by Lynn Abbey
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.
Chapter Three
Death was loose in the cavern, in the clubs and flame. Death would take Father and Mika—if she didn't find them first.
Mahtra stood at the junction of the antechamber corridor and the sloping gallery ramp that led to the water. The community was inflames that soared and crackled and threw countless shadows of sweeping arms and dripping stone-headed clubs onto the rock walls. Screams reverberated off the hard rock all around her and echoed between her ears, as well. Mahtra couldn't distinguish Father's screams, or Mika's, from all the others, but they were down there among the flames and the carnage.
Mahtra ran as fast as she could, leaping lightly over those whom Death had already claimed. She'd gone faster and farther than she'd gone before. Hope swelled in her pounding heart, but hands rose out of the darkness at the base of the ramp. They grabbed her wrists and her ankles. They pulled her down, held her down. Faces that were only eyes and voices hovered over her, muttering a two-word chorus: mistake and failure.
She fought free of them, sprang to her feet and ran onto the stony shore where flames and screams made everything seem unfamiliar. Dodging arms and clubs, Mahtra looked for the path that would take her to the hide-and-bone hut where Father and Mika were waiting. There were paths she'd never seen before, and all of them blocked by the same five mutilated corpses who rose up when she approached them, blaming her, not Death, for their dying.
She was frantic with despair when a wild-eyed halfling ran toward her. His cheeks were on fire and his bloody club was the most terrible of all Death's weapons. While Mahtra cowered, he found the familiar path that wound between the reproachful corpses and led to the hide-and-bone hut where little Mika stood bravely before the door.
The burnished marks on Mahtra's face and shoulders grew warm. Her vision blurred and her limbs stiffened, but it wasn't herself she wanted to protect; it was Father and Mika, and they were too far away. In agony, she forced her eyes to see, her legs to move. One stride, two strides... gaining on Death with every stride, but still too late.
The club fell and the only scream she heard was Father and Mika screaming as halfling-Death battered the hut with his club. Mahtra threw herself at Death and was repelled, simply repelled. Death did not want her; Death wouldn't threaten a made creature like her, who'd never been born— and without threat, Mahtra's flesh wouldn't kindle, her vision wouldn't blur.
Gouts of Mika's blood flew off the club as Death whirled it overhead. The sticky clots adhered to Mahtra's face. She fell to her knees, clawing at her hard, white skin, unable to breathe, unwilling to see. Her vision finally blurred, now—when it was too late and there was blood already on her hand, but she didn't give up, not completely. Lunging blindly, Mahtra aimed herself where her mind's vision said Death last stood. She felt the hem of Death's robe in her hands, but Death didn't fall. Death pulled free, and she fell instead.
Crawling again, she sought Death by the sound of his club as it fell, again and again. Warm, sticky fluid pelted her. She wanted to curl into a tight ball, but forced her back to straighten, her head to rise. She opened her eyes— —And saw sunlight. The nightmare images of fear, rage, helplessness, and defeat faded quickly in the bright light of morning. Since escaping the cavern, Mahtra had had this same nightmare, with its hopeless ending, whenever she'd fallen asleep. Its terrors were at least familiar, which was not true of her surroundings.
And be seen through them.
Mahtra felt her nakedness as an afterthought, but reacted swiftly, tucking the coverlet tightly around her lest she be seen by someone uninvited. There was no one watching. She was alone, as far as she could tell, in this bright bedchamber, and there was no one in the next chamber, which she could see through an open doorway.
Her gown was neatly folded on a chest at the foot of the bed. Her belt and coin pouch were on top of the dress; her sandals had been cleaned, oiled, and set beside them. And her mask—her mask wasn't on the chest. Mahtra's hands leapt to her face. The mask wasn't there, either. She kept her fingers pressed over what the makers had given her for a mouth and nose and racked her memory for the places she had been last night.
Not this room. Not any room. Not since she'd staggered out of the cavern many days ago.
