Cinnabar Shadows (26 page)

All healing was spellcraft of one sort or another, but this was spellcraft beyond Pavek's imagining. He
rose from the bed, went to the window where the light was better—and his hands remained the same,
exactly the same, but mirror images of each other.

Pavek was alive, restored, and wise enough not to waste time questioning good fortune. Setting both
hands on the window ledge, he leaned out for a better examination of his surroundings. There were walls,
not fields, beyond the tree he'd seen from the bed, masonry walls built from four rows of man-high stones.
The sounds that came over those walls, though faint, were the sounds of a city, of Urik. Pavek knew the
walls of Urik as well as anyone who'd ever spent a quinth of nights standing watch by moonlight. He knew
how the city was put together, and he knew that the only place he could be was inside the palace, which
meant Hamanu, which meant he had died.

It was just as well Pavek wasn't a gambling man.

There were sandals resting on the dirt floor beside the bed and clothes, fine linen garments like the
ones he'd ruined in Codesh, hung on a peg by the improbably rustic door. Pavek wasn't surprised to find a
gold high templar's medallion hanging beneath them. When he'd finished dressing and raking his hair with
his fingers—he didn't need a bath or a shave, which said something about either the amount of time that had
passed since Codesh or the quality of care he'd received since men—he stuck his head through the golden
noose and opened the door.

"You're awake at last!"

The voice came from a human man, about his own age and stature, but better looking, a man who
slapped his hands against his thighs as he stood up from a solid stone bench.

"How do you feel? How's the hand?"

Pavek held it out and flexed the fingers. "Good as new... good as the other one."

A smile twitched across the stranger's lips. Pavek sighed and dropped to one knee.

"A thousand thanks, Great Lord and Mighty King. I am not worthy of such miracles."

"Good—I had doubts you'd ever agree with me about anything."

Still on a bent knee, Pavek stared at his left hand and shook his head. "Great King, I am grateful, but I
am, and will always be, a thick-headed oaf of a man."

"But an honest oaf, which is rare enough around here. I am not blind, Lord Pavek. I know what is done
in my name. I am everything you imagine me to be, and more besides. Elabon Escrissar did amuse me; I
had great hopes for him. I have no hope for an honest oaf, and an honorable one in the bargain. By my
mercy, Lord Pavek—could you not at least have taken a look at that map?"

A man couldn't fall very far when he was already on his knee, which was fortunate for Pavek. "Did I
die, Great King? I don't remember. Was I already dead? The red-haired priest—I never learned his
name—he didn't... You didn't..."

"I didn't what, Lord Pavek? Look at me!"

In misery and fear, Pavek met the Lion-King's eyes.

"Do you truly think I must slay a man to unravel his memories? Do you think I must leave him a
gibbering idiot? Look at your hand again, Lord Pavek: that is what I can do. Did you die? Does it matter?
You're alive now—and as thick-headed as ever.

"A thousand years, Lord Pavek. A thousand years. I knew how to kill a man when I was younger than
you. I've killed more than even I can count; that is the essence of boredom, Lord Pavek. Every death is the
same; every life is different. Every hand is different."

Pavek swallowed hard, grinned anxiously, and said: "Mine aren't, Great King—not anymore."

Hamanu roared with laughter. His human disguise slipping further away with each unrestrained
guffaw. The Lion-King grew taller, broader, becoming the black-maned, yellow-eyed tyrant of Urik's outer
walls. He laughed until, like a lesser, mortal man, his ribs ached and, clutching at his side, he hobbled back
to his bench.
The ground shuddered when his weight hit the stone.

While Pavek blinked, the leonine Hamanu vanished and a human one took his place. He was older than
he'd seemed when Pavek walked through the wicker door: a man nearing the end of his prime, weathered
and weary, with scars on his face and a touch of gray in his dark hair.

"I was born in there," this mortal Hamanu said. His voice was soft; Pavek had to stretch forward to
hear it. "I took my first steps in the ancestor of that house when it stood a day's ride north of here, before
the troll army swept through, destroying everything in its path—except me. I was in the Scorcher's army.
Later, much later, when the trolls memory—" Hamanu's plain brown eyes narrowed, and he seemed to be
looking at a point behind Pavek's head, a point far-removed in place and time. His voice seemed to echo
from that distant, imaginary place. "I went to the Pristine Tower because trolls destroyed this house. I
won the war I was made to fight; the war the others could not win. Troll means nothing to you—" The
king looked directly at Pavek again. "When the war was over and the dust, oh the dust, had settled, I rebuilt
my house and I tried to bring back the wives and children the trolls had slain. They weren't the same."

