by Lynn Abbey
Five days later, imprisoned beneath the great BlackTree, surrounded by dank, dark dirt, with Zvain and Orekel little more than voices in the blackness, she still shuddered at the memory.
That theft had been Kakzim's personal vengeance against her. He'd humiliated the others, too, especially Ruari. When the half-elf told Kakzim that Pavek was already dead, the former slave had reeled backward as if Ruari had landed a blow in a particularly vulnerable place, and then transferred all his vicious hatred from Pavek, who was beyond his reach, to Ruari, who had no defense.
Throughout their two-day-long, stumbling, starving walk through the mazelike forest, Kakzim had harried Ruari with taunts and petty but vicious physical attacks. The half-elf was badly bruised and bleeding from a score of cuts, and barely able to stand by the time they reached their destination: the BlackTree.
Nothing in her spiraling memory could have prepared Mahtra for her first sight of the halfling stronghold. The crude bark map they'd found in Codesh depicted a single tree as large as the Smoking Crown Volcano, which they'd ridden near on their way to the forest. But coming upon it suddenly in this arm's-length world of trees everywhere, the black tree seemed exactly as big as the volcano.
Ten of her standing with arms extended could not have encircled its trunk. Roots as big around as Orekel's dwarven torso breached the dim, moss-covered clearing around the tree's trunk before returning into the ground.
But it wasn't the black tree's trunk or roots that lingered in Mahtra's memory, sitting here in the darkness between those roots. It was the moment she'd raised her head, hoping to see the sky through branches as big around as a kank's body. There'd been no sky, only the soles of a dead-man's feet.
She'd cried out. Kakzim had laughed, and—worse—the feet had moved, and Mantra had realized that a living man, a halfling, hung above her, suspended from a mighty branch by a rope wound tight beneath his arms.
Worse still, the living, hanging halfling was not alone. There were other halflings dangling from other branches, more than she could easily count. Some of them were alive, like the halfling whose feet were directly above her head, but others were rotting corpses, barely recognizable.
Worst of all—the memory Mahtra could not escape even now in her prison beneath the tree—was the great drop of blood that had struck between her eyes as she stood, transfixed by the horror above her. With her hands bound behind her back, she hadn't been able to wipe the blood off, and her pleas for help, for mercy, brought only laughter from her captors.
Her skin was still wet when Kakzim ordered his fellow halflings to drive her, Zvain, and Orekel through a narrow hole between the roots. Prodded by sharp spears, they'd wriggled like serpents through the hole, a narrow tunnel, and—blindly at the end—tumbled into the dank, dirt pit that now imprisoned them.
Orekel had gone first; he'd hurt his leg falling several times his own height into the pit. Then Zvain, who'd landed on top of the dwarf, and finally her. She'd landed on them both.
And maybe, she shuddered at the thought, they'd hung him in the tree.
That memory was all too clear. She'd been able to scrape the blood from her face, crawling on her belly down that tunnel, but there was nothing she could do for the blood in her memory.
It was daytime in the world above; she could tell because some light got in around the roots that wound around the sides of their prison. There was enough to see Zvain and Orekel, whose leg had swollen horribly since he fell. When night came, she could see nothing at all.
Night had come twice since they landed in the pit.
Food had come twice also, both times in the form of slops and rubbish thrown down the hole. It was vile and disgusting, but they were starving. Liquid seeped through the dirt walls of their prison. Mahtra's tongue tasted water, but her memory saw blood.
Orekel, who understood Halfling, said their captors were planning a big sacrifice when the little moon, Ral, passed in front of big Guthay. When he wasn't drunk with pain, he made plans for their escape:
Zvain was the smallest; he could climb up both their backs and through the hole to the tunnel. Then, using Mahtra's shawl, which Kakzim had left along with everything else save her mask and Ruari's knife, Zvain could hoist Mahtra to freedom. Her protection would do its work. They could find a rope—there was plenty of rope available—to get him out of the hole, find the treasure, and make good their escape before the halflings recovered from Mahtra's thunderclap.
That was Orekel's plan, when his ankle wasn't hurting so bad he couldn't think or talk. Maybe, if he'd been able to stand or she'd been confident her protection would work again, they might have tried it.
But Orekel couldn't stand and, though she'd chewed through and swallowed their last bit of cinnabar, the little lion that Zvain had stolen from the palace, Mahtra didn't think she'd ever be able to use the maker's protection again. Something was missing. There was now a dark place inside her, a place she'd never realized was lit until the flame went out.
And now there was no more talk of escape. Well into the third day of their captivity, their prison was quiet—except for Orekel's babbling and groans. She and Zvain had nothing left to say to each other.
Mahtra huddled by herself in the curve where the side became the bottom. She drew her knees up to her chest, rested her cheek on them, and wrapped her arms over her shins.