As soon as she'd felt the sun on her face, Mahtra had made her way to the high templar quarter, but she hadn't gone back to her old eleganta life. She hadn't been inside any residence. She'd hied herself to House Escrissar and sat herself down on the alleyway doorsill. House Escrissar was locked up, boarded up. It had been that way for a long time—not a year, but still a long time. Before it was locked and boarded, Mahtra had been a frequent visitor, entering at sunset through this alleyway door, leaving again at dawn.
Mahtra had met Lord Escrissar when her life in Urik was very new. He had noticed her admiring cinnabar beads in a market plaza. He'd bought her a bulging handful and then invited her to visit him at his residence. And because Lord Escrissar had worn a mask and because he'd made her feel welcome, she'd accepted his invitation that night and every night for all the years thereafter, until he had vanished and his residence had been sealed.
She'd been comfortable in House Escrissar, where everyone wore masks. Everyone except Kakzim. The halfling was a slave, and slaves did not wear masks. Their scarred cheeks, etched in black with a house crest, were masks enough.
Mahtra didn't understand slavery. She had little contact with the scarred drudges who hovered silently in the shadows of every high templar residence. There were drudge slaves in House Escrissar, but Kakzim was not one of them. Kakzim mingled with his master's guests and offered her gifts of gold and silver.
By then she knew that the high templars and their guests found her fascinating. She knew what to expect when she led them to the little room Lord Escrissar had set aside for her, deep within his residence, but Kakzim did not ask her to remove the mask, nor any of the other things to which she'd grown accustomed. He wanted to study the burnished marks on her shoulders, and she permitted that until he tried to study them with a tiny, razor-sharp knife. She protected herself so fast that when her vision cleared again, almost everything in the room was broken and Kakzim was slumped unconscious in the farthest corner.
Mahtra expected Lord Escrissar to chastise her, as Father would have if she'd wrought such damage underground, but the high templar apologized and gave her a purse with twenty gold coins in it. She went back to House Escrissar many, many times after that; she didn't started visiting the other residences in the quarter until after House Escrissar was boarded up. She saw Kakzim almost every time, but he'd learned his lesson and kept his distanc
e.
When Lord Escrissar first disappeared, there had been new rumors every night, whichever high templar residence she had visited. Lord Escrissar, she had learned, had had no friends among his peers and wasn't missed; his guests wore masks when they had come to his entertainments because they had not wished their faces to be noticed. Eventually the rumors had stopped flowing.
No one came back to House Escrissar; none came to find Mahtra sitting there, clutching that same purse he had given her.
Mahtra had no friends left, not even Lord Escrissar, who'd never shown her his true face. With both Father and Mika dead, there was no one to miss her, either. She sat on the sill of Lord Escrissar's residence, hoping he'd know she was waiting for him, hoping he'd come back from wherever he was, hoping he'd help her find Kakzim.
Hope was all Mahtra had as one day became the next and another without anyone coming to the door. She was hungry, but after so much waiting, she was afraid to leave the alley, for surely Lord Escrissar would return the moment she turned her back in the next intersection. The night-watch, which had a post on the rooftop at the back of the alley, tossed her their bread crusts when they went off duty. Between those mouthfuls of dry bread and water in the residence cistern, which had not been tapped since the last Tyr storm, Mahtra survived and waited.
And Mahtra didn't do things not of her own will. Kakzim and the enforcers of the elven market had learned that lesson. She could not have been forced here. She must have entered willingly, and removed her mask the same way. But she remembered nothing between the alley and the bedchamber except her nightmare.
The cold, hard presence of fear, which had become Mahtra's most constant companion since the cavern, reasserted itself around her. She curled inward until her forehead touched her toes and her face was completely hidden. The coverlet couldn't warm her, nor could her own hands chafing her skin. Her body shivered from an inner chill and tears her eyes couldn't shed.