Cinnabar Shadows (29 page)

"If this is as far as he can go, why can't we do what he wants and leave him here? The sun's coming
around. It's going to be as hot as the Sun's Fist against these rocks in a little while. Why should we all die
because he doesn't want to move again?"

"She's right about the sun," Orekel said softly to Ruari, though Zvain was between them and could
easily hear every word. "We got to get moving, son, or we'll fry."

They were already parched and achy from a lack of water, which Ruari could remedy with druidry.
The mountains were livelier than the Sun's Fist. If they'd had a bucket, he could have filled it several times
over. Without a bucket, he was hoping they'd last until he found a natural depression in the rocks. Here on
the ledge, he had nothing but his cupped hands to hold the water he conjured out of the air.

"Come on, Zvain," Ruari pleaded.

Mahtra walked ahead. "I'm leaving. Finding Kakzim's more important."

Orekel shrugged. "The lady's right, son. We can't stay here." He followed Mahtra.

"Zvain—?"

The boy turned slowly away from Ruari and took a halting step in Orekel's direction.

Ruari found his hollow rock near the top of the gap. On his knees with his eyes closed and his arms
outstretched, he recited the druid mnemonics for the creation of water in the presence of air and stone. The
guardian aspect of this place was sharp-edged like the cliffs, and heavy like the mountains themselves.
Ruari couldn't hold it the first time, and his spell did not quicken. The recitation ended with the hollow as dry
and empty as it had begun. Grimly, the half-elf withdrew Pavek's knife from its sheath and made a shallow
gash along his forearm. With his blood as a spark, the spell quickened and water began to collect in the
hollow.

When the water was flowing steadily, Ruari sat back on his heels, letting the others drink while he
recovered from the strain of druidry in an unfamiliar place.

"Magician, eh?" Orekel asked.

"Druid." Ruari offered the correct name for his sort of spellcraft.

"Don't kill no plants, do you?"

"Wind and fire, no—I'm not a defiler, nor a preserver. I'm not a wizard at all. My power comes from
the land itself, all the aspects of it."

"So long as you don't suck things down to ash. Can't go taking nobody into the forest who'd turn 'em
into ash."

"Don't worry."

Zvain had finished drinking. Orekel drank next, with Ruari's permission, then Ruari himself drank his
fill. When he'd finished, water was still bubbling in the hollow, faster than they could drink it down. It spilled
over the top and seeped across the soles of his sandals while Mahtra stood and stared.

"You better drink," Ruari advised. "I can't do that again until sundown, and we don't have anything to
carry water in."

The boy and the dwarf didn't need a second invitation, but Ruari stayed on the opposite side of the
hollow, his fists propped against his hips.

"After all this time, Mahtra—after all we've been through —do you truly think we're going to laugh or
run away screaming?"

"You might," she replied with that smooth honesty that left more questions than answers in Ruari's
mind.

The half-elf shook his head and lowered his arms. "Have it your way, then," he said and started
walking. He'd gone several paces when she called out:

"Wait!"

Ruari turned around as she lowered her hands from the back of her head, bringing the mask with them.
The mask was a good idea, he decided immediately. Her face was so unusual, he couldn't keep from
staring. Mahtra had no nose to speak of, just two dark curves matched against each other. She didn't have
much of a chin, either, or lips. Her mouth was tiny—about the right size for those red beads she liked so
much—and lined with teeth he could see from where he stood. Yet for all its strangeness, Mahtra's face
wasn't deformed. With her eyes and skin, an ordinary human face would have been deformed. Mahtra's
face was her own.

"Different," Ruari acknowledged aloud. "Maybe different enough to warrant a mask—but it's your
face—the face that belongs to the rest of you."

"Ugly," she retorted, and he saw that her mouth did not shape her voice and words.

"No—Pavek's..." He sighed and began again. "Pavek was ugly."

"Akashia said no. She said he wasn't an ugly man."

Another sigh. "Kashi said that, did she?" It was too late to consider what Kashi might have meant.
"What did she say about me?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all—but we weren't talking about you."

