Cinnabar Shadows Page 6

  She found herself in an austere chamber no larger than the august emerita's atrium, but empty, save for a single black marble bench; and quiet, save for the gentle cascade of water flowing over the great black boulder in front of the bench. There was no source for the water. Its presence, its endless movement, had to be the manifestation of powerful magic.

  Mahtra had learned a few useful things in House Escrissar, like where to sit when she didn't know what to expect next. She headed for that part of the wall that was farthest from the rock and yet afforded a clear view of the now-shut golden doors. It was no different than sitting on Lord Escrissar's doorsill, except the door was in front of her, not behind.

  "Have you been waiting long?"

  The doors hadn't opened, the young man hadn't come through them, and she nearly leapt out of her skin at the sound of his voice.

  "Did I frighten you?"

  She shook her head. Surprise was one thing, fright another, and she knew the difference well enough. He'd surprised her, but he wasn't frightening. With his lithe limbs and radiant tan, he could have been one of the august emerita's slaves, if his cheeks hadn't been as flawless as the rest of him. As he was, with those unmarked cheeks and wearing little more than his long, dark hair and a length of bleached linen wound around his body, she took him for eleganta, like herself.

  "Who are you waiting for?" he asked, standing in front her and offering his hand.

  Without answering the question, she accepted help she didn't need. He was stronger than Mahtra expected, leaving her with the sense of being set down on her feet rather than lifted up to them. Indeed, there seemed something subtly amiss in all his aspects, not a disguise, but not quite natural either. He was like no one she'd known, as different as she was, herself.

  In the space of a heartbeat, Mahtra decided that the eleganta was made, not born. That he was what the makers meant when they called her a mistake.

  "I am waiting for your lord, King Hamanu," she answered slowly and with all her courage.

  "Ah, everybody waits for Hamanu. You may wait a long time."

  He led her toward the bench where she sat down again, though he did not sit beside her.

  "What will you tell him when he gets here? — If he gets here." "If I tell you, will you tell me about the makers?"

  "Those makers," he said after a moment, confirming her suspicions and her hopes. "It's been a very long time, but I can tell you a little about them... after you tell me what you're going to tell Hamanu."

  What he'd just told her was enough: a very long time. Made folk didn't grow up. She hadn't changed in the seven years she could remember. He hadn't changed in a very long time. They weren't like Father or the august emerita; they didn't grow old.

  Mahtra began her story at the august emerita's beginning and this seemed to satisfy her made companion, though he interrupted, not because he hadn't understood, but with questions: How long had Gomer been selling her cinnabar beads? What did Henthoren look like and had she ever met any other elven market enforcers? Did she know the punishment for evading Hamanu's wards was death by evisceration?

  She hadn't, and decided not to ask what evisceration was. He didn't tell her, either, and that convinced her that he wasn't skimming words from her mind, but understood her as Mika had.

  When she had finished, he told her that the water-filled tavern was Urik's most precious treasure. "All Hamanu's might and power would blow away with the sand if anything fouled that water-hoard. He will reward you well for this warning."

  Reward? What did Mahtra want with a reward? Father and Mika were gone. She had only herself to take care of, and she didn't need a reward for that. "I want to kill them," she said, surprising herself with the venom and anger in her voice. "I want to kill Kakzim."

  A dark eyebrow arched gracefully, giving Mahtra a clearer view of a dark amber eye. His face was, if anything, more expressive than a born-human face, which told her what the makers could have done, if they hadn't made mistakes with her.

  "Would you? Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy takes many forms. If you wish vengeance, Hamanu can arrange that, too."

  The eleganta smiled then, a perfect, full-lipped smile that sent a chill down Mahtra's spine, and she thought she would take whatever reward the Lion-King offered, leaving the vengeance to others. His smile faded, and she asked for his side of their bargain.

  "Tell me about the makers—you promised."

  "They are very old; they were old when the Dragon was born, older still when he was made—"

  Behind her mask, Mahtra gasped with surprise: one life, both born and made!

