Cinnabar Shadows Read Online Free PDF

cabra-places among her memories. Six cabra-years, then,
since wherever cabras were born, wherever they grew, they appeared on the fruitseller's cart just once a
year. That made six years since she'd found herself in Urik and memories began, because the sixth
cabra-place, all bright red and cool, sweet nectar flowing down her throat, was very near the beginning of
the spiral. She'd have to make a new cabra-place in her memory today, the seventh cabra-place. She'd
been in Urik, living in a hide-and-bone hut beside underground water, for seven years.
    Changing her hold on her shawl, Mahtra thrust her hand into the morning. She extended one long,
slender finger tipped with a dark-red, long, sharp fingernail.
    "Only one, eleganta? What about the rest? Share them with your sisters—"
    Mahtra shook her head vigorously. She had no sisters, no family at all, except for Father, who said the
sweet cabra nectar hurt his old teeth. There was the dwarf, Mika, who shared the hide-and-bone hut. Like
her, Mika had no family, but Mika's family had died in a fire and Father had taken Mika in, because he'd
been born. He was "young," Father said, not new, and without family he couldn't take care of himself.
    Mika had arrived since the last cabra-place. Mahtra didn't know if he liked sweet fruit.
    She extended a second slender finger.
    "Wise, eleganta, very wise. Let me have your sack—"
    She retrieved a wad of knotted string from the sleeve of her gown. The fruitseller shook it out while
Mahtra sorted two ceramic bits out of her coin-pouch. By the time she had them, the half-elf was stuffing
the fourth cabra into the back. Mahtra didn't want the other fruits, but he didn't notice when she shook her
head. She considered reaching across the cart to get his attention by touching his hand; Father said
strangers didn't touch each other, unless they were children, and she—despite her newness—wasn't a
child. Grown folk got each other's attention with words.
    With one hand deathgripped on her shawl and the other clutching her two ceramic bits, Mahtra used
her voice to say: "Not four, only two."
    "Eh, eleganta? I don't understand you. Take off your mask."
    Mahtra recoiled. She let go of the ceramic bits and snatched her string-sack, four cabra fruits and all.
    "Eleganta...?"
    But Mahtra was gone, running toward the elven market with her chin tucked down and the shawl
pulled forward.
    She took off the mask only in the hide-and-bone hut, where Father knew all her secrets, and in the high
templar residences, but no where else. Though the mask wasn't a part of her, like the burnished marks on
her face and shoulders, she'd been wearing it when her awareness began. Her makers had made the mask
to hide their mistakes. That was what Father said when he examined its carefully wrought parts of leather
and metal... when he'd looked at the face her makers had wanted to keep hidden.
It wasn't the mask that made Mahtra's words difficult to understand; it was the makers. She'd
collapsed the first time she saw her face in a silver mirror—the only time she'd lost her consciousness.
Then she smashed the mirror and cursed her nameless, faceless makers: they'd forgotten her nose. Two
red-rimmed counter-curving slashes reached down from the bony ridge between her eyes. The slashes
ended above a mouth that was equally malformed. Mahtra's lips were thin and scarcely flexible. Her jaw
was too narrow for the soft, flexible tongue that other sentient races used to shape their words. The tongue
the makers had given her, like the. fine scales on her white skin, might have come from a lizard.
    The elven market was a world unto itself inside Lord Hamanu's city. It had its own walls built against
the city walls and its own gate opening into Urik-proper. A gang of templars stood watch at the gate where
the doors were thick and tall and their hinges were corroded from disuse. Why the templars watched and
what they were looking for was a mystery. They