Cinnabar Shadows (30 page)

Mahtra huddled by herself in the curve where the side became the bottom. She drew her knees up to
her chest, rested her cheek on them, and wrapped her arms over her shins.

The spiral of her life had become a circle; she was back where she'd begun: in deep, silent darkness.

After his time in Telhami's grove, Pavek thought he'd be prepared for the forest, but there was little
comparison between a meticulously nurtured grove and the wild profusion of a natural forest.

Instead of the guardian aspect that pulled a grove together with a single purpose, a single voice, the
halfling forest was a battleground with every mote of life competing for its place on the land.

It was a place hostile to them as well—which was not entirely surprising. War bureau maniples did not
go quietly, no matter where they went, though they were traveling light, at least as far as magic was
concerned. Except for the medallions they all wore and the ensorcelled bit of halfling hair, Pavek knew of
no Tablelands magic that they'd brought across the mountains into the forest. There were no defiling
sorcerers with them, no priests, either—unless the forest sensed that templars borrowed spellcraft from the
Lion-King or recognized Pavek's clumsy curiosity as the sign of a druid.

Even without magic, however, a living forest had reason to resent their intrusion. A double maniple of
templars armed with broad-bladed, single-edged swords hacked a wide swathe through the undergrowth as
they marched, still following the straight course set by the strands of blond hair Pavek now carried in a little
pouch on the gold chain of his high templar's medallion.

It was the morning of the twelfth day and the start of their first full day in the forest. Last night, the
two moons had been in the sky all night. They were both nearly full, and silvery little Ral was yapping
toward golden Guthay's middle.

Pavek could remember other times when both moons had shown their full faces at the same time, but
never when they'd been on the collision course of last night. It seemed to Pavek that Ral would crash
against Guthay's trailing edge tonight or tomorrow night, which would be the significant thirteenth night. He
mentioned his suspicions to the commandant once they'd broken camp and were marching through the
forest again, and his concern that Ral would be destroyed.
"If Kakzim knew that the moons were going to crash—"

Pavek bit his lip and held silent while he weighed what the Lion-King had told him about how using
magic now would destroy Urik. Easier to believe that no spells would be available until after the
sorcerer-king had prevented catastrophe in the heavens than to think Hamanu had been serious bout
birthing dragons and the death of Urik.

Which thoughts made Pavek wonder why the Lion-King would have lied to him about such a matter, if
the truth were so linked to this mission. That was not a question to ask Commandant Javed.

"I hadn't thought of it that way, Commandant," he said. "You're right. Of course."

"You're young yet. There's a lot to learn that never gets taught. You just have to put the pieces
together yourself— remember that."

Pavek assured the older, wiser elf that he would, and their march through the forest continued. The
sense that the forest itself was hostile to them grew steadily stronger until Javed and the maniple templars
sensed it also.

"It's too damned quiet," Javed concluded. "Trees. I hate trees. The forest is an ambusher's paradise.
They can put their scouts in the branches and tell their troops to lie low in the shade beneath them. Get out
your hair, Lord Pavek; see if our halfling's tried to close a trap behind us."

It was the trees themselves that were looking down on them—at least that's what Pavek thought. The
hair indicated it as well. Its line hadn't varied since they used it first at Khelo: Kakzim was still ahead of
them.

But the two-time Hero of Urik took no chances. He tightened their formation, giving orders to every
third templar: "Keep your eyes on the trees ahead of us, on either side, and especially behind. Anything
moves, sing out. I'd sooner duck from wind and shadows than have halflings running up our rumps."

They did a lot of shadow dodging that morning, but they also got a heartbeat's warning before the first
arrow flew at them. Trusting their silk tunics and leather armor, Commandant Javed ordered the maniples
together in a tight circle. He commanded them to kneel, presenting smaller targets to the hidden archers and
safeguarding their unprotected legs.

"Defend your face! That's where you're vulnerable," Javed shouted, taking his own advice when an
arrow whizzed toward him. "But mark where the arrows are coming from. We'll take these forest-scum
brigands when their quivers are empty."