A sense of loss, preserved for a millennium, filled the courtyard where they sat.

"I'm sorry. I never thought... never imagined.... We're taught you're a god: immortal, omnipotent,
unchanging. I doubted, but..." Words fell off Pavek's tongue until he managed to choke them off with a
groan.

"Did you? What did you doubt?" Another shimmering transformation, and the king was a beautiful
youth. "My power? My eternity? Come—tell me your doubts. Let me reassure your faith."

Pavek remained where he was, mute and kneeling.

"Very well, doubt it all. Power has limits. Eternity has a beginning and an end. I was born no different
than you. I have died many times—Look at me, Lord Pavek!"

Unable to disobey, Pavek straightened his back and neck. The human-seeming Hamanu was gone,
replaced by the apparition who'd terrified them all in the audience chamber when he examined the stains on
Ruari's staff. The long serpentine neck curved toward him. The whiplike tongue flashed out to touch the
scar on his cheek. A blast of hot, reeking air followed the tongue.

"See me as I truly am, Lord Pavek. Borys the Dragon is dead; Hamanu the Dragon is about to
be born!"

Another searing blast enveloped Pavek as he knelt, but, hot as it was, it wasn't enough to break the
cold terror paralyzing his lungs.

"A thousand years I held back the changes. I hoarded every templar's spell; I kept Urik safe
from change, Lord Pavek. Every mote of my magic is a grain of sand falling through the glass,
marking the lime until the change, when a dragon must be born. This shape you see is the sum of my
changes: a thousand years more than a man, but ten thousand... twenty thousand lives less than a
dragon. That incarnate fool, Kalak, would have sacrificed all the lives in his city to birth the dragon
within him. I will not sacrifice Urik to any dragon. Urik is mine and I will protect it—but each day
that I do nurtures the dragon within me, hastening the moment when it must be born."

The king stretched his long neck toward the bloody sun. His massive, fanged jaws opened and,
expecting a mighty roar or a blast of fire, Pavek closed his eyes. But the only sound was a sibilant curse.
When Pavek reopened his eyes, Hamanu in his most familiar leonine form had reappeared.

"You can appreciate my dilemma."

Pavek could understand that Urik was in danger either from its own sorcerer-king's transformation or
from one of the other remaining sorcerer-kings, but true appreciation of the Lion-King's dilemma was
beyond him. He nodded though, since anything else might provoke another transformation.

"Good, then you will be pleased and willing to tell me everything you know about this thing you raised,
this druid guardian, this aspect, this semblance that formed in Codesh."

Pavek had been willing to bleed to death rather than respond to that request. He wished for Telhami's
wisdom and remembered Telhami implying that she and Urik's king had once been more than friends.

"Great King, I can hardly tell you more than Telhami must have told you. I am a neophyte in the druid
mysteries—no better than a third-rank regulator."

"Telhami said our cities were abominations. Gaping sores, she called them, where the natural order is
inverted.

She said that Urik obliterated the land from which it rose and swore no guardian could abide within my
purview. I believed her then and all the years since, until you came back to Urik—not this time, but once
before. Something stirred when you stood outside House Escrissar."

"Yes, Lord Pavek," the Lion-King replied, his voice echoing in Pavek's ears, and between them as
well. "I know about House Escrissar." Then he smiled his cruel, perfect smile. "I knew about it then;
there was no need to probe deep into yo, past."

"Great King, what can I tell you that you don't already know?"

"How you raised a guardian that Telhami swore couldn't exist."

"Great King, I can't answer that. That first time outside House Escrissar, I didn't know what I'd done.
In Codesh, I was desperate," Pavek didn't mention why. "And, suddenly—without my doing anything—the
guardian was there."

"If despair is the proper incentive..." The Lion-King extended his claws. "Raise your guardian now."

Pavek, who had not yet risen from his knees, placed his identical palms flat on the ground. If despair
were the necessary condition for druidry, he should have been able to raise ten guardians.

