Cinnabar Shadows (32 page)

Her hands were strong enough to lift Ruari. They were surely strong enough to snap a halfling's neck.
Mahtra could imagine flesh, sinew, and bone giving way beneath her hands as she took her first stride
toward Kakzim.

You will die, she thought, her eyes fixed on his. I will kill you.

Mahtra struck a wall midway through her second stride, an invisible wall, an Unseen wall of
determination that was stronger and more focused than her own. It had no words, only images—images of
a white-skinned woman taking the rope and pulling it, hand over hand, until Ruari was high in the black tree.
The image was irresistible. Mahtra turned away from Kakzim. She took the rope and gave it a powerful
yank; Ruari's shoulders rose from stone slab. His head fell back with a moan. His long coppery hair shone
like fire in the sun's last light.

They would all die. They would all be sacrificed to the black tree: the sacred BlackTree, the stronghold
of halfling knowledge. Their blood would seep down to the deepest roots where it would erase the stigma of
failure and disgrace. Paddock—

Her hands faltered. The rope slipped. She could see the familiar face with its jagged scar from eye to
lip. His name was not Paddock; his name was Pavek. Pavek! And he would not approve of what she was
doing—

A fist of Unseen wind struck Mahtra's thoughts, shattering them and leaving her empty-minded until
other thoughts filled the void: It was not fitting that BlackTree refused to hear Kakzim's prayers, refused to
acknowledge his domination. He'd committed no crimes, made no errors. He'd been undone by the very
mongrels and misfits he'd sworn to eliminate, which was surely proof of the honor and validity of his
intentions.

Pavek would have been the perfect sacrifice, but Pavek had escaped. Kakzim would offer three
sacrifices in Pavek's place—Ruari first, then Zvain, then Mahtra herself—all three offered while the two
moons shone with one light. Their blood would nurture the BlackTree's roots, and all of Kakzim's minor
errors would be forgiven, forgotten. The BlackTree would accept him as the rightful heir of halfling
knowledge.

She tied the rope off with the others already knotted at the base of the BlackTree's huge trunk, then
she looked at Zvain. His turn would come next, when the overlapping moons were visible above the
treetops. Her turn would come at midnight, when Ral was centered within Guthay's orb. She would walk
freely to the stone, made by halflings and unmade the same way.

Made by halflings?

Mahtra recaptured her thoughts, broke the wall, and beat back the Unseen fist. Made by halflings—the
voices in the darkness at the beginning of her memory were halfling voices. The makers who had made a
mistake and cast her out of their lives with no more than red beads and a mask, those makers were
halflings. Now another halfling, the same halfling who had slaughtered Father, had cast her out of her own
thoughts, and...

Mahtra couldn't cry, but she could scream. She turned her head toward Kakzim when she screamed
and nailed him with a look as venomous and mad as he'd ever given the world. Thunder brewed inside her
as all the cinnabar she'd swallowed in the darkness quickened. The last thing she saw before the cloudy
membrane slid over her eyes was Kakzim running toward her with his arm raised and the metal knife in his
hand.

He might succeed in unmaking her, but that would come too late. Mahtra extended her arms, as if to
embrace a lover, and surrendered herself to what the halflings had given her, confident that her thunder
would kill.

Pavek had carried their guide almost from the start of their headlong march through the forest. He
believed too late for halfling legs might be just in time for longer human legs, if they stormed through the
forest like a thirst-crazed mekillot, never slowing, never weaving right or left. The little fellow on Pavek's
shoulders had collected a few more bruises dodging branches on a maze of trails not made by anyone of
Pavek's extended height, but Cerk hadn't complained, simply grabbed fistfuls of Pavek's hair and shouted
out "right" or "left" at the appropriate time.

The twin moons had risen before the sun completely set. Between them, they shed sufficient light
through the leaves to keep the trail visible to Pavek's dim, human eyes; but it was a strange light, filled with
ghosts and shimmering wisps and luminous eyes in slanting pairs and foreboding isolation. The novice
druid's skin crawled as Cerk guided him through the haunted trees, but he never hesitated, not until a
solitary clap of thunder rolled through the moonlit forest.

"Mahtra!" Pavek shouted.

"The white-skinned woman is still alive," Cerk agreed.

