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—
“Then I will kill. I will kill whoever killed you. I will take wrong against wrong and make it right again.”
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