Cinnabar Shadows

Chapter Twelve

Pavek was gone.

Pavek was dead.

One of the many roars Ruari heard while trudging along the ring road to Farl might have marked the moment when the Lion-King found his high templar's pale corpse. Another might have marked the moment when deadheart spells animated Pavek's body one last time. The last roar, the loudest and longest that he and Mahtra and Zvain heard, could only have marked the king's frustration when he found that Pavek, Just-Plain Pavek, had outwitted him.

Ruari brushed a knuckle quickly beneath his eye, catching a tear before it leaked out, drying the telltale moisture with an equally quick touch to his pant leg. Life went forward, he told himself, repeating the words Telhami had used every time he bemoaned the violence and hatred that had brought him into an uncaring world. There was nothing to be gained by looking back.

Then Pavek raised a guardian spirit out of Urik, where no other druid would have dreamed to look for one. Pavek changed—tried to change—the lay of life in a sorcerer-king's domain, and Pavek had paid the price of folly.

Life went forward. Don't look back.

But Ruari did look back. He sneaked a peek over his shoulder every few moments. The skyline of Codesh was still there, crowned with a thin cloud of dust and smoke that grew thinner each time he looked.

"You come from Codesh?" an overseer called from one of the roadside fields, his slave scourge folded in his hand. "What's the uproar?"

"Damn butchers tried to slaughter their templars. Got rid of some of them, but Hamanu answered their call."

The overseer scratched his nose thoughtfully. "They killed a few templars, and the Great Lord himself came out for vengeance. That ought to put the fear into them. High time."

"High time," Ruari agreed, ending the conversation as they walked beyond the field.

"Get it right, Ruari, or you'll make folk suspicious. It's Lord Hamanu or King Hamanu or Great and Mighty Lord King Hamanu when you're talking to someone who's got a scourge in their hand!" Zvain objected once they were out of the overseer's hearing. "You can't talk about Hamanu as if you've met him!"

"But I have met him," Ruari complained. "He terrorized us, then he gave us gifts. He encouraged us, then he abandoned us. 'Hamanu answered their call'—that's the biggest lie I've ever told, Zvain: he closed his eyes!"

"Doesn't matter. I'm telling you, you can't talk about Lord Hamanu that way. Say it the way I told you, or folk are going to get suspicious and start asking questions."

Ruari shrugged. "All right. I'll try."

Zvain had lived in Urik all his life, while Mahtra had lived under it and Ruari had grown up nowhere near it. The three of them together didn't have half Pavek's experience or canniness, but Pavek was gone. Dead. And Zvain had suddenly become their font of wisdom where the city and its customs were concerned. Ruari knew the responsibility weighed heavily on Zvain's shoulders and the boy was staggering under the load—

Wind and fire! They were all staggering, putting one foot in front of the other because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant Pavek. He'd known Pavek for a year, one lousy year—and for most of that year they'd been at each other's throats.... No, he'd been at Pavek's throat, trying to rile him into a display of templar temper, trying to kill him with kivet poison because... because?

On the dusty road to Farl, midway through the longest afternoon of his life, Ruari couldn't remember why he'd poisoned Pavek's dinner. But not so long ago he'd wanted Pavek's death so badly it made him blind. Now he could scarcely see for another reason and hurriedly sopped up another tear before it betrayed him.

"What are we going to do when we get to Farl?" Mahtra asked when another stretch of hot, dusty road had passed beneath their feet. "Will we stay there? Overnight? Longer? Where will we get our supper? How many coins do we have?"

Ruari didn't know if Mahtra grieved at all. She couldn't cry the way he and Zvain tried not to cry. Her eyes weren't right for tears, she said, and the tone of her voice never varied, no matter how many questions she asked. Ruari didn't care about anything, including Farl, which was where they were headed. They were only going there because the two templars who got them out of Codesh said they shouldn't go back to Urik and the road to Farl was right there in front of them when the templars said it. Without Mahtra's questions, Ruari wouldn't have given a single thought to where they'd stay once they got to the village, or whether he ever ate another meal.