Thinking he no longer needed a guide, Pavek came to a stiff-legged halt and tried to lift Cerk down, but
the halfling clung to him, insisting:

"You won't find it without me, even now. We must all stay together!"

Pavek turned to Javed, who'd halted beside him, as the other templars had come to a stop behind them.
With his nighttime skin and elven eyes, the commandant was little more than a moonlit ghost himself.

"You heard him. Commandant."

"Do you think you could ever outrun me, my lord?" Ivory teeth made a smile beneath glassy eyes.

"Javed—" Pavek dug the toe of his sandal into the loose debris that covered the forest floor. "I plan to
outrun death itself."

He filled his lungs and pushed off with all the strength in his body. The elven commandant fell behind
for two paces, then he was back at Pavek's side, grinning broadly, running effortlessly.

"Lean into your strides, Pavek, put your head down and breathe!"

Pavek hadn't the wherewithal to answer, but he took the lessons to heart as Cerk shouted another
"Veer left!" in his ear.

He saw hearthfires flickering in the near-distance. He'd heard nothing louder than Cerk or the pounding
of his own feet since the thunder rolled over them, but silence didn't reassure him. Mahtra's protection was
a potent weapon. She could have felled a score of halflings, but they wouldn't stay down for long. Pavek
fingered the knotted leather looped over the top of his scabbard and drew his sword as he and Javed led
their templars into a clearing that was larger than the whole halfling settlement, quiet as a tomb and almost
as dark at its heart.

"Spread out. Keep your wits and swords ready!" Javed shouted his orders before he stopped running.

In pairs, as always, the men and women of the war bureau did as they were told.

"Mahtra! Mahtra, where are you?" Pavek set Cerk down without protest and spun on his heels as he
called her name again: "Mahtra!"

"Pavek?" Her familiar, faintly inflected voice came from the black center of the clearing. "Pavek!"
He heard her coming toward him before her pale skin appeared in the moonlit. Javed took a brand from
the nearest hearth. Her mask was gone. Another time, her face would have astonished him—he would
have made a rude fool of himself gaping and staring. Tonight, he blinked once and saw the blood on
Mahtra's neck, shoulder, and arm instead; her own blood, from her stiff, uncertain movements. Then he
noticed the bodies. There were bodies everywhere: halflings on the ground, felled by thunder and just
starting to move; halflings overhead, dangling from the branches of the biggest tree Pavek had ever seen,
halflings whom Mahtra might have stunned, halflings who'd died long ago, and—scattered in the
torchlight—bodies that weren't halflings, including a lean, lanky half-elf he recognized between two
heartbeats.

"Hamanu's mercy," Pavek's voice was soft, his lungs were empty, and his heart. "Cut him down." He
couldn't breathe. His sword slipped through his fingers. "Zvain?" he whispered, starting another sweep of
the bodies in the tree and those on the ground, looking for a halfling who wasn't a halfling.

"Alive," Mahtra said. "Hurt. Cut him down?"

All of which confirmed Pavek's dire guess that Ruari was neither hurt, nor alive. His mouth worked
silently; the commandant gave the order. Two templars ran where the hanging ropes led, into the dark,
toward the great tree's trunk. Their obsidian swords sang as they hacked through the ropes. Bodies fell like
heavy, reeking rain, Ruari's among them, completely limp... deadweight... dead.

Pavek started toward his friend's lifeless body; the emptiness beneath his ribs had become an ache.

Mahtra stopped him. "Kakzim's gone. He grabbed me; he was touching me when the thunder
happened. Another mistake. He got away."

"Which way?" Rage banished Pavek's grief and got his blood flowing again. "Which way, Mahtra?"

"I don't know. He got away before I could see again."

Pavek swore. His rage was fading without a target; grief threatened. "Couldn't you hear something?"
he demanded harshly, more harshly than Mahtra deserved.

Her neck twisted, bringing one ear down to her bloody shoulder: her best impression of misery and
apology. "A sound, maybe—over there?" She pointed with her bloody arm.

A sound, that was all the help Mahtra could give him; it would have to be enough. Retrieving his sword,
Pavek jogged into the moonlit forest. Javed called him a fool. Cerk warned him his chase was futile and
doomed. He could live with doom and futility—anything was better than facing Ruari's corpse.

