Cinnabar Shadows

Chapter Fifteen

Another night, another day in shades of darkness beneath the black tree. Orekel's ankle had swelled up to the size of a cabra fruit. It was hot—not warm—to the touch; Mahtra had heard Zvain say so more than once. And painful. The dwarf couldn't move without moaning, couldn't move much at all. Zvain took Orekel's share of the slops the halflings dumped into their pit and carried it to him in his hands. The boy collected water from the ground seeps the same way.

His behavior made no sense to Mahtra. The dwarf didn't need food or water; he needed relief from his suffering. She didn't understand suffering. Father and Mika had died, but they'd died quickly. They hadn't suffered. Pavek had taken longer to die, but not as long as Orekel was taking. She'd asked Zvain, "What is wrong with the dwarf that he hasn't died?"

Zvain had gotten angry at her. He'd called her the names the street children had shouted when she'd walked from the templar quarter to the cavern in what seemed, now, to have been another life. Mahtra was hurt by the names, but not the way Orekel was hurt. She didn't die; she just crouched in the little place she'd claimed as her own.

Darkness thickened again; another night was coming. Mahtra thought it was the fourth night. She'd lost track of days and nights while she sat outside House Escrissar because they were the same while she lived them and fell one on top of the other in her memory. She didn't want to lose track of days again; it seemed somehow important to know how long she stayed in a particular place, even if the only events to remember were Orekel's groans and the slops falling from above.

Still thinking about time, Mahtra tried to make four marks that would help her keep the days and nights in order. The roots that intruded into their prison seemed an ideal place to carve her counting lines, but they were too tough for her fingernails; she broke two trying. Her nails were the color of cinnabar and tasted faintly of the bright red stone. She scratched along the dirt floor, searching for the broken-off pieces and had found one when she heard scratching sounds through the dirt beside her.

"Zvain—?" she whispered.

"Shsssh!" came the whispered reply. "I can hear it."

An animal digging through the dirt, drawn, perhaps, by the sounds she'd made? A large animal? An animal like the one Ruari had freed on the other side of the mountains? Fear tremors shook Mahtra's hands, nothing more. No warmth rising from the burnished marks on her skin, no heaviness in her arms, her legs, or her eyes. She'd chewed and swallowed all her cinnabar, but that wasn't enough. She didn't know what was missing, but cinnabar wasn't enough. If Ruari's beast burst into their prison, she'd have no protection.

"You can't go boom, can you?" he asked.

"No—I chewed up all my cinnabar, but something's missing."

"Damn!" the boy swore softly, and said other things besides. Father wouldn't have approved, or Pavek, but they were the words Mahtra would have used herself, if she'd remembered them.

Then there was light, so bright and painful that she couldn't see. Closing her eyes was no improvement. Her eyelids couldn't keep out the light after so much time in darkness. Mahtra warded the light with her hands, finally restoring the darkness with the pressure of her forearm against her closed eyes.

But she wanted desperately to see.

There were halfling voices, halfling words, halfling hands all around her, pulling her away from the wall, pushing her toward the agonizing light. She stumbled and needed her hands to catch herself as she fell. Her eyes opened—no choice of hers—and the light was less painful.

Halflings had scratched sideways into their prison!

For a heartbeat, Mahtra held the hope that they'd been rescued. Then she heard Kakzim's voice.

"Hurry up! The convergence begins before sundown! Hurry!"

Mahtra didn't know what a convergence was, but she didn't think she'd like it.

With halflings pushing and shoving, she crawled through the sideways hole, emerging into a tunnel that was high enough for the halflings to stand comfortably, but nowhere near high enough for Mahtra. Crawling was demeaning and not fast enough to satisfy the halflings, who harried her with sharpened sticks. She walked stooped over, like the old slave-woman at House Escrissar, and stopped when they thrust their sticks toward her face.

Zvain came out of the prison after her. Being not much bigger than the halflings themselves, the human youth could, and did, put up a fight that got him nowhere except beaten with sharp sticks and bound with ropes around his wrists and neck. Mahtra saw these things because the tunnel where she sat waiting had its own light: countless bright and flickering specks. The specks moved, gathering themselves into little worms that streaked up one side of the tunnel, across, and down the other where they broke apart and disappeared. The specks were white, but the little worms could be any color, or several colors and changing colors.