Mahtra was living proof that life went forward and that there was no use looking back. Her questions demanded answers—his answers. If Zvain had become their wisdom, Ruari discovered that he'd become their leader.

"We're poor," he said. "Not so poor that we'll starve right away, but—it's this way: I know the supplies we'd need to have to get back to Quraite: three riding kanks, at least seven water jugs, food for ten days, some other stuff, for safety's sake. That's what Kashi, Yohan, and I always had, but we had our own bugs, our own jugs, and Kashi did the buying when we needed food. I don't know how much going home will cost, or whether we have enough to get there."

Zvain offered a different idea before Ruari could answer. "I could—well—lift a bit. I got good at that." The boy dug deep in the wide hem of his shirt. He produced a little lion carved from rusty-red stone. "I lifted this right under Hamanu's nose!"

"Lord Hamanu," Ruari insisted, then, more seriously: "Wind and fire, Zvain—think of the trouble you could have gotten us into!"

"We'd be better off if I had," the boy replied, and there was nothing either one of them could say after that.

But nothing seemed to stanch Mahtra's questions. "Can I hold it? Keep it?"

"What for?" Ruari asked. "We get caught with something from Hamanu's palace and—" He mimed the drawing of a knife blade across his throat.

Mahtra took the figurine from Zvain's hand and held it up to her mask. "We won't get caught with it, if it's cinnabar."

Ruari cocked his head, asking a silent question of his own.

"I'll chew it up and swallow it," she replied. "If it's cinnabar. I can't tell through my mask. If it is, the more I swallow, the better I can protect myself. Lord Hamanu gave me plenty—" she parted a little pouch at her waist. "But, without Pavek, I don't think I can have too much cinnabar."

Zvain made disgusted, gagging noises, and Ruari's first instinct was to do the same thing. But he couldn't act on his first instincts, not anymore, no more than Pavek had.

Ruari's throat tightened, but he beat back that instinct, too, and all the memories. He forced himself to think of the crunching sounds he'd heard before the power passed through him and the passage caved in. If they had to choose between selling the staff Hamanu had given him or the red lion Zvain had stolen, Ruari supposed they should keep the lion. He could fashion himself another staff, he had a good carving knife now, thanks to Pavek, but Mahtra's ability to transform the air around them into a mighty, sweeping fist was a better weapon.

"Keep it, then. Do whatever you do with it."

"If it's cinnabar."

He nodded. He'd taken ten strides, maybe twenty, without mourning Pavek. He'd strung his thoughts together and made a decision—the decision Pavek would have made, he hoped, and with that hope his defenses crumbled. The grief, the aching emptiness, overwhelmed him ten times, maybe twenty, stronger than before.

Unable to hide or halt the sudden flow of tears, Ruari sat down on the edge of the road. He wanted to be alone, but Zvain was beside him in an instant, leaning against his shoulder, dampening his sleeve. He wanted to be alone, but he put his arm around the human boy instead, thinking that was what Pavek would have done. If Mahtra had knelt or sat beside him, Ruari would have comforted her the same way, but she stood behind them, keeping watch.

"There's someone coming this way," she said finally. "Coming from Codesh."

With a sigh, Ruari got to his feet, hauling Zvain up as well. There was a solitary traveler on the road far behind them, and behind the traveler, a swath of green fields becoming the dusty yellow of the barrens. The ring road had curved toward Farl; Codesh had disappeared.

"Come on. We've got to keep walking."

"Where?"

The questions had started again.

"Where, after Farl? What are we going to do?"

He said nothing, nothing at all, and Zvain asked:

"Is it kanks and Quraite, or do we go somewhere else?"

It was easier for Ruari to get angry with Zvain's adolescent whine. "Where else?" Ruari shouted. "Where else could we go? Back to Urik? Do you think we could just set ourselves up in that templar-house? Damn it, Zvain, think first, before you open your mouth!"

Zvain's mouth worked soundlessly. His nostrils flared, his eyes overflowed, and, with an agonized wail, he spun on his heel and started back to Codesh at a blind, stumbling run. Huari hesitated long enough to curse himself, then effortlessly made up the distance between them.

