Cinnabar Shadows

Chapter Two

All residents of Urik knew precisely when Lord Hamanu's curfew began, but few knew exactly when it ended. Those who could afford to laugh at the Lion-King's laws said curfew ended one moment after it began. Templars said curfew ended at sunrise and they'd arrest or fine anyone they caught on the streets before the sun appeared above the city walls, but usually they left the city alone once the sky began to brighten. Someone had to have breakfast waiting when the high and mighty woke up. Someone had to entertain the nightwatch templars before they went on duty and again when they left their posts. Someone had to sweep the streets, collect the honey jars, kindle the fires; someone had to make breakfast for the entertainers, sweepers, honeymen, and cooks. And since those someones would never be the yellow-robed templars of the night-watch, compromises as old as the curfew itself governed Urik's dark streets.

Nowhere were the nighttime rituals more regular than in the templar quarter itself, especially the double-walled neighborhood that the high templars called home. Even war bureau templars, each with a wealth of colored threads woven into their yellow sleeves, knew better than to question the comings and goings of their superiors. They challenged no one, least of all the thieves and murderers, who'd undoubtedly been hired by a dignitary with the clout to execute an overly attentive watchman on the spot, no questions asked. And if the watch would not challenge the criminals in their own quarter, they certainly left the high templars and their guests alone as well.

The sky above the eastern wall was glowing amber when an alley door swung open and a rectangle of light briefly illuminated the austere red-striped yellow wall of a high templar residence. The dwarven sergeant leaned heavily on the rail of her watchtower, taking note of the flash, the distinctive clunk of a heavy bolt thrown home again, and a momentary silhouette, tall and unnaturally slender, against the red-striped yellow wall. She snorted once, having recognized the silhouette and thereby knowing all she needed to know.

Folk had to live, to eat, to clothe themselves against the light of day and the cold of night. It wasn't any templar's place to judge another poor wretch's life, but it seemed to the sergeant that sometimes it might be better to lie down and die. Short of the gilded bedchambers of Hamanu's palace, which she had never seen, there wasn't a more nefarious place in all Urik than the private rooms of a high templar's residence. And the slender one who slipped quietly through the lightening shadows below her post spent nearly every night in one disreputable residence or another.

"Great Hamanu's infinitesimal mercy strike you down, child," the sergeant whispered as the footsteps faded.

It was not a curse.

Mahtra felt anonymous eyes at her back as she walked through the templar quarter. She didn't fear those who stared at her. There was very little that Mahtra feared. Before they drove her out onto the barren wastes, her makers had given her the means to take care of herself, and what her innate gifts could not deflect, her high templar patrons could. She had not developed the sensitivities of born-folk. Fear, hate, love, friendship were words Mahtra knew but didn't use often. It wasn't fear that made her pause every little while to adjust the folds of the long, black shawl she clutched tightly around her thin shoulders.

It wasn't because of cold, either, though there was a potent chill to the predawn air. Cold was a sensitivity, just like fear, that Mahtra lacked, though she understood cold better than she understood fear. Mahtra could hear cold moving through the nearest buildings: tiny hisses and cracklings as if the long-dead bones that supported them still sought to warm themselves with shrinking or shivering. Soon, as sunrise gave way to morning, the walls would warm, then grow hot, and the hidden bones would strive to shed the heat, stretching with sighs and groans, like any overworked slave.

No one else could hear the bones as Mahtra could, not even the high templars with their various and mighty talents, or the other nightfolk she encountered in their company. That had puzzled Mahtra when she was new to her life in Urik. Her sensitivities were different; she was different. Mahtra saw her differences in the precious silver mirrors high templars hung on their walls. They said mirrors could not lie. Of course, everyone was different in a mirror's magical reflection. Some of those she met nightly in these identically striped residences were more different than she was. That was hardly surprising: the high templars who commanded the gatherings Mahtra attended were collectors of the exotic, the new, and the different of the city.

