Cinnabar Shadows (Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas 4)

Of course not, Akashia realized, feeling like a fool. Eating or drinking would have meant removing the mask. While ransacking Mahtra's memory, Akashia had found the white-skinned woman's self-image—what she thought she looked like. If it was halfway accurate, there was good reason for that mask, though appearances alone would not have bothered Akashia.

One thing that did bother her was the way that Mahtra chose to stand a step away from the touchstone patterns on the dirt floor. Grandmother had known what they were: mind-benders' mnemonics, makeshift symbols Akashia had used to push and poke her way through Mahtra's dreams. Akashia was the only one who could have deciphered their meaning, yet Mahtra stared at them as if they were a public text on a Urik wall.

Akashia strode across her hut. She stood in the center of the pattern, scuffing it thoroughly—she hoped—with her bare feet before she took Mahtra by a white wrist. "Please sit down." Akashia tugged her guest toward a wicker stool. "Tell me about your dream," she urged, as if she didn't already know.

Mahtra's narrow shoulders rose and fell, but she went where Akashia led her and sat down on the stool. "It was a dream I would not want to have again. I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn't wake up."

"Were you frightened?" Akashia sat cross-legged on her sleeping platform. It was wrong to ask these questions, but the damage was already done, and she was curious. Mind-benders rarely got a chance to study the results of their efforts.

The pale blue-green bird's-egg eyes blinked slowly. "Yes, frightened, but I don't know why. It was not the worst dream."

"You've had other dreams that frightened you more?"

"Worse memories make worse dreams, but they're still dreams. Father told me that dreams can't hurt me, so I shouldn't be frightened by them. Sometimes memories get worse while I'm dreaming about them. That happened tonight, but that wasn't what frightened me."

"What did frighten you?" Akashia found herself speaking in a small voice, as if she were talking to a child.

Mahtra stared at her with guileless but unreadable eyes.

"Near the end, when I couldn't stop dreaming, I remembered memories that weren't mine. They frightened me."

Akashia's blood ran cold. She thought of the touchstone pattern and the possibility that she was not as skilled with the Unseen Way as she believed, at least not with the mind of a child-woman who'd been made, not born. "What kind of memories?" she asked, curiosity getting the better of her again. "How do you know

they weren't your own?" For a long moment Mahtra stared at the ground, as she'd stared at the patterns. Perhaps she was simply searching for words.

"Father was killed in the cavern below Urik, but Father didn't die until after I found him and after he'd given me the memories that held his killer's face—Kakzim's face—so I could recognize it. Father was very wise and he was right to save his memories, but now I remember Kakzim and I remember being killed. In my dreams the memories are all confused. I want to save Father and the others, but I never can. It's only a dream, but it makes me sad, and frightened."

"And your dream earlier tonight—it was like that?"

Mantra's head bobbed once, but her eyes never left the dirt. "I remember what never happened, not to me, but to someone like Father. Someone who's been killed and holding on to memories, waiting to die. I don't think I'll go to sleep again while I'm here."

Akashia was grateful that Mahtra wasn't looking at her. "There's no reason for you to stay awake." Not anymore. Akashia swore to herself that she wouldn't tamper with Mahtra's mind again.

"No one's been killed in Quraite," she continued, "not in a long time. There's no one dying here either."

"You are," Mahtra said as she raised her head and her odd eyes bore into Akashia's. "It was your voice I heard in my dream. I recognize it. You told me to remember what came before Urik. You told me to feel shame and fear, because you felt shame and fear. I felt what you felt, and then, I remembered what you remember." "No," Akashia whispered. For one moment, one heartbeat moment, the loathing she'd been trying to awaken in Mahtra had been awakened in her instead. She thought the touchstone pattern had protected her. She certainly hadn't acquired any of Mahtra's memories but, in her narrow drive for judgment, it seemed that her own had escaped. "No, that can't be."

Mahtra was a child of Urik's darkest nights, its murkiest shadows, but mostly she was a child, with a child's cold sense of right and wrong. Akashia nodded. "Yes," she said quickly, swallowing a guilty sob. "Yes, I believe he's dead. It's an even trade."

"Good. I'm glad. Without Father, there's no one to ask and I can't be sure if I've done the right thing. Your memories will sleep quietly now, and I can leave here with the ugly man and not look back. Kakzim killed Father. The ugly man and I will hunt Kakzim and kill him, too. For Father. Then all my memories will sleep quiet."

Akashia rose and faced a corner so she didn't have to face Mahtra. The white-skinned woman's world was so fiercely simple, so enviably simple. Mahtra's memories would sleep quietly, as perhaps Akashia's own memories would grow quieter, if she could truly believe in Mahtra's simple justice.

"Pavek," she said after a moment, still staring at the corner, still thinking about justice. "You should call him Pavek, if you're going to take him away. He's not an ugly man; you shouldn't call him that. He'll tell you when you've done the right thing. You should listen to him."

"Do you?"

It was a question Akashia could not find the strength to answer aloud.

"Father said the best lessons were the hardest lessons," Mahtra said after a long silence, then—to Akashia's heartfelt relief—walked softly out the door.

No need to worry: Mahtra could take care of herself wherever she went.

Reclaiming her bed, but not for sleeping, Akashia extinguished her lamp. She sat in the dark, thinking of what she'd done, what Telhami had said, and all because of the extraordinary individual the Lion-King had sent from Urik. Mahtra was like a Tyr-storm, rearranging everything she touched before disappearing. Akashia had taken a battering since sundown. She wouldn't be sorry to see the white-skinned woman leave, but she wasn't sorry Mahtra had come to Quraite, either. There was a bit of distance between herself now and the yesterday of Elabon Escrissar.

Akashia still found it difficult to think of Ruari or Pavek. Ruari was the past of hot, bright, carefree days that would never come again. Pavek was a future she wasn't ready to face. She didn't want either of them to leave with Mahtra, but she could admit that now, at least silently to herself, and with the admission came the strength to say good-bye before dawn, two days later.

She was proud of herself, that there were no tears, no demands for promises that they would return, only embraces that didn't last long enough and, from Pavek, something that might have been a kiss on her forehead just before he let go. Standing on the verge of the salt, Akashia watched and listened until the bells were silent and the Lion-King's kanks were bright dots against the rising sun. Then she turned away and, avoiding the village, walked to her own grove.