Cinnabar Shadows Chapter 12: Pavek Is Gone and the Map Points Forward
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Pavek Was Gone
“Pavek was gone. Pavek was dead.”
That’s how chapter 12 opens. Two sentences. No buildup, no softening. Just the fact of it landing like a stone. Abbey doesn’t give us any dramatic death scene because Pavek’s death happened between chapters, off the page. All we get is Ruari trudging down the ring road toward Farl, listening to distant roars and trying to figure out which one marked the moment the Lion-King found his high templar’s pale body.
The last roar, the loudest and longest, was probably Hamanu’s frustration. Pavek bled himself out before the king arrived, which means the necromancy would have been useless. Just-Plain Pavek outwitted his sorcerer-king.
But that small victory brings no comfort. Not to Ruari, who keeps sneaking tears and wiping them on his pant leg. Not to Zvain, who suddenly has to be the expert on Urik customs because he’s the only one who grew up there. And not to Mahtra, whose eyes can’t make tears and whose voice never varies, but who keeps asking the practical questions that force them all to keep moving.
Grief on the Road
The grief in this chapter is so well done. It’s not theatrical. It’s the mundane cruelty of having to keep walking when you want to stop existing. They pass a field overseer who asks about the commotion at Codesh. Ruari calls Hamanu by his bare name. Zvain snaps at him for it. If you talk about “Hamanu” instead of “Lord Hamanu” when a guy with a slave scourge is within earshot, you’re going to get questions you can’t answer.
And then we get this moment where Ruari, walking along the dusty road, can’t even remember why he once tried to poison Pavek’s dinner. Just last year he wanted the man dead. Now he can barely see through his tears. That kind of emotional reversal is what makes this book work. These characters earned their relationships by fighting through them.
They bicker. Ruari yells at Zvain for asking a stupid question, and the boy breaks down and runs. Ruari has to catch up and apologize. They hold each other on the road and cry. Mahtra stands behind them, keeping watch, because someone has to.
The Bark Map
Mahtra reminds them about the bark map from Kakzim’s room. Ruari unrolls it and tries to make sense of the markings. He thinks the toothy shape might be the Smoking Crown Volcano. The circle could be Urik. A black line connects them and runs westward in jagged segments through symbols of water, mountains, and other landmarks. The line ends at a black tree as big as the volcano on the map.
And Pavek hadn’t wanted to see it. He refused to look at the map, refused to hear about it. At the time it seemed like defeat talking. Now Ruari wonders if Pavek was protecting them. If he didn’t know where they went, he couldn’t tell Hamanu under necromancy.
Pavek took risks his whole life. He raised a guardian no druid thought possible. A year before, he walked into druid hands because stopping Laq mattered more than his survival. This was the same pattern. Don’t look at the map. Don’t know the answer. Die before you can be forced to give it up.
“Later,” Ruari says out loud, surprising his companions. “We’ll follow the map, somehow, wherever it takes us. All the way to that big black tree.”
Pavek Wakes Up
Plot twist. Pavek isn’t dead.
He wakes up on a hard bed in a one-room house with woven-wicker walls and a thatched roof. It looks like Quraite. But through the window he can see masonry walls. City walls. Urik walls. He’s in the palace.
And his hand. His shattered, mangled left hand that should have been gone. It’s healed. Completely. But more than healed. Every scar on his left hand now perfectly mirrors the scars on his right. It’s symmetry that goes beyond magic into something deliberately meticulous.
Pavek isn’t a gambling man, but he’d bet he didn’t actually die. He steps outside, and there’s a human man about his age waiting for him. Pavek recognizes the situation immediately and drops to one knee.
Hamanu.
The sorcerer-king appears first as a normal man, then shifts to his leonine form, then to something even worse. He tells Pavek about his origins. About a house where he took his first steps, before trolls destroyed everything. About going to the Pristine Tower. About winning a war the others couldn’t win. About trying to rebuild what was lost and failing because the dead don’t come back the same.
It’s the most vulnerable we’ve seen Hamanu in this entire book. He wasn’t always a monster. He was a man who lost his family and became something terrible trying to get them back.
Then he snaps back to business. He reveals he’s slowly becoming a dragon. Every spell he casts accelerates the transformation. One day the change will be inevitable, and he refuses to sacrifice Urik to it the way Kalak tried to sacrifice Tyr.
Marching Orders
Hamanu tells Pavek that Kakzim escaped from Codesh with another halfling. His investigators found a hair caught in the doorjamb. It’s ensorcelled, and it will point toward Kakzim like a compass.
Pavek gets his orders: take a double maniple from the war bureau, follow the hair, bring back Kakzim dead or alive. Kanks are waiting at Khelo. When he returns, they’ll investigate the guardian Pavek raised in Codesh.
Pavek asks about his friends. Hamanu sighs. Ruari sold the staff five days ago. Since then, the Lion-King doesn’t know where they went. He won’t waste magic tracking them because every spell brings the dragon closer.
The chapter closes with Ruari, Zvain, and Mahtra in the barrens, following the bark map with two shabby kanks and dwindling supplies. They reach a settlement where smoke rises above the heat shimmer.
Zvain immediately blows their cover by announcing they followed a map. Mahtra adds they’re looking for two halflings and a big black tree.
So much for keeping their heads down.
My Thoughts
This chapter pulls off the best kind of fake-out. We spend the first half genuinely grieving Pavek alongside his friends. The grief is raw and convincing. And then, without cheapening any of it, we learn he’s alive. But the emotional damage is real. Ruari, Zvain, and Mahtra don’t know. They’re making decisions out of genuine loss.
The Hamanu scene is remarkable. A thousand-year-old tyrant sitting in a courtyard, talking about the house where he was born and the wives he tried to bring back from the dead. It humanizes a character who is, literally and figuratively, a monster. Pavek makes a joke about his mirrored hands, and Hamanu laughs so hard his disguise slips. That moment feels genuine in a way that fantasy villains rarely get to be.
And then there’s the structural cleverness. Pavek and his friends are headed to the same place. Pavek is following ensorcelled hair. Ruari is following a bark map. Neither group knows the other is coming. That collision course drives the tension for the rest of the book.
Previous: Chapter 11 - Cerk and the Templars | Next: Chapter 13 - Ject and the Mountains