  "Yes," he said, with a quick, almost angry, twitch of his chin. "They do not make life, they make changes, and their mistakes cannot be undone." He touched the leather of the mask. "But there are masks that cannot be seen. You could speak clearly through such a glamour. Hamanu would grant you that. But I must leave now. He will come, and I cannot be seen beside him."

  And he was gone, before Mahtra could ask him his name or what he meant by masks that couldn't be seen. She didn't see him leave, any more than she'd seen him arrive. There was only a wind waft from the place where he'd been standing and a second against her back, which had been toward the golden doors.

  Mahtra remained on the bench until she heard a commotion beyond the doors: the tramp of hard-soled sandals, the thump of spear-butts striking the stone floor at every other step, the deep-pitched bark of men issuing orders that were themselves muffled. A few words did penetrate the golden doors: "The Lion-King bestrides the world. Bow down! Bow down!" And though, at that moment, she would have preferred to hide behind the black boulder, Mahtra prostrated herself before the doors.

  The doors opened, templars arrayed themselves with much foot-stamping and spear-pounding. They saluted their absolute ruler with a wordless shout and by striking the ribs over their hearts with closed fists. Mahtra heard every step, every salute, every slap of their leather armor against their bodies, but she kept her forehead against the floor, especially when a cold shadow fell over her back.

  "I have read the message of Xerake, august emerita of the highest rank. I have heard the testimony of the woman, Mahtra—made of the Pristine Tower, and find it full of fear and truth, which pleases me and satisfies me in every way. My mercy flows. Rise, Mahtra, and ask for anything."

  The first thing Mahtra noticed when she rose nervously to her feet was that King Hamanu was taller than the tallest elf and as brawny as the strongest mul. The second thing was that although he resembled his ubiquitous portraits in most ways, his face was less of a lion's and more of a man's. The third thing Mahtra noticed, and the thing that made her gasp aloud, was a pair of dark amber eyes beneath amusement-arched eyebrows. Vengeance? A mask that could not be seen? Or nothing at all, which she could hear Father's voice telling was the wisest course. That smile—full-lipped, perfect, and cruel— appeared on King Hamanu's face. For a heartbeat she felt hot and stiff as her innate protection responded to perceived threat, then she was cold as the cavern's water. The king brought his hands together over her head. She heard a sound like an egg cracking. Magic softer than her shawl spread over her head and down her body. It had no effect that she could see or feel, but when she tried to speak, even though she could not join two coherent thoughts together, the sounds themselves were soft-lipped and pleasant.

  Chapter Four

  Pavek leaned on the handle of his hoe and appraised his morning's work with a heavy sigh. He'd shed his yellow robe over a year ago. Exactly how much over a year had become blurred in his memory. The isolated community of Quraite that had become Pavek's home had no use for Urik's ten-day market weeks or its administrative quinths. By the angle of the sun beating down on his shoulders, he guessed high-sun was upon the Tablelands and another year had begun, but he wasn't sure, and he no longer cared. He was farther from his birthplace than any street-scum civil bureau templar ever expected to find himself; he'd been reborn as a novice druid.

  These days he measured time
with plants, by how long they took to grow and how long they took to die. Elsewhere in Quraite, the plants he had spent all morning setting out in not-quite-straight rows would have been called weeds and not worthy of growth. The children of the community's farmers hacked weeds apart before throwing them into cess pits where they rotted with the rest of the garbage until the next planting phase when they'd be returned to the fields as useful fertilizer.

  Farmers treated weeds the way templars treated Urik's street-scum, but druids weren't farmers or templars. Druids tended groves. They nurtured their plants not with fertilizer but with magic—usually in the form of stubbornness and sweat. Telhami's stubbornness and Pavek's sweat. Right now, his sweaty hide was rank enough to draw bugs from every grove and field in Quraite. He wanted nothing more than to retreat to the cool, inner sanctum of the grove where a stream-fed pool could sluice him clean and ease his aches.

  Armor-plated mekillots would fly to the moons before Telhami let him off with half a day's labor in her grove. Telhami's grove—Pavek never thought of it as his, even though she'd bequeathed it to him with her dying wishes—was Quraite's largest, oldest, and least natural grove. It required endless nurturing.