"I'm sorry—"

Zvain wriggled out of his grasp, but he was finished with running and merely stood, arms folded, head down, and law clenched in a sad, sullen sulk, just out of Ruari's reach.

"I said I was sorry. Wind and fire, I hurt inside, too. I want him here. I want this morning back; I'd make him take that damn gold medallion—"

"That's why Hamanu closed his eyes. Don't you remember, in that room with the black rock, Hamanu warned Pavek that if he didn't take the medallion, he wouldn't listen. He gave Pavek another chance to take it this morning; the medallion was sitting on top of his clothes. I saw Pavek leave it behind. Damn—" Ruari's voice broke.

"Not your fault," Zvain said quickly before his voice got Host in sobbing. He lunged at Ruari, giving the half-elf an embrace that hurt and dulled their other pain. "Not your fault, Ru. Not our fault."

Mahtra joined them, not to grieve, but to say: "The man behind us is getting closer. Shouldn't we be walking?"

The answer was yes, and just as the ring road curves had hidden Codesh, they brought Farl into view. Farl, a place where Ruari had never been, the first place he'd go after Pavek. And after Farl? He had to decide.

"I say we find ourselves kanks as soon as we get there, and head home—to Quraite."

"Whatever you say," Zvain agreed without enthusiasm.

But then, none of them had any enthusiasm. Ruari wasn't looking forward to returning to Quraite, to telling Kashi their misadventures, but he couldn't think of anywhere else to go.

"You have Kakzim's map," Mahtra reminded him, as if she'd heard Ruari's thoughts. "We could go to a place we've never been."

"The map's a trap," Ruari replied.

Zvain shot back: "Pavek didn't want to see it, didn't want to hear about it. Pavek thought it wasn't a trap. He thought it was worthwhile."

Pavek wasn't thinking; Pavek was dying! Ruari wanted to say, and didn't. He fished the map out of his shirt-hem instead and unrolled it as they walked. If the toothy shape near the right side of the bark scrap was a mountain... if the smudge above the shape was not a smudge, but smoke... then the mountain might be the Smoking Crown Volcano, and the circle in the lower right-hand corner might be Urik. A black line connected the circle and the mountain. The line continued leftward and upward in jagged segments, each separated with symbolic shapes: wavy lines that might be water, smaller mountains, smaller circles, and others Ruari couldn't immediately interpret. The black line ended at the base of a black tree, the only symbol that was the same color as the line and was, on the map, as large as the Smoking Crown.

And Pavek hadn't wanted to see the map, hadn't wanted to hear anything about it.

Because he didn't want to tell Hamanu where they'd gone?

It was possible. Pavek took risks. Today, he'd raised a guardian no druid dreamed existed, and he'd done it because it might keep them alive. A year ago, he'd surrendered himself into druid hands because getting rid of Laq was more important than his own life.

Go home and plant... a big, ugly lump of a tree. And carve my name into its bark.

"Later," Ruari said aloud, drawing concern from his companions, "we'll follow the map, somehow, wherever it takes us—all the way to that big black tree."

He'd fallen asleep in the wrong position, lying on a bed that was harder than dirt. Every joint in his body ached and complained when he yawned himself awake—

But he was awake.

Pavek knew he had awakened, knew, moreover, that he was alive. He remembered Codesh and silting with his hand in a water bucket, hoping to die before Hamanu caught up with him. Those were his last memories, but he hadn't died. At least Pavek didn't remember dying, although the dead weren't supposed to remember that was the whole reason he'd had his hand in the bucket: he hadn't wanted to be alive—feeling or remembering—when Hamanu found him.

Could he have died and been restored to life? Hamanu could transform life into death in countless ways, but as Pavek understood histories, legends, and dark rumors, the Lion-King could not transform death into life. A wise man wouldn't bet his life against a sorcerer-king's prowess. Pavek was willing to bet he hadn't died—

Though he'd almost be willing to bet that Hamanu hadn't found him. What Pavek saw when he opened his eyes seemed almost like Quraite: a one-room house with woven-wicker walls and a thatched roof. The door was shut, the window, open. From the very hard bed he could see leafy branches and cloudless sky.

