Cinnabar Shadows (11 page)

He almost laughed aloud, but swallowed the sound when he saw Akashia's face darkening. "Your
lord?" he asked instead. "King Hamanu? The lord of Urik is your lord?"

"Yes, he is my lord. He is lord of everything." Mahtra rose confidently to her feet, displaying no sign
that she'd been unconscious rather than asleep. Extending a wickedly pointed red fingernail, she reached for
Pavek's face. He flinched and dodged. "Will it always look like that? Is it painful?"

New Race, he reminded himself: not a mark on her scaly skin other than those metallic patches. Not a
scratch or a scar, nor a sun blister. He recalled Zvain's warnings about the mask and didn't want to imagine
what scars it might conceal. She was as tall as Ruari; her slight, strong body was almost certainly
full-grown, but what of her mind?

"It aches sometimes. I would rather you didn't touch it. You can understand that, can't you?" He met
the pale blue stare and held it until she blinked. He hoped that was understanding. "You have a message for
me?"

"My lord says he's given you more time than a mortal man deserves. He says you've dawdled in your
garden long enough. He says it's time for you to return and finish what you started."

Aware that everyone—Mahtra, Akashia, Ruari, and Zvain —was staring at him intently, Pavek asked,
"Did the Lion tell you what that might be?" in an almost-normal voice.

"He said you and I would hunt the halfling called Kakzim, and I would have vengeance for the deaths
of Father and Mika."

"Kakzim!" Zvain exclaimed. "Kakzim! Do you hear that, Pavek? We've got to go back now."

"Father! What Father? You said she was made, not born. She's lying—!"

Pavek watched those jewel-like eyes brighten as the New Race taunt came out of Ruari's mouth.
"Shut up—both of you!" he shouted.

All along, while Escrissar was his enemy and Laq the scourge Pavek sought to eliminate, Escrissar's
halfling slave had lurked in the background. The Lion-King had come to Quraite to destroy Escrissar, but
the Lion didn't know about the slave. Among the last things the living Telhami had said to him was that
Hamanu didn't notice a problem until it scratched him in the eye. Kakzim—whose name Pavek had gotten
from Zvain that same day when Telhami died—had finally caught the Lion's attention. Pavek wondered
how and, though he didn't truly want to know the answer, asked the necessary questions:

"How do you know of Kakzim? What has he done?"
Bright eyes studied Ruari first, then Zvain before returning to Pavek. "He is a murderer. His face was
the last face Father saw before he was killed...." Mahtra's composure failed. She looked down at her hands
and contorted her fingers into tangles that had to hurt her knuckles. "I turned to Lord Escrissar, but he
never returned. Another high templar sent me to Lord Hamanu, and he sent me here to you. Aren't you
also a high templar? Don't you already know Kakzim?"

"Escrissar." Her loathing made a curse of the name. "You turned to that foul nightmare disguised as a
man? What was he—your friend, your lover? Is that why you wear a mask? Rotter. Is it your face that's
rotten, or your spirit?"

He'd never heard such venom in Akashia's voice. It rocked Pavek back a step and made him wonder if
he knew Akashia at all. Were a handful of days, however tortured and terrible, enough to sour Kashi's
spirit? What did she see when she looked at Mahtra? A mask, long and menacing fingernails, black cloth
wrapped tightly around a slender body. Were those similarities enough to summon Escrissar's memory to
her eyes?

Without warning, Akashia lunged toward Mahtra. She wanted vengeance, and failed to get a taste of it
when Pavek and Zvain together seized her and held her back. The golden patches around Mahtra's eyes
and on her shoulders glistened in the lamplight, distorting the air around them as sunlight distorts the air
above the salt flats.

"Kakzim was Escrissar's slave," Pavek shouted, wanting to avert disaster but pushing closer to the
brink instead. "His house would be the first place anyone would look."

"Get her out of here," Akashia warned, wresting free from them, no longer out of control but angrier
and colder than she'd been ten heartbeats before. "Get out of here!" she snarled at Mantra.

