Cinnabar Shadows Chapter 1: Urik and the Lion King - Dark Sun Retelling
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Chapter 1: Urik and the Lion King
The book opens with a bird’s-eye view. Literally. We see the city of Urik through the eyes of a soaring kes’trekel (a scaled bird native to Athas). The city looks like a giant sulfur growth rising from a green plain, its walls covered with murals of the same figure over and over: a powerful man with a lion’s head, bronze skin, black mane, and fierce yellow eyes that flash in the sunlight.
That’s Lord Hamanu. The Lion of Urik. Sorcerer-King. And his people know he’s watching them. Always.
Abbey does a great job establishing the vibe right away. Hamanu’s deal with his city has lasted a thousand years. He gives them peace and stability. In return, they obey his laws, pay his taxes, bribe his templars, and worship him as a living god. It’s oppressive, but it works. The people even feel a kind of pride about it. Their king didn’t fall when the Dragon came through. Their city prospered because Hamanu is as cunning as he is cruel.
There’s a strict curfew. Once the tenth star appears in the sky, law-abiding citizens need to be indoors. And nobody enters Urik unannounced. The city charges overnight taxes at public houses, so commerce flows through ten market villages that circle the plain. Each village has its own day of the week.
Codesh: The Abattoir
Nine of these villages are friendly, sprawling settlements. But not Codesh.
Codesh is the first village in Urik’s weekly rotation, and it is Urik’s sanctioned slaughterhouse. This is where beasts are brought for slaughter and processed into every useful thing you can imagine. Nothing goes to waste. The butchery clans flay hides, render fat, drill bones for marrow, dry blood for sale to mages and farmers, and even collect gallstones and gizzard pebbles. The kes’trekels circle overhead constantly, diving for scraps and sometimes eating each other in the frenzy.
It’s disgusting and fascinating. Abbey paints Codesh as this essential, awful place that the city depends on but nobody wants to visit.
Codesh is also defiant. The villagers challenge Hamanu more than anyone else dares. When there’s trouble, the war bureau templars come to Codesh first. The walls here aren’t wicker like the other villages. They’re real fortress walls. On those walls are murals of Hamanu, but without the flashing eyes, and he’s always holding a butcher’s poleaxe. It tells you everything about the relationship.
Enter Kakzim
Our point-of-view character for most of this chapter is Kakzim, a halfling mind-bender who had been controlling one of those kes’trekels for fun. He’s watching from a slaughterhouse balcony in Codesh, his face hidden in a dark cowl because of horrific acid scars he gave himself to cover older scars. Everything about this guy is intense.
Here’s his backstory: Kakzim came from the forests beyond the Ringing Mountains almost twenty years ago. He swore a life-oath to the BlackTree Brethren, an extremist halfling organization that wants to restore the world to its pre-sorcerer-king state. Their motto is basically: whatever it takes, no sacrifice is too great.
The BlackTree elders recognized Kakzim’s genius. He memorized ancient halfling lore from carvings in a vast chamber beneath the BlackTree. He went to Urik, wormed his way into the confidence of a high templar named Elabon Escrissar, and together they manufactured Laq, a dangerous drug that enslaved and destroyed its users. The plan was to spread it to multiple cities and start a war between sorcerer-kings.
It almost worked. But then some low-ranking templar (whose name Kakzim can barely remember: “Paddle, Puddle, Pickle…”) blundered into their operation and brought the whole thing down. That templar was Pavek, who we’ll meet later.
Kakzim abandoned Escrissar the moment things went south. He raided the treasury and went underground. He sent a message to the BlackTree elders saying he’d failed and promising to kill himself. That was a lie. He had no intention of dying. He was already planning his next move.
And now here he is in Codesh, working on something far worse than Laq.
Cerk: The Spy Who Can’t Lie
Then we get Cerk’s perspective. He’s Kakzim’s young halfling apprentice, sent by the BlackTree elders to be their eyes and ears. The elders warned him Kakzim would be difficult. They didn’t mention he was completely insane.
Cerk is genuinely afraid of Kakzim. Those white-rimmed eyes above the ruined face look out from another plane. When the madness is on him, Kakzim can cloud another halfling’s thoughts. Cerk has learned not to look directly at him during those moments. He fills his mind with memories of home: green trees, dripping water, the taste of ripe bellberries.
But here’s what’s interesting about Cerk. The elders taught him how to defend his mind without letting the attacker know. When Kakzim tries to mind-bend him, Cerk plays dumb, shapes himself “simple and befuddled,” and lets Kakzim believe the manipulation worked. He watches and learns and swallows his nausea.
Cerk is struggling with money. He doesn’t understand the concept of currency at all. In the BlackTree Forest, there is no money. The idea that a broken ceramic disk equals a day of someone’s labor just doesn’t compute for him. He knows the coins come from a dwindling hoard in a blind alley in Urik’s templar quarter, and that Kakzim can always steal more through mind-bending, but the math of it drives him crazy.
The Plan
When Cerk asks why they need to kill the underground cavern-folk, Kakzim reveals the full scope of his plan. This isn’t small-time drug dealing. He wants to brew a contagion of poison and disease in ten massive alabaster bowls, incubate it, and dump it into Urik’s underground water reservoir. Anyone who drinks from a city wellhead or fountain will sicken and die. Anyone who nurses the dying will catch it too. In a week or two, all of Urik’s lands will be filled with corpses.
In Kakzim’s vision, only the Urikites die. But Cerk knows better. Everything that drinks water dies. The beasts, the birds, the insects, the plants. Even halflings.
Cerk considers running. But the oath he swore beneath the BlackTree means there’s no escape. The choice between dying with Kakzim in the Tablelands and going home as an oathbreaker is no choice at all.
The Massacre
That evening, Cerk sits at a table by the abattoir door, paying each thug a ceramic bit as they enter. It’s mostly dwarves, because they see better in the dark. Kakzim gives a speech, but he doesn’t rally them with words. He uses mind-bending power to forge them into a weapon, the same way a sorcerer-king would with an army, just on a smaller scale.
Cerk gets caught in it. His defenses hold, barely, but the images of hatred and disgust overwhelm his conscious mind. The last thing he clearly remembers is grabbing a torch and a stone-headed poleaxe as heavy as he is. Then the mob moves toward the underground cavern.
Later, he strips off his bloodstained clothes. He tells himself he wasn’t strong enough to kill anyone. But he doesn’t actually know. He can’t remember.
He can’t sleep.
My Take
This is a strong opening chapter. Abbey uses Kakzim and Cerk to set up the threat before we ever meet our heroes. We know exactly what’s coming: mass poisoning, genocide dressed up as environmentalism. Kakzim is terrifying because he genuinely believes he’s right. The BlackTree Brethren want to restore Athas to its former glory, and their method is to burn everything that’s left.
But the real gut punch is Cerk. He’s trapped. He knows his master is insane. He can see the plan will kill everything, not just humans. And he goes along with it anyway because an oath is an oath. By the end of the chapter, he might have blood on his hands and he doesn’t even know.
That’s a brutal way to start a book.
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