by Lynn Abbey
The elders of the BlackTree had warned him Brother Kakzim would not be an easy master, but that he should be grateful for the opportunity. They said Brother Kakzim was a genius in the alchemic arts. There was no halfling alive who knew what Brother Kakzim knew about the old ways of manipulation and transformation. Brother Kakzim had decrypted the ancient knowledge the Brethren guarded at the BlackTree. He knew what the ancestors knew, and he'd begun to use it. The elders wanted to know more about how Brother Kakzim was applying his knowledge. They wanted Cerk to be their eyes and ears in Urik.
An apprentice should be grateful for such an opportunity, for such trust, and Cerk supposed he was. Brother Kakzim was a master beyond reckoning where alchemy was concerned; Cerk had learned things in this foul-smelling village he could never have learned in the BlackTree Forest. But Cerk wished the elder brothers had mentioned that Brother Kakzim was completely mad. Those white-rimmed eyes above the ruined cheeks looked out from another plane and had the power to cloud another man's thoughts, even another halfling's thoughts.
Cerk was careful not to look straight at Brother Kakzim when the madness was on him, as it was now. He kept his head down and filled his mind with thoughts of home: lush green trees dripping water day and night, an endless chorus of birds and insects, the warm, sweet taste of ripe bellberries fresh off the vine. Then Cerk waited for the danger to pass. He judged it had when Brother Kakzim adjusted his robe's sleeves and cowl again, but he was careful to stay out of reach.
"It is not just the men who want to be paid, Brother Kakzim. The dwarves who own this place want to be paid for its use tonight, and for the rooms where we've lived. And the joiners say we owe them for the scaffolding they've already constructed. We owe the knackers and the elven gleaner, Rosu. She says she's found an inix fistula with the abscess still attached, but she won't sell it—"
"Pay them!" Brother Kakzim repeated, though without the raving intensity of a few moments past. "You have the coins. I've given you all our coins."
"Yes," Cerk agreed, thinking of the sack he kept under his bed. Money had no place in the BlackTree Forest. The notion that a broken ceramic disk could be exchanged for food, goods, or a man's service—indeed, that such bits, disks, or the far rarer metal coins must be exchanged—was still difficult for him to understand. He grappled with the sack nightly, arranging its contents in similar piles, watching as the piles grew steadily smaller. "I keep careful count of them, Brother Kakzim, but if I give these folk all that they claim is theirs, we ourselves will have very little left."
"Is that the problem. Brother Cerk?"
Reluctantly, Cerk bobbed his head.
"Pay them," Brother Kakzim said calmly. "Look at me, Brother Cerk—"
Cerk did, knowing it was a mistake, but Brother Kakzim's voice was so reassuring at times. Disobedience became impossible.
"You don't doubt me, do you?"
Cerk's lower lip trembled. He couldn't lie, didn't want to tell the truth.
"Is it the money, Brother Cerk? Haven't I always given you more money when you needed it? Money is nothing to worry about, Brother Cerk. Pay the insects. Pay them generously. Money grows like rope-vine in shadowed places. It's always ready for harvest. Don't worry about money, Brother Cerk."
He wasn't such a fool as that. The Brethren elders hadn't sent him out completely unprepared. It was the precision of money that eluded him: the how and why that equated a day of a man's life with a broken chip from a ceramic disk, while the rooms he and Brother Kakzim occupied above the slaughterhouse equated an entire ceramic disk each week, and Rosu's festering fistula was the same as an entire shiny silver coin.
Cerk knew where money came from generally and Brother Kakzim's specifically. Whenever the need to refill the sack arose, he sneaked into Urik following the brother through the maze of sharp-angled intersections and identical buildings. Brother Kakzim's money came from a blind alley hoard-hole in the templar quarter of the city, and it was much diminished compared to what it had been when Cerk first saw it.
No doubt Brother Kakzim could harvest ceramic disks and metal coins from other trees. Brother Kakzim didn't risk his fingers when he picked a pocket. All Brother Kakzim had to do was touch a rich man's thoughts with mind-bending power—as Brother Kakzim was doing to Cerk at this very moment—and that man would shed his wealth on the spot. As Cerk should have shed his doubts beneath the seductive pressures of Brother Kakzim's Unseen urging. And maybe the Urikites were as simple as lumbering mekillots. Maybe their minds could be touched again and again with them never recognizing that their thoughts were no longer wholly their own. But the BlackTree elders had taught Cerk how to defend himself from Unseen attack without the attacker becoming aware of the defense. They'd also taught him never to underestimate the enemy.
