Cinnabar Shadows Chapter 5: Visitor from Urik - Dark Sun Retelling

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

Chapter 5: Visitor from Urik

Salt sprites are still dancing on the Sun’s Fist as sunset dies. Golden Guthay (one of Athas’s moons) climbs the eastern horizon. Pavek stops Ruari and Zvain at the edge of the salt flats. No point risking themselves out there until the sun is well set and the moonlight is strong enough to navigate by.

Pavek stares toward Urik. There’s nothing out there yet. He consoles himself knowing Telhami must have sensed whoever this is. She teases and tests him, but she wouldn’t expose Quraite to real danger.

Zvain suggests the visitor might be dead. Ruari offers to have the guardian cloud her mind so she’d wander until her bones baked. Pavek shoots that down. If not wanting to meet someone were enough, Akashia would have done it already.

The Lion’s Bells

Then they hear it. Bells. Hundreds of them. Ceramic bells, stone bells, metal bells. The sound that announces Hamanu’s personal minions traveling across the barrens. Nobody messes with the Lion-King’s messengers. Pavek remembers why.

Once, escaped slaves waylaid Hamanu’s messengers. The Lion-King hunted them personally and brought them back in wicker cages. He slung the cages above the south gate. The captives got all the water they wanted but no food and no protection from the sun. Or from each other, as they starved. It was two quinths before the last one died. The cages dangled for a year after that as a warning.

That’s Hamanu’s “infinitesimal mercy” for you. Quraite will deal fairly with this visitor, or face consequences.

Dead Escort

Ruari spots them first with his elven nightvision. Seven kanks in arrowhead formation. Not the sleek black kanks the Moonracer elves breed. These are massive, war-bureau grade insects, their chitin painted in bright enamels and hung with bells. The kind of bugs that make you think twice before approaching.

But Akashia sensed only one mind. Seven riders, one mind broadcasting. That means the rest are either dead, magically shielded, or some combination that makes Pavek’s stomach drop.

The lead kank takes exception to Pavek’s drawn sword. It rears up, mandibles dripping yellow phosphorescent poison. Then its rider topples off like a sack of grain. Ruari jumps into action with druid magic, creating rapport between himself and the bugs. One by one the kanks calm down, mandibles stop clashing, chittering fades to silence.

Pavek examines the fallen riders. The first is a war bureau templar, dead, with dark foul liquid spilling from his mouth and nose. Not a natural death. Another is a decorated dwarf, also dead. One saddle has only charred hands gripping a scorched pommel. Pavek thinks this was the defiler Hamanu sent along. Something incinerated him fast and precise, burning the rider but not the kank.

There’s a message satchel with the high bureau’s seven interlocking circles stamped in gold, but before Pavek can open it, Ruari erupts in panic from the far end of the formation.

Mahtra

“What is she… it?” Ruari sputters, invoking legendary druid paladins.

Pavek steers the freaked-out half-elf aside. Ruari grew up in clean, free Quraite. He’s seen elves and dwarves and humans. He hasn’t seen anything like this.

The woman is white-skinned, scaled, wearing a tight gown and a mask that covers whatever face her makers gave her. She has metallic gold marks around her eyes. She’s unconscious. Pavek recognizes what she is immediately.

“New Race.”

Zvain knows too. “Rotters,” he calls them. “Things that got made, not born. Claws and teeth and other things they shouldn’t have.” He backs away but adds a critical warning: don’t touch her mask. She has a power that even Escrissar couldn’t get around.

Then he drops the real bomb. He saw her before. At House Escrissar. Almost every night. She was eleganta. She entertained behind closed doors.

Pavek processes this quietly. New Race people come from the Pristine Tower, far to the south. Slavers take coffles of captives there and bring back the few that survive the transformation. Each one comes out different. Made, not born. No mothers or fathers. “They die, though. Just like the rest of us.”

Ruari won’t help Pavek heal her. He’s too horrified, too disgusted. Pavek kneels beside her and tries to loosen the cloth wrapped around her head. Zvain tackles him from the side, shouting “She’ll blast you!” The boy has seen her protective power firsthand.

This triggers something ugly in Pavek. Blind rage clouds his eyes. He grabs Zvain’s neck and starts squeezing. It takes the boy’s desperate pleas to snap him out of it. Pavek releases his grip, horrified at himself. His templar instincts, the violence he carries from years of bureau life, surfaced without warning.

