Cinnabar Shadows

Chapter Fourteen

"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.

Mahtra huddled by herself in the curve where the side became the bottom. She drew her knees up to her chest, rested her cheek on them, and wrapped her arms over her shins.

The spiral of her life had become a circle; she was back where she'd begun: in deep, silent darkness.

After his time in Telhami's grove, Pavek thought he'd be prepared for the forest, but there was little comparison between a meticulously nurtured grove and the wild profusion of a natural forest.

Instead of the guardian aspect that pulled a grove together with a single purpose, a single voice, the halfling forest was a battleground with every mote of life competing for its place on the land.

It was a place hostile to them as well—which was not entirely surprising. War bureau maniples did not go quietly, no matter where they went, though they were traveling light, at least as far as magic was concerned. Except for the medallions they all wore and the ensorcelled bit of halfling hair, Pavek knew of no Tablelands magic that they'd brought across the mountains into the forest. There were no defiling sorcerers with them, no priests, either—unless the forest sensed that templars borrowed spellcraft from the Lion-King or recognized Pavek's clumsy curiosity as the sign of a druid.

Even without magic, however, a living forest had reason to resent their intrusion. A double maniple of templars armed with broad-bladed, single-edged swords hacked a wide swathe through the undergrowth as they marched, still following the straight course set by the strands of blond hair Pavek now carried in a little pouch on the gold chain of his high templar's medallion.

It was the morning of the twelfth day and the start of their first full day in the forest. Last night, the two moons had been in the sky all night. They were both nearly full, and silvery little Ral was yapping toward golden Guthay's middle.

Pavek could remember other times when both moons had shown their full faces at the same time, but never when they'd been on the collision course of last night. It seemed to Pavek that Ral would crash against Guthay's trailing edge tonight or tomorrow night, which would be the significant thirteenth night. He mentioned his suspicions to the commandant once they'd broken camp and were marching through the forest again, and his concern that Ral would be destroyed. "If Kakzim knew that the moons were going to crash—"

Pavek bit his lip and held silent while he weighed what the Lion-King had told him about how using magic now would destroy Urik. Easier to believe that no spells would be available until after the sorcerer-king had prevented catastrophe in the heavens than to think Hamanu had been serious bout birthing dragons and the death of Urik.

Which thoughts made Pavek wonder why the Lion-King would have lied to him about such a matter, if the truth were so linked to this mission. That was not a question to ask Commandant Javed.

"I hadn't thought of it that way, Commandant," he said. "You're right. Of course."

"You're young yet. There's a lot to learn that never gets taught. You just have to put the pieces together yourself— remember that."

Pavek assured the older, wiser elf that he would, and their march through the forest continued. The sense that the forest itself was hostile to them grew steadily stronger until Javed and the maniple templars sensed it also.

"It's too damned quiet," Javed concluded. "Trees. I hate trees. The forest is an ambusher's paradise. They can put their scouts in the branches and tell their troops to lie low in the shade beneath them. Get out your hair, Lord Pavek; see if our halfling's tried to close a trap behind us."

It was the trees themselves that were looking down on them—at least that's what Pavek thought. The hair indicated it as well. Its line hadn't varied since they used it first at Khelo: Kakzim was still ahead of them.

But the two-time Hero of Urik took no chances. He tightened their formation, giving orders to every third templar: "Keep your eyes on the trees ahead of us, on either side, and especially behind. Anything moves, sing out. I'd sooner duck from wind and shadows than have halflings running up our rumps."

They did a lot of shadow dodging that morning, but they also got a heartbeat's warning before the first arrow flew at them. Trusting their silk tunics and leather armor, Commandant Javed ordered the maniples together in a tight circle. He commanded them to kneel, presenting smaller targets to the hidden archers and safeguarding their unprotected legs.

"Defend your face! That's where you're vulnerable," Javed shouted, taking his own advice when an arrow whizzed toward him. "But mark where the arrows are coming from. We'll take these forest-scum brigands when their quivers are empty."

The soft, smooth silk lived up to the commandant's claims, and the lightweight, slow-moving arrows failed to find targets time and again. One templar cried out when an arrow grazed her hand, and moments later she'd fallen unconscious. But she was their only casualty, and gradually the arrow flights came to a halt and the forest was silent.

"Mark where you saw 'em. Move out in pairs." This time the commandant gave his orders in a voice that wouldn't carry to the trees. "We don't have to catch them all, just one or two." Then he turned to Pavek and whispered: "You mark any, my lord?"

Pavek pointed to a crook halfway up one substantial tree where he'd spotted a shadowed silhouette against the branches.