"I go with High Templar Pavek," the New Race woman replied without flinching. She was eleganta.
She made her life in the darkest shadows of the high templar quarter. There was nothing Akashia could do
to frighten her. "With him alone or with any others who desire vengeance. Do you desire vengeance,
green-eyed woman?"

Confronted by an honesty she couldn't deny and a coldness equal to her own, it was Akashia who
retreated, shaking her head as she went. Pavek thought they'd gotten through the narrows, but he hadn't
reckoned on Ruari, who'd come to Akashia's defense no matter how badly she treated him—or how little
she needed it.

"She can't talk to Kashi that way. Take her to the grove, Pavek!" he demanded—the same demand
he'd made when Pavek had arrived here, and for roughly the same reason. "Let the guardian judge her, and

her Father and her vengeance."

"No," he replied simply.

"No? It's the way of Quraite, Pavek. You don't have a choice: the guardian judges strangers."

"No," he repeated. "No—for the same reason we'll bury the templars and return their belongings. The
Lion will know what we do to his messengers, and he knows how to find us. And, more than that, this isn't
about Quraite or the guardian of Quraite. This is about Urik and Kakzim. I saw Kakzim making Laq, but I
didn't go back to find him because I thought when he couldn't make Laq anymore, he couldn't harm anyone
either. I was wrong; he's become a murderer with his own hands. Hamanu's right, it's time for me to go
back. We'll leave as soon as the kanks and Mahtra are rested—"

"Now," Mahtra interrupted. "I need no rest."

And maybe she didn't. There was nothing weary in her strange eyes or weak in the hand she wrapped
around Pavek's forearm.

"The bugs need rest," he said, and met her stare. "The day after tomorrow or the day after that."

She released her grip.

"I'm going with you," Zvain said, which wasn't a surprise.

"Me, too," Ruari added, which was.

Akashia looked at each of them in turn, her expression unreadable, until she said: "You can't. You can't
leave Quraite. I need you here," which was a larger surprise than he could have imagined.

"Come with us," he said quickly, hopefully. "Put an end to the past."

"Quraite needs me. Quraite needs you. Quraite needs you, Pavek."

If Akashia had said that she needed him, possibly he would have reconsidered, but probably not, not
with Hamanu's threat hanging over them. That, and the knowledge that Kakzim was wreaking havoc once
again. He started for the door, then paused and asked a question that had been bothering him since Mahtra
spoke her first words.

She blinked and seemed flustered. "I'm new, not old. The cabras have ripened seven times since I
came to Urik."

"And before Urik, how many times had they ripened?"

"There is no before Urik."

As Pavek had hoped, Akashia's eyes widened and the rest of her face softened. "Seven years?
Escrissar—"

He cut her off. "Escrissar's dead. Kakzim. Kakzim's the reason to go back."

Pavek left the hut. Mahtra followed him, a child who didn't look like a child and didn't particularly act
like one, either. She slipped her arm through his and stroked his inner forearm with a long fingernail. He
wrested free.

"Not with me, eleganta. I'm not your type."

"Where do I go, if not with you?"

It was a very good question, for which Pavek hadn't an answer until he spotted a farmer couple
peering out their cracked-open door. Their hut was good-sized, their children were grown and gone. He
took Mahtra to stay with them until morning, and wouldn't hear no for an answer. Still this was one night
Pavek wasn't going back to Telhami's grove. He stretched out in a corner of the bachelor hut.

Tomorrow was certain to be worse than tonight. He'd get some sleep while he could.

How old are you?

A voice, a question, and the face of an ugly man haunted the bleak landscape of Mahtra's dreams.

Seven ripe cabras. A whirling spiral with herself at the center and seven expanding revolutions
stretching away from her. The spiraling line was punctuated with juicy, sweet fruit and the other events of
the life she remembered. Seven years—more days than she could count—and all but the last several of
them spent inside the yellow walls of Urik. She hadn't known the city's true shape until she looked back as
the huge, painted bug carried her away to this far-off place.