Mahtra's skin was white, that was one difference—not pale like that of a house-bound courtesan who never saw the light of day, but white like chalk or salt or bones that the sun had bleached dry. Her skin was cool to the touch, harder and lightly scaled, as if she'd been partly made from snakes or lizards. Her body grew no hair to cover her stark skin, but there were burnished, sharp-angled scars on her shoulders and around her wide-set turquoise eyes, scars that were like gold-leaf set into her flesh. The makers had put those scars on her, though Mahtra could not remember when or how. They were what the makers had given her to protect her, as born-folk had teeth and knives. Mahtra knew she could protect herself against any threat, but she could not explain how she did it, not to Father, not to herself.

The dignitaries she met at the high templar gatherings were fascinated by her skin—as they were fascinated by anything exotic. They handled her constantly, sometimes with ardent gentleness, sometimes not.

The reasons for their fascination were unimportant to Mahtra, so long as they gave her something when they were finished. Coins were best; coins had so many uses. She could take them to the market and exchange them for food, fuel, clothing, or anything else Father and the other waterside dwellers needed. Jewels were almost as useful; they could be turned into coins in the elven market. Sometimes, though, her nighttime consorts gave Mahtra things she kept for herself, like the long, black shawl she wore this chilly morning.

A human merchant had given Mahtra the shawl at one of the first high templar gatherings she'd attended. He said the forest-weavers of Gulg had woven it from song-spider silk. He said she should wear it to conceal her delicate white-white skin—and the dark mottled blotches he'd made on it. She obeyed without argument. Obedience was so much easier than argument when she was still so new and the world, so old.

Father had sucked on his teeth when she handed him the shawl. Burn it or sell it, he said, throwing it on the damp, stony shores of the water; there were better ways to live above ground, if that was where she was determined to live. But Father couldn't tell her how to live those better ways, any more than he could explain the difference between made and born.

So Mahtra disobeyed him, then, and kept the shawl as a treasure. It warmed her as she walked between the hut and the high templar residences and it was softer than anything she'd felt before or since. She didn't think about the merchant; neither he nor the mottled blotches mattered enough to remember. Her skin always turned white again, no matter how dark a night's handling left it.

And the shawl would hide her no matter what color her skin was.

Hiding; hiding was why Mahtra kept the shawl pulled tight around her. The stares of folk who were only slightly different from each other hurt far more than the hands that touched her at the high templar gatherings. Children who looked up from their street games to shout "Freak," or "Spook," or "Show us your face!" hurt most of all, because they were as new as she was. But children were born; they could hate, despise, and scorn. She was made; she was different.

Mahtra clung to her shawl and the shadows until she reached yesterday's market. Early-rising folk and nightfolk like herself were dependent on the enterprising merchants of yesterday's markets: collections of carts that appeared each sunrise near Urik's most heavily trafficked intersections. Yesterday's markets served those who couldn't wait until the city gates opened and the daily flood of farmers and artisans surged through the streets to the square plazas where they set up their stalls and sold their wares. The vendors of yesterday's markets lived in the twilight and dawn, buying the dregs of one day's market to sell before the next day's got under way.

Yesterday's markets were very informal, completely illegal, and tolerated by Lord Hamanu because they were absolutely necessary to his city's welfare. And as with all other things that endured in Urik, yesterday's markets had become traditional. The half-elf vendor who laid claim to the choice northwestern corner where the Lion's Way crossed Joiners' Row sold only yesterday's fruit, as his father had sold only such fruit from the cart he wheeled each dawn to that precise location, and as his children would when their turn came. His customers, sleepy-headed at either the start or finish of their day's work, relied on his constancy and he, in turn, knew them, as well as strangers dared to know each other in Urik.

"Cabras, eleganta," he said with a smile and a gesture toward four of the husky, dun-colored spheres. "Almost fresh from the Dolphiles estate. First of this year's crop, and the best. A bit each, two bits for the lot."

The fruitseller talked constantly, without expecting an answer, which Mahtra appreciated, and he called her eleganta, which Father said was a polite word for improper activities, but she liked the sound of it. Mahtra liked cabras, too, though she had almost forgotten them. Seeing them now on the fruitseller's cart, she remembered that she hadn't seen them for a great many mornings. For a year's worth of mornings, according to the half-elf.