Pavek thought about standing up, but first things first: there'd been a reason the last thing he remembered was his hand dangling in a bucket. It hadn't hurt then, despite the damage when the medallion burst apart, and still didn't. After taking a deep breath, Pavek lifted his left arm into the sunlight and, in complete amazement, rotated it front to back. Palm-side or knuckle-side, his mangled hand had been restored. Movement and sensation had been restored as well. Each finger bent obediently to touch the tip of his thumb.

All healing was spellcraft of one sort or another, but this was spellcraft beyond Pavek's imagining. He rose from the bed, went to the window where the light was better—and his hands remained the same, exactly the same, but mirror images of each other.

Pavek was alive, restored, and wise enough not to waste time questioning good fortune. Setting both hands on the window ledge, he leaned out for a better examination of his surroundings. There were walls, not fields, beyond the tree he'd seen from the bed, masonry walls built from four rows of man-high stones. The sounds that came over those walls, though faint, were the sounds of a city, of Urik. Pavek knew the walls of Urik as well as anyone who'd ever spent a quinth of nights standing watch by moonlight. He knew how the city was put together, and he knew that the only place he could be was inside the palace, which meant Hamanu, which meant he had died.

It was just as well Pavek wasn't a gambling man.

There were sandals resting on the dirt floor beside the bed and clothes, fine linen garments like the ones he'd ruined in Codesh, hung on a peg by the improbably rustic door. Pavek wasn't surprised to find a gold high templar's medallion hanging beneath them. When he'd finished dressing and raking his hair with his fingers—he didn't need a bath or a shave, which said something about either the amount of time that had passed since Codesh or the quality of care he'd received since men—he stuck his head through the golden noose and opened the door.

"You're awake at last!"

The voice came from a human man, about his own age and stature, but better looking, a man who slapped his hands against his thighs as he stood up from a solid stone bench.

"How do you feel? How's the hand?"

Pavek held it out and flexed the fingers. "Good as new... good as the other one."

A smile twitched across the stranger's lips. Pavek sighed and dropped to one knee.

"A thousand thanks, Great Lord and Mighty King. I am not worthy of such miracles."

"Good—I had doubts you'd ever agree with me about anything."

Still on a bent knee, Pavek stared at his left hand and shook his head. "Great King, I am grateful, but I am, and will always be, a thick-headed oaf of a man."

"But an honest oaf, which is rare enough around here. I am not blind, Lord Pavek. I know what is done in my name. I am everything you imagine me to be, and more besides. Elabon Escrissar did amuse me; I had great hopes for him. I have no hope for an honest oaf, and an honorable one in the bargain. By my mercy, Lord Pavek—could you not at least have taken a look at that map?"

A man couldn't fall very far when he was already on his knee, which was fortunate for Pavek. "Did I die, Great King? I don't remember. Was I already dead? The red-haired priest—I never learned his name—he didn't... You didn't..."

"I didn't what, Lord Pavek? Look at me!"

In misery and fear, Pavek met the Lion-King's eyes.

"Do you truly think I must slay a man to unravel his memories? Do you think I must leave him a gibbering idiot? Look at your hand again, Lord Pavek: that is what I can do. Did you die? Does it matter? You're alive now—and as thick-headed as ever.

"A thousand years, Lord Pavek. A thousand years. I knew how to kill a man when I was younger than you. I've killed more than even I can count; that is the essence of boredom, Lord Pavek. Every death is the same; every life is different. Every hand is different."

Pavek swallowed hard, grinned anxiously, and said: "Mine aren't, Great King—not anymore."

Hamanu roared with laughter. His human disguise slipping further away with each unrestrained guffaw. The Lion-King grew taller, broader, becoming the black-maned, yellow-eyed tyrant of Urik's outer walls. He laughed until, like a lesser, mortal man, his ribs ached and, clutching at his side, he hobbled back to his bench. The ground shuddered when his weight hit the stone.

While Pavek blinked, the leonine Hamanu vanished and a human one took his place. He was older than he'd seemed when Pavek walked through the wicker door: a man nearing the end of his prime, weathered and weary, with scars on his face and a touch of gray in his dark hair.

