Cinnabar Shadows (17 page)

Pavek threw a wild punch in the half-elf's direction. It fell short by several handspans, but Ruari got the
idea and ran for cover.

Twilight had become an evening that was not as dark as in Quraite. Pavek could see the wall where
the gardener lined up his tools: shovel, rake, hoe, and a rock-headed maul. Testing its heft and balance as if
it were a weapon, Pavek gave the maul a few practice swings. The knotted muscles in his shoulders
crackled. He wasn't the sort of man who handled tension well; he'd rather work himself to exhaustion than
think his way out of a puzzle.

One end of the stone-link chain remained where the gardener had dropped it. The other end was
fastened to a ring at the center of the garden. Pavek coiled all the links around the ring and started
hammering. The links slid against each other; Pavek never hit the same place twice. Stone against shifting
stone was as futile labor as Urik had to offer, but Pavek found his rhythm and once he'd broken a sweat,
his conscience was clearer—emptier—than it had been in days.

Swinging and striking, he lost track of time and place, or almost lost track. He'd no notion how much
time had passed when he became aware that he wasn't alone. Ruari, he thought. Ruari had returned for the
final word. He swung the maul with extra vigor, missed the links altogether, but raised sparks from the ring.
The gasp he heard next didn't come from a half-elf or a human boy.

"Mahtra?"

He saw her in the doorway, a study in moonlit pallor and seamless shadows. Their eyes met and she
receded into the dark. A child, Pavek reminded himself; he'd frightened her with his hammering. He set the
maul aside.

She shook her head. The shawl slid down her neck. With the mask dividing her head, it was like looking
at two incomplete faces—which was probably not an inaccurate way to describe her.

"Does this place make you uneasy? Do you want to talk to me about it?" He'd already failed miserably
with Ruari, but the night was young and filled with opportunity.

"No, I like it here. I remember Akashia, but my own memories are different."

"You used to come to this garden?"

"No, never. No one came here, except Agan. He was always here. Agan and Initri, they were
special."

Their conversation was assuming its familiar pattern: Pavek asking what he assumed were simple
questions and Mahtra replying with answers he didn't quite understand. "How?" he asked, dreading her
answer.

"Sometimes Lord Elabon, he called Agan 'my thrice-damned-father'."

The maul handle stood beside Pavek, in easy reach. He could swing it and imagine the link it struck
was Elabon Escrissar's skull. He'd been wise to dread anything Mahtra could tell him about his inherited
home. How had Escrissar—even Escrissar—enslaved his own parents? What was he, Just-Plain Pavek,
supposed to do to correct that mistake? What could he do?

"It might not mean anything," Mahtra continued. "Father wasn't my father. I don't have a father or
mother; I was made, not born. I just called Father that because it felt good. Maybe Lord Escrissar did the
same."

Pavek said, "I hope not," and Mahtra receded into the shadows again. He called her back saying, "It's
all right for you feel good about calling someone Father—" Mahtra had a clear sense of justice and honor;
he assumed she'd gotten it from the man she called Father who had, therefore, been worthy of a child's
respect. She certainly hadn't gotten anything honorable from Elabon Escrissar. "But it wouldn't be right if
you'd put scars on his face and a chain around his neck, and then you felt good about calling him Father."

"It would feel good to call you Father. You truly wouldn't set your mistakes free, would you?"

She'd been eavesdropping on his argument with Ruari, if it could be called eavesdropping when they'd
been screaming at each other.

"I wouldn't—not deliberately, but Mahtra, you can't call me Father. I'm Pavek, Just-Plain Pavek. Leave
it at that."

She blinked, and pulled her arms tight around her slender torso as if Pavek had struck her, which only
made him feel worse. But he couldn't have her calling him Father; that was a responsibility he couldn't take.

"Mahtra—"

"I need someone to talk to and I don't think I should talk to Lord Hamanu. I think he'd listen, but I don't
think I should. I think he's made, too, or born so long ago he's forgotten."

"You can talk to me," Pavek assured her quickly, determined to put an end to any thought of confiding
in the Lion-King. "You can't call me Father, but you can talk to me about anything." He felt like a man
walking open-eyed off a cliff.

Mahtra came closer. Her bird's-egg eyes sparkled—actually sparkled—with excitement. "I can protect
myself now!"

