Lynn Abbey - Cinnabar Shadows

Ruari's spirits sank. Pavek wanted Kakzim; not catching him was going to hurt Pavek more than losing his hand. "Is there anything here? Pavek..."

"Nothing!" Zvain said, kicking over a stool for emphasis. "Not a damn thing!"

"There's this—" Mahtra held out a chunk of what appeared to be tree bark.

"Garbage!" Zvain kicked the stool again.

Ruari left his staff leaning against the doorjamb and took Mahtra's offering. It was bark, though not from any tree that grew on the Tablelands. Holding it, feeling its texture with his fingers, he got a vision of countless trees and mountains wrapped in smoke like the Smoking Crown Volcano... no, mountains wrapped in clouds, like nothing he'd seen before.

Any other time, he'd cherish the bark simply for the vision it gave his druid spirit, but there was no time, and the bark was more than bark. Someone had covered it with straight black lines and other, irregular

"Writing," he mused aloud.

That gave him Zvain's swift attention. The boy grabbed the bark out of his hands. "Naw," he drawled, "that's not writing. I know writing when I see it; I can read—and there're no words here."

"I know writing, too," Ruari insisted, although he was better at recognizing its many forms than in reading any one of them. "There's writing here, halfling writing, I'll wager. And other things—"

"That's a mountain," Mahtra said, tapping the bark with a long, red fingernail. "And that's a tree—like the ones I saw where you live."

"It's a map!" Zvain exalted, jumping up and throwing the bark scrap into the air. "Kakzim left us a map!"

Ruari snatched the bark while it was still well above Zvain's head and gave him a clout behind the ear as well. "Don't be a kank-brained fool. Kakzim's not going to gather up everything else and leave a map behind."

"What's a map?" Mahtra asked.

"Directions for finding a place you've never been," Ruari answered quickly, not wanting to be rude to her.

"Then maybe he left it behind because he doesn't need it anymore."

Ruari closed his hand over Mahtra's. She was seven, younger than Zvain. She not only didn't know what a map was, she didn't understand at all the way a man's mind worked. "It's garbage, like Zvain said, or it's a trap."

"A trap?" she asked, freeing herself and taking the scrap from his hand to examine it closely.

She didn't understand, and Ruari was still ransacking his mind, searching for better words, when they heard, first, a gong clattering loudly and, second, a roar that belittled it to a tinkling cymbal.

"The Lion-King!" Zvain said as they all turned toward the sound, toward Codesh's outer gate.

"Pyreen preserve and protect!" Ruari took the bark map, rolled it quickly, and pushed it all the way up inside his shirt hem. "Is there anything else? Anything?"

Zvain said, "Absolutely nothing," and Mahtra shook her head.

Ruari grabbed his staff and headed for the killing ground with the other two close behind him.

The first thing Ruari noticed was that the templars and Codeshites were still fighting near the gate. The second was that they'd moved Pavek out of the sun.

Pavek was sitting on the ground with his back against one of the massive tables where the Codeshites turned carcasses into meat. His head was tilted to one side; he seemed to be resting, maybe sleeping. His face was a gray shade of pale, but Ruari wasn't concerned until he was close enough to see that Pavek's mangled left hand was inside a bucket. Water was excellent for washing a wound and keeping it clean, but submerging that bad an open wound was a good way to bleed a man to death.

"Damn you!" he shouted and, grasping his staff by its base, swung its bronzed lion end at the three men standing by while Pavek slowly died.

The nearest templar raised his sword to parry the staff. The templar could have attacked, could have slain Ruari, who was fighting with his heart, not his head, and his heart was breaking; but the yellow-robed warrior didn't take the easy slash or thrust. He parried the staff, beat it aside, closing the distance between them until he could loft a sandal-shod kick into Ruari's midsection. Catching the staff with one hand as it flew through the air, he tried to catch Ruari with the other.

Ruari dodged, and landed hard, flat on the ground an arm's length from Pavek. Ignoring the pain in his own gut, the half-elf crawled forward. He plucked the frayed leather thong out of the dirt, then tried to lift Pavek's hand out of the bucket.

"My choice," Pavek said, his voice so weak Ruari read the words on his lips more than he heard them with his ears.

The priest held onto Zvain—barely. The burnished skin on Mahtra's shoulders was glowing again, and her bird's-egg eyes were open so wide they seemed likely to fall out of her face.

"What's happening?" she demanded.

"He's killing himself!" Ruari shouted. "He's bleeding himself to death!"

"The king is coming," the priest said, as if that were an explanation.

Pavek asked, "You couldn't find Kakzim?" before Ruari could challenge the priest.

"No, he's scarpered," the half-elf admitted, shaking his head and turning his empty palms up. All the disappointment he'd dreaded showed in Pavek's eyes just before he closed them with a shrug, as if the big man had stayed alive this long only because he'd hoped his friends would be successful. Taking a painful breath, Ruari finished: "He got away clean, again. Didn't leave anything behind."

But Pavek raised his good hand and turned away. "No. No, I don't want to see it. Don't tell me about it. Just—Just get out of Codesh quickly. All three of you."

"Why?" Zvain, Mahtra, and Ruari demanded with a single voice.

Pavek looked up at the priest.

"Under necromancy, a dead man must tell the truth, but he can't reveal what he didn't know while he was alive."

"Necromancy?" Ruari said slowly, as the pieces began to fall into place. "Deadhearts? Hamanu?"

The templar who'd parried Ruari's staff nodded. "We kill our prisoners before we take them to the deadhearts. The dead don't suffer; they don't feel pain."

"They don't remember," the other templar corrected. "Everything stops when they die. They've got no present, no future; only the past."

"No."

"I can hope, Ru," Pavek said in his weak voice. "What good would I be anyway, Ru, without my right hand?"

"No," Ruari repeated, equally soft and weak.

"I raised a guardian, here—in Codesh, in his realm. He's not going to be happy, and he's not going to rest until he controls it or destroys it. I can't let him do that, and the only way I can stop him from trying... and succeeding is if I'm already a corpse when he finds me. It takes a druid to raise a guardian. The Lion-King's not a druid, Ru, and after I'm dead, I won't be either."

Another roar, louder than the first, warned them all that there wasn't much time.

"You can't raise it, Ru. I know that, and I know that you don't believe me when I tell you that—not truly—and that'll get you killed, if you don't get out of here... now."

Pavek spoke the truth: Ruari didn't believe that he couldn't raise the Urikite guardian, and the Lion-King would use that belief. He'd die trying to raise the wrong guardian, or he'd die the moment he succeeded. He had to leave, and take Zvain and Mahtra with him, but he put his arms around Pavek instead.

"I won't forget you," he gasped, trying to remain a man, trying not to cry.

"Go home and plant a tree for me. A big, ugly lump of a tree. And carve my name in its bark."

The tears came, as many as Ruari had ever shed for someone else. Zvain wormed in between them, silently demanding his moment, and getting it, before Ruari pulled him to his feet.

"Wait—" Pavek called, and Ruari dared to hope he'd changed his mind, but Pavek only wanted to give him the coin pouch from his belt and his most prized possession: a small steel-bladed knife snug in its sheath.