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 distance.
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.
There’d been no novelty in the alleyway, nothing but the angle of the shadows by day and the movement of the stars overhead by night to distinguish one hour from another. The days and nights themselves fell on top of each other in Mahtra’s memory rather than stringing themselves out in a row. She wasn’t sure how many days and nights she’d been waiting, but it seemed certain that she’d done nothing else. Leaving the alley, coming to this place with its bright walls, spiderweb curtain, and her own nakedness should have left a mark in her mind—if she’d done it of her own will.
And Mahtra didn’t do things not of her own will. Kakzim and the