Cinnabar Shadows (4 page)

The elven market was a world unto itself inside Lord Hamanu's city. It had its own walls built against
the city walls and its own gate opening into Urik-proper. A gang of templars stood watch at the gate where
the doors were thick and tall and their hinges were corroded from disuse. Why the templars watched and
what they were looking for was a mystery. They challenged folk sometimes as they entered or left, letting
the lucky pass and leading the unlucky away, unless they executed them on the spot, but they never
challenged her, even when she approached the gate at a panic! run.

Maybe they knew who she was—or where she spent her nights. Maybe she was too different, even
for them. They let her pass between them and through the gaping gates without comment this morning as
they had every other morning.

Unlike the other markets of Urik, the elven market wasn't a gathering of farmers and vendors who
arrived in an empty plaza, hawked their wares, and then disappeared. The elven market wasn't a market at
all, but a separate city, the original Urik, older than the Dragon or the sorcerer-kings, older than the barren
Tablelands that now surrounded the much larger city. Lord Hamanu's power was rightly feared in the elven
market, but his laws were largely ignored and could be ignored because the unwritten laws of this ancient
quarter were every bit as brutally efficient.

Enforcers had carved the mazelike market into a precinct patchwork through which strangers might
wander unaware that every step they took, every bargain, every sidelong glance or snicker was watched
and, if necessary, remembered. The market residents were watched by the same network, and paid dearly
for the privilege. In return, those who dwelt within the old walls of the elven market, where the Lion-King's
yellow-robed templars feared to travel in gangs of less than six, were assured of protection from everyone
except their protector.

Mahtra was neither a stranger nor a resident. She paid several enforcers for the privilege of walking
through the precinct maze early each morning when the market was as close to quiet as it ever got. Having
paid for her safe passage, Mahtra was careful never to deviate from her permitted path, lest the eyes that
always watched from rooftops, alleyways, and shadowed, half-open doors report her missteps to the
enforcers.

Once, when she was much newer than she was now, curiosity had lured Mahtra off the paid-for path.
She meant no harm, but the enforcers didn't believe—or couldn't understand—her mute protestations.
They'd sent their bully-boy runners after her, and they'd learned the hard way that Mahtra would protect
herself. She couldn't be harmed, except at great cost in lives and the greater risk of drawing Lord
Hamanu's attention down to their little domains.

That long-ago morning, when she was very new and didn't understand what was important, Mahtra
said nothing to Father when she returned to the cavern, nor anything when she went out at dusk. But when
she returned the next morning, five corpses, all tortured and mutilated, lay in the chamber at the head of the
elven market passage to the cavern. The enforcers had decided that others—born-folk without her ability to
take care of themselves—would pay the price of her indiscretions.

Men and women with weapons in hand were waiting for her in the cavern, demanding justice,
demanding retribution. Mahtra prepared to defend herself, but Father told her no, and faced the angry mob
himself. She heard herself called terrible things that day, but Father prevailed, and the mob dispersed.

When they returned to the hide-and-bone hut, Father took her wrists firmly in his hands and said cavern
children were allowed one mistake, no matter how serious, and that he'd persuaded the others that she
should be granted the same grace, because being new was like being a child. Then, holding her wrists tight
enough to hurt, Father said she must concern herself with the born-folk who were their neighbors along the
shore of the underground water. She must not endanger the whole community with her curiosity; she must
stick to the path she'd paid for, else he himself would be the one to banish her and nothing her makers had
given her would protect her from his wrath.
Father had come into Mahtra's mind then, as a warning, not as her mentor. His face was more terrible
than her own and there was a horror he named death burning in his eyes. She was powerless before him.
She learned a meaning of fear and had stayed on the paid-for path.

"Mahtra! Mahtra!" a woman called from behind, a dwarf by the deep pitch of her voice and,
considering where Mahtra was on her path, most likely Gomer, a trader who specialized in beads and
amulets.

Mahtra stopped and turned. Gomer flashed a smile and beckoned her. With a glance at the rooftops,
alleys and the other places where her invisible escort might be lurking, Mahtra backtracked to the dwarf.
Gomer sold her goods from the inside a boxlike stall along Mahtra's paid-for path. The enforcers wouldn't
object—not if she saved a bit or two for the runner who'd surely show up, demanding a share of Gomer's
trade, before Mahtra left this precinct.

