Cinnabar Shadows Chapter 15: The BlackTree Convergence and Kakzim's End

Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0

Underground

Chapter 15. The climax. And it starts in the worst possible place: a dirt pit beneath the black tree’s roots.

Mahtra, Zvain, and Orekel have been prisoners for days. Orekel’s ankle is swollen huge and hot. Zvain feeds him slops that the halflings dump into the hole. Water seeps through the dirt walls. Mahtra’s tongue tastes water but her memory sees blood.

That blood is from her first sight of the black tree. Living halflings hanging from the branches by ropes under their arms. Dead ones rotting. A drop of blood from a living prisoner struck her between the eyes while her hands were bound behind her back. She couldn’t wipe it off. She begged for help and got laughter.

Orekel, when he’s not delirious with pain, makes escape plans. Zvain climbs up, pulls Mahtra through, she uses her protection to blast a path, they grab rope and haul Orekel out. But Mahtra’s protection isn’t working. She’s chewed all her cinnabar, including the little lion Zvain stole from Hamanu’s palace. Something else is missing. There’s a dark place inside her now. A flame went out and she doesn’t know how to light it again.

Kakzim’s Sacrifice

The halflings dig sideways into their prison. Kakzim is screaming about a convergence starting before sundown. They’re dragged through tunnels lit by moving specks of light. Glowing worms that streak across the walls in changing colors. The halfling knowledge, Kakzim calls it. Not to be touched by “corrupt mongrels.”

They’re brought to another pit. This one is open to the sky. And there’s Ruari.

Hanging from a broken branch by ropes around his wrists. His toes barely touching a stump below. He can balance, but he can’t rest. He’s been tortured for days. When Zvain throws himself at Ruari’s legs, the half-elf swings free and his whole body knots in spasms.

Kakzim has Ruari cut down and laid on a flat stone. He uses Pavek’s steel knife to make shallow gashes above Ruari’s ankles. Blood fills a groove in the stone and channels it to the moss-covered ground. When the first drops hit the earth, the chanting starts and a drum begins to beat.

A halfling shinnies up the tree with rope. They want Mahtra and Zvain to pull Ruari up and hang him in the branches.

Zvain refuses. “You can kill me, but you can’t make me do that!”

The halflings start poking him with stone-tipped spears. One thrusts high and gouges above his eye. Blood pours down his face. Kakzim is furious. He turns his mind-bending on one of his own halflings, who drops to his knees, bleeds from the nostrils, and dies.

Then Kakzim turns to Mahtra.

The Mind-Bending Battle

What follows is one of the best internal conflicts in the book. Kakzim floods Mahtra’s mind with images. She sees herself taking the rope and pulling Ruari into the tree. The image is irresistible. She takes the rope. She yanks. Ruari’s shoulders rise from the stone. His head falls back.

But then something breaks through. An image of Pavek’s face. His name isn’t Paddock. His name is Pavek. And he would not approve.

Kakzim hits her with another mind-bending blast, shattering her thoughts. He fills the void with his narrative. His sacrifices will purify the BlackTree. Their blood will wash away his failures. Three sacrifices. Ruari first, then Zvain, then Mahtra at midnight.

Mahtra ties the rope at the tree’s base. She looks at Zvain and sees his future. She is completely controlled.

Until she isn’t.

“Made by halflings?” The thought surfaces from deep inside her. The voices in the darkness at the beginning of her memory were halfling voices. Her makers were halflings. And now another halfling, the same one who killed Father, has cast her out of her own thoughts.

She recaptures her mind. She sees what she did. That’s Ruari hanging above her. That’s Ruari’s blood in the dark moss. She hung him there.

Mahtra screams. She turns toward Kakzim with a look as venomous and mad as he’s ever given the world. The cinnabar quickens. Because that’s what was missing. Not just cinnabar. Light. She needed light, and now she’s standing in the last rays of the blood-red sunset.

She extends her arms like an embrace and lets the thunder loose.

The Hunt

Pavek has been running through the forest with Cerk on his shoulders, following trails too small for his height. They heard Mahtra’s single thunderclap roll through the trees. They know she’s alive. They know they’re close.