"Take your time," he said to Mantra, rubbing his forearm, though that wasn't the part of him that hurt.
"I'll wait just up here. We can let the other two get a bit ahead."

Ruari found himself a rock that gave Mahtra her privacy and him a good view of Zvain and Orekel as
they continued up the gap. He took out Pavek's knife, and wondered whose black hair had been braided
around the hilt. Not Kashi's. Not anyone Ruari had ever heard Pavek mention. Maybe they would have
gotten their affections straightened out if they'd had the time; maybe not. One thing for certain: he'd made a
fool of himself trying to capture Kashi's attention and affection when Pavek had already secured it.

Mahtra reappeared with her mask in place, and together they continued up the gap, easily catching up
with Zvain and Orekel. The sun came around in the middle of the afternoon, baking their bodies into numb
silence. The three lowlanders—who'd never seen a mountain up close, much less climbed one—thought the
gap would never end, but it did as the sun was setting. As green faded to black, they got their first look at a
verdant forest that stretched ahead of them as far as they could see.

For Ruari, the sight was a waking dream. Telhami's grove in Quraite remembered forests and offered
the hope that a forest might return. This—this vastness that was everything the barren Tablelands had
ceased to be, was Telhami's hopes fulfilled, Quraite's promise kept. He would have sat there staring at it all
night, except the mountain cooled faster than the barrens did, and he was shivering before he knew it.

It wasn't long until they were huddled together against the rocks, trying to keep warm and not
succeeding. Orekel said it was too dangerous to descend the mountain without sunlight to show them the
way. There was nothing with which to build a fire and though Ruari's druidry could wring water and a bland
but nutritious paste out of the cooling air, he knew no spell that would provide them with warmth.

Pavek might have known such a spell. Pavek claimed to have memorized as many of the spellcraft
scrolls as he'd been able to read in the Urik city archives. But it seemed more likely that no one in the long
history of the parchec tablelands had bothered to formulate a spell for heat, so they took turns in the middle
of their huddle. When dawn reached over the mountain crest, it found them stiff, sore, and still weary.

The descent into the forest was harder on their legs than yesterday's climb through the gap had been.
Ruari discovered new muscles along his shins and across the tops of his feet. It would have been easier if
his body had simply gone numb, but he felt every step from his heel to the base of his skull. He had no idea
how the other three were doing; his world began and ended with the aches of his body.

When Orekel asked to see the map, Ruari dug it out of his sleeve without a second thought.

"Son, this here, this here's not a map, son."

"I never said it was," Ruari countered, smiling wearily and looking for something to sit on that wouldn't
be impossible to get up from afterward.

Ruari eased himself onto the trunk of a fallen tree. He wished he didn't hurt so much. The forest was a
miraculous place—the promise every druid made in his grove fulfilled to the greatest imaginable measure.
There were birds and insects to complement the trees, and gray-bottomed clouds in the distance bearing the
promise of real, not magic-induced, rain. The land quivered and crawled with riotous life, more life in a
handful of moist, crumbly dirt than in a day's walking across the barren Tablelands.

And Ruari couldn't appreciate it. Not only did he hurt too much, he wasn't here to immerse himself in
druidry. He'd come to the forest to find a black tree, to find Kakzim and bring him to justice. For Pavek. All
for Pavek, because it was Kakzim's fault that Pavek was dead. He'd take Kakzim's head back to Urik and
hurl it at Hamanu's palace. Then he'd go home to Urik and plant a tree for his friend.

"Son—" Orekel tugged on his sleeve. "Son, I say we have a problem."

"You can't help us," Ruari said slowly. "That's the problem, isn't it? You can't find the black tree. All
that talk in Ject about halfling treasure you hadn't brought out because you'd gotten 'tempted,' that was just
wind in the air. You're no different than Mady: you thought we had a map we weren't smart enough to
keep or follow."

Orekel removed his cap. "You put a mite too fine a point on things, son. The black tree, she's in this
forest, and she's got treasure trove buried 'neath her roots. She's not two-day's walk from here, and that's a
fact. But this here—" He held out the map. "Now, you don't rightly speak Halfling, so you're not likely to
read it much either. So, you got to believe me, son, this here's not a map to the black tree; it's more a map
to your place, I reckon, to Urik—that's where you come from, now, isn't it?"