There'd been worms in the reservoir cavern, even worms that glowed faintly in the dark, but nothing like these fast-moving, fast-changing creatures that seemed to be made from light itself. Watching them, Mahtra forgot the prison she'd just left, forgot Zvain, forgot the halflings with their sticks—nothing mattered except touching a worm....

"Ack!" a halfling shouted in its own language, and struck Mahtra's knuckles with its stick.

She pulled her hand back to her hard-lipped mouth.

"Behave yourself! The halfling knowledge isn't to be touched by corrupt mongrels like you." Kakzim sneered. "Your protection doesn't work in the dark, does it, Mahtra?"

With her stinging hand still pressed against her mouth, Mahtra gave a wide-eyed nod, which was a lie—one of the very few that she'd ever told, but one for which she thought Father would forgive her. Pavek certainly would, or Ruari or Zvain. She could almost hear the three of them telling her not to let Kakzim know that she'd felt a spark inside when the halfling struck her hand.

Or that Kakzim himself had told her something she hadn't known before: darkness did stifle her protection, but she needed only a very little light to make it work again. A daily walk between the templar quarter and the elven market had been enough, so that she'd never suspected light was as important as cinnabar, but the little worms she mustn't touch were almost bright enough themselves.

The halflings were sealing their prison, leaving Orekel alone inside it, and that made Zvain frantic. He fought again, screaming that he and the dwarf couldn't be separated, and got beaten again. The two humans Mahtra knew best, Zvain and Pavek, were each inclined to risk themselves for others, regardless of the consequences. It was very brave, she supposed, but also very foolish. Wherever they were going—now that the halflings were making them move forward again—the dwarf was better off where he was.

As for Ruari—Mahtra hoped, as the halflings prodded her through another tight passage, that Ruari was with Pavek and Father in the place where people went after they died.

But Ruari was still alive.

They came out into another prison chamber, similar to the one they'd left, except it was open to the sky and afternoon bright, and the first thing she saw was Ruari's long, lean body hanging down from rope tied around his wrists. The second was the shallow movements of his ribs.

Mahtra called his name. His head, which had fallen forward against his chest, didn't move. Zvain did more than call; he bolted away from his guards and threw himself at Ruari's legs. He either had not remembered or didn't care that his own hands were tied and the slightest jostle would upset Ruari's delicate balance atop the stump.

Ruari swung free. He made a sound that should have been a scream but was a hoarse gasp instead. The muscles of his upper body knotted in spasms Mahtra could feel in her own back and shoulders.

"Go ahead. Cut him down," Kakzim said, handing a knife to another halfling who attacked the knots at the end of Ruari's rope.

Mahtra had last seen the knife the halfling used when it was attached to Ruari's belt and first seen it attached to Pavek's. Now it belonged to Kakzim, who reclaimed it once Ruari's weight was sufficient to fray through the rope. Mahtra had a half-heartbeat to remind herself that no good came from owning things, before Ruari landed in the bottom of the pit: a twitching, groaning collection of arms and legs that couldn't hope to stand on its own.

A second halfling untied Zvain's wrists.

"Get him up, you two," Kakzim barked at Mahtra and Zvain.

It seemed unspeakably cruel to seize Ruari by the wrists and ankles, to drag him to the opening where they'd entered the pit and manhandle him through the tight passage, but Zvain and Mahtra had no choice in the matter. The halflings were eager to put their sharp sticks to use and, no matter what they did to him, it would have been worse if they'd forced the barely conscious Ruari to move on his own. Like Orekel, the half-elf was oblivious to everything that wasn't pain. He didn't recognize them by sight or sound, though he knew Kakzim's voice and cringed whenever he heard it.

Mahtra had guessed where they were headed and what Ruari's part in the "convergence" would be when the passage through which they were dragging Ruari began to slope upward to the surface. The thought that he would hang from the black tree until he died and rotted disturbed her, although she saw no alternatives. She'd seen people slay other people—the nightmare image of Father's crushed skull was never out of memory's reach—but she didn't know how to kill, didn't want to learn, not even to end Ruari's suffering.