"What've you got in your sack? Got yourself some cabras, eh?" Gomer knew Mahtra didn't talk much;
she didn't waste precious time pausing between questions. "So they're starting to show up in the markets?
Have to go out and get me some, maybe. Unless we could make a bargain, you and I. That's a lot of fruit
you've got there. Make you sick, it would—even you. But I've got something here you'd like better than
cabra—cinnabar!"

Gomer's meaty, powerful hand wove delicately over the compartmented trays set out on her selling
board. She plucked up a carved bead about the size of her thumb's knuckle and the same color as Mahtra's
fingernails. The sight of it made Mahtra's mouth water. She liked cabra fruit, but she craved the
bitter-tasting beads carved from red cinnabar.

"Thought you'd want it, dearie," Gomer chuckled.

She closed her fingers over the bead, shook her hand and blew across it, as if she were casting dice in
a high-stakes game, and then opened her fist one finger at a time. To Mahtra's dismay, the bead had
vanished.

"You do want it, don't you?"

Mahtra nodded vigorously. The dwarf chuckled again. She made extravagant motions with her hand,
and when she showed her palm again, there were three red beads nestled among the calluses.

"I should charge you a silver, that's what they're worth, you know—especially since you won't resell
them—but give me two of your cabras and I'll let you have them for a half-disk."

Mahtra would have made a bad bargain to acquire the beads, but Gomer's offer was ideal. She fished
the extra fruits out of her sack and five ceramic bits out of her coin-pouch. Gomer dribbled the beads into
her hand. They were pretty little things, with leaves and flowers carved all over two of them and a strange
animal she'd never seen before carved in the third. But it was the cinnabar itself that excited her. Her hand
began to warm as soon as the red beads touched it.

"Have fun, dearie," Gomer said.

The dwarf balanced one of the husky fruits against her thigh and smashed it open with a blow from her
fist. Red juice sprayed her tunic, looking for a heartbeat like blood. Mahtra didn't like blood; it was
something old and deep within her, from beyond the spirals of her memory. An inner voice told her to run,
and she did, though she knew the splatters were only sweet cabra juice.

A runner appeared a bit farther on. He was a human youth, sleek and well-muscled, typical of the
well-fed bullies who worked for the market enforcers. He stopped her. There was an obsidian knife in his
hand and an arrogant jut to his jaw, but he kept his distance as he said:

"For luck, Mahtra," and held out his hand. "Give me some of what you bought."

She'd have paid him however many ceramic bits he wanted, or gone off with him to whatever bolthole
he called home, but she wouldn't surrender her cinnabar beads. She tried to make her refusal plain, but the
youth couldn't understand her gestures—or perhaps that was only his own stubborn refusal.

"Give me half," he demanded, "or I'll tell Map."

Another sturdy human, Map was the local enforcer and a man with a temper to be avoided. Mahtra
thought of the butchered corpses in the antechamber years ago and of the three beads in her hand right
now. Three wasn't a number that could be easily divided in half. Although she and the runner stood in an
intersection, Mahtra felt as if she were trapped in a corner. Juggling the loose beads and the heavy string
sack with one hand, she fumbled through her coin-pouch with the other and fished out a shiny silver coin.

The bully frowned. "I want what you bought from Gomer. She's making special bargains for you.
Map's gonna want to know about it."

That was too much threat, too much confusion, for Mahtra to bear. She felt trapped, she felt angry, and
the burnished scars on her shoulders began to grow warm beneath her shawl. Stiffness spread down her
arms, down her spine all the way to her feet; she couldn't move. The scars around her eyes burned as well,
and a cloudy membrane slipped across her vision while the makers' precautions protected her.

Mahtra's scars were burning; her vision was blurred. She felt the silver coin yanked out of her
fingertips and heard hard pounding as the bully ran away, but it was several more heartbeats before the
membranes withdrew, her limbs relaxed and she could move again.

