Cinnabar Shadows (Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas 4)

Pavek knew he had awakened, knew, moreover, that he was alive. He remembered Codesh and silting with his hand in a water bucket, hoping to die before Hamanu caught up with him. Those were his last memories, but he hadn't died. At least Pavek didn't remember dying, although the dead weren't supposed to remember that was the whole reason he'd had his hand in the bucket: he hadn't wanted to be alive—feeling or remembering—when Hamanu found him.

Could he have died and been restored to life? Hamanu could transform life into death in countless ways, but as Pavek understood histories, legends, and dark rumors, the Lion-King could not transform death into life. A wise man wouldn't bet his life against a sorcerer-king's prowess. Pavek was willing to bet he hadn't died—

Though he'd almost be willing to bet that Hamanu hadn't found him. What Pavek saw when he opened his eyes seemed almost like Quraite: a one-room house with woven-wicker walls and a thatched roof. The door was shut, the window, open. From the very hard bed he could see leafy branches and cloudless sky.

Pavek thought about standing up, but first things first: there'd been a reason the last thing he remembered was his hand dangling in a bucket. It hadn't hurt then, despite the damage when the medallion burst apart, and still didn't. After taking a deep breath, Pavek lifted his left arm into the sunlight and, in complete amazement, rotated it front to back. Palm-side or knuckle-side, his mangled hand had been restored. Movement and sensation had been restored as well. Each finger bent obediently to touch the tip of his thumb.

All healing was spellcraft of one sort or another, but this was spellcraft beyond Pavek's imagining. He rose from the bed, went to the window where the light was better—and his hands remained the same, exactly the same, but mirror images of each other.

Pavek was alive, restored, and wise enough not to waste time questioning good fortune. Setting both hands on the window ledge, he leaned out for a better examination of his surroundings. There were walls, not fields, beyond the tree he'd seen from the bed, masonry walls built from four rows of man-high stones. The sounds that came over those walls, though faint, were the sounds of a city, of Urik. Pavek knew the walls of Urik as well as anyone who'd ever spent a quinth of nights standing watch by moonlight. He knew how the city was put together, and he knew that the only place he could be was inside the palace, which meant Hamanu, which meant he had died.

It was just as well Pavek wasn't a gambling man.

There were sandals resting on the dirt floor beside the bed and clothes, fine linen garments like the ones he'd ruined in Codesh, hung on a peg by the improbably rustic door. Pavek wasn't surprised to find a gold high templar's medallion hanging beneath them. When he'd finished dressing and raking his hair with his fingers—he didn't need a bath or a shave, which said something about either the amount of time that had passed since Codesh or the quality of care he'd received since men—he stuck his head through the golden noose and opened the door.

"You're awake at last!"

The voice came from a human man, about his own age and stature, but better looking, a man who slapped his hands against his thighs as he stood up from a solid stone bench.

"How do you feel? How's the hand?"

Pavek held it out and flexed the fingers. "Good as new... good as the other one."

A smile twitched across the stranger's lips. Pavek sighed and dropped to one knee.

"A thousand thanks,

Great Lord and Mighty King. I am not worthy of such miracles."

"Good—I had doubts you'd ever agree with me about anything."

Still on a bent knee, Pavek stared at his left hand and shook his head. "Great King, I am grateful, but I am, and will always be, a thick-headed oaf of a man."

"But an honest oaf, which is rare enough around here. I am not blind, Lord Pavek. I know what is done in my name. I am everything you imagine me to be, and more besides. Elabon Escrissar did amuse me; I had great hopes for him. I have no hope for an honest oaf, and an honorable one in the bargain. By my mercy, Lord Pavek—could you not at least have taken a look at that map?"

A man couldn't fall very far when he was already on his knee, which was fortunate for Pavek. "Did I die, Great King? I don't remember. Was I already dead? The red-haired priest—I never learned his name—he didn't... You didn't..."

"I didn't what, Lord Pavek? Look at me!"

In misery and fear, Pavek met the Lion-King's eyes.

"Do you truly think I must slay a man to unravel his memories? Do you think I must leave him a gibbering idiot? Look at your hand again, Lord Pavek: that is what I can do. Did you die? Does it matter? You're alive now—and as thick-headed as ever.

"A thousand years, Lord Pavek. A thousand years. I knew how to kill a man when I was younger than you. I've killed more than even I can count; that is the essence of boredom, Lord Pavek. Every death is the same; every life is different. Every hand is different."

Pavek swallowed hard, grinned anxiously, and said: "Mine aren't, Great King—not anymore."

Hamanu roared with laughter. His human disguise slipping further away with each unrestrained guffaw. The Lion-King grew taller, broader, becoming the black-maned, yellow-eyed tyrant of Urik's outer walls. He laughed until, like a lesser, mortal man, his ribs ached and, clutching at his side, he hobbled back to his bench. The ground shuddered when his weight hit the stone.

While Pavek blinked, the leonine Hamanu vanished and a human one took his place. He was older than he'd seemed when Pavek walked through the wicker door: a man nearing the end of his prime, weathered and weary, with scars on his face and a touch of gray in his dark hair.

"I was born in there," this mortal Hamanu said. His voice was soft; Pavek had to stretch forward to hear it. "I took my first steps in the ancestor of that house when it stood a day's ride north of here, before the troll army swept through, destroying everything in its path—except me. I was in the Scorcher's army. Later, much later, when the trolls memory—" Hamanu's plain brown eyes narrowed, and he seemed to be looking at a point behind Pavek's head, a point far-removed in place and time. His voice seemed to echo from that distant, imaginary place. "I went to the Pristine Tower because trolls destroyed this house. I won the war I was made to fight; the war the others could not win. Troll means nothing to you—" The king looked directly at Pavek again. "When the war was over and the dust, oh the dust, had settled, I rebuilt my house and I tried to bring back the wives and children the trolls had slain. They weren't the same."

A sense of loss, preserved for a millennium, filled the courtyard where they sat.

"I'm sorry. I never thought... never imagined.... We're taught you're a god: immortal, omnipotent, unchanging. I doubted, but..." Words fell off Pavek's tongue until he managed to choke them off with a groan.

"Did you? What did you doubt?" Another shimmering transformation, and the king was a beautiful youth. "My power? My eternity? Come—tell me your doubts. Let me reassure your faith."