The soft, smooth silk lived up to the commandant's claims, and the lightweight, slow-moving arrows
failed to find targets time and again. One templar cried out when an arrow grazed her hand, and moments
later she'd fallen unconscious. But she was their only casualty, and gradually the arrow flights came to a
halt and the forest was silent.

"Mark where you saw 'em. Move out in pairs." This time the commandant gave his orders in a voice
that wouldn't carry to the trees. "We don't have to catch them all, just one or two." Then he turned to Pavek
and whispered: "You mark any, my lord?"

Pavek pointed to a crook halfway up one substantial tree where he'd spotted a shadowed silhouette
against the branches.

Javed flashed his black-and-white smile. "Let's go catch us a halfling—"

But fickle fortune was against the heroes. Their quarry dropped down and hit the ground running.
Javed's elven legs weren't what they'd been in his prime, and Pavek had never been much of a sprinter.
The halfling went to ground in a stand of bramble bushes.

Other pairs were luckier. When the maniples reassembled near the body of the unconscious templar,
they had captured four halflings, none of whom seemed to understand a word Commandant Javed said
when he asked where their village was.

Intimidation was an art among templars. Pavek had been taught the basic skills in the orphanage. Being
big, which Pavek had always been, and ugly, which he'd become early on life, Pavek had a natural
advantage. The joke was that he was a born intimidator, but the truth was that Pavek didn't enjoy making
other folk writhe in terror or anxiety. He was good at it because he hated it, and now that he held the
highest rank imaginable, he intended never to professionally intimidate anyone again. He gave a hands-off
gesture and stepped aside to allow the commandant to finish what he'd begun.

"You're lying," Javed told the captives who knelt before him. He looked aside to Pavek and began
speaking above heads that rose no higher than his thigh. "My name is Commandant Javed of Urik, and I
give you my word as a commandant that we're searching for one man, one male halfling with blond hair and
slave scars on his face. He committed crimes in Urik, and he will answer for them. No one else need fear
us. We won't harm you or your families or your homes if you give us the criminal we've come for. You will
help us—understand that. Dead or alive, one of you will guide us to your homes. Now, which one of you
will it be?"

From the side, Pavek knew what was coming next. He'd seen two of the halflings flinch when Javed
implied the necromancy for which the templarates were infamous. A third had lowered his eyes when the
commandant asked for a volunteer. Although necromancy would be more difficult without borrowed
spellcraft, Pavek trusted that Javed wouldn't have made the threat if he didn't have the means to carry it
through. He also trusted that one of the other templars would have seen the halflings' reaction and would
report them to the commandant. Pointing out an enemy who'd shot poisoned arrows at him didn't trouble
him, but condemning a man to death and worse because he wouldn't betray his home and family wasn't
something Pavek could do.

As Ruari had told him when they'd argued in Escrissar's garden, he had a convenient conscience.

And not long to wait. The maniple templars had caught all four halflings reacting to Javed's speech.
The commandant grabbed the lone woman in the group, not—Pavek assumed—strictly because of her sex,
but because she had huddled close by one of the men. When templars of any rank, from any bureau,
wanted fast intimidation results, they turned their attention to the smaller, weaker partner in a pair, if a pair
was available.

While one templar held the woman from behind and another pressed his composite sword's blade
against her pulsing throat, Commandant Javed removed a scroll from his pack. He broke the heavy black
seal and began to read the mnemonics of the same necromantic spell Pavek had expected the Lion-King to
use on him at Codesh. Midway through the invocation, the sword-wielding templar pricked the halfling's
skin with the blade's razor-sharp teeth.

The woman gave no more reaction to the pain and the trickling of her own warm, red blood than she
had to the commandant's speech, but the sight was too much for the halfling she'd huddled against. He
sprang to his feet.

"Spare her, and I'll lead you to our village," he said in the plain language of the Urik streets.