"Haven't you always been able to do that?" he asked, hoping for a comprehensible answer. She'd
talked about the protection her makers had given her before, but she'd never been able to explain it.

"Before, it just happened. I got stiff and blurry, and it happened. But today, by the water, when I got
angry at Ruari, I didn't want him to stop me, so I made myself afraid that he'd hurt me, and made it
happen."

Pavek recalled the moment easily. "You made it stop, too. Didn't you?"

"Almost."

That was not the answer he'd hoped for. "Almost?"

"Angry-afraid makes the protection happen. When Ruari pushed me down, I wasn't angry-afraid
anymore, I was sad-afraid, and sad-afraid makes the protection go away. I'm glad it went away without
happening; I didn't want to hurt Ruari, not truly. But I didn't make it not-happen."

Pavek looked up into her strange, trusting eyes. He scratched his itchy scalp, hoping to kindle
inspiration and failing in that endeavor, too. "I don't know, Mahtra, maybe you did learn how to control what
your makers gave you: angry-fear makes it start; sad-fear makes it stop. If you could make yourself angry,
you can make yourself sad."

"Is that good—? Making myself feel differently, to control what the makers gave me?"
"It's better than hurting Ruari—however you would've hurt him. It's better than making a mistake."

"If I made a mistake, then I'd be responsible for it, like you? I want to be like you, Pavek. I want to
learn from you, even if you're not Father."

He turned away, not knowing what to say or do next. It was bad enough when Zvain or Ruari put their
trust in him, but there always came a point in those conversations where he could poke them in the ribs and
break the somber mood with a little roughhousing. A poke in the ribs wouldn't be the same with Mahtra.
With Mahtra, he could only say:

"Thank you. I'll try to teach you well."

And pray desperately for Initri to ring the supper bell.

Ruari came back during supper. Pavek didn't ask where he'd been, but he had a turquoise and aqua
house-lizard the size of his forearm clinging contentedly to his shoulder, its whiplike tail looped around his
neck. In itself that was a good sign. The brightly beautiful lizards had innate mind-bending defenses: they
could sense a distressed or aggressive mind at a considerable distance and make themselves scarce before
trouble arrived. Even Ruari, who turned to animals for solace when he was upset, couldn't have gotten
close to the creature while he was angry.

Ruari unwound the lizard from his neck and offered it to Pavek. "My Moonracer cousins say that in the
cities a house where one of these lizards lives is a house where friends can be found."

Friendship—the greatest gift an elf could give, and a gift Ruari had never gotten from those Moonracer
cousins of his. Or offered, and that's what Ruari was offering. Pavek held out his hands with a heart-felt
wish that the damn thing found him acceptable and didn't take a chunk out of his finger. It probed him with
a bright red tongue, then slowly climbed his arm.

"I'll keep it in the garden," he said once it had settled on his shoulder.

They ate quietly, quickly, grateful for the food rather than the cooking. The question of baths and
laundry came up. House Escrissar had a hypocaust where both clothes and bodies could be soaked clean in
hot water, but it required a cadre of slaves to stoke the furnace and run the pumps. Mahtra said she'd take
care of herself. Pavek and Ruari sluiced themselves as best they could at the kitchen cistern. They
cornered Zvain and subjected him to the same treatment. Fresh clothing came out of the packs they'd
brought from Quraite: homespun shirts and breeches, not really suitable for a high templar, but what
remained of Elabon Escrissar's clothes wouldn't go around Pavek's brawny, human shoulders and Ruari
would have nothing to do with them.

Ruari refused to sleep in a bed where Elabon Escrissar might have slept. Late evening found the
half-elf spreading his blankets in the garden under the watchful, independent eyes of their new house lizard.
Pavek considered telling the youth that he was a fool, that Urik was noisier than Quraite and the sounds
would keep him awake, but those were the precise sounds Pavek was spreading his own blankets to hear
throughout the night.

Midnight brought an echoing chorus of gongs and bells as watchtowers throughout the city signalled to
one another: all's well, all's quiet. Pavek listened to every note, and all the other sounds Urik made while it
slept—even Ruari's soft, regular breathing an arm's length away on the other side of the fountain. As the
stars spun slowly through the roof-edged sky, Pavek tried to appreciate the irony: much as he enjoyed the
cacophony of city life, he was the one who couldn't sleep.