She was strong enough to carry him in her arms, and she picked him up once they stood outside without asking per-mission or waiting to be told. The cinnabar she'd swallowed quickened as soon as the sunset light struck her face. She could make a boom, as Zvain called her protection. She and the boy might be able to run far enough and fast enough to escape the halflings, but not if she were carrying Ruari. They'd have to leave the half-elf behind, the dwarf, too—and then there'd be a chance that Zvain wouldn't come with her.

Mahtra didn't need Zvain or anyone else since Father had died. She could escape on her own—and would, she decided, before she let the halflings drive her underground again or hang her in the tree. But those things weren't happening right now and something altogether different might happen before they did, so she decided to wait before making her own escape.

A horde of halflings stood waiting beneath the black tree's branches. They chanted phrases Mahtra didn't understand when she appeared with Ruari draped across her arms, and repeated them as she followed Kakzim to a long, flat stone set in the ground like a bed or table.

"Put him down," Kakzim said, and she obeyed, then retreated, also obediently.

Kakzim shouted something in Halfling, and the chanting stopped. Everything was quiet while the blood-colored sun shot rays of blood-colored sunset through the leaves of the black tree. Kakzim used the metal-bladed knife to make a pair of shallow gashes along the inside of Ruari's shins, just above his ankles. There was a groove in the flat stone, unnoticeable in the shallow light until it began to fill with Ruari's blood and channel it to the moss-covered ground. When the first red drops struck the moss, the chanting resumed and somewhere someone began beating a deep-voiced drum.

The drum beat slowly at first, while halflings wound more rope around Ruari's chest, beneath his armpits. It began to beat faster when one of the halflings climbed into the tree with the rope's free end tied loosely around his waist. After weaving carefully through the main limbs, the halfling shinnied out along one of the thickest branches, then looped his end of the rope over the branch and dropped it to the ground.

"Grab it and pull," Kakzim ordered, his voice almost lost in the shrill chanting of the other halflings. "Both of you! Now!"

The halflings guarding them had exchanged their sharpened prods for stone-tipped spears once they were above ground, and Zvain's arms bloodied fast, batting the tips away as he tried to stand his ground. Though most of the halflings aimed at his flanks and thighs, trying to make him walk, one thrust high, putting a gouge just above the boy's left eye.

Between Zvain's shriek and the blood that flowed thick and fast down his face, it was impossible to measure his injury, except that it wasn't what Kakzim wanted. The onetime slave screamed at his halflings, disciples—and one of them, perhaps the one who'd thrust high, threw his spear aside and dropped to one knee with his hands pressed over his eyes and ears. As he swayed from side to side, oblivious to the world, blood began to trickle from his nostrils. And all the while, Kakzim stood, tense, with his fists clenched, his eyes closed and the scars on his face throbbing in rhythm with the solitary drum.

"Mahtra," Zvain pleaded, staring at her with his un-bloodied eye while he kept both hands pressed over the other.

Blood no longer trickled from the halfling's nostrils; it poured out of him in a steady stream. He'd fallen on his side, already unconscious.

"Yes, Mahtra," Kakzim purred. He turned from the dead halfling. "Take up the rope and pull."

Mahtra was angry and frightened by the blood and dying. She was hot inside and could feel her arms starting to stiffen. The cloudy membranes in the corners of her eyes fluttered as she considered if this was the right moment to loose her protection.

"Do something!" both Zvain and Kakzim shouted at the same time.

The drum beat faster and so did Mahtra's heart, yet her thoughts whirled faster still. She had a lifetime to look from Zvain to Ruari and finally to Kakzim. There was nothing she could do for the half-elf or the human, but she would not leave this place while the scarred halfling lived. Her protection was not a fatal magic: she'd have to kill him with her hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Made by halflings?

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

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

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

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

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

"Mahtra!" Pavek shouted.

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

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

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

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

"You heard him. Commandant."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sweating, overheated fool.

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

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

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

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

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

Kakzim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A real weapon, Pavek reminded himself. Kakzim could lose himself in an illusion, but the knife remained real, fixed in the real grip of the halfling's arm, limited by a halfling's reach, a halfling's skill. He'd taken a wound in his thigh because it was exposed, but also because it was Kakzim's easiest target. Pavek kept his arms and the sword in constant motion, warding against the attacks he thought a halfling might choose, while he, himself, looked for a knife-sized flaw in the illusion.