  Pavek suspected Telhami's grove reached backward through time. Not only was it much larger within than without, but the air felt different beneath its oldest trees. And how else to explain the variety of clouds that were visible only through these branches and the. gentle, regular rains that fell here, but nowhere else?

  It was unnatural in less magical ways, too. Druids weren't content to guard their groves or enlarge them. No, druids seemed compelled to furbish and refurbish; their groves were never finished. They transplanted rocks as readily as they transplanted vegetation and meddled constantly with the water-flow, pursuing some arcane notion of 'perfect wilderness' that a street-scum man couldn't comprehend. In his less charitable moments, Pavek believed Telhami had chosen him to succeed her simply because she needed someone with big hands and a strong back to rearrange every rock, every stream, every half-grown plant.

  Not that Pavek was inclined to complaint. Compared to the mul taskmaster who'd taught him the rudiments of the five templar weapons—the sword, the spear, the sickles, the mace, and a man-high staff—while he was still a boy in the orphanage, Telhami's spirit was both good-humored and easygoing in her nagging. More important, at the end of a day's labor, she became his mentor, guiding him through the maze of druid magic.

  For all the twenty-odd years of his remembered life, Pavek had longed for magic—not the borrowed spellcraft that Urik's Lion-King granted his templars, but a magic of his own command. While he wore a regulator's yellow robe, he'd spent his off-duty hours in the archives, hunting down every lore-scroll he could find and committing it to his memory. When fate's chariot carried Pavek to Quraite, he'd seized the opportunity to learn whatever the druids would teach him. Under Telhami's guidance, he'd learned the names of everything that lived in the grove and the many, many names for water. He could call water from the ground and from the air. He could summon lesser creatures, and they'd eat tamely from his hand. Soon, Telhami promised, they'd unravel the mysteries of fire. How could Pavek dare complain? If he suffered frustration or despair, it wasn't his mentor's fault, but his own.

  The permitted process was straight-forward enough: Dig up the weeds from an established part of the grove. Bring the bare-root stalks to the verge, and plant them here with all the hope a man could summon. If a weed established itself, then the grove would become one plant larger, one plant stronger, and the balance of the Tablelands would tilt one mote away from barrenness, toward fertility.

  Day after day since Telhami died, Pavek weeded and planted little plots along the verge of her grove. In all that time, from all those hundreds and thousands of weeds, Pavek had tilted the balance by exactly one surviving plant: a hairy-leafed dustweed looming like the departed Dragon over the slips he had just planted. The dustweed was waist high now and in full, foul-smelling bloom. Pavek's eyes and nose watered when he got close to it, but he cherished the ugly plant as if it were his firstborn child. Still on his knees, he brushed each fuzzy leaf, pinching off the wilted ones lest they pass their weakness to the stem. With the tip of his little finger, he collected sticky, pale pollen from a fresh blossom and carefully poked it into the flower's heart.

  "Leave that for the bugs, my ham-handed friend. You haven't got any talent for such sensitive things."

  Pavek looked around to see a luminously green Telhami shimmering in her own light some twenty paces behind him, where the verge became the lush grove. He looked at his dustweed again without acknowledging her, giving all his attention to the next blossom.

  Telhami wouldn't come closer. Her spirit was bound by the magic of the grove and the grove didn't extend to the dustweed....

  Not yet.

  "You're a sentimental fool, Just-Plain Pavek. You'll be I talking to them next, and giving them names."

  He chuckled and kept working. Other than Telhami, only the half-elf, Ruari, and the human boy, Zvain, treated him anything like the man he'd always been. And Telhami was the only person, living or dead, who still used the name he claimed when he first sought refuge here. To the rest of Quraite he was Pavek, the glorious hero of the community's desperate fight against High Templar Elabon Escrissar. In the moment of Quraite's greatest need, when the community's defenses were nearly overrun, when druid and farmer alike had conceded defeat in their hearts, Pavek had called on Hamanu the Lion-King of Urik. He surrendered his spirit to become the living instrument of a sorcerer-king's deadly magic. Then, in a turn of events that seemed even more miraculous in the minds of the surviving Quraiters, Pavek had delivered the community from its deliverer.