She hadn't actually done anything wrong, but Father would be angry—very angry. He might not believe
it wasn't her fault, even when he could look inside her mind where the truth was marked into her memory.
Fear emerged from its lonely corner, haunting her thoughts as she continued through the market maze.

Her destination was a plaza built around a broad, circular fountain that was scarcely different from the
tens of other fountains scattered through Urik. Women of every race scrubbed and pounded their laundry
on its curbstones while a steady parade of men and children filled water jugs from the four spouts. An old
elf with a crippled leg and a sullen demeanor kept watch from an awning-crowned, tall, wheeled chair. He
was the enforcer, and the fountain plaza was his entire precinct. Mahtra didn't approach him, or the squat
stone building in the northwest corner of the plaza until he recognized her with the ivory-tipped walking stick
he balanced across his thighs.

Usually he sported her a heartbeat after she appeared on the plaza verge, but today he stared at the
sky and a rippling stripe of clouds that were much too high to threaten rain. When he did lower his head and
command his minions to swivel his chair about, there was still no sign of recognition, no invitation to cross
the plaza. Mahtra feared Map and the runner had gotten here first, and feared something deeper, too, to
which she could not put a name—except that it was dark and cold, and it smothered the cinnabar warmth
she clutched in her hand.

A half-elf child came running toward her. Mahtra juggled her beads and fruit once again, expecting
another demand, but the child stopped short and delivered a message:

"Henthoren," she said, the crippled-elf enforcer's name, "wishes you to know you are the first to
approach the well since the nightwatch rang its first bells. He keeps the peace. He wishes you to remember
that."

The child bowed low and retreated. Mahtra looked toward the enthroned Henthoren, who leveled his
stick at her, giving her leave to traverse his little domain. Then the old elf went back to staring at the sky.
She raised her eyes as well, half-expecting that the clouds had fallen and darkened, so palpable had the
sense of chill darkness become within her mind. But the clouds remained distant white streaks in the
cerulean vault.

Mahtra longed to ask the enforcer what he meant, why this morning he sent a child to tell her what
was always true: she was the first walker from the cavern to return home since the midnight bells. But
asking was talking and talking to the enforcer was more daunting than his message had been, more daunting
than the unease she felt striding past the fountain to the little stone building with its metal-grate door.

There were eyes on her back as she opened the door. She hesitated before crossing the threshold into
the unlit antechamber, but nothing flew from the shadows or darted past her feet. There were no
sounds—no smells, as there had been when the corpses were laid out as examples. Born-folk had an
expression: quiet as a tomb. Mahtra had never seen a tomb, but it could not have been quieter than the
windowless antechamber and its stone carved stairway leading into the ground. She stepped inside and
pulled the door shut behind her.

Father said she had human eyes, meaning that she didn't see well in the dark, though she knew the
passageway from the antechamber down to the cavern well enough that she didn't need one of the torches
that were kept ready by the door. She did pause long enough to loosen the gauze-pleated sidepieces of her
mask and slip one of the cinnabar beads into her mouth. Her narrow jaw, so ill-suited to ordinary speech,
was strong enough to shatter the bead with a single effort. Her tongue carried the fragments to the back of
her mouth where they began to dissolve, along with her unease.

A shimmering drapery of blue-green light, the hallmark of the Lion-King's personal warding, shone at
the top of the stairway where torchlight would have revealed the maw of a passage high enough to admit a
full-grown elf. Templars with their medallions could pass safely through the light. Anyone else died. The
cavern-dwellers had another way, which could not have been entirely unknown to either the market
enforcers or the yellow-robe templars of the larger city. Using the boundary of Lord Hamanu's spell as a
reference, Mahtra stepped sideways, one, twice, three times and felt the opening of a passage no torch
would reveal, no elf or dwarf could see.
Ten tight, twisting steps later, the two passages became one again. Mahtra slipped the second bead into
her mouth and continued with confidence down the lightless slope. A faint aroma of charcoal and charred
meat lingered in the air, a bit unusual, but accidents happened in the darkness beside the water. People got
careless, lamps overturned, cookfires leapt out of their hearths. Mika had lost his family that way, but
Father was careful, and Mantra's fear did not return.