Cinnabar Shadows (22 page)

"My lord wrote his instructions out for you. He says you must be careful to do everything exactly as
he's described. He says you wouldn't want to be responsible for any mistakes."

"Who's your lord?" the sergeant asked, apparently puzzled that her lord was someone other than Pavek,
who occupied himself breaking the seal while Mahtra answered:

Hamanu's instructions weren't complicated, but they were precise: flammable bitumen, naphtha, and
balsam oil—leather sacks and sealed jars of which would be waiting for them at the elven market
guardpost—had to be mixed thoroughly with the contents of each of Kakzim's bowls, then set afire with a
slow match, which would also be waiting for them. The resulting blaze would reduce the sludge to harmless
ash, but the three ingredients were almost as dangerous as the sludge. With bold, black strokes across the
parchment, Hamanu warned Pavek to be careful and to stay upwind of the flames.

Pavek committed the writing to his memory before he met the consternated sergeant's eyes again.
They were, after all, not merely templars, but templars from opposing bureaus, and the traditional disdain
had to be observed.

"These instructions come from the Lion himself," Pavek said mildly. "He mentions bitumen, naphtha,
and balsam oil—" The sergeant blanched, as any knowledgeable person would hearing those three names
strung together. "The watch at the elven market gate holds them. We'll take them underground with us."

He'd spoken loudly enough for the maniple to overhear, and Pavek, in turn, heard their collective gasp.
They were only twenty templars, twenty-two if they counted Pavek and the sergeant. There were hundreds
of traders, mercenaries, and renegades of all stripes holed up in the elven market, every one of whom
would risk his life for the incendiaries they were supposed to carry underground.

"Great Lord," the sergeant began after clearing her throat. "Respectfully—most respectfully—I urge
you to leave your kinfolk behind. Wherever we go, whatever we do today, it will be no place for the
unseasoned. Respectfully, Great Lord. Respectfully."

Pavek should have been insulted—beyond a doubt she included him among the unseasoned,
respectfully or not— but mostly he was startled by her assumption that his motley companions were his
family. Denials formed on his tongue; he swallowed them. Let her believe what she wanted: a man could
do far worse.

"Respectfully heard, but they know more than you, and they've earned the right to see this through."

"Great Lord, if there's fighting—"

"Don't worry about me or mine. Your only concern is keeping those bowls secure on their platforms
until you've eliminated the opposition. Now—let's move out! We've got our work cut out for us if we're to
catch that other maniple at midday in Codesh. I hope you're paid up with your fortune-seller. We're going to
need a load of luck before the day's out."

The sergeant shot another glance behind her. This time Pavek saw it land on a young man in the last
row of the maniple, another redhead. He called the man forward. The sergeant stiffened, and so did the
rest of the maniple. Whatever was going on, they shared the secret. Pavek asked for the redhead's
medallion. More grim and apprehensive glances were exchanged, especially between the two red-haired
templars, but the young man removed the medallion and gave it to the high templar.

Lord Hamanu's leonine portrait was precisely carved, delicately painted, but that vague aura of
ominous power that surrounded every legitimate medallion was missing. Without saying anything, Pavek
flipped the ceramic over. As he expected, the reverse side of the medallion was smooth— the penalty for
impersonating a templar was death; the penalty for wearing a fake medallion was ten gold pieces. The
medallion Pavek held was fraudulent, but the mottled clay beads he could just about see beneath the
"templar's" yellow tunic were genuine enough.

Underground, an earth cleric would be more useful than all the luck a fortune-seller could offer.

"When the fighting starts," Pavek advised, returning the medallion, "stay close to Zvain and Mahtra," he
pointed them out, "because they'll be staying out of harm's way—as you should."

"Great Lord, you are indeed a smart man. We might all live to see the sun rise again."

Pavek grimaced and cocked his head toward the eastern horizon, which had begun to lighten. "Not
unless we get moving."