"You see, little brother, there's nothing to worry about."
Brother Kakzim came close enough that their robes were touching. They embraced as elder to apprentice, with Cerk on the verge of panic as he forced himself to remain calm and pliant. His companion was mad. That made him more, not less, dangerous.
Cerk didn't flinch when Brother Kakzim pinched his cheek hard enough to pierce skin, then nearly undid everything with a relieved gasp when the hand withdrew. Brother Kakzim pinched Cerk again, not on the cheek, but over the pulsing left-side artery of his neck.
"Questions can kill," Brother Kakzim warned calmly as his fingers began to squeeze the artery shut.
Cerk has less than a heartbeat to concoct a question that wouldn't. "I—I do not understand why the cavern-folk must die tonight," he whispered with just enough sincere terror to make Brother Kakzim unbend his fingers.
"When the water dies, all Urik will die. All Urik must die. All that exists in the Tablelands must die before the Black-Tree triumphs. That is our goal, little brother, our hearts' desire."
Cerk swallowed hard, but inwardly, he'd begun to relax. When Brother Kakzim talked about the BlackTree, his mind was focused on larger things than a solitary halfling apprentice. Still, he tread carefully; Brother Kakzim had not answered his question, which was an honest question, one to which he dearly wanted an answer.
"Why start with the cavern-folk, Brother Kakzim? Won't they die with the rest of Urik once we've putrefied their water? Why do we have to kill the cavern-folk ourselves? Why can't we let the contagion kill them for us?"
A tactical mistake: Brother Kakzim backhanded him against the nearest wall. Cerk feared that worse was to come, but his Unseen defenses hadn't broken. There were no further assaults, physical or otherwise, just Brother Kakzim, hissing at him in Halfling.
"Cut out your tongue lest you tell all our secrets! The cavern-folk must die because our contagion cannot be spat into the reservoir by the thimbleful. The ingredients must seethe and settle for many days before they'll be potent enough to destroy first Urik, then all the cities of the Tablelands. Our contagions must be incubated..." The white-rimmed eyes wandered, and Cerk held his breath. Kakzim was on the verge of inspiration, and that always meant something more for Cerk to do without thanks or assistance. "They must be incubated in alabaster bowls—ten of them, little brother, eight feet across and deep. You'll find such bowls and have them set up in the cavern."
Cerk blinked, trying to imagine ten alabaster bowls big enough to drown in and completely unable to imagine where he might find such objects, or how to transport them to the reservoir cavern. For once, his slack-jawed confusion was unfeigned, but Brother Kakzim mistook his bewilderment for insight.
"Ah, little brother, now you understand. This is not Laq to be measured by the powder packet. This is a contagion of poison and disease on a far grander scale. Once we've simmered it and stirred it to perfection, we'll spill the bowls into the reservoir and Urik will begin to die. Whoever draws water from a city wellhead or drinks from a city fountain will sicken and die. Whatever fool nurses the dying, he'll die, too as the plague spreads. In a week, Brother Cerk, no more than two, all the lands of Urik will be filled with the dead and dy
ing. Can you see it, Brother Cerk? Can you see it?"
Brother Kakzim seized Cerk's robe again and assailed him with Unseen visions of bloated corpses strewn through the streets and houses of the city, on the roads and in the fields, even here on the killing floors of Codesh. In Brother Kakzim's envisioning, only the Urikites were slain, but Cerk knew that all living things needed water, and anything living that drank Urik's water after Brother Kakzim tainted it would die. The useful beasts, the wild beasts, birds, insects, and plants that drank water through their roots, they all would die.
Even halflings would die.