"I was born in there," this mortal Hamanu said. His voice was soft; Pavek had to stretch forward to hear it. "I took my first steps in the ancestor of that house when it stood a day's ride north of here, before the troll army swept through, destroying everything in its path—except me. I was in the Scorcher's army. Later, much later, when the trolls memory—" Hamanu's plain brown eyes narrowed, and he seemed to be looking at a point behind Pavek's head, a point far-removed in place and time. His voice seemed to echo from that distant, imaginary place. "I went to the Pristine Tower because trolls destroyed this house. I won the war I was made to fight; the war the others could not win. Troll means nothing to you—" The king looked directly at Pavek again. "When the war was over and the dust, oh the dust, had settled, I rebuilt my house and I tried to bring back the wives and children the trolls had slain. They weren't the same."

A sense of loss, preserved for a millennium, filled the courtyard where they sat.

"I'm sorry. I never thought... never imagined.... We're taught you're a god: immortal, omnipotent, unchanging. I doubted, but..." Words fell off Pavek's tongue until he managed to choke them off with a groan.

"Did you? What did you doubt?" Another shimmering transformation, and the king was a beautiful youth. "My power? My eternity? Come—tell me your doubts. Let me reassure your faith."

Pavek remained where he was, mute and kneeling.

"Very well, doubt it all. Power has limits. Eternity has a beginning and an end. I was born no different than you. I have died many times—Look at me, Lord Pavek!"

Unable to disobey, Pavek straightened his back and neck. The human-seeming Hamanu was gone, replaced by the apparition who'd terrified them all in the audience chamber when he examined the stains on Ruari's staff. The long serpentine neck curved toward him. The whiplike tongue flashed out to touch the scar on his cheek. A blast of hot, reeking air followed the tongue.

"See me as I truly am, Lord Pavek. Borys the Dragon is dead; Hamanu the Dragon is about to be born!"

Another searing blast enveloped Pavek as he knelt, but, hot as it was, it wasn't enough to break the cold terror paralyzing his lungs.

"A thousand years I held back the changes. I hoarded every templar's spell; I kept Urik safe from change, Lord Pavek. Every mote of my magic is a grain of sand falling through the glass, marking the lime until the change, when a dragon must be born. This shape you see is the sum of my changes: a thousand years more than a man, but ten thousand... twenty thousand lives less than a dragon. That incarnate fool, Kalak, would have sacrificed all the lives in his city to birth the dragon within him. I will not sacrifice Urik to any dragon. Urik is mine and I will protect it—but each day that I do nurtures the dragon within me, hastening the moment when it must be born."

The king stretched his long neck toward the bloody sun. His massive, fanged jaws opened and, expecting a mighty roar or a blast of fire, Pavek closed his eyes. But the only sound was a sibilant curse. When Pavek reopened his eyes, Hamanu in his most familiar leonine form had reappeared.

"You can appreciate my dilemma."

Pavek could understand that Urik was in danger either from its own sorcerer-king's transformation or from one of the other remaining sorcerer-kings, but true appreciation of the Lion-King's dilemma was beyond him. He nodded though, since anything else might provoke another transformation.

"Good, then you will be pleased and willing to tell me everything you know about this thing you raised, this druid guardian, this aspect, this semblance that formed in Codesh."

Pavek had been willing to bleed to death rather than respond to that request. He wished for Telhami's wisdom and remembered Telhami implying that she and Urik's king had once been more than friends.

"Great King, I can hardly tell you more than Telhami must have told you. I am a neophyte in the druid mysteries—no better than a third-rank regulator."

"Telhami said our cities were abominations. Gaping sores, she called them, where the natural order is inverted.

She said that Urik obliterated the land from which it rose and swore no guardian could abide within my purview. I believed her then and all the years since, until you came back to Urik—not this time, but once before. Something stirred when you stood outside House Escrissar."

"Yes, Lord Pavek," the Lion-King replied, his voice echoing in Pavek's ears, and between them as well. "I know about House Escrissar." Then he smiled his cruel, perfect smile. "I knew about it then; there was no need to probe deep into yo, past."