Ruari tried to remember if he or Zvain or Mahtra had mentioned Urik since they'd met the dwarf, but
his memory refused to cooperate. Maybe they had and Orekel was playing them for fools, or maybe he
could read those marks, one of which spelled Urik. Either way, Ruari was too tired for deception.

"Around Urik, yes."

"Always best to be honest, son," Orekel advised, and suddenly his eyes seemed much sharper, his
movements, crisper. "Now, maybe we can solve our problem—you being a druid and all—maybe you don't
need a map to find the black tree. Like as not, you can just kneel down on the ground the way you did up on
the crest and mumble a few words that'll show you the way."

Ruari said no with a shake of his head.

Zvain hobbled over. The boy looked at the tree trunk and—wiser than Ruari—chose not to sit down.
"Sure you could, Ru. You've just got to try. Come on, Ru—try, please?"

He shook his head again; he'd already tried. As soon as Orekel had made the suggestion, Ruari
had—almost without thinking—put his palms against the moss-covered bark and opened himself to the
aspects of the forest. The blare of life would have overwhelmed him if he'd had the wit or will to resist it.
Instead, it had flowed through him like water through a hollow log—in one side and out the other.

In the aftermath of that flow, Ruari considered it fortunate that he'd been numbed by aches and
exhaustion. The guardian aspects of this forest weren't habituated to a druid's touch, weren't habituated and
didn't seem to like it, not druidry in general, nor him in particular. For a moment, all the leaves had become
open eyes and open mouths with teeth instead of edges.

That moment had passed once he raised his palms and consciously shut himself off from the forest's
burgeoning vitality. Leaves were simply leaves again, but the sense that they were being watched persisted.
For most of his life— even in his own grove, which was mostly brush and grass with a few sparse
trees—Ruari had either been within walls or looking at a horizon that was at least a day's walk away. Here
in the forest, he could touch the green-leafed horizon, and the forest, which had seemed like paradise before
he sat down, had become a place of hidden menace.

He was afraid to cut himself a staff, lest he arouse something more hostile.

"Give it a try, son." Orekel urged. "What've we got to lose?"

"I'm too tired," Ruari replied, which was true. "Maybe later," which was a lie—but he didn't want to
alarm the others.

"So, what do we do?" Zvain asked, backsliding into the whiny, selfish tone he used when he was tired,
frightened, or both. "Sit here until you're rested?"

Orekel took Zvain's arm and gently spun him around. "Best to keep moving, son. Things that stay in
one place too long attract an appetite."

"Move where?" Zvain persisted.

"Does it matter?" Mahtra asked. The climb down hadn't bothered her any more than the climb up, any
more than anything ever seemed to bother her. If the New Races were made from something, someone
else, then whatever Mahtra had been, it wasn't elven, or dwarven, or human. "We don't have a map
anymore. One direction's as good as another if we don't know where we're going."

A heartbeat later, they were thrown against one another and hoisted off the ground in a net. Zvain
screamed in terror; Orekel cursed, as if this had happened before, and— foolish as it was—Ruari felt better
with his weight on the ropes, not his feet.

The sizzle of Mahtra's thunderclap power passed through Ruari not once, but twice. The sound was
loud enough to detach a shower of leaves from their branches and make the net sway like a bead on a
string. But it wasn't enough to send them crashing to the ground, and Mahtra's third blast was much weaker
than the first two. The fourth was no more than a flash without the thunder.

Heartbeats later, they heard movement in the underbrush, and halflings appeared on the trail beneath
them. Looking down, Ruari saw a score of halflings. None looked friendly, but the one who raised his spear
and prodded the half-elf sharply in the flank had a truly frightening face, with weblike burn scars covering
his cheeks and eyes as black and deep as night between the stars. He gave Ruari another poke between
the ribs.

"The ugly man—Templar Paddock—where is he?"

