Cinnabar Shadows (Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas 4)

"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.

"Some of the scum have run toward that far corner," one of the templars said, pointing where he meant. "There must be a way out. We'll go with you as far as the village walls."

The priest said he'd stay to the end, in case Pavek needed a nudge "to separate his spirit from his body before the Lion-King got too close." He said he wasn't worried about Hamanu, and that was a lie—but maybe he'd lost everything he cared about when red-haired Ediyua went down in the passage.

Ruari didn't say good-bye, just took hold of Mahtra and Zvain and started walking fast to catch up with the templars who'd already left. He didn't look back, either.

Not once.

Not until they were clear of the Codesh walls.

Chapter Twelve

Pavek was gone.

Pavek was dead.

One of the many roars Ruari heard while trudging along the ring road to Farl might have marked the moment when the Lion-King found his high templar's pale corpse. Another might have marked the moment when deadheart spells animated Pavek's body one last time. The last roar, the loudest and longest that he and Mahtra and Zvain heard, could only have marked the king's frustration when he found that Pavek, Just-Plain Pavek, had outwitted him.

Ruari brushed a knuckle quickly beneath his eye, catching a tear before it leaked out, drying the telltale moisture with an equally quick touch to his pant leg. Life went forward, he told himself, repeating the words Telhami had used every time he bemoaned the violence and hatred that had brought him into an uncaring world. There was nothing to be gained by looking back.

Then Pavek raised a guardian spirit out of Urik, where no other druid would have dreamed to look for one. Pavek changed—tried to change—the lay of life in a sorcerer-king's domain, and Pavek had paid the price of folly.

Life went forward. Don't look back.

But Ruari did look back. He sneaked a peek over his shoulder every few moments. The skyline of Codesh was still there, crowned with a thin cloud of dust and smoke that grew thinner each time he looked.

"You come from Codesh?" an overseer called from one of the roadside fields, his slave scourge folded in his hand. "What's the uproar?"

"Damn butchers tried to slaughter their templars. Got rid of some of them, but Hamanu answered their call."