Face to Face

They carry the unconscious Mahtra back to Quraite, bells clanging on the kank train behind them. Akashia waits at the village edge, worried and doubting. Pavek explains: the escort is dead, this one’s the messenger, she’s New Race.

He takes Mahtra to Akashia’s hut. The tension is immediate. Zvain slips in and confesses he saw Mahtra at House Escrissar. When Mahtra wakes, she sits up with slow, feline grace. Her eyes are pale blue-green, like gemstones, with no white visible. Just iris and swelling black pupils.

“I am Mahtra. I have a message for the high templar called Pavek.”

He steps forward. She stares at his scarred face and says: “My lord said I would find an ugly, ugly man.”

That’s Hamanu’s sense of humor.

Mahtra delivers the message: Hamanu says Pavek has dawdled in his garden long enough. Time to finish what he started. She and Pavek will hunt Kakzim together, and she will have vengeance for Father and Mika.

Explosive Reactions

The reactions cascade. Zvain is excited: Kakzim! They have to go back! Ruari is suspicious: she says she had a Father? She’s made, not born, she must be lying!

And then Akashia detonates.

When Mahtra mentions she turned to Escrissar for help, Akashia’s voice fills with venom. “Escrissar. You turned to that foul nightmare disguised as a man? What was he, your friend, your lover? Is that why you wear a mask? Rotter. Is it your face that’s rotten, or your spirit?”

Akashia lunges at Mahtra. Pavek and Zvain grab her. Mahtra’s golden marks begin to glow, distorting the air like heat above the salt flats. Disaster is close.

Pavek shouts that Kakzim was Escrissar’s slave. Of course Mahtra would go to Escrissar’s house. It was the first place anyone would look.

Akashia pulls free, furious but controlled. She orders Mahtra out. But Mahtra doesn’t flinch. “I go with High Templar Pavek. With him alone or with any others who desire vengeance. Do you desire vengeance, green-eyed woman?”

Confronted by honesty she can’t deny and coldness equal to her own, Akashia retreats.

Ruari demands they let the grove’s guardian judge Mahtra. Pavek refuses. The Lion sent her. The Lion knows where they are. They’ll bury the templars, return their belongings, and leave as soon as the kanks are rested.

Pavek asks Mahtra how old she is. “The cabras have ripened seven times since I came to Urik.” Seven years. And before Urik? “There is no before Urik.”

Akashia’s face softens when she hears this. Seven years old. Made at the Pristine Tower and dumped into the world seven years ago. Everything she’s been through, everything she’s done to survive, in seven years of consciousness.

As Pavek leaves, Mahtra slips her arm through his and strokes his inner forearm with a long fingernail. He pulls away. “Not with me, eleganta. I’m not your type.”

“Where do I go, if not with you?”

He parks her with a farmer couple. Then he stretches out in the bachelor hut. Tomorrow is certain to be worse than tonight. He’ll sleep while he can.

My Take

This chapter brings all the threads together. Pavek, Mahtra, Ruari, Zvain, and Akashia in one room. It’s like dropping a lit match into a jar of competing chemicals.

Akashia’s reaction to Mahtra is the most revealing moment in the book so far. We knew Escrissar tortured her. We knew she had nightmares. But her instant, visceral rage at a woman who merely visited the same house tells us how deep the damage goes. She doesn’t see a New Race woman with a dead family and a king’s mission. She sees the mask, the tight dress, the eleganta life, and it takes her right back to the worst days of her life.

And Mahtra doesn’t understand any of that. She looks at Akashia’s rage and responds with the only honesty she knows: “Do you desire vengeance?” It’s a real question from someone who doesn’t know how to be anything but direct.

Pavek’s moment with Zvain, grabbing the boy’s throat in blind rage, is important too. He’s spent a year playing at being a peaceful druid, but the templar is still inside him. The violence is still there, ready to surface the instant he’s triggered. It terrifies him more than anything on the salt flats.

The best line of the chapter might be the simplest. When asked how old she is, Mahtra says: “There is no before Urik.” Five words that explain everything about who she is and why she doesn’t react to the world the way everyone else expects her to.

The hunt for Kakzim is on. But the real conflict isn’t out in the Tablelands. It’s right here, between five people who can barely stand to be in the same room together.

Previous: Chapter 4 - Pavek the Druid Templar | Next: Chapter 6 - Mahtra’s Origins Revealed