Cinnabar Shadows - Lynn Abbey Page 0,1

the templars before the next morning’s trek to the massive gates of Urik.

Nine of the villages were sprawling, almost friendly settlements with walls and gatehouses that could scarcely be distinguished from animal pens. Registrators from the civil bureau of Lord Hamanu’s templarate had become as much a part of the community as templars could, considering their loyalties and the medallions hung around their necks, symbols of Hamanu and the terrible power a true sorcerer-king could channel to and through his chosen minions.

In many cases, the registrators had been born and raised in their village, as had their parents, grandparents, and so on back through the generations. In their inmost thoughts, they considered themselves Modekaners, Todekites, Khelons, and such. Villagers rather than city-dwellers, they had no ambition to brave the dangers of Urik’s greater hierarchy. To protect their sinecures, the rural yellow-robes had learned the arts of negotiation. They compromised when compromise would resolve a village problem without attracting the attention of their superiors in the civil bureau—much less that of their overlord, Mighty Hamanu.

Long after curfew on market-day eve and market-day night, there was usually music in the village streets and raucous laughter in its inns.

Except in the market village of Codesh.

The first day of Urik’s week and the first of its villages, Codesh was as old as the city itself. In the beginning, before conquering Hamanu laid claim to this corner of the Tablelands, it was also larger than Urik—or so the village elders proclaimed at every opportunity. Codeshites feared Hamanu more than their compatriots in the other villages because they challenged him more than his other subjects would dare. When there was trouble outside Urik’s walls, Codesh was the first place the templars came. Not templars from the tame civil bureau, but hardened veterans from the war bureau, armed with dark magic and the will to use it.

There was no camaraderie between templars and villagers in Codesh.

Wicker walls and rickety towers weren’t sufficient for the fractious village. Both Codeshite and Urikite templars wanted stalwart towers and fortress walls that might give them the advantage if push ever came to shove. Codesh’s walls were only a third as high as Urik’s, but that was more than enough to separate the stiff-necked Codeshites from the more congenial market-farmers who congregated outside the village walls on Codesh eve and Codesh night each week.

There were murals on the Codesh walls: the obligatory portraits of the Lion of Urik, without the sunset flashing eyes, and invariably armed with a butcher’s poleaxe, which explained what the village was and why its insolence was tolerated generation after generation. Codesh was Urik’s sanctioned abattoir: the place where beasts of every kind were brought for slaughter in the open-roofed, slope-floored killing ground and processed into meat and other necessities.

Nothing valuable was wasted by the butchery clans of Codesh. Each beast that came into their hands was slain, gutted and carefully flensed into layers of rawhide and fat that were consigned to subclans of tanners and Tenderers, all of whom maintained reeking establishments elsewhere within the Codesh walls. The Tenderers took the small bones and offal, as well, adding them to the seething brews of their giant-sized kettles. Long bones went to bonemen who excised the marrow with special drills, then sold the best of what remained to joiners for the building of houses, and the scraps to farmers for their fields.

Honeymen collected the blood that ran into the pits at the rear of each killing floor. They dried the blood in the sun and sold it underhand to mages and priests of every stripe. They also sold their rusty powder overhand to the farmers who dribbled it like water on their most precious crops. Gleaners collected their particular prizes—jewel-like gallstones, misshaped organs, bright green inix eyes, polished pebbles from erdlu gizzards—and sold them, no questions asked, to the highest bidder. Gluemakers took the last: hooves, talons, beaks, and the occasional sentient miscreant whose body must never be found.

And if some bloody bit did fall from a clansman’s cart, sharp-eyed kes’trekels flocked continuously overhead. With an eerie scream, the luckiest bird would fold its wings and plummet from the sky. A score of others might follow. A kes’trekel orgy was no place for the fainthearted. The birds brawled as they fed, sometimes on each other, until nothing remained. Even a strong-stomached man might wisely turn away.

The mind-bender who’d claimed the mind of a soaring kes’trekel from boredom hours earlier let it go when it became part of that