His halfling companions, including the woman whose life he was trying to save, sputtered epithets in
their clicking, screeching language. The woman got another nick in her throat; the other two halflings got
savage blows from the hilts of templar weapons. Templars did not tolerate in others those treacherous,
divisive behaviors they practiced to perfection among themselves.

"And the scarred, blond-haired halfling?" Javed asked.

The traitor wrung his hands. "I know of no such man."

Javed's long arm swung out to clout the halfling. He staggered and tripped over his indignant
companions.

"We know he came this way!" the commandant thundered. "I will have the truth, from your mouth or
hers!" He shook the scroll he still held in his right hand and began again to read the mnemonics.

With a hand held over his bleeding mouth, the halfling scrambled toward Commandant Javed. "Great
One," he cried, "there is no such man. I swear it."

"What do you think, Lord Pavek? Is he telling the truth?"

Eyes turned toward Pavek, who scratched the bristly growth on his chin before asking: "Which way to
your village?"

Eager to respond to a question he could answer, the halfling pointed in the direction they'd already been
headed, but regarding his truthfulness, Pavek could only scratch his chin a second time. Halflings were rare
in Urik, unheard of in the templarate. He could count the number he knew by name on the fingers of one
hand, and save his thumb for Kakzim. As far as he was concerned, halfling faces were inscrutable. The
male halfling in front of him could have been Zvain's age, his own age, or venerable like Javed; he could
have been telling the absolute truth, or lying through his remaining teeth.

The only certainty was that Pavek held lives on the tip of his tongue. He looked at Javed; the
commandant's shadowed face was as inscrutable as the halfling's. In the end, Pavek relied more on hope
than logic.
"I believe him about his village. As for the other—" following the commandant's lead, Pavek didn't say
Kakzim's name aloud "—men of no account frequently don't know the answers to important questions."
Fate knew, he, himself, dwelt in ignorance most of the time. "We'll talk to the elders when we get there."

The village to which their halfling captive led them wasn't far away. If they'd been on the barrens
instead of deep in a forest, the templars would have spotted it from the ambush sight. Of course, without
the forest, there would have been no ambush, and no halfling houses, either. The halflings lived in a circle of
huge, spreading trees around a shaded, moss-covered clearing. Some of their homes had been, carved out
of the trees' trunks so long ago the bark had healed around them. Others were perched in their branches:
like nests. The homes seemed both alive and ancient, and all of them were too small for even a dwarf's
comfort.

Tiny, feral faces—halfling children—peeked out of moss-framed windows, but the men and women of
the community had gathered in the clearing, with weapons ready. A duet of Halfling singsong passed
between the templars' captives and the anxious villagers. One of the templars translated:

"Our fellows said they had no choice; we would have killed them and gotten the information from their
corpses. The old fellows in the center, they speak for the village and they wanted to know why we've
come, what we're looking for."

Commandant Javed nodded. Speaking clearly in the Urikite dialect, confident the elders could
understand, he said, "We've tracked a renegade halfling to this village, a blond man with Urik slave scars on
his cheeks. If they surrender him at once, and if they provide us with an antidote for the poison they used
on our comrade, we will depart immediately. Otherwise we'll destroy this village and everyone here, one by
one. Children first."

When the elders protested in a passable dialect that there was neither an antidote nor a blond, scarred
halfling, Commandant Javed turned to Pavek.

"My lord?" he asked, cold as a man's voice could be.

Pavek set down the sword he'd held ready since the ambush began. He dug out his bit of ensorcelled
hair and let it spin freely, as much to give the halfling elders additional time to consider their folly—they
might be superb fighters for their size, but they didn't stand a chance against Javed's maniples. For the first
time, the hair pointed in a different direction, almost perpendicular to the path they'd been following since
Khelo. The halflings who'd watched this subtle bit of Tablelands magic seemed impressed, but did not
recant.

Their elders repeated that there was no antidote for the poison the halflings smeared on their
arrowheads. The templar woman would die without awakening. And there was no blond-haired halfling
with Urikite slave-scars on his cheeks in this village or anywhere else. Didn't the templars know that
halflings would sooner die than surrender their freedom?