"I've heard there's a hunters' village about a day's ride from here. They call it Ject. It's a way station
for beasts on their way to the combat arenas of the cities. It's full of scoundrels, knaves, and charlatans of
every stripe, some of whom'll lead a party across the mountains and into the halfling forests. It's a day's ride
to the southeast, but we could hire a guide for an easier passage, if you think we should, Lord Pavek."

Unlike the ride from Quraite to Urik, there were no bells on the huge kank Lord Pavek rode, no excuse
for not hearing Commandant Javed's statement, no excuse for not answering the implied question.

Still, under the guise of careful consideration, Pavek could take the time to shift his weight, easing
strained joints and muscles. He'd been kank-back for the better part of three days, and the only parts of him
that didn't hurt were the ones that had gone numb while the walls of Urik were still visible behind them.

Pavek thought he'd set a hard pace when he'd gotten himself, Mahtra, Ruari, and Zvain from Quraite to
Urik in ten days. Since leaving Khelo shortly after his conversation with Lord Hamanu, Pavek had learned
new things about the bugs'—and his own—endurance.

Together with Commandant Javed of Urik's war bureau, a double maniple of troops, and an equal
number of slaves, Pavek had pushed the war bureau's biggest, toughest bugs relentlessly, following the line
he saw when he suspended the strands of ensorcelled halfling hair in the draft-free box he kept lashed to
the back of his saddle.

And now, when they were almost on top of the mountains they'd been chasing since yesterday
morning, the commandant was suggesting a two-day detour. More than two days: it would surely take
longer to walk through the forest on the other side of the mountains than it would to ride to this Ject.

But Pavek had learned over the past few days not to trust Commandant Javed's statements at face
value.

"Is that a recommendation, Commandant?" In that time, Pavek had learned the trick of answering
Javed's questions with questions. It made him seem wiser than he was and sometimes kept him from falling
into the commandant's traps.

"A fact, Lord Pavek," Javed said with a smile and no sign of the aches that plagued Pavek. "You're the
man in charge. You make the decisions; I merely provide the facts. Do we veer southeast, or do we hold
steady?"

A challenge. And another question, the same, but different.

Hamanu had said the templars in the double maniple were all volunteers, but the Lion hadn't said
anything about the commandant, whether or not he was a willing participant in this barrens-trek or not; and,
if he was, why? Those facts might have helped Pavek interpret Javed's smiles.

Commandant Javed had served Urik and the Lion-King for six decades, all of them illustrious. He was
well past the age when most elves gave up their running on foot and sat quietly in the long sunset of their
lives, but the only concession the commandant made to his old bones and old injuries was the kank he rode
as if he'd been born in its saddle.

There were three rubies mounted in Javed's steel medallion, one for each time he'd been designated
Hamanu's Champion, and two diamonds commemorating his exploits as Hero of Urik.

Among Pavek's cherished few memories of life before the orphanage was the day he'd stood on the
King's Way, holding his mother's hand and watching the parade as the great Commandant Javed returned
triumphant from a campaign against Gulg.

The farmers and druids of Quraite nowadays called Pavek a hero; Pavek reserved that honor for the
black-skinned, black-haired elf riding beside him.

"A decision, Lord Pavek," the commandant urged. "A decision now, while the wheel can still turn
freely." He gestured toward the outriding templars. "Timing is everything. Do not confuse a decision with
an accident or lost opportunity, my lord."

Good advice. Excellent advice. So why wasn't Javed leading this expedition? Never mind that high
templars outranked commandants: that only proved to Pavek that Commandant Javed had been more
successful at holding on to his steel medallion than he himself had been at holding on to his regulator's
ceramic one.

So why was Javed here at all? After conquering every challenge Urik's war bureau offered and
successfully resisting a golden medallion, why was Commandant Javed headed into the halfling forest at a
regulator's side, and looking to that regulator for orders?

"Now, Lord Pavek." The commandant smiled again, ivory teeth gleaming through the black gash in his
weathered face.

Pavek turned from that face and looked straight ahead at the mountains.