Corruption, laziness, and internecine rivalries notwithstanding, the men and women who served the
Lion-King of Urik mostly followed their orders and followed them competently. The sergeant brought her
augmented maniple through the predawn streets to me gates of the elven market without incident or delay.
Three sewn-shut leather sacks were waiting for them. Their seams had been secured with pitch; each had
been neatly labelled and branded with Lord Hamanu's personal seal. The sacks had been brought from the
city warehouse by eight civil bureau templars, messengers and regulators in equal numbers, who remained
at the market gates with orders to join the war bureau maniple when it was time to move the sacks again.

The elven market was quiet when a wedge-shaped formation of nearly thirty templars passed through
the gate. It was much too quiet, and what sounds they could hear were almost certainly signals as they
passed from one enforcer's territory to the next. There were silhouettes on every rooftop, eyes in every
alley and doorway. But thirty templars were more trouble than the most ambitious enforcer wanted to buy,
and there'd been no time for alliances. Observed, but not disturbed, they reached the squat, old building in its
empty plaza as the lurid colors of sunrise stained the eastern sky.

She sent two elves and a half-elf down the tunnel first, not to take advantage of their night vision, but to
chant a barrage of minor spells meant to give them safe passage. Privately, Pavek was dismayed by the
sergeant's tactics. He told himself it was only civil bureau prejudice against the war bureau's reliance on
magic—a prejudice born in envy because the civil bureau had to justify every spell it cast and the war
bureau didn't.

Still, he was relieved when one of the spell-chanters worked his way to the rear where the dull-eyed
humans gathered, and reported that they'd gone too deep to pull anything through their medallions without
creating an ethereal disturbance that could be easily detected by any Code-shite with a nose for magic.

The sergeant didn't hide her preferences. "If there's anyone at all in the damned cavern."

But the chanter saw things differently. "It will not matter where they are, Sergeant. The deeper we go,
the harder we must pull, and the bigger the ethereal disturbance, which radiates like a sphere and will reach
Codesh long before we do. It is also true, sergeant, that the harder we pull, the less we are receiving. I
believe it will not be long before we receive nothing useful at all no matter how hard we pull. The Mighty
Lord Hamanu's power does not seem to penetrate the rock beneath his city."

They conferred with the red-headed priest in templar's clothing. He couldn't account for the problems
the chanters were having. In Urik, he and other earth-dedicated priests worked very quietly because
Hamanu's power reached into their sanctuaries quite easily.

"The rock here must be different, Ediyua," he addressed the sergeant not by her rank, but by her name,
confirming Pavek's suspicion that they were kin. "I could investigate, but it would take time, perhaps as
much as a day."

Ediyua muttered a few oaths. In her opinion, they should return to the palace; the war bureau didn't like
to fight without Hamanu backing them up, but Pavek was the great commander for this foray, and the final
decision was his.

Hearing that the Lion-King's power wouldn't reach the reservoir cavern had shaken Pavek's
confidence. He'd been so certain Hamanu was toying with them. Now it seemed the great king truly
needed the help and skill of a ragtag handful of ordinary folk to thwart Kakzim's plan to poison the city's
water. Pavek still considered himself and all of his companions to be pawns in a great game between
Hamanu and the mad halfling, but the stakes had been raised to dizzying heights.

"The bowls," he said finally. "Destroying the bowls— that's the most important thing. If we go back to
the palace without doing that, we'll be grease and cinders. The Lion's given orders that the bowls are to be
burnt before we link up with the other maniple in Codesh at midday. And we're going to burn them, or die
trying, because if we fail, the dying will be worse."

There was a grumble of agreement from the nearest templars. Even the sergeant nodded her head.

Pavek continued. "I was seen and recognized yesterday on the Codesh killing ground. Our enemy
knows I'll be coming back, one way or another. He'll have guards in the cavern—workmen, too—but no
magic except mind-bending. He's a mind-bender, I think. Tell everyone to be alert for thoughts that aren't
their own. It's dark as a tomb in there. Keep your elves up front. Let them use their eyes. Forget spellcraft.
There're twenty of you, Sergeant. If you can't defeat three times your number without pulling magic,
Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy won't be enough to save you."