Years and crops confused Mahtra. Her life was made up of days and nights, strings of dark beads following light beads, with no other variations. Others spoke of weeks and years, of growing up and growing old. They spoke of growing crops, of planting and harvesting. She'd been clever enough to piece together the notion that food wasn't made in the carts of yesterday's market; food was born somewhere outside the city walls. But growing was a more difficult concept for someone who hadn't been born, hadn't been a child, couldn't remember being anything except exactly what she was.

Staring at the cabras, Mahtra felt her differences—her made-ness and her newness—as if she were standing in an empty cavern and her life were a meager collection of memories strewn in a spiral at her feet.

When she concentrated, Mahtra found six 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 challenged folk sometimes as they entered or left, letting the lucky pass and leading the unlucky away, unless they executed them on the spot, but they never challenged her, even when she approached the gate at a panic! run.

Maybe they knew who she was—or where she spent her nights. Maybe she was too different, even for them. They let her pass between them and through the gaping gates without comment this morning as they had every other morning.

Unlike the other markets of Urik, the elven market wasn't a gathering of farmers and vendors who arrived in an empty plaza, hawked their wares, and then disappeared. The elven market wasn't a market at all, but a separate city, the original Urik, older than the Dragon or the sorcerer-kings, older than the barren Tablelands that now surrounded the much larger city. Lord Hamanu's power was rightly feared in the elven market, but his laws were largely ignored and could be ignored because the unwritten laws of this ancient quarter were every bit as brutally efficient.

Enforcers had carved the mazelike market into a precinct patchwork through which strangers might wander unaware that every step they took, every bargain, every sidelong glance or snicker was watched and, if necessary, remembered. The market residents were watched by the same network, and paid dearly for the privilege. In return, those who dwelt within the old walls of the elven market, where the Lion-King's yellow-robed templars feared to travel in gangs of less than six, were assured of protection from everyone except their protector.

Mahtra was neither a stranger nor a resident. She paid several enforcers for the privilege of walking through the precinct maze early each morning when the market was as close to quiet as it ever got. Having paid for her safe passage, Mahtra was careful never to deviate from her permitted path, lest the eyes that always watched from rooftops, alleyways, and shadowed, half-open doors report her missteps to the enforcers.

Once, when she was much newer than she was now, curiosity had lured Mahtra off the paid-for path. She meant no harm, but the enforcers didn't believe—or couldn't understand—her mute protestations. They'd sent their bully-boy runners after her, and they'd learned the hard way that Mahtra would protect herself. She couldn't be harmed, except at great cost in lives and the greater risk of drawing Lord Hamanu's attention down to their little domains.

That long-ago morning, when she was very new and didn't understand what was important, Mahtra said nothing to Father when she returned to the cavern, nor anything when she went out at dusk. But when she returned the next morning, five corpses, all tortured and mutilated, lay in the chamber at the head of the elven market passage to the cavern. The enforcers had decided that others—born-folk without her ability to take care of themselves—would pay the price of her indiscretions.

Men and women with weapons in hand were waiting for her in the cavern, demanding justice, demanding retribution. Mahtra prepared to defend herself, but Father told her no, and faced the angry mob himself. She heard herself called terrible things that day, but Father prevailed, and the mob dispersed.

When they returned to the hide-and-bone hut, Father took her wrists firmly in his hands and said cavern children were allowed one mistake, no matter how serious, and that he'd persuaded the others that she should be granted the same grace, because being new was like being a child. Then, holding her wrists tight enough to hurt, Father said she must concern herself with the born-folk who were their neighbors along the shore of the underground water. She must not endanger the whole community with her curiosity; she must stick to the path she'd paid for, else he himself would be the one to banish her and nothing her makers had given her would protect her from his wrath. Father had come into Mahtra's mind then, as a warning, not as her mentor. His face was more terrible than her own and there was a horror he named death burning in his eyes. She was powerless before him. She learned a meaning of fear and had stayed on the paid-for path.

"Mahtra! Mahtra!" a woman called from behind, a dwarf by the deep pitch of her voice and, considering where Mahtra was on her path, most likely Gomer, a trader who specialized in beads and amulets.