  Pavek hadn't done any such thing, of course. King Hamanu came to Quraite for his own reasons and departed the same way. The Lion-King had ignored them since, which made a one-time templar's heart skip a beat whenever he thought about it.

  But there was no point in denying his heroism among the Quraiters or expecting them to call him Just-Plain Pavek again. He'd tried and they'd attributed his requests and denials to modesty, which had never been a templar's virtue, or—worse—to holiness, pointing out that Telhami had, after all, bequeathed the high druid's grove to him, not Akashia.

  Until that fateful day when Hamanu walked into Quraite and out again, every farmer and druid would have sworn that Akashia was destined to be their next high druid. Pavek had expected it himself. Like Pavek, Akashia was an orphan, but she'd been born in Quraite and raised by Telhami. At eighteen, Kashi knew more about druidry than Pavek hoped to learn with the rest of his life, and though beauty was not important to druids or to Kashi herself, Pavek judged her the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

  And as for how Akashia judged him...

  "You're wasting time, Just-Plain Pavek. There's work to be done. There'll be no time for lessons if you stay there mooning over your triumphs."

  Pavek wanted his lessons, but he stayed where he was, staring at the dustweed and getting himself under control before he faced Telhami again. He didn't know how much privacy his thoughts had from the grove's manifest spirit; he didn't ask. Telhami never mentioned Akashia directly, only needled him this way when he wandered down morose and hopeless paths.

  If Pavek couldn't deny that he'd become a hero to the Quraiters, then he shouldn't deny, at least to himself, that right after the battle he'd hoped Kashi would accept him as her partner and lover. She had turned to him for solace while Telhami lay dying, and he'd laid his heart bare for her, as he'd never done—never been tempted to do—with anyone. Then, when Telhami made her decision, Kashi turned away from him completely. She wouldn't speak with him privately or meet his eyes. If he approached, she retreated, until Pavek retreated as well, nursing a pain worse than any bleeding wound.

  These days, Kashi kept counsel and company strictly with herself. Quraite's reconstruction had become her life, and for that she needed workers, not partners. As for love, well,
if Akashia needed any man's love, she kept her needs well hidden, and Pavek stayed out of her way. He spent one afternoon in four drilling the Quraiters in the martial skills Kashi wanted them to have; otherwise Pavek came to the village at supper, then returned to the grove to sleep with starlight falling on his face.

  It was easier for them both.

  Easier. Better. Wiser. Or so Pavek told himself whenever he thought about it, which was as seldom as possible. But the truth was that he'd give up Telhami's grove in a heartbeat if Kashi would invite him to hers.

  A wind-gust swirled out of the grove. It slapped Pavek smartly across the cheek—Telhami was annoyed with his dawdling and guessed, he hoped, at the reasons. He dusted off the pollen and retrieved his hoe. A stone-pocked path led from the verge to the heart of the grove—Telhami's magic from his first days here when he'd spent most of his time getting lost. This one path would take him anywhere in the grove, anywhere that Telhami wanted him to go. He veered off it at his own risk, even now. Telhami's grove abounded with bogs and sumps as dank as any Urik midden hole. Such places were home to nameless creatures that regarded the grove's current, under-talented druid as Just-Another Meal.

  There was a black-rock chasm somewhere near the grove's heart—he'd come upon it from both sides without ever finding a way across. And a rainbow-shrouded waterfall that he'd like to visit again, except that it had taken him three days to find the path out.

  Stick to the path, Akashia had snarled when he'd finally returned to Quraite, tired and hungry after that misadventure. Do what she tells you. Don't make trouble for me.

  He'd told her about the misty colors and the exhilaration he'd felt when he stood on a rock with the breathtakingly cold water plummeting around him. Foolishly and without asking, he'd taken her hand, wanting to show her the way while it was still fresh in his memory.