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.
No matter how hard she tried, how much she practiced, the words Mahtra heard so clearly in her head were badly mangled by the time they emerged from her mouth. Father could understand her, but Father could hear the words in her head whether she spoke them or not. Some of the high templars and their guests had that gift, too. Of all the rest, only Mika seemed to understand what she said.
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