Mahtra hadn't remembered a horizon other than rooftops, cobbled streets, and guarded walls. She had
known the world was larger than Urik; the distant horizon itself wasn't a surprise, but she'd forgotten what
empty and open looked like.

What else had she forgotten?

There is no before Urik.

Another voice. Her own voice, the voice she wished she had, echoed through her dreams. Did it tell
the truth? Had she forgotten what came before Urik, as she had forgotten what stretched beyond it?

Turn around. Step beyond the spiral. Find the path. What before Urik? Remember, Mahtra.
Remember....

The spiral of Mahtra's life blurred in her dream-vision. Her limbs became stiff and heavy. She was
tempted to lie down where she was, at the center of her life, and ignore the beautiful voice. What would
happen if she fell asleep while she was dreaming? Would she wake up in her life or in the dream, or
somewhere that was neither living nor dreaming?

Somewhere that was neither living nor dreaming...

Mahtra knew of such a nowhere place. She had forgotten it, the way she'd forgotten the colors and
shapes on the other side of Urik's walled horizon. It was the outside place, beyond the memories of the
cabra-marked spiral.

A place before Urik.

A place of drifting, neither dark nor bright, hot nor cool. A place without bottom or top, or any direction
at all, until there was a voice and a name:

Mahtra.

Her name.

Walking, running, swimming, crawling, and flying—all those ways she'd used to move toward her
name. At the very end, she fought, because the place before Urik had not wanted her to leave. It grew
thick and dark and clung to her arms, her ankles. But once Mahtra had heard her name, she knew she
could no longer drift; she must break free.

Mahtra put a word to the substance of her earliest memories: the place before Urik was water and the
hands were the hands of the makers, lifting her out of a deep well, holding her while she took her first
unsteady steps. Her memory still would not show her the makers' faces, but it did show Mahtra her arms,
her legs, her naked, white-white flesh.

Made, not born. Called out of the water fully-grown, exactly the person she was in her dream, in her
life:

Mahtra.

The hands wrapped her in soft cloth. They covered her nakedness. They covered her face.

Who did this? The first words that were not her name touched her ears. What went wrong? Who is
responsible? Who's to blame for this—for this error, this oversight, this mistake? Whose fault?

Not mine. Not mine. Not mine!

Accusing questions and vehement denials pierced the cloth that blinded her. The steadying hands
withdrew. The safe, drifting place was already sinking into memory. This was the true nature of the world.
This was the enduring, unchanging nature of Mahtra's life: she was alone, unsupported in darkness, in
emptiness; she was an error, an oversight, a mistake.

That face! How will she talk? How will she eat? How will she survive? Not here—she can't stay
here. Send her away. There are places where she can survive.

The makers had sent her away, but not immediately. They dealt honorably with their errors.
Honorably—a dream-word from Urik, not her memory. They taught her what she absolutely needed to
know and gave her a place while she learned: a dark place with hard, cool surfaces. A cave, a safe and
comforting place... or a cell where mistakes were hidden away. Cave and cell were words from Urik. In
her memory there was only the place itself.

Mahtra wasn't helpless. She could learn. She could talk— if she had to—she could eat, and she could
protect herself. The makers showed her little red beads that no one else would eat. The beads were
cinnabar, the essences of quicksilver and brimstone bound together. They were the reason she'd been
made, and, though she herself was a mistake, cinnabar would still protect her through ways and means her
memory had not retained.

When Mahtra had learned all she could—all that the makers taught her—then they sent her away with
a shapeless gown, sandals, a handful of cinnabar beads, and a mask to hide their mistake from the world.

Follow the path. Stay on the path and you won't get lost.

And with those words the makers disappeared forever, without her ever having seen their faces. In her
dream, Mahtra wondered if they had known what awaited her on the path that led away from their isolated
tower. Did they know about the predators that stalked the eerie, tangled wilderness around their tower?
Were those ghastly creatures mistakes like herself? Had they strayed from the path and become forever
lost in the wilderness? Were they the lucky mistakes?