"Tell your guardian the Lion of Urik, the King of Mountain and Plain, requires assurance that it is not a
pawn of my enemies."

In Codesh and last year, when they searched for Akashia outside the walls of House Escrissar, the
guardian power had leapt into Pavek's body, but here, in the palace, in heart of Urik's heart, the land was
empty—obliterated, exactly as Telhami had described it. The trees that shaded them were sterile sticks,
engendered with Hamanu's magic and sustained in the same way. The stones in the walls were each a
tomb for an aspect of a larger, long-vanished guardian.

Nothing Pavek did quickened the land: no druid magic, not even the simplest evocation of water, could
be wrought where he knelt. He sat back on his heels.

"There's nothing," he muttered, omitting Hamanu's royal title. "Just nothing, as if there never was
anything at all."

"Yet that night outside House Escrissar, something stirred, and in Codesh, you raised an invincible
creature out of dust and offal."

Pavek nodded. "And now there's nothing. No guardian, no aspect, nothing at all. Druid magic should
not work in Urik, Great King—yet I know it has, and not only for me. I don't understand; I must be doing
something wrong. A thousand pardons, Great King. I am not Telhami; I don't have her wisdom or strength.
Perhaps if I tried again, if I went back to House Escrissar—"

"Possibly," Hamanu agreed and frowned as well. The retribution Pavek feared seemed unlikely as the
Lion-King scratched his chin thoughtfully with a sharp, black claw. "Telhami could get her spellcraft to
work elsewhere in Urik, but never when I was nearby. Even so, she could work the lesser arts of druidry,
never the great ones, never a guardian. It is a mystery you and I will unravel when you return to Urik."

Pavek sat still a moment, savoring the life he still had before asking: "When I return?"

"Kakzim lives. The Codeshites we interrogated said that Kakzim incited them to their rebellion, then left
them to their fate. Some saw him and another halfling running away through the smoke. You will find them
and bring them back, Lord Pavek. Justice is the responsibility of the high bureau, your responsibility."

"Did the Codeshites know where Kakzim might have gone?"

The Lion-King held out his hand. A knotted string appeared; it hung from a black claw's tip and held,
within the knot, a few strands of pale blond hair. "A team of investigators searched what remained of their
rented quarters.

They found this caught in the doorjamb. Hold it where the wind does not blow, and it will lead you to
the halflings."

He took the string carefully, respectfully, but without quite concealing his skepticism. "How can you be
certain? Hair is hair. My friends searched those quarters, too."

"And found that map you refused to look at." King Ha-manu sighed heavily. "Mahtra has no hair. Both
Ruari and Zvain have hair that's too dark, and all of them are too tall, unless Ruari was on his hands and
knees when he hit his head. That is halfling hair, Pavek, and it will lead you to Kakzim. Guard it carefully.
You begin your search tomorrow; kanks are waiting for you at Khelo. A double maniple from the war
bureau awaits you there as well. The Codesh survivors volunteered; the others are solid veterans. We will
make our own search for Urik's guardian when you return; you will return, Pavek, with Kakzim or proof of
his death."

Orders had been given—orders the Lion-King had intended to give Pavek from the beginning, no
doubt. Hamanu began to walk toward the wall and a door Pavek hadn't noticed before.
Acting on impulse, which had gotten him into trouble so often before, Pavek called out to him: "Great
King—"

"My friends—Ruari, Zvain, and Mahtra—what happened to them?"

"If you spent half as much time thinking about yourself as you think about others, Pavek, you'd go
farther in this world. Your friends escaped from Codesh before I arrived. They went to Farl. Five days ago,
Ruari sold the staff I gave him to a herder; since then, I do not know. You know my dilemma, Pavek: magic
hastens the dragon. I will not risk Urik to find any one man—not Kakzim, not a friend of yours. If it suits
you, you may search for them after we've raised the guardian."

"It suits me, Great King," Pavek said to the great king's back.

With the purse Ruari had gotten from Pavek before he died, the silver he got in exchange for his staff,
the handful of coins Zvain insisted he "found" beneath a pile of rubbish in a Farl alley, and the three silver
coins Mahtra got he-didn't-ask-where, they had enough money to purchase three unimpressive kanks from
the village pound and outfit them with shabby saddles, peeling harnesses, and other supplies of dubious
quality.