Lynn Abbey - Cinnabar Shadows

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.