"Great King, what can I tell you that you don't already know?"

"How you raised a guardian that Telhami swore couldn't exist."

"Great King, I can't answer that. That first time outside House Escrissar, I didn't know what I'd done. In Codesh, I was desperate," Pavek didn't mention why. "And, suddenly—without my doing anything—the guardian was there."

"If despair is the proper incentive..." The Lion-King extended his claws. "Raise your guardian now."

Pavek, who had not yet risen from his knees, placed his identical palms flat on the ground. If despair were the necessary condition for druidry, he should have been able to raise ten guardians.

"Tell your guardian the Lion of Urik, the King of Mountain and Plain, requires assurance that it is not a pawn of my enemies."

In Codesh and last year, when they searched for Akashia outside the walls of House Escrissar, the guardian power had leapt into Pavek's body, but here, in the palace, in heart of Urik's heart, the land was empty—obliterated, exactly as Telhami had described it. The trees that shaded them were sterile sticks, engendered with Hamanu's magic and sustained in the same way. The stones in the walls were each a tomb for an aspect of a larger, long-vanished guardian.

Nothing Pavek did quickened the land: no druid magic, not even the simplest evocation of water, could be wrought where he knelt. He sat back on his heels.

"There's nothing," he muttered, omitting Hamanu's royal title. "Just nothing, as if there never was anything at all."

"Yet that night outside House Escrissar, something stirred, and in Codesh, you raised an invincible creature out of dust and offal."

Pavek nodded. "And now there's nothing. No guardian, no aspect, nothing at all. Druid magic should not work in Urik, Great King—yet I know it has, and not only for me. I don't understand; I must be doing something wrong. A thousand pardons, Great King. I am not Telhami; I don't have her wisdom or strength. Perhaps if I tried again, if I went back to House Escrissar—"

"Possibly," Hamanu agreed and frowned as well. The retribution Pavek feared seemed unlikely as the Lion-King scratched his chin thoughtfully with a sharp, black claw. "Telhami could get her spellcraft to work elsewhere in Urik, but never when I was nearby. Even so, she could work the lesser arts of druidry, never the great ones, never a guardian. It is a mystery you and I will unravel when you return to Urik."

Pavek sat still a moment, savoring the life he still had before asking: "When I return?"

"Kakzim lives. The Codeshites we interrogated said that Kakzim incited them to their rebellion, then left them to their fate. Some saw him and another halfling running away through the smoke. You will find them and bring them back, Lord Pavek. Justice is the responsibility of the high bureau, your responsibility."

"Did the Codeshites know where Kakzim might have gone?"

The Lion-King held out his hand. A knotted string appeared; it hung from a black claw's tip and held, within the knot, a few strands of pale blond hair. "A team of investigators searched what remained of their rented quarters.

They found this caught in the doorjamb. Hold it where the wind does not blow, and it will lead you to the halflings."

He took the string carefully, respectfully, but without quite concealing his skepticism. "How can you be certain? Hair is hair. My friends searched those quarters, too."

"And found that map you refused to look at." King Ha-manu sighed heavily. "Mahtra has no hair. Both Ruari and Zvain have hair that's too dark, and all of them are too tall, unless Ruari was on his hands and knees when he hit his head. That is halfling hair, Pavek, and it will lead you to Kakzim. Guard it carefully. You begin your search tomorrow; kanks are waiting for you at Khelo. A double maniple from the war bureau awaits you there as well. The Codesh survivors volunteered; the others are solid veterans. We will make our own search for Urik's guardian when you return; you will return, Pavek, with Kakzim or proof of his death."

Orders had been given—orders the Lion-King had intended to give Pavek from the beginning, no doubt. Hamanu began to walk toward the wall and a door Pavek hadn't noticed before. Acting on impulse, which had gotten him into trouble so often before, Pavek called out to him: "Great King—"

"My friends—Ruari, Zvain, and Mahtra—what happened to them?"