Mahtra stopped and turned. Gomer flashed a smile and beckoned her. With a glance at the rooftops, alleys and the other places where her invisible escort might be lurking, Mahtra backtracked to the dwarf. Gomer sold her goods from the inside a boxlike stall along Mahtra's paid-for path. The enforcers wouldn't object—not if she saved a bit or two for the runner who'd surely show up, demanding a share of Gomer's trade, before Mahtra left this precinct.

"What've you got in your sack? Got yourself some cabras, eh?" Gomer knew Mahtra didn't talk much; she didn't waste precious time pausing between questions. "So they're starting to show up in the markets? Have to go out and get me some, maybe. Unless we could make a bargain, you and I. That's a lot of fruit you've got there. Make you sick, it would—even you. But I've got something here you'd like better than cabra—cinnabar!"

Gomer's meaty, powerful hand wove delicately over the compartmented trays set out on her selling board. She plucked up a carved bead about the size of her thumb's knuckle and the same color as Mahtra's fingernails. The sight of it made Mahtra's mouth water. She liked cabra fruit, but she craved the bitter-tasting beads carved from red cinnabar.

"Thought you'd want it, dearie," Gomer chuckled.

She closed her fingers over the bead, shook her hand and blew across it, as if she were casting dice in a high-stakes game, and then opened her fist one finger at a time. To Mahtra's dismay, the bead had vanished.

"You do want it, don't you?"

Mahtra nodded vigorously. The dwarf chuckled again. She made extravagant motions with her hand, and when she showed her palm again, there were three red beads nestled among the calluses.

"I should charge you a silver, that's what they're worth, you know—especially since you won't resell them—but give me two of your cabras and I'll let you have them for a half-disk."

Mahtra would have made a bad bargain to acquire the beads, but Gomer's offer was ideal. She fished the extra fruits out of her sack and five ceramic bits out of her coin-pouch. Gomer dribbled the beads into her hand. They were pretty little things, with leaves and flowers carved all over two of them and a strange animal she'd never seen before carved in the third. But it was the cinnabar itself that excited her. Her hand began to warm as soon as the red beads touched it.

"Have fun, dearie," Gomer said.

The dwarf balanced one of the husky fruits against her thigh and smashed it open with a blow from her fist. Red juice sprayed her tunic, looking for a heartbeat like blood. Mahtra didn't like blood; it was something old and deep within her, from beyond the spirals of her memory. An inner voice told her to run, and she did, though she knew the splatters were only sweet cabra juice.

A runner appeared a bit farther on. He was a human youth, sleek and well-muscled, typical of the well-fed bullies who worked for the market enforcers. He stopped her. There was an obsidian knife in his hand and an arrogant jut to his jaw, but he kept his distance as he said:

"For luck, Mahtra," and held out his hand. "Give me some of what you bought."

She'd have paid him however many ceramic bits he wanted, or gone off with him to whatever bolthole he called home, but she wouldn't surrender her cinnabar beads. She tried to make her refusal plain, but the youth couldn't understand her gestures—or perhaps that was only his own stubborn refusal.

"Give me half," he demanded, "or I'll tell Map."

Another sturdy human, Map was the local enforcer and a man with a temper to be avoided. Mahtra thought of the butchered corpses in the antechamber years ago and of the three beads in her hand right now. Three wasn't a number that could be easily divided in half. Although she and the runner stood in an intersection, Mahtra felt as if she were trapped in a corner. Juggling the loose beads and the heavy string sack with one hand, she fumbled through her coin-pouch with the other and fished out a shiny silver coin.

The bully frowned. "I want what you bought from Gomer. She's making special bargains for you. Map's gonna want to know about it."

That was too much threat, too much confusion, for Mahtra to bear. She felt trapped, she felt angry, and the burnished scars on her shoulders began to grow warm beneath her shawl. Stiffness spread down her arms, down her spine all the way to her feet; she couldn't move. The scars around her eyes burned as well, and a cloudy membrane slipped across her vision while the makers' precautions protected her.

Mahtra's scars were burning; her vision was blurred. She felt the silver coin yanked out of her fingertips and heard hard pounding as the bully ran away, but it was several more heartbeats before the membranes withdrew, her limbs relaxed and she could move again.

She hadn't actually done anything wrong, but Father would be angry—very angry. He might not believe it wasn't her fault, even when he could look inside her mind where the truth was marked into her memory. Fear emerged from its lonely corner, haunting her thoughts as she continued through the market maze.