Kakzim chuckled; Pavek slashed at the sound. The halfling wasn't a fighter, not with steel. Kakzim sent illusion after illusion into Pavek's mind. Some were people the halfling must have plucked out of Pavek's memory, others were total strangers. All of them had weapons and all of them withered in the barren soil of Pavek's imagination.

All except one—

One dark-eyed woman returned, no matter how many times Pavek sent her image away. Her name was Sian. She had hair like midnight and a luscious smile. She'd never met a man she didn't love; never met a man she didn't love more than she loved her tagalong son. Pavek couldn't fight the memory of his own mother, couldn't look for a knife in her hand.

Kakzim had found his weakness. He took another gouge along his left leg. It was painful, but not yet disabling. The halfling's weapon was a small knife, but, then again, in human terms, any halfling weapon would seem small.

Pavek gritted his teeth against the pain. Once again, he reasoned his way past his long-dead mother—and became aware of another Unseen presence in his mind. It was furtive, but not small. It faded from a glancing thought, and with Kakzim reconstructing Sian's image, Pavek couldn't afford a second outward thought: the first alone cost him another gash—this one on his right shin, and deep enough to affect his balance.

Not a halfling, Pavek's mind reached that certainty with the speed of lightning. No halfling had the power, the sheer weight, to drive him to his knees. And, to his knowledge, nothing could strike a man so many times as he went down. The beast had twice as many legs as it needed and a tufted tail with wickedly curved spikes protruding through the shaggy hair. Fortunately, the spikes curved toward the tail's tip and were sharp on their inner edge, else Pavek would have lost an eye, at the very least, as the beast sank down on its too-many-feet between himself and Kakzim.

It was the Unseen predatory presence he'd felt moments ago and, quite probably, the predator that had responded to his Kakzim-image with food. Ears flicking constantly, it flooded the minds of its prey with a simple but powerful mind-bending attack. Pavek knew this, because it considered him prey. It considered Kakzim prey, as well, because the halfling had shed his illusions. Beads of sweat bloomed on Kakzim's forehead as he absorbed the beast's assault, trying—no doubt—to dominate it and turn it against Pavek.

If he'd been a clever man, Pavek would have used his few precious moments to slay the beast and Kakzim, too, but he was awed by its power, its lethal beauty. Hamanu styled himself the Lion of Urik, though no one in Urik had ever seen a lion. This many-legged creature could be Hamanu's lion. It had almost as many ways to kill its prey: if mind-bending wasn't enough, it had eight clawed feet, an abundance of teeth, a pair of horns, and the spikes on its tail.

Pavek was lucky to be alive, and he should kill it while he had the chance, but lethal as it was, it was beautiful, too, with irregular stripes across its long back, its tail, and down each leg. Magical silver-gold moonlight limned each muscular curve of its body as it fought Kakzim for dominance. The dark stripes were tipped with starlight; the lighter, tawny stripes, with fire.

Though he knew what he should do, Pavek found himself thinking of Ruari, instead. It was so easy to imagine the two of them together, Ruari on his knees, scratching all the itchy places that were sure to collect around those horns and ears.

So easy, and so breathtakingly sad that the half-elf would never touch, never see—

The lion made a sound deep in its throat, the first sound it had made. Pavek sensed its concentration had faltered. He feared Kakzim had won. Then, in his mind's eye, Pavek saw Ruari as he'd not seen him before: angular and flat-nosed, coppery hair and coppery skin coming together around slit-pupiled coppery eyes.

Ruari? Pavek was no mind-bender, but after enduring so many of Kakzim's Unseen assaults, he had a notion of how to channel his thoughts to the lion. Ruari—? Is that you? Telhami, after all, persisted as a green sprite in her grove. Perhaps on this magic-heavy night, Ruari had found a refuge in the mind of a lion.

But before the lion could answer, Kakzim lunged forward and thrust his knife between its ribs, high above its front legs. The lion leapt aside and yowled. Pavek saw—and recognized instantly—the knife sticking out of a tawny stripe. It was his knife, the knife he'd given to Ruari in Codesh, the knife whose hilt he'd wrapped with a lock of his mother's midnight hair.