They burst into the clearing. Bodies everywhere. Halflings stunned on the ground. Halflings hanging from branches, living and dead. And Ruari. Lean, lanky, coppery hair unmistakable even in torchlight.

“Cut him down,” Mahtra pleads.

Pavek can barely breathe. His sword slips from his fingers. He asks about Zvain. Alive. Hurt. But alive.

Mahtra tells him Kakzim escaped. He was touching her when the thunder hit. Another mistake. But he got away.

Pavek picks up his sword and runs into the forest. Javed calls him a fool. Cerk warns him it’s futile. He doesn’t care. Anything is better than facing Ruari’s body.

Moonlight Magic

By a brook in the silver-gold moonlight, Pavek does something new. He reaches for the moons and the forest voices at the same time. He pulls them all together and shapes a single image: Kakzim. He asks the forest who has seen Kakzim pass. Footprints glow on the water. Branches shimmer where the halfling brushed against them. Something large and predatory responds with its own image: food.

Pavek follows the trail and catches up. In the trees, Kakzim strikes first with mind-bending. He strips Pavek of confidence. But Pavek is an ugly, clumsy, dung-skulled oaf who never had illusions about himself. That stuff doesn’t work on a man who already believes the worst about himself.

Kakzim tries courage next. Another waste of time. Pavek has never been brave. His courage is the same as a tree standing through a storm. You don’t need bravery when you just refuse to fall.

So Kakzim hides himself in an illusion. He becomes Escrissar with a poleaxe. Pavek can see moonlight through the fake mask, but he can’t see the real knife. He takes a gash in his left thigh before he understands the problem. The illusion keeps shifting. Different faces, different weapons. All of them wither in Pavek’s barren imagination.

Except one. A dark-eyed woman named Sian. Midnight hair and a smile. She never met a man she didn’t love, never met a man she loved more than her tagalong son. Pavek’s mother. He can’t fight her image. Kakzim cuts him twice more.

Then a large predatory presence enters the fight. An eight-legged cat with horns and a barbed tail. It hits Kakzim with its own mind-bending. A kirre.

Pavek looks at this impossible creature and thinks of Ruari. How easy to imagine them together, Ruari scratching the itchy places around those horns. And the kirre makes a sound. In Pavek’s mind, he sees Ruari: angular, coppery, slit-pupiled eyes. As if the half-elf found refuge in the cat’s mind.

Before that connection can become anything more, Kakzim lunges forward and stabs the kirre between its ribs. The knife sticking out of the beast’s side is Pavek’s knife. The one whose hilt he wrapped with his mother’s hair. The one he gave Ruari in Codesh.

Pavek screams. He takes his sword in both hands and swings.

Kakzim’s head falls. His body topples forward. The kirre is already gone into the forest, roaring, taking Pavek’s knife with it.

Pavek cries for his knife as he hasn’t yet cried for Ruari and never cried for Sian. Then he picks up Kakzim’s head by a tuft of hair and starts the long walk back.

My Thoughts

This chapter is everything the book has been building toward. Every character thread comes together under the black tree. Mahtra’s identity crisis. Zvain’s loyalty. Ruari’s suffering. Pavek’s impossible endurance. Kakzim’s magnificent insanity.

The fight between Pavek and Kakzim is perfect because it isn’t a fair fight and it isn’t a heroic one. Kakzim has every advantage. Mind-bending, illusions, the darkness, a weapon Pavek can’t see. Pavek wins because he has nothing left to lose. Kakzim strips away confidence, bravery, and illusions, but Pavek never had much of those to begin with. He’s an honest man. An ugly, stubborn, grief-broken man who just keeps walking forward.

And the kirre. That kirre carrying echoes of Ruari, or maybe just reflecting Pavek’s grief-fueled imagination. It doesn’t matter which. What matters is that the creature saved Pavek’s life long enough for him to swing, and Kakzim killed it with the knife Pavek gave Ruari. Every object in this story carries weight. Every connection between characters pays off.

The image of Pavek crying for a knife is the most Pavek thing in the whole book. Not crying for his dead friend. Not crying about his wounds. Crying for a small blade with his mother’s hair on the hilt, lost in a dark forest, carried away by a wounded cat that might hold his best friend’s spirit.

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