if the watch would not challenge the criminals in their own quarter, they certainly left the high templars and their guests alone as well.
The sky above the eastern wall was glowing amber when an alley door swung open and a rectangle of light briefly illuminated the austere red-striped yellow wall of a high templar residence. The dwarven sergeant leaned heavily on the rail of her watchtower, taking note of the flash, the distinctive clunk of a heavy bolt thrown home again, and a momentary silhouette, tall and unnaturally slender, against the red-striped yellow wall. She snorted once, having recognized the silhouette and thereby knowing all she needed to know.
Folk had to live, to eat, to clothe themselves against the light of day and the cold of night. It wasn’t any templar’s place to judge another poor wretch’s life, but it seemed to the sergeant that sometimes it might be better to lie down and die. Short of the gilded bedchambers of Hamanu’s palace, which she had never seen, there wasn’t a more nefarious place in all Urik than the private rooms of a high templar’s residence. And the slender one who slipped quietly through the lightening shadows below her post spent nearly every night in one disreputable residence or another.
“Great Hamanu’s infinitesimal mercy strike you down, child,” the sergeant whispered as the footsteps faded.
It was not a curse.
Mahtra felt anonymous eyes at her back as she walked through the templar quarter. She didn’t fear those who stared at her. There was very little that Mahtra feared. Before they drove her out onto the barren wastes, her makers had given her the means to take care of herself, and what her innate gifts could not deflect, her high templar patrons could. She had not developed the sensitivities of born-folk. Fear, hate, love, friendship were words Mahtra knew but didn’t use often. It wasn’t fear that made her pause every little while to adjust the folds of the long, black shawl she clutched tightly around her thin shoulders.
It wasn’t because of cold, either, though there was a potent chill to the predawn air. Cold was a sensitivity, just like fear, that Mahtra lacked, though she understood cold better than she understood fear. Mahtra could hear cold moving through the nearest buildings: tiny hisses and cracklings as if the long-dead bones that supported them still sought to warm themselves with shrinking or shivering. Soon, as sunrise gave way to morning, the walls would warm, then grow hot, and the hidden bones would strive to shed the heat, stretching with sighs and groans, like any overworked slave.
No one else could hear the bones as Mahtra could, not even the high templars with their various and mighty talents, or the other nightfolk she encountered in their company. That had puzzled Mahtra when she was new to her life in Urik. Her sensitivities were different; she was different. Mahtra saw her differences in the precious silver mirrors high templars hung on their walls. They said mirrors could not lie. Of course, everyone was different in a mirror’s magical reflection. Some of those she met nightly in these identically striped residences were more different than she was. That was hardly surprising: the high templars who commanded the gatherings Mahtra attended were collectors of the exotic, the new, and the different of the city.
But Mahtra’s difference was inside, too, like the bones hiding inside the walls, as if she were made of old bones herself. Father said no, that she was flesh and blood and living bone, for all that she’d been made, not born. He was very wise, Father was, and as old as she was new, but he couldn’t explain the difference between made and born. Mahtra listened carefully to all that Father said. He’d taught her left from right, right from wrong, and many other things about this world in which she’d found herself new and grown; made, not born. She was grateful and could neither imagine nor remember her life without Father’s welcome each morning when she returned to their hide-and-bone hut beside the underground water, but where she herself was concerned, Mahtra believed the differences she saw in high templar mirrors and those she heard in the walls.
Mahtra’s skin was white, that was one difference—not pale like that of a house-bound courtesan who never saw the light of day, but white like chalk or salt or bones that the sun had bleached dry. Her skin was cool to the touch, harder and lightly