Javed flashed his black-and-white smile. "Let's go catch us a halfling—"

But fickle fortune was against the heroes. Their quarry dropped down and hit the ground running. Javed's elven legs weren't what they'd been in his prime, and Pavek had never been much of a sprinter. The halfling went to ground in a stand of bramble bushes.

Other pairs were luckier. When the maniples reassembled near the body of the unconscious templar, they had captured four halflings, none of whom seemed to understand a word Commandant Javed said when he asked where their village was.

Intimidation was an art among templars. Pavek had been taught the basic skills in the orphanage. Being big, which Pavek had always been, and ugly, which he'd become early on life, Pavek had a natural advantage. The joke was that he was a born intimidator, but the truth was that Pavek didn't enjoy making other folk writhe in terror or anxiety. He was good at it because he hated it, and now that he held the highest rank imaginable, he intended never to professionally intimidate anyone again. He gave a hands-off gesture and stepped aside to allow the commandant to finish what he'd begun.

"You're lying," Javed told the captives who knelt before him. He looked aside to Pavek and began speaking above heads that rose no higher than his thigh. "My name is Commandant Javed of Urik, and I give you my word as a commandant that we're searching for one man, one male halfling with blond hair and slave scars on his face. He committed crimes in Urik, and he will answer for them. No one else need fear us. We won't harm you or your families or your homes if you give us the criminal we've come for. You will help us—understand that. Dead or alive, one of you will guide us to your homes. Now, which one of you will it be?"

From the side, Pavek knew what was coming next. He'd seen two of the halflings flinch when Javed implied the necromancy for which the templarates were infamous. A third had lowered his eyes when the commandant asked for a volunteer. Although necromancy would be more difficult without borrowed spellcraft, Pavek trusted that Javed wouldn't have made the threat if he didn't have the means to carry it through. He also trusted that one of the other templars would have seen the halflings' reaction and would report them to the commandant. Pointing out an enemy who'd shot poisoned arrows at him didn't trouble him, but condemning a man to death and worse because he wouldn't betray his home and family wasn't something Pavek could do.

As Ruari had told him when they'd argued in Escrissar's garden, he had a convenient conscience.

And not long to wait. The maniple templars had caught all four halflings reacting to Javed's speech. The commandant grabbed the lone woman in the group, not—Pavek assumed—strictly because of her sex, but because she had huddled close by one of the men. When templars of any rank, from any bureau, wanted fast intimidation results, they turned their attention to the smaller, weaker partner in a pair, if a pair was available.

While one templar held the woman from behind and another pressed his composite sword's blade against her pulsing throat, Commandant Javed removed a scroll from his pack. He broke the heavy black seal and began to read the mnemonics of the same necromantic spell Pavek had expected the Lion-King to use on him at Codesh. Midway through the invocation, the sword-wielding templar pricked the halfling's skin with the blade's razor-sharp teeth.

The woman gave no more reaction to the pain and the trickling of her own warm, red blood than she had to the commandant's speech, but the sight was too much for the halfling she'd huddled against. He sprang to his feet.

"Spare her, and I'll lead you to our village," he said in the plain language of the Urik streets.

His halfling companions, including the woman whose life he was trying to save, sputtered epithets in their clicking, screeching language. The woman got another nick in her throat; the other two halflings got savage blows from the hilts of templar weapons. Templars did not tolerate in others those treacherous, divisive behaviors they practiced to perfection among themselves.

"And the scarred, blond-haired halfling?" Javed asked.

The traitor wrung his hands. "I know of no such man."

Javed's long arm swung out to clout the halfling. He staggered and tripped over his indignant companions.

"We know he came this way!" the commandant thundered. "I will have the truth, from your mouth or hers!" He shook the scroll he still held in his right hand and began again to read the mnemonics.

With a hand held over his bleeding mouth, the halfling scrambled toward Commandant Javed. "Great One," he cried, "there is no such man. I swear it."

"What do you think, Lord Pavek? Is he telling the truth?"

Eyes turned toward Pavek, who scratched the bristly growth on his chin before asking: "Which way to your village?"

Eager to respond to a question he could answer, the halfling pointed in the direction they'd already been headed, but regarding his truthfulness, Pavek could only scratch his chin a second time. Halflings were rare in Urik, unheard of in the templarate. He could count the number he knew by name on the fingers of one hand, and save his thumb for Kakzim. As far as he was concerned, halfling faces were inscrutable. The male halfling in front of him could have been Zvain's age, his own age, or venerable like Javed; he could have been telling the absolute truth, or lying through his remaining teeth.

The only certainty was that Pavek held lives on the tip of his tongue. He looked at Javed; the commandant's shadowed face was as inscrutable as the halfling's. In the end, Pavek relied more on hope than logic. "I believe him about his village. As for the other—" following the commandant's lead, Pavek didn't say Kakzim's name aloud "—men of no account frequently don't know the answers to important questions." Fate knew, he, himself, dwelt in ignorance most of the time. "We'll talk to the elders when we get there."