"If you spent half as much time thinking about yourself as you think about others, Pavek, you'd go farther in this world. Your friends escaped from Codesh before I arrived. They went to Farl. Five days ago, Ruari sold the staff I gave him to a herder; since then, I do not know. You know my dilemma, Pavek: magic hastens the dragon. I will not risk Urik to find any one man—not Kakzim, not a friend of yours. If it suits you, you may search for them after we've raised the guardian."

"It suits me, Great King," Pavek said to the great king's back.

With the purse Ruari had gotten from Pavek before he died, the silver he got in exchange for his staff, the handful of coins Zvain insisted he "found" beneath a pile of rubbish in a Farl alley, and the three silver coins Mahtra got he-didn't-ask-where, they had enough money to purchase three unimpressive kanks from the village pound and outfit them with shabby saddles, peeling harnesses, and other supplies of dubious quality.

Six days west of Farl, they were down to two kanks. Tempers were short, and they spent a part of each day arguing whether any of the landmarks they passed matched those on their white-bark map. If it weren't for Ruari's fundamentally sound sense of distance and direction, they'd have been hopelessly lost. Each time they set off in a direction the three of them eventually agreed was wrong, he'd been able to get them back to a place they recognized.

The sun was at its height in the heavens and there wasn't a sliver of shade anywhere—except in the lee of the same three boulders where they'd camped last night.

"I told you these rocks matched the three dots," Ruari grumbled as he dismounted. He hobbled the bug before offering a hand to either Mahtra or Zvain, who rode together on the other one.

"They're awfully small," Mahtra said.

"All right, they don't match the three dots—-and we've followed Kakzim's damned map into the middle of nowhere. In case you haven't noticed, we're running out of land!" Ruari swung his arm from due north to due west where the horizon was a solid line of jagged peaks. "The circle is north of here, between us and those mountains, or it's not anywhere!"

"You don't have to shout," Zvain complained as he jumped down from the kank's saddle.

Mahtra tried to make peace. "We'll go north next. We always go two directions before we settle on one."

"At least two."

Ruari got the last word as he hobbled the second kank and let it go foraging. The surviving kanks were doing better than their riders. Bugs could eat just about anything that wasn't sand or rock; people were more particular. They'd run out of village food two days ago. Ruari didn't consider it a serious problem; he'd had little trouble hunting up a steady supply of bugs, grubs, and lizards—more than enough to keep the three of them healthy, but Zvain was fussy, and Mahtra truly seemed to become ill on the wriggly morsels. She'd sooner forage with the kanks—which she did, after Ruari rationed out their water.

It was midafternoon before they were remounted and headed north. Ruari wasn't as well-organized as Pavek, and certainly wasn't as effective getting Mahtra and Zvain moving; he owed Pavek an apology—

The half-elf closed his eyes and pounded a tight fist against his thigh. Pavek's name hadn't crossed his mind since sunrise. He was ashamed that he'd forgotten his friend for so many hours and was grieved by the memories, once they returned. The downward spiral between shame and grief hadn't ended when Mahtra and Zvain both called his name.

"Look—" Mahtra extended her long, white arm.

Wisps of smoke rose through the seared air. They could be mirages—the sun's pounding heat made everything shimmer by late afternoon. But the smoke didn't shimmer, and it wasn't long before they saw other signs of habitation. Zvain prodded their bug's antennae, urging it to greater speed; Ruari did the same thing—until he got his kank far enough ahead to force the other one to a halt.

"Not so fast! We don't know what's up there, who's up there, or if they're going to be friendly to the likes of us." Wind and fire, he was sounding more like Pavek every time he opened his mouth. "This could still be a trap. We go in slow, and we go in cautious. Stay close together. Keep your heads down and eyes open. That's what Yohan would say—" Pavek, too, but by unspoken agreement, they didn't mention his name. "Understand?"

Still, their kanks could outrun all but the fastest elves. Ruari prodded his bug to a halt and let the strangers come to them.

"What brings you three to Ject?" one of the humans asked.

Before Ruari could voice a suitably cautious answer Zvain announced: "We followed a map!" and Mahtra added: "We're looking for two halflings, and a big black tree."