Her destination was a plaza built around a broad, circular fountain that was scarcely different from the tens of other fountains scattered through Urik. Women of every race scrubbed and pounded their laundry on its curbstones while a steady parade of men and children filled water jugs from the four spouts. An old elf with a crippled leg and a sullen demeanor kept watch from an awning-crowned, tall, wheeled chair. He was the enforcer, and the fountain plaza was his entire precinct. Mahtra didn't approach him, or the squat stone building in the northwest corner of the plaza until he recognized her with the ivory-tipped walking stick he balanced across his thighs.

Usually he sported her a heartbeat after she appeared on the plaza verge, but today he stared at the sky and a rippling stripe of clouds that were much too high to threaten rain. When he did lower his head and command his minions to swivel his chair about, there was still no sign of recognition, no invitation to cross the plaza. Mahtra feared Map and the runner had gotten here first, and feared something deeper, too, to which she could not put a name—except that it was dark and cold, and it smothered the cinnabar warmth she clutched in her hand.

A half-elf child came running toward her. Mahtra juggled her beads and fruit once again, expecting another demand, but the child stopped short and delivered a message:

"Henthoren," she said, the crippled-elf enforcer's name, "wishes you to know you are the first to approach the well since the nightwatch rang its first bells. He keeps the peace. He wishes you to remember that."

The child bowed low and retreated. Mahtra looked toward the enthroned Henthoren, who leveled his stick at her, giving her leave to traverse his little domain. Then the old elf went back to staring at the sky. She raised her eyes as well, half-expecting that the clouds had fallen and darkened, so palpable had the sense of chill darkness become within her mind. But the clouds remained distant white streaks in the cerulean vault.

Mahtra longed to ask the enforcer what he meant, why this morning he sent a child to tell her what was always true: she was the first walker from the cavern to return home since the midnight bells. But asking was talking and talking to the enforcer was more daunting than his message had been, more daunting than the unease she felt striding past the fountain to the little stone building with its metal-grate door.

There were eyes on her back as she opened the door. She hesitated before crossing the threshold into the unlit antechamber, but nothing flew from the shadows or darted past her feet. There were no sounds—no smells, as there had been when the corpses were laid out as examples. Born-folk had an expression: quiet as a tomb. Mahtra had never seen a tomb, but it could not have been quieter than the windowless antechamber and its stone carved stairway leading into the ground. She stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind her.

Father said she had human eyes, meaning that she didn't see well in the dark, though she knew the passageway from the antechamber down to the cavern well enough that she didn't need one of the torches that were kept ready by the door. She did pause long enough to loosen the gauze-pleated sidepieces of her mask and slip one of the cinnabar beads into her mouth. Her narrow jaw, so ill-suited to ordinary speech, was strong enough to shatter the bead with a single effort. Her tongue carried the fragments to the back of her mouth where they began to dissolve, along with her unease.

A shimmering drapery of blue-green light, the hallmark of the Lion-King's personal warding, shone at the top of the stairway where torchlight would have revealed the maw of a passage high enough to admit a full-grown elf. Templars with their medallions could pass safely through the light. Anyone else died. The cavern-dwellers had another way, which could not have been entirely unknown to either the market enforcers or the yellow-robe templars of the larger city. Using the boundary of Lord Hamanu's spell as a reference, Mahtra stepped sideways, one, twice, three times and felt the opening of a passage no torch would reveal, no elf or dwarf could see. Ten tight, twisting steps later, the two passages became one again. Mahtra slipped the second bead into her mouth and continued with confidence down the lightless slope. A faint aroma of charcoal and charred meat lingered in the air, a bit unusual, but accidents happened in the darkness beside the water. People got careless, lamps overturned, cookfires leapt out of their hearths. Mika had lost his family that way, but Father was careful, and Mantra's fear did not return.

From here she should see the whole community: thirty-odd huts and homesteads beside thirty-odd hearths burning bright in the cavern's eternal night: But there were only a handful of fires, and all of them were wildfires, outside the hearths. The charred scent was thick in the air; Mahtra could taste it through her mask, feel it on her skin through the shawl. The only sounds came from the crackling fires. There was no laughter, no shouts, none of the ordinary buzz that should have greeted her ears here.