The village to which their halfling captive led them wasn't far away. If they'd been on the barrens instead of deep in a forest, the templars would have spotted it from the ambush sight. Of course, without the forest, there would have been no ambush, and no halfling houses, either. The halflings lived in a circle of huge, spreading trees around a shaded, moss-covered clearing. Some of their homes had been, carved out of the trees' trunks so long ago the bark had healed around them. Others were perched in their branches: like nests. The homes seemed both alive and ancient, and all of them were too small for even a dwarf's comfort.

Tiny, feral faces—halfling children—peeked out of moss-framed windows, but the men and women of the community had gathered in the clearing, with weapons ready. A duet of Halfling singsong passed between the templars' captives and the anxious villagers. One of the templars translated:

"Our fellows said they had no choice; we would have killed them and gotten the information from their corpses. The old fellows in the center, they speak for the village and they wanted to know why we've come, what we're looking for."

Commandant Javed nodded. Speaking clearly in the Urikite dialect, confident the elders could understand, he said, "We've tracked a renegade halfling to this village, a blond man with Urik slave scars on his cheeks. If they surrender him at once, and if they provide us with an antidote for the poison they used on our comrade, we will depart immediately. Otherwise we'll destroy this village and everyone here, one by one. Children first."

When the elders protested in a passable dialect that there was neither an antidote nor a blond, scarred halfling, Commandant Javed turned to Pavek.

"My lord?" he asked, cold as a man's voice could be.

Pavek set down the sword he'd held ready since the ambush began. He dug out his bit of ensorcelled hair and let it spin freely, as much to give the halfling elders additional time to consider their folly—they might be superb fighters for their size, but they didn't stand a chance against Javed's maniples. For the first time, the hair pointed in a different direction, almost perpendicular to the path they'd been following since Khelo. The halflings who'd watched this subtle bit of Tablelands magic seemed impressed, but did not recant.

Their elders repeated that there was no antidote for the poison the halflings smeared on their arrowheads. The templar woman would die without awakening. And there was no blond-haired halfling with Urikite slave-scars on his cheeks in this village or anywhere else. Didn't the templars know that halflings would sooner die than surrender their freedom?

Faced with such intransigence, there was nothing Pavek could do to save them or their village. He met the commandant's eyes and nodded. Javed barked orders to his maniples:

The first were to stand with swords drawn, guarding the armed adults and venerable elders already gathered in the clearing. The second would collect flaming brands from the halfling hearths and set fire to the tree homes—and be prepared to snare the halfling children as they fled their burning shelters.

When a human templar seized the first halfling child as it bolted, hair and clothes aflame, toward its parents, the armed halflings surged against their enemies in a desperate attempt to save their children.

But the templars had their orders; the carnage was proceeding to its inevitable, one-sided conclusion, but just as blood began to flow:

STOP!

It was a frantic, mind-bending assault against them all, templar and halfling alike, and the Unseen, unheard shout was, in its way, louder than the shrill halfling screams or the crackling flames. It echoed in Pavek's mind, and was enough to make him retreat from the dirty work of slaying halflings. He was not alone in his retreat: though most of the templars brought their swords down toward their victims without hesitation, some did not, and even the halflings' resistance seemed to falter.

Paddock! Another Unseen shout, accompanied this time by an image Pavek recognized as his own face. Make them stop, Paddock. I'll give you what you want!

A second face loomed in Pavek's mind, a face covered with shiny, weblike scars, a face surrounded by tangled wisps of dark brown hair, a face he didn't recognize until its eyes absorbed his attention.

Eyes like black, bottomless pits, eyes of infinite hate and madness.

Kakzim's eyes. "Stand down!" Pavek shouted. "Javed! Commandant! Give the order to stand down. Now!"

A halfling came out of the underbrush bordering the village—from the direction the ensorcelled hair had foretold. His hair was blond and his face dark, but he wasn't Kakzim, and the marks covering his face were not slave-scars, but bloody bruises.

Leaning on a crutch, favoring a bandaged leg and an arm that was bound up beneath his ribs, he made slow progress toward the cautiously waiting templars. As he approached, Pavek realized the bruises, while not fresh, were a long way from being healed. His right eye was swollen completely shut; the left was crowned with a festering scab.

Whoever had beaten the halfling—and in Pavek's experienced opinion, several fists and clubs had been involved— they'd known what they were doing. Though he wasn't near dying, it would be a long time before the man could move easily again, if he ever did.

"Paddock," the battered halfling said through puffy lips once he reached the edge of the clearing.

