Cinnabar Shadows Chapter 10: Audience with Hamanu - The Lion-King Shows His True Face
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
After nearly dying on the Codesh killing floor, Pavek and his companions get the royal treatment. Luxurious rooms, incredible food, hot baths. It should feel like a reward. Instead, it feels like the calm before something terrible. And they are right.
Living Like Kings (For One Night)
Hamanu puts them up in a sumptuous palace room with gold-leaf walls, a bathing pool, silk bedding in rainbow colors, hidden musicians playing from behind lattice screens, and a feast that is frankly absurd. The bread is baked into flower shapes. The cold sausage has been twisted into animal figures. There is fruit nobody can identify, even Ruari with his druid training.
The centerpiece is a silver bowl filled with a fragrant drink and what Pavek thinks are stones. A slave explains they are ice. Solid water. Pavek touches one with his tongue and concludes it must be magic. He puts it back.
But none of them can enjoy it. They just watched Hamanu shift forms. They just saw claws and fangs and something that is not even close to human. The luxury feels hollow.
Everyone Is Dealing With It Differently
Zvain has been rubbing his cheek raw since they left the audience chamber. Hamanu touched him there, and whatever happened in that touch, the boy cannot shake it off. He follows Pavek like a shadow, sitting on the floor against Pavek’s leg, unable to be more than a few steps away.
Ruari paces in ovals around Pavek’s bench, muttering curses. He is angry at himself for being scared. He collapsed when Hamanu grabbed his staff. He fell to his hands and knees and stayed there while Pavek argued with a god. The shame is eating him alive.
And then he says it: “She was laughing at me.”
He means Mahtra. She walked out of the audience chamber arm-in-arm with Hamanu. To Ruari, this is a betrayal on multiple levels. Because Zvain’s observation hits like a brick: “You’re getting mushy for her.”
Ruari swings at Zvain. Pavek catches the fist. Then Ruari and Pavek start shouting at each other. Nothing they say makes sense. It is pure tension and fear and exhaustion. They back each other across the balcony to the edge of bloodshed. Pavek pins Ruari against the wall and draws back his fist.
Then Zvain jumps on Pavek’s back. “Stop it! Don’t fight! Don’t hurt each other.”
Pavek catches his rage. He looks at his fist and wills his fingers straight. He could hurt Ruari. He would kill a boy Zvain’s size with one bad punch. He lets go.
Zvain slides down Pavek’s back, wraps his arms around Pavek’s ribs, and presses his face against Pavek’s spine. “Don’t make me take sides. Don’t make me choose. I can’t choose. Not between you.”
That is the moment these three stop being travel companions and become something like a family. Ruari nudges Zvain above the elbow. Nobody has to say anything. The fight is over.
The Audience
The fun part is over. Now comes the reason they are here.
Hamanu is already in his audience chamber when the palace doors open. He has been contemplating water flowing over a black boulder. He is golden, armored in beaten gold, taller than any elf, with a perfect human face and a leonine mane. Beautiful and terrifying.
“Just-Plain Pavek, so you’ve come home at last.”
Pavek finds the strength to clasp the king’s hand without flinching, even as the claws scrape his skin. The air is hot and sulfurous. He can barely breathe.
Hamanu embraces Mahtra with genuine warmth. She is not afraid of him at all. He pats her head and she smiles inside her mask. Then he turns to Ruari and reminds him of the last time they met, when Ruari was curled on the floor beside Telhami. “Are you still afraid?” The fangs come out. Ruari trembles so badly he needs his staff to stand.
Zvain gets a touch on the cheek. His eyes close and stay closed. “The truth is best, Zvain, always remember that. There are worse things than dying, aren’t there, Lord Pavek?”
Then: “Recount.”
Words pour out of Pavek. His own words, not torn from him, but flowing freely. He tells everything. Quraite. Modekan. The elven market. The warded passage. The cavern. When he reaches the cavern, the mental pressure eases. He describes the shimmering glamour of the bowls and scaffolds, and how they were actually crude constructions filled with poison.
“I thought of Codesh, O Mighty King. But I wanted proof.”
“You wanted a measure of that sludge, because you’d forgotten to collect it the first time and you believed your own words would not be enough.”
Pavek’s blood goes cold. Hamanu has been in his mind the entire time. His memories have been unreeled and he did not even feel it.
The Monster Emerges
Hamanu asks for the rest. Pavek tells him about the stains on Ruari’s staff. The king moves with speed Pavek cannot track and takes the staff from Ruari. When the half-elf hesitates, Hamanu roars.
And then the Lion-King stops pretending.
His jaw thrusts forward with rows of sharp teeth. The mane vanishes, replaced by a dark scaly crest. His spine angles forward. His neck becomes long and flexible. Dark talons slash through the cloth on Ruari’s staff. A forked tongue touches the stains. Then Hamanu hurls the staff against the wall. It explodes.
“Why have you taken so long?”
The words echo inside Pavek’s skull. He cannot answer with his tongue. Instead, he pushes up images: he tried. He did his best. He is merely human. If they failed, the blame is his alone. But the failure was not deliberate. Merely mortal.
He stares into the eyes of the creature. He wills himself not to blink. And after an eternity, the creature turns away first.
The Mission
Hamanu transforms again, this time into a hard-faced, aging human man with weary eyes and graying hair. Ordinary looking. Very human.
He tells Pavek the sludge is not simple poison. It is a contagion that could despoil every drop of water in Urik if it ripens. In thirteen days, when Ral occludes Guthay, the contagion would spread through water, air, and every other element. All of Athas would sicken and die.
Pavek begs the king to destroy the bowls himself. Hamanu refuses.
“You will not blunder, Just-Plain Pavek; it’s not in your nature.”
Pavek gets a war bureau maniple. Twenty veteran templars, a sergeant named Ediyua, and sealed orders. Take them underground, destroy the scaffolds and bowls, then find the passage to Codesh where a second maniple will be waiting. Find Kakzim. Destroy him or bring him in.
Hamanu offers the gold medallion one more time. Pavek refuses again. “I’m not wise enough to wish, O Mighty King.”
The king smiles. “As you wish, Lord Pavek.” Then he transforms into a beautiful youth and walks out arm-in-arm with Mahtra.
Cerk Watches Everything Fall Apart
The chapter’s final section shifts to Cerk, Kakzim’s young halfling apprentice, sitting in the dark near the Codesh tunnel entrance. He is tired and resentful. He built the scaffolds, stitched the bowls, hired the work crews, and all he got for it was a beating from Kakzim.
He watches the templars charge in and overwhelm the Codeshite guards. He tries mind-bending on a few templars. One falls, but the rest throw off his influence. His doubts swell. The bowls are doomed.
Cerk runs. He has to tell Kakzim. He sprints through the tunnel until his lungs burn and his legs give out. Then he pushes himself up and runs again.
This section is important because it shows us the other side. Kakzim has been escalating since the Codesh confrontation. He has ordered the guards, demanded more reagents be added to the bowls, and wants to release the contagion immediately rather than waiting for peak strength under the conjoined moons.
Kakzim is panicking. And a panicking madman with a bioweapon is worse than a patient one.
The chapter ends with Cerk running through the dark toward his elder brother, carrying bad news. The war has begun. And Pavek, carrying incendiaries through the elven market at dawn with thirty templars and his ragtag family, is right in the middle of it.
Previous: Chapter 9 - Hunt for Kakzim in Codesh | Next: Chapter 11 - Cerk and the Templars