Mahtra had followed the makers' instructions until the shadowy wilderness ended and the path
broadened into the hard ground of the barrens. She wasn't lost. There were men waiting for her. Odd—her
memory hadn't held the words for water or cave or any of the beasts she'd avoided in the wilderness, but
she'd known mankind from the start, and gone toward them, as she had not gone toward the beasts.

In the dream, a shadow loomed between Mahtra and the men. She veered away from the memories it
contained.

Stay on the path.

Again, she heard the voice that might be her own and watched in wonder as a glistening path sliced
through the shadow, a path that had not existed on that day she did not want to remember.

Follow the path.

The voice pulled her into the shadow where rough hands seized her, tearing her gown and mask. Her
vision blurred, her limbs grew heavy, but she was not in the drifting place. A flash of light and sound
radiated from her body. When her senses were restored, she stood free.

This was what the makers meant when they said she could protect herself. This was what happened to
the cinnabar after she ate the red beads. The men who'd held her lay on the ground, some writhing, others
very still. Mahtra ran with her freedom, clutching the corners of her torn gown against her breasts. She ran
until she could run no farther and darkness had replaced the light: not the pure darkness of a cave or cell,
but the shadowy darkness of her first moonless night.

Her cinnabar beads could protect her, but they couldn't nourish her flesh nor slake her thirst. She rested
and ran again, not as far as she'd run the first time, not as far as she had to. The men followed her. They
knew where she was. She could hear them approach. The cinnabar protected her again, but the men were
wily: they knew the range of her power and harried her from a safe distance throughout the night.

Fear, Mahtra. Fear. There is no escape.

The men caught her at dawn, when she was too exhausted to crawl and the cinnabar flash was no
more potent than a flickering candle. They bound her wrists behind her back and hobbled her ankles before
they confined her in a cart. She had nothing but her mask to hide behind, because even these cruel and
predatory creatures—

No mask. Nothing. Nothing at all. There is no escape from your memory.

Mahtra's mask vanished. She was truly, completely naked in the midst of men who both feared her and
tormented her. There were other carts, each pulled by a dull-witted lizard and carrying one of the makers'
unique creations. She called to them, but they were not like her; they were nameless beasts and answered
with wails and roars she couldn't understand. Her voice made the men laugh. Mahtra vowed never to speak
where men could listen.

Crouched in the corner of the cart as it began to move, she heard the word Urik for the first time.

Urik! the voice of her dream howled. Remember Urik! Remember the fear. Remember shame and
despair. There is no escape!

She shook her head and struggled against her bonds.

There was no escape from the voice in her dream, but the dream was wrong. Memory was wrong.
She still had the makers' mask; it had not been taken from her. It had not vanished. Urik was on the path
the makers had told her to follow. It was the place where she belonged, where the makers said she could,
and would, survive.

Remember Urik. Remember Elabon Escrissar of Urik!

In a heartbeat, Mahtra did remember. A torrent of images etched with bitter emotion and pain fell into
her memory. Consistent with her nakedness and helplessness, the images expanded her memories,
transforming everything she'd known. The shame she'd felt for her face spread to cover her entire body,
her entire existence, and fear extended its icy fingers into the vital parts of her being.

Fear and shame and despair. They are a part of you because you were a part of them.
Remember!

Mahtra fought out of the dream. The cruel men of memory disappeared, along with the bonds around
her wrists and ankles. Her mask returned, comfortable and reassuring around her face, but the last
victory—waking up—eluded her. She found herself on a gray plain, more dreary and bleak than anything
she'd imagined, assaulted by an invisible wind that blew against her face no matter where she looked. While
Mahtra tried to understand, the wind strengthened. It drove her slowly backward, back to the dream and
memories of shame.

"Enough!" A voice that was not Mahtra's or the dream's thundered across the gray plain. It set an
invisible wall against the wind and, a moment later, dealt Mahtra a blow that left her senseless.

"Enough!"