A globe of flickering witch-light magnified the sergeant's vexation at listening to a civil bureau regulator
tell her how to prepare for a fight. But she gave the orders Pavek wanted to hear. All magic was stifled,
and they finished their journey as Pavek recommended, keeping themselves low to the ground. He got a
moment's satisfaction when another report filtered back to them stating that there were at least a score of
Codeshites in the cavern, some working atop shining platforms, while the rest were both armed and
armored.

Leaving the balsam oil with the two dwarves, Pavek followed the sergeant to the front of their column.
As he'd done the previous day, he sneaked down the ramp and cautiously stole a peek across the reservoir.
The scaffolds and bowls shone with their glamourous light, inciting awestruck gasps from his companions.
Unlike the previous day, however, the cavern swarmed with activity. Workers were on the scaffolds and at
their bases, hauling buckets up from the shore and adding who-knew-what to the simmering sludge. Beyond
the workers stood a ring of guards—Pavek counted eighteen—all with their backs to the scaffolds and with
their poleaxes ready.

The sergeant swore and crawled back with him to the tunnel passage where they could confer. The
plan they made was simple: Leaving the nontemplars behind with the sealed sacks; the rest of them would
fan out along the shore and advance as far as possible before they were spotted by the dwarves among the
Codeshites. Once they were seen, they'd charge and pray there were no archers hiding in the darkness.
Even if there were, the plan wouldn't change.

Someone was sure to run for Codesh. Ruari and the red-haired priest had their orders to watch which
way those runners went. Then, with Zvain and Mahtra's help, they were to carry the sacks to the scaffolds
whatever way they could.

"With luck, we'll have those bowls burning before reinforcements arrive from the abattoir," Pavek
concluded.

The war bureau templars commended themselves to Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy. Pavek embraced
his friends. In the darkness it didn't matter, but his eyes were damp and useless when he joined the other
templars on the shore.

Cerk sat in the rocks near the entrance to the tunnel leading back to the village. Among themselves in
the forests, halflings weren't daunted by physical labor, but on the Tablelands, where the world was
overflowing with big, heavy-footed folk, a clever halfling stayed out of the way whenever there was work
to be done.

He'd earned his rest. Gathering all the bones for the scaffolds and the hides for the bowls had taxed his
creativity to the limit. Simply getting everything into the cavern had been a challenge. The Codesh passage
had collapsed sometime in the distant past. When Brother Kakzim had first found it, the twisting tunnel was
barely large enough for a human and broad enough for a dwarf. There wasn't enough clearance to
maneuver the long bones Cerk needed for the scaffolds. He'd hired work-crews every night for a week to
clear away the debris before the longest bones could be manhandled into the cavern.

Brother Kakzim had raged and stormed. Elder brother wanted monuments of stone to support his
alabaster brewing bowls. By the shade of the great BlackTree itself, Cerk could have kept those crews
excavating for another year, and there wouldn't have been enough room to get the bowls Brother Kakzim
wanted into the cavern—assuming he'd been able to find any alabaster bowls, much less the ten that elder
brother swore he needed. Cerk had worked miracles to get enough hide to make the five wicker-frame
bowls they did have.

A little appreciation would have been welcomed. Instead Brother Kakzim had assaulted Cerk both
physically and mentally. The lash marks across Cerk's back had healed shut, but they were still sore and
tender. In the end—at least before the end of Cerk's life—elder brother's madness had receded and reason
prevailed. The contagion could be successfully brewed in the five bowls Cerk provided, and their
scrap-heap origin could be disguised with a well-constructed glamour.

Cerk still didn't understand why the glamour had been necessary. It had taken every last golden coin in
the Urik cache to create it: half to find a defiler willing to cast such a spell and the other half for the
reagents. They'd gotten some of the gold back when they'd slain the defiler after he raised the glamour, but
most of their money was gone, now. And for what? The workers who saw the illusion were the same folk
who'd lashed bones together to form the scaffolds and stitched their fingers raw making the bowls. Cerk
certainly wasn't impressed by it, and they weren't going to invite the sorcerer-king to the cavern to witness
the spilling of the bowls, the destruction of his city.