"No guides," he said. "We've already got our guide." He thumped the box behind him and shot a
sideways glance at the commandant, whose smile had faded to a less-than-approving frown. "When we
brought the cavern poison to Lord Hamanu, he said we had time to destroy it because Ral didn't 'occlude'
Guthay—whatever that means—for another thirteen days. Well, we got rid of the poison, but we didn't
catch Kakzim. Maybe he's gone home in defeat and we can catch him anytime, but maybe he's got
something else he can unleash when the moons 'occlude' four nights from now.

"If we go southeast and hire ourselves a guide, we're sure to lose at least two days getting back on the
halfling's trail. Maybe more than two days, without kanks on the far side of the mountains. My rump would
appreciate an easy passage, but not if I miss another chance to nab Kakzim."

The commandant's frown had deepened all the while Pavek explained the thin logic of his decision. He
considered reversing himself, but the stubbornness that had kept him trapped in lower ranks of the civil
bureau took hold of his neck and stiffened his resolve.

He faced Javed squarely, matching his scar-twisted smile against the elf's frown. "You wanted my
decision, Commandant. Now you've got it: we hold steady, straight into those mountains ahead and the
forest beyond. I want my hands on Kakzim's neck before the moons occlude."

"Good," the commandant said softly, almost as if he were speaking to himself, though his amber eyes
were locked with Pavek's. "Better than I expected. Better than I'd hoped from the Hero of Quraite. Four
days left from thirteen. Let's put on some speed, Lord Pavek. I could walk faster than this. We'll sleep
tonight on the mountain crest. We'll sleep on the mountain, and we'll find your halfling before Ral marches
across Guthay's face. My word on it, Lord Pavek."

Commandant Javed's word was as good as the steel he wore around his neck. Leaving behind the
kanks, the slaves, and everything else that a templar couldn't carry on his back, the elf had had them
sleeping on top of the mountain ridge one night and on the forest floor the next. They'd lost two templars in
the process, one going up the mountains, the other coming down.

Carelessness, Javed had said both times, and refused to slacken the pace.

At the forest-side base of the mountains, the templars, including Pavek and Javed, paused to exchange
the shirts they'd been wearing for long-sleeve tunics and leather armor that was fitted from neck to waist
and divided into overlapping strips from there down to the middle of their thighs.

It was all part of the equipment Pavek had been given at the beginning of this journey, and he thought
nothing of Javed's order until he touched the tunic's drab, tightly woven fabric.

"Silk?" he asked incredulously, fingering the alien fabric, which he'd associated with fawning nobles,
simpering merchants, and women he couldn't afford.

"That's protection?" For all that the commandant had experience with the forest halflings on his side,
Pavek began to remove his slippery tunic.

"Damn sure is. The barbs on the arrowheads don't catch your guts. Ease the silk out; and you ease the
arrowhead out, too—with the poison still on it."

"Still on the arrow?"

Javed's enigmatic smile flickered at him. "Didn't believe it myself till I was fighting belgoi north of
Balic. Watched a healer work an arrow clean out of a man's gut; silk was as good as new, and so was the
man ten days later. Been a believer ever since. My advice, my lord, is to keep it on. We know your man's a
poisoner."

The protection Mahtra's makers had given her against living creatures had no effect whatsoever on
woven vine net. Unfortunately, she had exhausted herself against the halfling-made net before she realized
that fact. She'd had nothing left when the halflings lowered them to the ground, and so she stood helpless,
barely able to stay upright, when Kakzim had personally bound her wrists behind her back and taken her
mask away.

Five days later, imprisoned beneath the great BlackTree, surrounded by dank, dark dirt, with Zvain and
Orekel little more than voices in the blackness, she still shuddered at the memory.

That theft had been Kakzim's personal vengeance against her. He'd humiliated the others, too,
especially Ruari. When the half-elf told Kakzim that Pavek was already dead, the former slave had reeled
backward as if Ruari had landed a blow in a particularly vulnerable place, and then transferred all his
vicious hatred from Pavek, who was beyond his reach, to Ruari, who had no defense.