Pavek's thoughts drifted, as a man's thoughts tended to do when he was alone in the dark. They took a
sudden jog back to the cavern with its glamourous bowls and deceptive scaffolds, the noxious sludge
clinging to Ruari's staff; oozing down his own leg. He imagined he could feel the slime again, and without
thinking further, swiped his thigh beneath the blankets. His fingers brushed the soft, clean cloth of his
breeches. For a heartbeat, Pavek was reassured, then panic struck.

Wide-awake and chilled from the marrow out to his skin, Pavek threw his blankets aside. Stumbling
and cursing in unfamiliar surroundings he made his way from the garden and through the residence. He
found his filthy clothes where he'd left them: in a heap beside the cistern. Viewed by starlight, one stain
looked like another and there was no safe guessing which, if any, came from the cavern sludge.

There were bright embers in the hearth and an oil lamp on the masonry above it. Pavek lit the lamp and
went searching for Ruari's staff, which he found against a wall, just inside the main door. Stains mottled the
wooden tip. Lamp in hand, Pavek got down on his knees to examine its stains more closely.

"What are you doing?"

Ruari's unexpected question scared a year from Pavek's natural life—assuming he'd be lucky enough
to have one.

"Looking for proof that we saw what we saw in the cavern."
Pavek probed the largest of the stains with a jagged thumbnail. The wood crumbled as if it were rotten.
Ruari swore and yanked his most prized possession out of Pavek's hands. He probed the stain and another
bit of soggy, ruined wood came away on his fingertip.

The half-elf was sulky, stubborn, and quick to anger, but he wasn't stupid. He glowered a moment,
thinking things through, then handed the staff back to Pavek.

"The Lion—he'd believe us, wouldn't he? I mean, you're the one he sent for, why wouldn't he believe
you? He wouldn't have to ravel your memories. He wouldn't leave you an empty-headed idiot. That's just
talk, isn't it?"

Pavek shook his head. "I've seen it done."

"Telhami could get the truth out of anyone, too, but she'd just look at you, she didn't do anything. No
one ever lied to her; she knew the truth when she heard it."

"Aye," Pavek agreed, tearing off the hem of his dirty shirt and beginning to wind it around the stained
part of the staff like a bandage. "Heard or saw or tasted. Hamanu can do that, too, or he can spin your
memories out, floss into thread, and leave you as empty as the day you were born. That's what I've seen.
Should've let you collect a great dollop of that swill."

"I was glad I hadn't—until now. Will this be enough?" Ruari asked, taking his staff and checking the
knot Pavek had made for fastness.

"Slaves would tell you to pray to Great Hamanu; they think he's a god."

"And we know better. What else can we do?"

"Except pray? Nothing. It's me he'll come after, Ru; you shouldn't worry too much. When he killed
Escrissar, he decided I'd make a good replacement. That's what this is about. He wants me for a pet."

Pavek didn't think he'd made a stunning revelation; the look on Ruari's face said otherwise.

"There're always a few Hamanu favors. Some called them the Lion's Cubs; we called them his pets in
the barracks. He gives them free rein and they dull his boredom. Escrissar was one." Telhami was another,
but Pavek didn't say that aloud; he'd given Ruari a big enough mouthful to chew on already.

"We can go back to the cavern.... We can go back right now with a bucket!"

"Don't be foolish. It's the middle of the night."

"That won't make any difference in a cavern! We can do it, Pavek. That messed-up medallion of yours
will get us past anyone who challenges us and the warding in the elven market. We could be back by
dawn, if we hurry."

Pavek's heart was touched to see Ruari so eager, so blind to danger on his behalf. Friendship, he
supposed. But it was too foolish to consider. "Maybe tomorrow morning—if there's no one from the palace
hammering on the door before them."

"Wind and fire, Pavek. If we're going to wait until tomorrow morning, we might just as well go to this
Codesh-place, too, and see if we can find the other end of the passageway."

It would be a long shot, and Pavek had never been a gambler, but Ruari was right. If they walked into
the palace with the a bucket of sludge in their hands and a Codesh passageway to the cavern on the
surface of their minds, they'd be in as good a bargaining position as mortals could attain in the Lion-King's
court.