of the table until Mahtra came to the very end of her tale.
“…Father said he’d been killed with Mika and the others. He gave me an image of the man who’d killed them. He said… He said I had patrons who could make certain no one else was killed. I knew the man in Father’s last image, Lord Escrissar’s halfling slave, Kakzim. So I went to Lord Escrissar—to House Escrissar—to wait for him.”
The august emerita was on her feet again, and pacing, holding her snake-stick but not using it. Her free hand rose to the medallion she wore, then fell to her side.
“You had no right to live there. The reservoir is a proscribed place; you saw King Hamanu’s wards and circumvented them. The one you call ‘Father,’ broke the king’s law living there and taking you there. Urik has places for those who cannot work or have no kin. They’d all be alive if they lived within the law where the templarate could protect them.”
Her stick clacked emphatically on the mosaic, and Mahtra felt no need to tell her that the folk who lived beside the underground water were wary of their king’s law and twice wary of his templars. Father said he’d sooner live underground in total darkness than live in slavery in the light, and even new-made Mahtra knew that slavery was the lot of those whose work or family could not keep them out of debt. She wondered, though, if the lithe and laughing Bettin would agree.
The august emerita’s stick struck the mosaic a second time. “Ask him,” she said, thereby reminding Mahtra that her thoughts were not private here.
She took her thoughts back to the cavern, then, and Father’s last image.
“Yes, yes—” the old woman said wearily. “The wheels of fortune’? chariot turn fair and strange, child. None of you should have been living beside the reservoir, and you should have been among them when catastrophe struck. Had the wheel turned as it should have turned, there’d be no tale to tell or no one to tell it. But Kakzim… Damn Elabon!” She struck her stick loud enough to disturb her caged birds and insects. “He was warned.”
Not knowing whether “he” was Kakzim or Lord Escrissar, Mahtra closed her eyes and tried very hard to think of neither man. It must have worked; the august emerita started pacing again.
“This is more than I can know: Elabon’s mad slave and Urik’s reservoir. I have been too long behind my own walls, do you understand me, Mahtra?”
Mahtra didn’t, but she nodded, and the woman did not skim her thoughts to know she’d lied.
“I do not go to the bureau. I do not go to the court. I am emerita; I’ve put such things behind me. I cannot pick them up again. I mistook your purpose on his doorstep, child. I thought you were his, or carrying his, that’s all. In my dreams I saw nothing like this. Damn Elabon!”
The old woman strode to a wall where hung several knotted silk ropes that Mahtra had not noticed before. She yanked on one that was twisted black and gold and another that was plain blue, then turned to Mahtra.
“Follow me. I will write a message for you. That is all I dare do. There would be too many questions, too much risk. There is only one who can look and listen and act.”
A message for her, and written, too. Mahtra shivered as she rose from the table. Writing was forbidden. Lord Escrissar and Father both had warned her that she must never try to master its secrets; Lord Escrissar and Father had almost never given her the same advice. But the august emerita was going to write a message for her. Surely this was what Father meant when he said her powerful patrons would help her.
Mahtra snatched another cinnabar pebble from Ver’s fountain, then hurried to keep up with the fast-striding woman. They wound up in a smaller room where the only furnishings were another table, another chair, and shelf upon shelf of identical chests, each with a green-glowing lock. On the wall behind the table someone had painted a fresco-portrait of Lord Hamanu. The Lion-King glowered at Mahtra through gemstone eyes while the august emerita snipped a corner off a fresh sheet of parchment and covered it with bold, red lines of ink.
Two more human slaves, neither of whom was Benin but who were like him in all other ways—lithe, tanned, and lightly scarred—joined them. Mahtra guessed that