Cinnabar Shadows Chapter 2: Mahtra and the Night - Dark Sun Retelling

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

Chapter 2: Mahtra and the Night

Chapter 2 shifts us completely away from Kakzim and Codesh. We enter Urik itself, in the predawn hours, and meet one of the most unusual characters I’ve come across in fantasy fiction.

The chapter opens with a little scene-setting about Urik’s curfew. Everybody knows when it starts (tenth star in the sky) but nobody knows exactly when it ends. Templars say sunrise, but the city needs people working before that. Someone has to cook breakfast, sweep the streets, collect the honey jars. So compromises as old as the curfew govern the dark streets.

Good, law-abiding folk lock their doors. But everyone else? They’re out there. Thieves, entertainers, servants, the nightwatch. The templars know them all by type. As long as palms get greased, business goes on.

Then we see a tall, unnaturally slender silhouette slip out of a high templar’s residence. A dwarven sergeant on her watchtower recognizes the figure. She whispers: “Great Hamanu’s infinitesimal mercy strike you down, child.” It’s not a curse. It’s pity.

Meet Mahtra

Mahtra feels anonymous eyes on her back as she walks through the templar quarter. But she doesn’t fear the watchers. Her makers gave her the means to protect herself, and her high templar patrons provide additional cover.

Here’s the thing about Mahtra: she was made, not born. She doesn’t fully understand emotions like fear, hate, love, or friendship. She knows the words but doesn’t really use them. She adjusts the black shawl she wears not because of cold (she can’t feel cold the way others do) but to hide.

Mahtra’s skin is white. Not pale. White like chalk or salt or sun-bleached bone. It’s cool to the touch, lightly scaled, as if her makers used parts of snakes or lizards. She grows no hair. There are burnished, gold-colored scars on her shoulders and around her eyes, marks from her makers that serve as her protection. When threatened, these marks heat up, her vision blurs with a protective membrane, and her body stiffens while some kind of automatic defense activates.

She wears a mask because her makers forgot her nose. There are just two red-rimmed slashes where a nose should be, above a mouth that’s too narrow for speech. Her tongue might have come from a lizard. No matter how hard she tries, her words come out mangled. Only Father, some telepathic high templars, and a young dwarf named Mika can understand her.

The dignitaries at high templar gatherings are fascinated by her exotic appearance. They handle her, sometimes gently, sometimes not. She’s what the book calls “eleganta.” In exchange, they give her coins, jewels, or gifts like the black shawl a human merchant gave her, woven from song-spider silk.

The Elven Market

Every morning, Mahtra walks a paid-for path through the elven market. This is a city within a city, older than Urik itself, with its own brutal enforcement system. The enforcers carved the market into precincts where every step is watched. Mahtra pays multiple enforcers for safe passage and never, ever strays from her route.

She learned that lesson early. When she was new, curiosity led her off the path. The enforcers sent bully-boys after her, and they discovered the hard way that Mahtra protects herself. But the enforcers didn’t attack her again. Instead, they killed five other people and left their tortured, mutilated bodies at the entrance to the cavern passage. Father told the angry mob it was Mahtra’s one allowed mistake. Then he warned her: stick to the path, or he would be the one to banish her.

This is such a powerful piece of world-building. Mahtra is dangerous, but she’s also naive. The consequence of her actions fell on innocent people. And she learned not through punishment to herself, but through the punishment of others. That’s dark.

On this particular morning, Mahtra stops at her favorite fruitseller, a half-elf who calls her “eleganta.” She buys cabra fruit. She counts the cabra-places in her memory and realizes she’s been in Urik for seven years. This is how she measures time, not in weeks or seasons, but in when certain fruits appear.

She also trades for cinnabar beads from Gomer, a dwarven bead trader. Mahtra craves cinnabar. Her hand warms as soon as the red beads touch it. A bully-boy runner tries to take some of her purchases, and when she refuses, the golden marks on her shoulders start warming. Her protective membranes begin to slip across her vision. The runner backs off and takes a silver coin instead.

The Cavern

Mahtra’s destination is an underground reservoir beneath Urik, accessed through a secret passage in the elven market. She passes Lord Hamanu’s magical ward by stepping sideways through a hidden entrance that the templars either don’t know about or ignore.

She crushes a cinnabar bead in her mouth. The fragments dissolve and calm her unease.

But when she rounds the last curve into the gallery above the water, everything is wrong. Instead of thirty-odd hearths burning bright, there are only a handful of wildfires. The air reeks of charcoal and charred meat. There is no laughter, no shouting, no ordinary buzz of community life.

She trips and falls. Her hands find a lifeless head.

From there it gets worse. Bodies everywhere. All bloody, all dead. She finds Dalya, a woman she recognized, staring up but not seeing. She finds Mika, partly burned, his face split by a gouge from forehead to neck. And she finds Father. His skull crushed by a club. Fire hadn’t touched him, but a weapon had.

Mahtra can’t cry. Her makers didn’t give her that ability. She makes sad, little noises deep in her throat. She carries Father to the water’s edge and washes the gore away.

Then Father opens his remaining eye.

He speaks into her mind. He tells her she must leave before they come back. He tells her she has powerful patrons who will help her. And he gives her one final image: a stone-headed club descending, and behind it, a wild-eyed, burn-scarred face. A halfling’s face with a single black line carved into the scars.

“Kakzim,” Mahtra whispers. And she walks away without looking back.

My Take

This chapter broke me a little.

Abbey uses Mahtra’s newness to the world to make everything more painful. She doesn’t fully understand death, grief, or even time. She counts her life in cabra fruit seasons. She lives underground because Father told her to. She walks her paid-for path because she learned the cost of straying. She doesn’t understand why children call her “Freak” but she knows it hurts.

And then she comes home to find everyone murdered. The only family she has. Father, who taught her left from right and right from wrong. Mika, who understood her speech. All gone.

The fact that she can’t cry is devastating. The makers gave her protective powers, scaled skin, golden marks. But they didn’t give her tears. So she makes “sad, little noises deep in her throat” and those noises hurt worse than anything.

Mahtra is one of the most compelling characters I’ve read in Dark Sun fiction. She’s powerful but naive. Dangerous but gentle. Made but struggling to understand what it means to be alive. And now she’s been given a name and a mission. Kakzim. Vengeance.

The parallel between chapters 1 and 2 is perfect. Chapter 1 shows us the killers preparing and then doing the deed from Cerk’s compromised perspective. Chapter 2 shows us what they left behind through the eyes of someone who doesn’t even have the emotional vocabulary to process it.

That’s good storytelling.

Previous: Chapter 1 - Urik and the Lion King | Next: Chapter 3 - Nightmare and Awakening