Cinnabar Shadows (Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas 4)

Other pairs were luckier. When the maniples reassembled near the body of the unconscious templar, they had captured four halflings, none of whom seemed to understand a word Commandant Javed said when he asked where their village was.

Intimidation was an art among templars. Pavek had been taught the basic skills in the orphanage. Being big, which Pavek had always been, and ugly, which he'd become early on life, Pavek had a natural advantage. The joke was that he was a born intimidator, but the truth was that Pavek didn't enjoy making other folk writhe in terror or anxiety. He was good at it because he hated it, and now that he held the highest rank imaginable, he intended never to professionally intimidate anyone again. He gave a hands-off gesture and stepped aside to allow the commandant to finish what he'd begun.

"You're lying," Javed told the captives who knelt before him. He looked aside to Pavek and began speaking above heads that rose no higher than his thigh. "My name is Commandant Javed of Urik, and I give you my word as a commandant that we're searching for one man, one male halfling with blond hair and slave scars on his face. He committed crimes in Urik, and he will answer for them. No one else need fear us. We won't harm you or your families or your homes if you give us the criminal we've come for. You will help us—understand that. Dead or alive, one of you will guide us to your homes. Now, which one of you will it be?"

From the side, Pavek knew what was coming next. He'd seen two of the halflings flinch when Javed implied the necromancy for which the templarates were infamous. A third had lowered his eyes when the commandant asked for a volunteer. Although necromancy would be more difficult without borrowed spellcraft, Pavek trusted that Javed wouldn't have made the threat if he didn't have the means to carry it through. He also trusted that one of the other templars would have seen the halflings' reaction and would report them to the commandant. Pointing out an enemy who'd shot poisoned arrows at him didn't trouble him, but condemning a man to death and worse because he wouldn't betray his home and family wasn't something Pavek could do.

As Ruari had told him when they'd argued in Escrissar's garden, he had a convenient conscience.

And not long to wait. The maniple templars had caught all four halflings reacting to Javed's speech. The commandant grabbed the lone woman in the group, not—Pavek assumed—strictly because of her sex, but because she had huddled close by one of the men. When templars of any rank, from any bureau, wanted fast intimidation results, they turned their attention to the smaller, weaker partner in a pair, if a pair was available.

While one templar held the woman from behind and another pressed his composite sword's blade against her pulsing throat, Commandant Javed removed a scroll from his pack. He broke the heavy black seal and began to read the mnemonics of the same necromantic spell Pavek had expected the Lion-King to use on him at Codesh. Midway through the invocation, the sword-wielding templar pricked the halfling's skin with the blade's razor-sharp teeth.

The woman gave no more reaction to the pain and the trickling of her own warm, red blood than she had to the commandant's speech, but the sight was too much for the halfling she'd huddled against. He sprang to his feet.

"Spare her, and I'll lead you to our village," he said in the plain language of the Urik streets.

His halfling companions, including the woman whose life he was trying to save, sputtered epithets in their clicking, screeching language. The woman got another nick in her throat; the other two halflings got savage blows from the hilts of templar weapons. Templars did not tolerate in others those treacherous, divisive behaviors they practiced to perfection among themselves.

"And the scarred, blond-haired halfling?" Javed asked.

The traitor wrung his hands. "I know of no such man."

Javed's long arm swung out to clout the halfling. He staggered and tripped over his indignant companions.

"We know he came this way!" the commandant thundered. "I will have the truth, from your mouth or hers!" He shook the scroll he still held in his right hand and began again to read the mnemonics.

With a hand held over his bleeding mouth, the halfling scrambled toward Commandant Javed. "Great One," he cried, "there is no such man. I swear it."

"What do you think, Lord Pavek? Is he telling the truth?"

Eyes turned toward Pavek, who scratched the bristly growth on his chin before asking: "Which way to your village?"

Eager to respond to a question he could answer, the halfling pointed in the direction they'd already been headed, but regarding his truthfulness, Pavek could only scratch his chin a second time. Halflings were rare in Urik, unheard of in the templarate. He could count the number he knew by name on the fingers of one hand, and save his thumb for Kakzim. As far as he was concerned, halfling faces were inscrutable. The male halfling in front of him could have been Zvain's age, his own age, or venerable like Javed; he could have been telling the absolute truth, or lying through his remaining teeth.

The only certainty was that Pavek held lives on the tip of his tongue. He looked at Javed; the commandant's shadowed face was as inscrutable as the halfling's. In the end, Pavek relied more on hope than logic. "I believe him about his village. As for the other—" following the commandant's lead, Pavek didn't say Kakzim's name aloud "—men of no

account frequently don't know the answers to important questions." Fate knew, he, himself, dwelt in ignorance most of the time. "We'll talk to the elders when we get there."

The village to which their halfling captive led them wasn't far away. If they'd been on the barrens instead of deep in a forest, the templars would have spotted it from the ambush sight. Of course, without the forest, there would have been no ambush, and no halfling houses, either. The halflings lived in a circle of huge, spreading trees around a shaded, moss-covered clearing. Some of their homes had been, carved out of the trees' trunks so long ago the bark had healed around them. Others were perched in their branches: like nests. The homes seemed both alive and ancient, and all of them were too small for even a dwarf's comfort.

Tiny, feral faces—halfling children—peeked out of moss-framed windows, but the men and women of the community had gathered in the clearing, with weapons ready. A duet of Halfling singsong passed between the templars' captives and the anxious villagers. One of the templars translated:

"Our fellows said they had no choice; we would have killed them and gotten the information from their corpses. The old fellows in the center, they speak for the village and they wanted to know why we've come, what we're looking for."

Commandant Javed nodded. Speaking clearly in the Urikite dialect, confident the elders could understand, he said, "We've tracked a renegade halfling to this village, a blond man with Urik slave scars on his cheeks. If they surrender him at once, and if they provide us with an antidote for the poison they used on our comrade, we will depart immediately. Otherwise we'll destroy this village and everyone here, one by one. Children first."

When the elders protested in a passable dialect that there was neither an antidote nor a blond, scarred halfling, Commandant Javed turned to Pavek.

"My lord?" he asked, cold as a man's voice could be.

Pavek set down the sword he'd held ready since the ambush began. He dug out his bit of ensorcelled hair and let it spin freely, as much to give the halfling elders additional time to consider their folly—they might be superb fighters for their size, but they didn't stand a chance against Javed's maniples. For the first time, the hair pointed in a different direction, almost perpendicular to the path they'd been following since Khelo. The halflings who'd watched this subtle bit of Tablelands magic seemed impressed, but did not recant.

Their elders repeated that there was no antidote for the poison the halflings smeared on their arrowheads. The templar woman would die without awakening. And there was no blond-haired halfling with Urikite slave-scars on his cheeks in this village or anywhere else. Didn't the templars know that halflings would sooner die than surrender their freedom?

Faced with such intransigence, there was nothing Pavek could do to save them or their village. He met the commandant's eyes and nodded. Javed barked orders to his maniples:

The first were to stand with swords drawn, guarding the armed adults and venerable elders already gathered in the clearing. The second would collect flaming brands from the halfling hearths and set fire to the tree homes—and be prepared to snare the halfling children as they fled their burning shelters.