Cerk could see Brother Kakzim's vision more clearly than Brother Kakzim, and he was sickened by the sight. He nodded without enthusiasm. The poor wretches living in darkness on the shores of Urik's underground reservoir were actually the luckiest folk alive. They'd be the first Urikites to die. A chill ran through Cerk's body. He clasped his arms tight over his chest for warmth and told himself it was nothing more than the coming of night now that purple twilight had replaced the garish hues of the sunset. But that was a lie. His shivers had nothing to do with the cooling air. An inner voice counseled him to run away from Brother Kakzim, Codesh, and the whole mad idea. Cerk swallowed that inner voice. There was no escape. The Brethren had made Brother Kakzim his master; he couldn't leave without breaking the oath he'd sworn beneath the BlackTree.
"Can you see it, Brother Cerk?"
"I see it all," Cerk agreed, then squaring his shoulders within his dark robe, he grimly followed his companion and master down from the balcony to the killing floor where a silent, surly crowd was already gathered. "I see everything."
That evening was like a dream—a living nightmare.
At sundown, Cerk took a seat behind a table, beside the abattoir door. He methodically and mindlessly put a broken ceramic bit onto the palm of every thuggish hand that reached toward him once its owner had crossed the abattoir threshold. A decent wage for a decent night's work: that's what Brother Kakzim said, as though what these men—the thugs were all males, mostly dwarves, because their eyes saw more than human eyes in the dark—were going to do tonight was decent.
And perhaps it was. The killing that went on in the abattoirs and would go on in the reservoir cavern wasn't like the hunting Cerk had done as a boy in the forest, and it wasn't sacrifice as the Brethren made sacrificial feasts beneath the branches of the BlackTree. In Codesh they practiced slaughter, and the slaughter of men was no different.
When the doors were shut and barred and a ceramic bit had been placed in every waiting hand, Cerk had done everything that Brother Kakzim had asked of him. He rolled up his mat, intending to slip quietly upstairs to his room, but got no farther than the middle steps before Brother Kakzim began his harangue.
Brother Kakzim was no orator. His voice was shrill, and he had a tendency to gasp and stutter when he got excited. The burly thugs of Codesh exchanged snickering leers and for a moment Cerk thought—hoped—they'd all walk out of the abattoir. But Brother Kakzim didn't harangue with words. Like a sorcerer-king, Kakzim used the Unseen Way to focus his audience and forge them into a lethal weapon. Brother Kakzim worked on a smaller scale than Lord Hamanu: forty hired men rather than an army, but the effect was the same.
The mat slipped out of Cerk's hands. It bounced down the stairs and rolled unnoticed against the wall.
Cerk returned to the killing floor in an open-eyed trance. His inner voice frantically warned him that his thoughts were no longer his own, that Brother Kakzim was bending and twisting his will with every step he took. His inner voice spoke the truth, but truth couldn't overcome the images of hatred and disgust that swirled up out of Cerk's deepest consciousness. The dark-dwellers were vermin; they deserved to die. Their death now, for the cause of cleansing Urikj was the sacrifice that redeemed their worthless lives.
With his final mote of free thought, Cerk looked directly at Brother Kakzim and tried to give his whipped-up hatred its proper focus, but he was no mind-bending match for an elder brother of the BlackTree brethren. His images were overwhelmed.
The last thing Cerk clearly remembered was grabbing a torch and a stone-headed poleaxe that was as long and heavy as he was. Then the mob surged toward a squat tower at the abattoir's rear, and he went with them. Brother Kakzim stood by the tower's door. His face shone silver, like a skull in moonlight.
Delusion! Cerk's inner voice screamed when Brother Kakzim's eyes shot fire and one of the thugs fell to the ground. Mind-bending madness! Go back!
But Cerk didn't go back. Wailing like a dwarven banshee, he kept pace with the mob as it made its noisy way to the cavern.
Later, much later, when he'd shed his bloodstained clothes, Cerk consoled himself with the thought that he wasn't strong, even for a halfling. He had no skill with heavy weapons. It was possible—probable—that he hadn't killed anyone. But he didn't know; he couldn't remember anything after picking up the torch and axe.
He didn't know how his clothes had become bloodstained.
He was afraid to go to sleep.