Faster than thought and with a scream of his own, Pavek took his sword-hilt in both hands. He easily dodged the lion's thrashing tail and committed everything to a sweeping crosswise slash with his sword.

Kakzim's body toppled forward; his head came to rest where the wounded lion had stood a heartbeat earlier. The lion was already gone into the forest, roaring its anger and agony, taking Pavek's knife with it. Pavek called his friend's name, but Ruari's spirit had not come to rest in the great cat, and soon the forest was quiet again.

He cried for his knife as he hadn't yet cried for Ruari and had never cried for Sian. Then Pavek picked up Kakzim's gory head by a tuft of hair. He remembered the four of them—him, Mahtra, Zvain and Ruari—first returning to Urik; it seemed a lifetime ago. Zvain had wished for honor and glory; he'd wanted to throw Kakzim's head at Hamanu's feet.

If Zvain lived, he, at least, could have a wish come true.

But the strength of purpose that had sustained Pavek since morning finally failed him. Walking slowly with Kakzim's head in one hand and his sword back in its scabbard, Pavek slowly retraced his way to the black tree. Ral slid free of Guthay; the forest remained bright, but the silver-gold light came to a sudden end.

***** Dawn was coming, the fainter stars had already vanished for the day, and Pavek's injured legs hurt with every plodding step he took. By the time got back to the brook where he'd reached for moonlight magic, Pavek didn't know quite where he was, and really didn't care. He stumbled on the wet stones and went down. The cool water felt good on his wounds. He didn't want to stand again; couldn't have, if he'd tried. Pavek barely had the strength left to heave Kakzim's head onto the far bank where someone could find it. For himself, all he wanted to do was put his head down and sleep..

Pavek didn't recognize the voice—didn't see anyone at all until Javed laughed and pulled him out of the water. Mahtra was waiting on the bank, too. Her mask was in its accustomed place and her shawl was expertly wound around her shoulder.

"Lord Javed is very good at bandaging; he'll take good care of your legs," she confided to Pavek.

With one arm bound against her, Mahtra remained as strong as many men, and had no trouble propping Pavek's weary body against a tree. The commandant—whom she called Lord Javed, as she'd once called Elabon Escrissar Lord Elabon—stood nearby tearing strips of silk into bandages. Everyone said the Hero of Urik took good care of his men, and apparently that was no myth. He unslung a roll of soft black leather and surveyed an assortment of salves and potions that any healer would be proud to own.

Mahtra must have seen Pavek staring. "Don't worry," she reassured him. "My lord is very wise, like Father. He's been everywhere—even to the tower where I was made. There's nothing he doesn't know."

Pavek was too weary to say anything except the first words that came into his mind: "You've made a good choice, Mahtra. He'll take good care of you."

"I know."

The commandant had already taken care of almost everything. While Javed cleaned and bandaged Pavek's three wounds, he carefully explained everything that he'd done while Pavek was chasing Kakzim through the forest— and in Lord Pavek's name, of course. The corpses had been respectfully laid out beneath the black tree; they awaited the proper burial rites, which the halfling, Cerk, would perform with the assistance of the Brethren who'd sworn their loyalty to him. Javed had personally examined all the wounded before sending them to the halfling village for rest, food, and other care. Those halflings who'd refused to swear to Cerk had been sent to the village, also—under the watchful eyes and sharper swords of Javed's maniples. And once Lord Pavek's wounds were bound up, they'd be going back to the village. There was a litter waiting, with two strong dwarves to carry it, if Lord Pavek didn't think he could walk that far.

Pavek nodded. He listened to everything the commandant said, but he didn't really hear any of it. His legs had been numb before Javed bandaged them, and they felt no different now. He needed help standing, and if it weren't for Javed's arm under his, he'd have fallen several times along the path from the brook to the black tree. He'd had the presence of mind to make certain Kakzim's head wasn't left behind. Beyond that, whatever Javed said, wherever Javed took him, however he got there, it was all the same to Pavek.

The sky was glowing when, with the commandant steadying his every step, Pavek walked beneath the black tree again. The moss-covered clearing was quiet—

"Pavek!"

Zvain ran toward him. There was a big bandage around his forehead, covering one eye, but he ran too well to have been seriously injured. Pavek opened his arms and let the boy try to catch him as he fell.