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A half-elf child came running toward her. Mahtra juggled her beads and fruit once again, expecting another demand, but the child stopped short and delivered a message:
"Henthoren," she said, the crippled-elf enforcer's name, "wishes you to know you are the first to approach the well since the nightwatch rang its first bells. He keeps the peace. He wishes you to remember that."
The child bowed low and retreated. Mahtra looked toward the enthroned Henthoren, who leveled his stick at her, giving her leave to traverse his little domain. Then the old elf went back to staring at the sky. She raised her eyes as well, half-expecting that the clouds had fallen and darkened, so palpable had the sense of chill darkness become within her mind. But the clouds remained distant white streaks in the cerulean vault.
Mahtra longed to ask the enforcer what he meant, why this morning he sent a child to tell her what was always true: she was the first walker from the cavern to return home since the midnight bells. But asking was talking and talking to the enforcer was more daunting than his message had been, more daunting than the unease she felt striding past the fountain to the little stone building with its metal-grate door.
There were eyes on her back as she opened the door. She hesitated before crossing the threshold into the unlit antechamber, but nothing flew from the shadows or darted past her feet. There were no sounds—no smells, as there had been when the corpses were laid out as examples. Born-folk had an expression: quiet as a tomb. Mahtra had never seen a tomb, but it could not have been quieter than the windowless antechamber and its stone carved stairway leading into the ground. She stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind her.
Father said she had human eyes, meaning that she didn't see well in the dark, though she knew the passageway from the antechamber down to the cavern well enough that she didn't need one of the torches that were kept ready by the door. She did pause long enough to loosen the gauze-pleated sidepieces of her mask and slip one of the cinnabar beads into her mouth. Her narrow jaw, so ill-suited to ordinary speech, was strong enough to shatter the bead with a single effort. Her tongue carried the fragments to the back of her mouth where they began to dissolve, along with her unease.
A shimmering drapery of blue-green light, the hallmark of the Lion-King's personal warding, shone at the top of the stairway where torchlight would have revealed the maw of a passage high enough to admit a full-grown elf. Templars with their medallions could pass safely through the light. Anyone else died. The cavern-dwellers had another way, which could not have been entirely unknown to either the market enforcers or the yellow-robe templars of the larger city. Using the boundary of Lord Hamanu's spell as a reference, Mahtra stepped sideways, one, twice, three times and felt the opening of a passage no torch would reveal, no elf or dwarf could see. Ten tight, twisting steps later, the two passages became one again. Mahtra slipped the second bead into her mouth and continued with confidence down the lightless slope. A faint aroma of charcoal and charred meat lingered in the air, a bit unusual, but accidents happened in the darkness beside the water. People got careless, lamps overturned, cookfires leapt out of their hearths. Mika had lost his family that way, but Father was careful, and Mantra's fear did not return.
From here she should see the whole community: thirty-odd huts and homesteads beside thirty-odd hearths burning bright in the cavern's eternal night: But there were only a handful of fires, and all of them were wildfires, outside the hearths. The charred scent was thick in the air; Mahtra could taste it through her mask, feel it on her skin through the shawl. The only sounds came from the crackling fires. There was no laughter, no shouts, none of the ordinary buzz that should have greeted her ears here.
"Father?" Mahtra whispered. "Mika?"
She started to run, but hadn't gone ten paces before she tripped and stumbled hard to her knees. The cabras went flying. Mahtra groped for them, for the cause of her tumble. She wasn't the only cavern dweller with human eyes. Most of the community didn't see in the dark. There were penalties for cluttering the paths; there'd be a reckoning when Father and the other elders found out.
Mahtra's hands touched something round, but it wasn't a cabra fruit. It was hair... a head... a lifeless head. Her hands dripped blood when she sprang back.
"Father! Father!"
She couldn't run. There were other bodies in the gallery.
There were bodies everywhere, all lifeless and bloody.
"Father!"
Mahtra staggered to the gallery's end and the first of the homesteads where flames consumed the last of a hide-and-bone hut like her own and a human woman she recognized lay on her back, staring up.
"Dalya!"
Dalya had never understood Mahtra's clumsy speech, but she didn't blink at the sound. Dalya didn't move at all. Dalya 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."