"Father?" Mahtra whispered. "Mika?"

She started to run, but hadn't gone ten paces before she tripped and stumbled hard to her knees. The cabras went flying. Mahtra groped for them, for the cause of her tumble. She wasn't the only cavern dweller with human eyes. Most of the community didn't see in the dark. There were penalties for cluttering the paths; there'd be a reckoning when Father and the other elders found out.

Mahtra's hands touched something round, but it wasn't a cabra fruit. It was hair... a head... a lifeless head. Her hands dripped blood when she sprang back.

"Father! Father!"

She couldn't run. There were other bodies in the gallery.

There were bodies everywhere, all lifeless and bloody.

"Father!"

Mahtra staggered to the gallery's end and the first of the homesteads where flames consumed the last of a hide-and-bone hut like her own and a human woman she recognized lay on her back, staring up.

"Dalya!"

Dalya had never understood Mahtra's clumsy speech, but she didn't blink at the sound. Dalya didn't move at all. Dalya was as lifeless as the rest, and suddenly Mahtra couldn't get air into her lungs no matter how hard she breathed. Warmth kindled in her burnished scars again. The protective membrane twitched in the corners of her eyes.

"No!" she gasped, ordering her body to behave, as if it belonged to someone else.

She couldn't lose her vision. She had to see. She had to find Father, and trembling so badly that she had to crawl, she made her way down once-familiar lanes to another burning hut.

Mahtra sat on her knees a few paces short of the destruction. The makers had given her human eyes where light and darkness were concerned, but they hadn't given her the ability to cry as humans and all the other sentient races did. It had never been a hardship before, but now—looking at Mika's body, partly seared by fire, and his face, split by a gouge that reached from his forehead across his right eye, nose, and cheek before it ended on his neck—now, Mahtra could only make sad, little noises deep in her throat. The sounds hurt worse than any mottled skin she'd acquired in the high templar residences.

But the makers had made Mahtra strong. She rose to her feet and stepped around Mika's corpse. Father lay a few steps farther. Fire hadn't touched him; a club had: his skull was crushed. Mahtra couldn't see his face for the gore. Kneeling again, she slid her slender arms beneath him and lifted him carefully, easily. She carried him to the water's edge where she washed the worst away.

The keening sounds still trilled in the base of Mahtra's throat. Sharp pains from no visible source lashed her heart. Grief, she told herself, remembering how Mika's cheeks had glistened the night his family died. Grief and cold and dark: Death, suddenly more real than anything else around her. Crouched and cowering over Father, Mahtra peered into the darkness, expecting Death to appear.

Death was here in the cavern. She could feel it. Death would take her, too; she couldn't stay. But as she lowered Father to the stony shore, he opened his remaining eye.

Mahtra—

His voice sounded in her mind; his lips had not moved.

"Father? Father—what's happened? What has happened? Mika... You... Father, tell me—What do I do now?"

You must leave, Mahtra. They will come back, and they will overwhelm even you—

"Who? Why? You did no wrong, Father; this should not have happened. You did no wrong."

It doesn't take wrong for killing to start, Father explained, patient with her newness even now.

"Killing," Mahtra felt the word in her thoughts, on her malformed tongue. It wasn't a new word, but it had a new meaning. "Have you been killed, Father?" Yes—

Mahtra felt Father's sadness. He would chastise her, she thought, as he had chastised her for keeping the black shawl. She knew wrong couldn't be made right—she knew that from looking in the high templar mirrors.

Father surprised her. You have powerful patrons, Mahtra. They will help you. This must not happen again. You must make certain of it.

Father made an image grow in Mahtra's mind then, the last image of his life: a stone-head club, an arm descending, and a wild-eyed, burn-scarred face beyond it. After the image, there was nothing more; but the image was enough.

It was a stranger's face for a heartbeat, then in her mind's closer inspection, Mahtra saw a halfling's distinctive old-young features. A single black line emerged from the scars. It made two angles and disappeared into raw flesh again. That was enough, along with the wild eyes. She knew him. "Kakzim," she whispered as she rose and walked away without a backward glance.