, but
the gouged medallion was hot against his ribs, and Pavek was not completely reassured.

In contrast to his own nightmare anxiety, Zvain and Ruari seemed to think they'd embarked on the
great adventure of their young lives. They chattered endlessly about cleverness, courage, and the victory
that would be theirs. Zvain imagined throwing Kakzim's bloody head at the Lion-King's feet and being
rewarded with his weight in gold. Ruari, to his credit, thought he could assure Quraite's isolation. Even
Mahtra got swept up in vainglory, though her expectations were more modest: an inexhaustible supply of
cabra melons and red beads.

The trio tried to infect him with their enthusiasm, calling him an old man when he resisted. They had a
point. Pavek could remember himself at Ruari's age—it wasn't more than a handful of years ago—and he'd
been a cautious old man even then.

After dealing with the sorcerer-king's boredom, Pavek feared his greatest challenge was going to be
riding herd on his rambunctious allies.

Ruari had matured in the past year. He had moments of blind, adolescent stubbornness, but overall
Pavek trusted the half-elf to act sensibly and hold up under pressure. Zvain was still very young, in the
midst of his most willful and rebellious years, and nursing childhood wounds. He was inclined at times to
crumble, to curl in on himself— especially when Pavek and Ruari lapsed into one of their vigorous but
ultimately inconsequential arguments. The boy craved affection that Pavek could barely provide and then
frequently rejected it just as fast, which only made life more difficult.

As for Mahtra... the made-woman was an enigma. Younger than Zvain by several years, she wasn't
so much a child—though she had a child's notion of cause and effect— as a wild creature, full-grown and
unpredictable. She was much stronger than she appeared, and, or so she claimed, had the capacity to
'protect herself'.

Mahtra said she'd ridden out of Khelo, the market village most nearly aligned with Quraite's true
location and the one where Lord Hamanu maintained his kank stables. But Pavek held to the Quraite
tradition of entering Urik from a deceptive direction.

They circled the city, camping one final night on the barrens, and joined the city's southern road shortly
after dawn the next morning.

That was the limit of caution or discretion. Once the bright, belled kanks were on the road, rumor
traveled with them through the irrigated fields. Pavek spotted the isolated dust plumes as runners spread the
word, and before long there were gawkers on the byways. They kept their distance, of course, even the
noble ladies in their distinctive gauze-curtained howdahs, but curiosity was the strongest mortal emotion and
a parade of the Lion-King's decorated bugs was almost as fascinating as the Lion himself. Pavek, Ruari,
and Zvain were nothing to look at, but Mahtra, the eleganta with her stark white skin and unusually masked
features, captured the onlookers' attention. She certainly did when they reached Modekan, the village
where, in the past, Quraiters had registered their intent to bring zarneeka into Urik the following day.

Pavek had no idea what day it was as they approached Modekan, but the village was quiet. The
Modekan registrators weren't expecting visitors, at least not visitors riding the sorcerer-king's kanks. Pavek
began to regret his decision to pass through Modekan, where their impending arrival had all the earmarks of
the event of the year, if not the decade.

Every village templar was lined up at the gate, wearing tattered, wrinkled yellow robes that would
never pass muster at Pavek's old barracks. The rest of Modekan mobbed behind the line, necks craning and
heads bobbing for a good look. Three strides through the gate, and every pair of eyes was fastened tight on
Mahtra. A burly human woman with a bit more weaving in her yellow sleeve than the others hurried
forward to crouch beside Mahtra's kank, offering her own back as a dismounting platform. Mahtra's
bird's-egg eyes fairly bulged with surprise, and rather than dismounting, she pulled her feet up onto the
saddle.

It was an insult, a breach of tradition. Pavek didn't imagine that registrators liked being treated as
kank-furniture— regulators certainly didn't—but having humiliated oneself, no low-rank templar like to be
refused. Confusion reigned and threatened to turn ugly with the village's ranking templar groveling in the
dust and Mahtra trying to keep her balance. Pavek had his eye particularly focused on another templar in
the crowd, young enough and angry enough to be the crouched woman's son, who'd turned a dangerous
shade of red.

When the furious templar began to move, Pavek moved as well, dismounting in the war bureau
style—off leg swinging forward over the pommel, rather than backward over the cantle, so the rider landed
with the kank at his back and eyes on his enemy. He'd seen the method, but never tried it before. Success
made him bold.

"Who's in charge here?" he demanded with his arms bided over his chest. No one answered. Mahtra
looked like someone important; he looked like a farmer. Pavek hooked the leather thong around his neck
and brought the gouged medallion into the light. "Who is in charge?" he repeated.

Audacity often succeeded in the Tablelands because the price of failure was so high that few would
dare it. Templar and villager alike knew the punishment for impersonating a high templar. They stared at
Pavek brandishing his ceramic medallion as if it were made of gold. After a long moment during which his
heart did not beat at all, the crouching woman got to her feet. There was a smile on her face as she came
toward him. The earlier insult was forgotten; now she expected to have the honor of turning an imposter
over to higher authorities.

Then she saw the gouge in the medallion he held out to her, and her smile wavered. Pavek didn't need
magic or mind-bending to hear the doubts contending in her mind as she extended her arm. They were,
however, equally shocked when crimson sparks leapt from the gouge to her fingertips, sparks bright enough
to make them both blink.

"Great One!" she cried, nursing burnt fingers as she dropped to her knees. "Great One, Lord, forgive
me. I meant no disrespect."

All the others followed her example, parents grabbing their children as they knelt and holding them
close. The children cried protest at the rough handling, but there were adult sobs, also. Pavek could slay
them all with his own hands, no questions asked nor quarter given. He could enslave them on the spot,
selling them or keeping them without regard for kinship. Such were the ingrained powers of the Lion-King's
high templars.

Pavek chewed his lower lip, sickened by what he'd done, uncertain how to rectify it. The only high
templar he'd met in the flesh was Elabon Escrissar, whose example he'd sooner die than follow.

"Mistakes happen," he muttered. Mistakes did, of course, and people died for them. "You weren't
expecting us." They should have gone to Khelo. "There's been no harm done, to us or you. No reason to
sweat blood."

Slipshod and undisciplined as the registrators were, they were templars, and they knew about sweating
blood. Here and there, a head came up to stare at him. If mekillots would fly before a high templar showed
mercy to fools, then Pavek had just sprouted wings.