Kakzim left no trail. There was a path, but it petered out on the bank of a little brook. Kakzim could
have crossed the water or followed it upstream or down—if he'd come this way at all. The chase was futile
and doomed, and Pavek knew himself for a fool.

A sweating, overheated fool.

The forest was cooler than the Tablelands, but not by much, and its moist air had glued Pavek's silk
shirt to his skin. He knelt on the bank, his sword at his side, and plunged his head beneath the surface, as he
would have done after a day's work in Telhami's grove. The forest spoke to him while he drank, an
undisciplined babble, each rock and tree, every drop of water and every creature larger than a worm
trumpeting its own existence: wild life at its purest, without a druid to teach it a communal song.

Pavek raised his dripping head. The moons had risen above the treetops. Javed was right: little Ral was
slipping, silently and safely, across Guthay's larger sphere. Silver light mixed with gold. He could feel it on
his face, not unlike the sensations a yellow-robe templar felt when Hamanu's sulphur eyes loomed overhead
and magic quickened the air.

Insight fell upon him. Templars reached to Hamanu for their magic. Druids reached to the guardian
aspects of the land for their magic. Kakzim had wanted the power of two moons when he aimed to poison
Urik or sacrifice Ruari. It was a useless parade of insights: Magicians reached for magic to work their
magic. Different magicians reached to different sources. A magician reached to the source that worked for
him, and magic happened.

Anyone could reach, but if a man grabbed and held on with all his strength, all his will, magic might
happen. And if you were already a doomed fool, you might as well reach for the moons, and the sparkling
stars, too.

Pavek reached with his hands and his thoughts. He drew the silver-gold moonlight into himself and
used it to summon the voices of the forest. When he held them all-moons and voices together—and his
head seemed likely to burst from the strain, he shaped a single image.

Kakzim.

Kakzim with slave-scars, Kakzim without them. Black-eyed Kakzim, hate-eyed Kakzim. Kakzim who
had come this way.
Who had seen Kakzim pass? What had felt him?

He wasn't a fast runner, even measured against other humans, but Pavek was steady and endowed
with all the endurance and stamina the templar orphanage could beat into a youngster's bones. One of his
strides equalled two of Kakzim's, and one stride at a time, Pavek narrowed the gap between himself and his
quarry.

The moment finally came when merely human ears heard movement up ahead and merely human eyes
spied a halfling's silhouette between the trees. Releasing the forest voices and the silver-gold magical
moonlight, Pavek drew his sword. Still and silent, he planned his moves carefully, borrowing every trick
Ruari had ever shown him. But physical stealth wasn't enough.

Kakzim struck first with a mind-bender's might. The halfling's initial strike stripped Pavek of his
confidence, but that wasn't a significant loss: Pavek truly believed he was an ugly, clumsy, dung-skulled
oaf—and unlucky, besides. Relieved of those burdens, Pavek was alert and centered behind his sword as
he approached the trees where Kakzim lurked. Next, Kakzim sent his mind-bending thoughts after Pavek's
bravery and courage, which was a waste of the halfling's time. Pavek had never been a brave man, and his
courage was the same as a tree's when it stood through a storm.

"You are an honest man!" Kakzim muttered in disgust, but loud enough for Pavek to hear the halfling
judge him as Hamanu had judged him. "You have no illusions."

And with that, Kakzim shrouded himself in an illusion of his own. Instead of bringing his sword down
on a halfling's unprotected neck, Pavek found himself suddenly nose-to-nose with an enemy who wore
Elabon Escrissar's gold-enameled black mask and took the stance of a Codesh brawler with a poleaxe
braced in both hands.

It was a poor illusion, in certain respects. Pavek could see moonlight through the mask and did not
believe, for one heartbeat, that he faced either Escrissar or a butcher. It was, however, an effective illusion
because he couldn't see Kakzim, and he didn't see the knife Kakzim wielded against him, even when it
sliced across his left thigh. Reeling backward in pain and shock, Pavek instinctively slashed the illusionary
Escrissar from the left shoulder to the right hip and was stunned when he met no resistance.

Pavek's leather armor and even the silk of his shirt would protect his body from the knife he though
Kakzim was using against him, but no man could survive for long, taking real wounds from a weapon he
couldn't see.