The spiral of her life had become a circle; she was back where she'd begun: in deep, silent darkness.
* * *
After his time in Telhami's grove, Pavek thought he'd be prepared for the forest, but there was little comparison between a meticulously nurtured grove and the wild profusion of a natural forest.
Instead of the guardian aspect that pulled a grove together with a single purpose, a single voice, the halfling forest was a battleground with every mote of life competing for its place on the land.
It was a place hostile to them as well—which was not entirely surprising. War bureau maniples did not go quietly, no matter where they went, though they were traveling light, at least as far as magic was concerned. Except for the medallions they all wore and the ensorcelled bit of halfling hair, Pavek knew of no Tablelands magic that they'd brought across the mountains into the forest. There were no defiling sorcerers with them, no priests, either—unless the forest sensed that templars borrowed spellcraft from the Lion-King or recognized Pavek's clumsy curiosity as the sign of a druid.
Even without magic, however, a living forest had reason to resent their intrusion. A double maniple of templars armed with broad-bladed, single-edged swords hacked a wide swathe through the undergrowth as they marched, still following the straight course set by the strands of blond hair Pavek now carried in a little pouch on the gold chain of his high templar's medallion.
It was the morning of the twelfth day and the start of their first full day in the forest. Last night, the two moons had been in the sky all night. They were both nearly full, and silvery little Ral was yapping toward golden Guthay's middle.
Pavek could remember other times when both moons had shown their full faces at the same time, but never when they'd been on the collision course of last night. It seemed to Pavek that Ral would crash against Guthay's trailing edge tonight or tomorrow night, which would be the significant thirteenth night. He mentioned his suspicions to the commandant once they'd broken camp and were marching through the forest again, and his concern that Ral would be destroyed. "If Kakzim knew that the moons were going to crash—"
Pavek bit his lip and held silent while he weighed what the Lion-King had told him about how using magic now would destroy Urik. Easier to believe that no spells would be available until after the sorcerer-king had prevented catastrophe in the heavens than to think Hamanu had been serious bout birthing dragons and the death of Urik.
Which thoughts made Pavek wonder why the Lion-King would have lied to him about such a matter, if the truth were so linked to this mission. That was not a question to ask Commandant Javed.
"I hadn't tho
ught of it that way, Commandant," he said. "You're right. Of course."
"You're young yet. There's a lot to learn that never gets taught. You just have to put the pieces together yourself— remember that."
Pavek assured the older, wiser elf that he would, and their march through the forest continued. The sense that the forest itself was hostile to them grew steadily stronger until Javed and the maniple templars sensed it also.
"It's too damned quiet," Javed concluded. "Trees. I hate trees. The forest is an ambusher's paradise. They can put their scouts in the branches and tell their troops to lie low in the shade beneath them. Get out your hair, Lord Pavek; see if our halfling's tried to close a trap behind us."
It was the trees themselves that were looking down on them—at least that's what Pavek thought. The hair indicated it as well. Its line hadn't varied since they used it first at Khelo: Kakzim was still ahead of them.
But the two-time Hero of Urik took no chances. He tightened their formation, giving orders to every third templar: "Keep your eyes on the trees ahead of us, on either side, and especially behind. Anything moves, sing out. I'd sooner duck from wind and shadows than have halflings running up our rumps."
They did a lot of shadow dodging that morning, but they also got a heartbeat's warning before the first arrow flew at them. Trusting their silk tunics and leather armor, Commandant Javed ordered the maniples together in a tight circle. He commanded them to kneel, presenting smaller targets to the hidden archers and safeguarding their unprotected legs.
"Defend your face! That's where you're vulnerable," Javed shouted, taking his own advice when an arrow whizzed toward him. "But mark where the arrows are coming from. We'll take these forest-scum brigands when their quivers are empty."
The soft, smooth silk lived up to the commandant's claims, and the lightweight, slow-moving arrows failed to find targets time and again. One templar cried out when an arrow grazed her hand, and moments later she'd fallen unconscious. But she was their only casualty, and gradually the arrow flights came to a halt and the forest was silent.
"Mark where you saw 'em. Move out in pairs." This time the commandant gave his orders in a voice that wouldn't carry to the trees. "We don't have to catch them all, just one or two." Then he turned to Pavek and whispered: "You mark any, my lord?"
Pavek pointed to a crook halfway up one substantial tree where he'd spotted a shadowed silhouette against the branches.
Javed flashed his black-and-white smile. "Let's go catch us a halfling—"
But fickle fortune was against the heroes. Their quarry dropped down and hit the ground running. Javed's elven legs weren't what they'd been in his prime, and Pavek had never been much of a sprinter. The halfling went to ground in a stand of bramble bushes.
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.