Akashia inhaled her mind-bending intentions from the subtle realm where the Unseen influenced
reality. She feared she recognized that voice, hoped she was wrong, and took no chances. As soon as she
was settled in her physical self, she swept a leafy frond through the loose dirt and dust on the ground in
front of her, destroying the touchstone patterns she'd drawn there. In another moment she would have
erased them from her memory as well, replacing them with innocent diversions.

But Akashia didn't have another moment.

A wind from nowhere whisked through her Quraite hut. It took a familiar shape: frail-limbed and
hunched with age, a broad-brimmed hat with a gauze veil obscuring eyes that shone with their own light.

Not a friendly light. Akashia didn't expect friendship from her one-time mentor. She knew what she'd
been doing. There were fewer rules along the Unseen Way than there were in druidry. Still, it didn't take
rules to know that Telhami wouldn't approve of her meddling in the white-skinned woman's dreams.

"Grandmother."

A statement, nothing more or less, a paltry acknowledgment of Telhami's presence in this hut, their first
meeting since Telhami's death a year ago. For in all that time, no matter what entreaties Akashia offered,
Telhami hadn't left her grove, hadn't strayed from the man to whom she'd bequeathed that grove.
Even now, after all that silence, Telhami said nothing, only lifted her hand. Wind fell from her
outstretched arm, an invisible gust that scoured the ground between them. When it had finished, the
touchstone pattern had reappeared.

She drew a veil of her own around her thoughts, preserving her privacy. While Telhami might have the
mind-bending strength to pierce Akashia's defenses, Akashia had survived more fearsome assaults than
Grandmother was likely to throw at her, no matter how great her disappointment. Courtesy of Elabon
Escrissar, Akashia knew what dwelt in every murky corner of her being, and she'd learned to transform
that darkness into a weapon.

If Telhami wanted to do battle with those nightmares, Akashia was ready.

"Is this judgment?" Telhami's spirit demanded, adding its own judgment to its disappointment.

Akashia offered neither answer nor apology to the woman who'd raised her, mentored her, ignored her
and now presumed to challenge her.

"I asked you a question, Kashi."

"Yes, it's judgment," she said, defying the hard bright eyes that glowed within the veil. "It had to be
done. She came from him!" she snarled, then shuddered as defiance shattered. Escrissar's black mask
appeared in her mind's eye. And with the mask, bright unnatural talons fastened to the fingers of his
dark-gloved hands appeared also. Talons that caressed her skin, leaving a trail of blood.

The New Race woman's mask was quite, quite different. Her long red fingernails seemed impractical;
nevertheless a rope had been thrown and pulled tight. Akashia couldn't think of one without thinking of the
other.

"It had to be done," she repeated obstinately. "I told Pavek to take her to his grove—to the grove you
bequeathed to him—but the Hero of Quraite refused. So I judged her myself."

"Ignoring his advice?"

"She'd already blinded his common sense. I'm not afraid, Grandmother; I'm not weak. There was no
reason for you to turn to him instead of me. Pavek will never understand Quraite the way I do, even
without your grove to guide me. He doesn't care the way I care."

"The white-skinned woman came from Hamanu, not his high templar," Telhami corrected her, ignoring
everything else. "The Lion-King sent her. She alone traveled under his protection, she alone survived the
Sun's Fist. It's not for druids to judge the Lion-King, or his messengers. If you will not believe the woman
herself, if you refuse to listen to Pavek, believe me."

Why? Akashia wanted to scream. Why should she believe? All the while she'd been growing up,
learning the druid secrets under Grandmother's tutelage, Urik and its sorcerer-king had been Quraite's
enemy. Everything she learned was designed to nurture the ancient oasis community and hide it from the
Lion-King's rapacious sulphur eyes. The only exception was zarneeka, which the druids grew in their
groves and which Quraite sent to Urik to compound into an analgesic for the poor who couldn't afford to
visit a healer. And then, they learned that Escrissar and his halfling alchemist were compounding their
zarneeka not into Ral's Breath, but into the maddening poison Laq.