"Pavek," Pavek corrected and waited without saying anything more.

"My name is Cerk," the halfling said, then added something in Halfling. "I've told them this is my fault. They were protecting me. I am to blame; this is the BlackTree's judgment. They've told you the truth: there is no antidote for our poison, and they know no one whose hair is blond and whose cheeks bear the scars of Urik's slaves. If you'd asked them about Kakzim—"

Heads came up among the village halflings, even among the four they'd held captive since the ambush. Kakzim's name was known here, and to judge by the expressions on the halfling faces when they heard the name, both feared and hated. A flurry of clicks, whistles and musical syllables passed among the halflings.

"They're cursing a black tree, my lord, Commandant," said the templar who'd translated the conversations earlier. "I don't think it's a place."

"It is a place and a brotherhood," Cerk explained. "They were my home, but they belong to Kakzim now. He is mad."

"We know that," Pavek said impatiently, when Cerk seemed to consider madness a sufficient explanation. "Where can we find him? Where's this black tree? You said you'd give us what we want."

"What you want, Pavek. He fears you as he fears nothing else; he knew you would come. You are the only one who can stop him—"

There was another outburst of Halfling. Their templar began to translate, but Cerk held up his hand and the man fell silent.

"The BlackTree has been the center of my people's lives since we came to this forest many, many generations ago. It holds the knowledge of our past in its roots. We would sooner die than deliver it to outsiders—dragon-spawned templars, especially. But Kakzim has already taken the BlackTree from us. You, Pavek, are our last hope."

Pavek thought hard and fast before speaking. "This knowledge it holds in its roots—you mean the knowledge to make poisons like Laq and that sludge Kakzim was going to pour into our water? Our king said if those bowls had been emptied, everyone in Urik and beyond would die. Is that the knowledge you're trying to protect?"

"It is only a very small part of the knowledge the Black-Tree has preserved," Cerk countered, then added softly and sadly: "But it is the knowledge Brother Kakzim absorbed and seeks to expand, now that he's usurped the Brethren to his own purposes."

"You helped him," Pavek voiced the conclusion as it formed in his mind. "You helped him in Urik, helped him return to the forest. Then he turned on you—"

Cerk nodded, a movement that made him stiffen with pain. "We came back to the Brethren. I recanted my vows; I denounced what we had done. I called on the elders to do what must be done—but while they sought a consensus, Kakzim split the Brethren and turned one half against the other. Brother Kakzim has a mighty voice; no one can resist it now. There is no one left but you, Pavek. Your friends said you were dead in Codesh, but they hadn't seen your corpse. I should have known that you weren't dead, were coming. That you weren't far behind, Pavek."

"Lord Pavek," Commandant Javed corrected. His sword remained unsheathed as he approached. "Speaking of a mighty voice, this one's spinning a pretty tale. The hair points to him. I think we've found our halfling, don't you, my lord? Let's settle this now." He raised his sword for a decapitating strike.

Pavek restrained Javed's arm. "He's not Kakzim, Commandant. We'll let him take us to this tree—"

"Only you, Pavek—" "See!" the commandant sputtered. "What did I tell you?"

It had the sound of an unpleasant death worthy of Hamanu himself, and an equally worthy, unpleasant ambition. For those reasons alone, although there were others, Pavek was inclined to believe the battered little man—but not to agree to his terms.

"We'll take our chances together. You'll lead us there. And, Cerk, what others? What friends of mine have you been talking to?"

"Hamanu's mercy!" Javed erupted before Cerk could answer. "With him leading us, we'll need two days to get anywhere."

"Then we'll still be there in time, Commandant," Pavek snarled, surprising himself and Javed with his vehemence. "Now, Cerk, again—what others?"

"The others—I don't know their names. The ones that were with you on the killing ground. They followed us— same as you did—we assumed you were with them, but obviously we were wrong. Kakzim was waiting for them when they crossed the mountains. He brought them to the BlackTree. I don't know what time you're thinking of, Pavek, but there's no time for your friends. I'm certain Kakzim will sacrifice them tonight when the moons converge: the blood of Urik to atone for his failures in Urik. I heard him say so many, many times. He'd hoped it would be your blood, of course, but he still needs to make a sacrifice and the best time will be tonight."

"Tomorrow night!" Pavek protested. "The thirteenth night. I have the Lion-King's word—"

"Tonight," Cerk insisted. "Halflings have forgotten more than the dragons will ever know. Hamanu's calculations are founded in myth; ours in fact: The convergence will be tonight. We're too late for them, but Kakzim will be drunk and bloated. Tomorrow will be a good time to confront him—"

"Tonight! We'll get there tonight, if I have to carry you. Start walking!"