Chapter Two
All residents of Urik knew precisely when Lord Hamanu's curfew began, but few knew exactly when it ended. Those who could afford to laugh at the Lion-King's laws said curfew ended one moment after it began. Templars said curfew ended at sunrise and they'd arrest or fine anyone they caught on the streets before the sun appeared above the city walls, but usually they left the city alone once the sky began to brighten. Someone had to have breakfast waiting when the high and mighty woke up. Someone had to entertain the nightwatch templars before they went on duty and again when they left their posts. Someone had to sweep the streets, collect the honey jars, kindle the fires; someone had to make breakfast for the entertainers, sweepers, honeymen, and cooks. And since those someones would never be the yellow-robed templars of the night-watch, compromises as old as the curfew itself governed Urik's dark streets.
Nowhere were the nighttime rituals more regular than in the templar quarter itself, especially the double-walled neighborhood that the high templars called home. Even war bureau templars, each with a wealth of colored threads woven into their yellow sleeves, knew better than to question the comings and goings of their superiors. They challenged no one, least of all the thieves and murderers, who'd undoubtedly been hired by a dignitary with the clout to execute an overly attentive watchman on the spot, no questions asked. And if the watch would not challenge the criminals in their own quarter, they certainly left the high templars and their guests alone as well.
The sky above the eastern wall was glowing amber when an alley door swung open and a rectangle of light briefly illuminated the austere red-striped yellow wall of a high templar residence. The dwarven sergeant leaned heavily on the rail of her watchtower, taking note of the flash, the distinctive clunk of a heavy bolt thrown home again, and a momentary silhouette, tall and unnaturally slender, against the red-striped yellow wall. She snorted once, having recognized the silhouette and thereby knowing all she needed to know.
Folk had to live, to eat, to clothe themselves against the light of day and the cold of night. It wasn't any templar's place to judge another poor wretch's life, but it seemed to the sergeant that sometimes it might be better to lie down and die. Short of the gilded bedchambers of Hamanu's palace, which she had never seen, there wasn't a more nefarious place in all Urik than the private rooms of a high templar's residence. And the slender one who slipped quietly through the lightening shadows below her post spent nearly every night in one disreputable residence or another.
"Great Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy strike you down, child," the sergeant whispered as the footsteps faded.
It was not a curse.
Mahtra felt anonymous eyes at her back as she walked through the templar quarter. She didn't fear those who stared at her. There was very little that Mahtra feared. Before they drove her out onto the barren wastes, her makers had given her the means to take care of herself, and what her innate gifts could not deflect, her high templa
r patrons could. She had not developed the sensitivities of born-folk. Fear, hate, love, friendship were words Mahtra knew but didn't use often. It wasn't fear that made her pause every little while to adjust the folds of the long, black shawl she clutched tightly around her thin shoulders.
It wasn't because of cold, either, though there was a potent chill to the predawn air. Cold was a sensitivity, just like fear, that Mahtra lacked, though she understood cold better than she understood fear. Mahtra could hear cold moving through the nearest buildings: tiny hisses and cracklings as if the long-dead bones that supported them still sought to warm themselves with shrinking or shivering. Soon, as sunrise gave way to morning, the walls would warm, then grow hot, and the hidden bones would strive to shed the heat, stretching with sighs and groans, like any overworked slave.
No one else could hear the bones as Mahtra could, not even the high templars with their various and mighty talents, or the other nightfolk she encountered in their company. That had puzzled Mahtra when she was new to her life in Urik. Her sensitivities were different; she was different. Mahtra saw her differences in the precious silver mirrors high templars hung on their walls. They said mirrors could not lie. Of course, everyone was different in a mirror's magical reflection. Some of those she met nightly in these identically striped residences were more different than she was. That was hardly surprising: the high templars who commanded the gatherings Mahtra attended were collectors of the exotic, the new, and the different of the city.
Mahtra's skin was white, that was one difference—not pale like that of a house-bound courtesan who never saw the light of day, but white like chalk or salt or bones that the sun had bleached dry. Her skin was cool to the touch, harder and lightly scaled, as if she'd been partly made from snakes or lizards. Her body grew no hair to cover her stark skin, but there were burnished, sharp-angled scars on her shoulders and around her wide-set turquoise eyes, scars that were like gold-leaf set into her flesh. The makers had put those scars on her, though Mahtra could not remember when or how. They were what the makers had given her to protect her, as born-folk had teeth and knives. Mahtra knew she could protect herself against any threat, but she could not explain how she did it, not to Father, not to herself.