Throughout their two-day-long, stumbling, starving walk through the mazelike forest, Kakzim had
harried Ruari with taunts and petty but vicious physical attacks. The half-elf was badly bruised and bleeding
from a score of cuts, and barely able to stand by the time they reached their destination: the BlackTree.

Nothing in her spiraling memory could have prepared Mahtra for her first sight of the halfling
stronghold. The crude bark map they'd found in Codesh depicted a single tree as large as the Smoking
Crown Volcano, which they'd ridden near on their way to the forest. But coming upon it suddenly in this
arm's-length world of trees everywhere, the black tree seemed exactly as big as the volcano.

Ten of her standing with arms extended could not have encircled its trunk. Roots as big around as
Orekel's dwarven torso breached the dim, moss-covered clearing around the tree's trunk before returning
into the ground.

But it wasn't the black tree's trunk or roots that lingered in Mahtra's memory, sitting here in the
darkness between those roots. It was the moment she'd raised her head, hoping to see the sky through
branches as big around as a kank's body. There'd been no sky, only the soles of a dead-man's feet.

She'd cried out. Kakzim had laughed, and—worse—the feet had moved, and Mantra had realized that
a living man, a halfling, hung above her, suspended from a mighty branch by a rope wound tight beneath his
arms.

Worse still, the living, hanging halfling was not alone. There were other halflings dangling from other
branches, more than she could easily count. Some of them were alive, like the halfling whose feet were
directly above her head, but others were rotting corpses, barely recognizable.

Worst of all—the memory Mahtra could not escape even now in her prison beneath the tree—was the
great drop of blood that had struck between her eyes as she stood, transfixed by the horror above her. With
her hands bound behind her back, she hadn't been able to wipe the blood off, and her pleas for help, for
mercy, brought only laughter from her captors.

Her skin was still wet when Kakzim ordered his fellow halflings to drive her, Zvain, and Orekel through
a narrow hole between the roots. Prodded by sharp spears, they'd wriggled like serpents through the hole, a
narrow tunnel, and—blindly at the end—tumbled into the dank, dirt pit that now imprisoned them.

Orekel had gone first; he'd hurt his leg falling several times his own height into the pit. Then Zvain,
who'd landed on top of the dwarf, and finally her. She'd landed on them both.

And maybe, she shuddered at the thought, they'd hung him in the tree.

That memory was all too clear. She'd been able to scrape the blood from her face, crawling on her
belly down that tunnel, but there was nothing she could do for the blood in her memory.

It was daytime in the world above; she could tell because some light got in around the roots that wound
around the sides of their prison. There was enough to see Zvain and Orekel, whose leg had swollen horribly
since he fell. When night came, she could see nothing at all.

Night had come twice since they landed in the pit.

Food had come twice also, both times in the form of slops and rubbish thrown down the hole. It was
vile and disgusting, but they were starving. Liquid seeped through the dirt walls of their prison. Mahtra's
tongue tasted water, but her memory saw blood.

Orekel, who understood Halfling, said their captors were planning a big sacrifice when the little moon,
Ral, passed in front of big Guthay. When he wasn't drunk with pain, he made plans for their escape:

Zvain was the smallest; he could climb up both their backs and through the hole to the tunnel. Then,
using Mahtra's shawl, which Kakzim had left along with everything else save her mask and Ruari's knife,
Zvain could hoist Mahtra to freedom. Her protection would do its work. They could find a rope—there was
plenty of rope available—to get him out of the hole, find the treasure, and make good their escape before
the halflings recovered from Mahtra's thunderclap.

That was Orekel's plan, when his ankle wasn't hurting so bad he couldn't think or talk. Maybe, if he'd
been able to stand or she'd been confident her protection would work again, they might have tried it.

But Orekel couldn't stand and, though she'd chewed through and swallowed their last bit of cinnabar,
the little lion that Zvain had stolen from the palace, Mahtra didn't think she'd ever be able to use the maker's
protection again. Something was missing. There was now a dark place inside her, a place she'd never
realized was lit until the flame went out.

And now there was no more talk of escape. Well into the third day of their captivity, their prison was
quiet—except for Orekel's babbling and groans. She and Zvain had nothing left to say to each other.