"Good. Now, come, sit down and have something more nourishing to eat."
There was a plate of things on the wicker table... pinkish-orange things with too many legs and wispy eyestalks that were still moving and were nothing that Mahtra wanted to eat.
"Benin, go to the pantry and fetch up a plate of fruit and dainties. Our guest has a delicate palate."
She didn't want fruit, Mahtra thought as the slave departed. She wanted her mask; she wanted to leave, she wanted to return to her vigil outside House Escrissar.
"Sit down, child," the woman said with a sigh.
Despite the sigh—or possibly because of it—Mahtra hied herself to a chair and sat.
"How many days and nights have you been waiting, child?"
Mahtra considered the layers in her memory: More than two, she was sure of that. Three or four?
"Three or four, child—try ten. You'd been sitting there for ten days and nights!"
Ten—that was more than she'd imagined, but what truly jolted Mahtra was the realization that, like Father, the august emerita could skim the words of her thoughts from her mind's surface. So she thought about her mask, and how badly she wanted it.
The woman smiled a high templar's knowing smile. She looked a little like Father, with creases across her face and streaks in her hair that were as white as Mahtra's own skin. Her eyes, though, were nothing like Father's. They were dark and hard, like Lord Escrissar's eyes, which she'd seen through the holes of his mask. All the high templars had eyes like that.
"All of us have been tempered like the finest steel, child. Tell me your name—ah, it's Mahtra. I thought so. Now, Mahtra—"
But she hadn't thought the word of her name. The august emerita had plunged deep into her mind to pluck out her name. That roused fear and, more than fear, a sense that she was unprotected, and that made the marks on her shoulders tingle.
I mean you no harm, Mahtra. I'm no threat to you.
Mahtra felt the makers' protection subside as it had never done before, except in her nightmares when Death ignored her. This was no dream. The woman had done something to her, Mahtra was sure of that. She couldn't protect herself, and learned yet another expression for fear.
"No harm, Mahtra. Your powers will return, but were I you, child, I'd learn more about them. I'm long past the days when helplessness excited me, but—as you've noticed—I'm an old woman, and you won't find many like me. I want only to know why you've sat on the doorsill of House Escrissar these last ten days. Don't you know Elabon's dead?"
Dead? Dead like Father, like Mika, and all the others in the cavern? What hope had she of finding Kakzim if Lord Escrissar was dead?
Mahtra lowered her head. She was cold and, worse than shivering, she felt alone, without the powerful patrons Father mentioned in his last words to her. Blinding pressure throbbed behind her eyes and strange high-pitched sounds brewed in her throat. She couldn't cry, but she couldn't stop trying, any more than she could bring back the makers' protection.
Suddenly, there was warmth, but not from within. The high templar had left her chair. She stood behind Mahtra, massaging her neck.
"How witless of me," the august emerita said. Lord Escrissar had used the same words in his apology after he'd left her alone with Kakzim. There was more pressure behind her eyes, more sound brewing in her sore throat. The coincidence had been too great; Mahtra couldn't bear the pain any longer. She slumped sideways, and only the considerable strength in the old templar's arm kept her from falling to the floor.
Mahtra was ready to tell someone—anyone—what had happened, but it was very difficult to keep her thoughts dear enough for the august emerita to understand without saying the words, however poorly, as they formed in her mind. And without her mask, Mahtra was too self-conscious to speak. So, when Bettin returned to the atrium with a plate of sliced fruits and other appetizing morsels, the high templar sent him off after the mask.
"You'll eat everything on that plate first, child."
Eating, like talking, made Mahtra uncomfortable, but the light of food had awakened her stomach and the august emerita was not a person to be disobeyed. Mahtra ate with her fingers, ignoring the sharp-edged knife and sharp-tined fork the slave, Bettin, had laid beside the plate. She'd seen much devices before, in other high templar residences, and knew they were more polite, more elegant, than fingertips. She was eleganta, though, not elegant, and she made do with sticking her fingers under the concealing folds of her thawl. The august emerita didn't say anything about Mahtra's manners; the august emerita seemed to have forgotten the had a guest.
Clutching an ornate walking-stick as if it were a weapon rather than a crutch, the old woman paced circles around her fountain and her trees. She wasn't the tallest human woman Mahtra had ever seen, but she was just about the straightest: her shoulders stayed square above her hips as she took-her measured steps, and her nose pointed forward only, never to either side, even when Mahtra accidently hudged her unused fork, and it skidded and clattered loudly to the mosaic floor.
Yet the august emerita was paying attention to her. She returned to her own chair on the opposite side of the table as soon as Mahtra had swallowed the last morsel of the last sweet-meat pastry. Bettin appeared, suddenly and silently, out of nowhere and disappeared the same way once he'd deposited Mahtra's mask on the table beside his master. Like her clothes and sandals, the mask had been carefully tended. Its leather parts had been oiled, the metal parts, polished, and the cinnabar-colored suede that would touch her skin once she fastened the mask on had been brushed until it was soft and fragrant again. The august emerita looked aside while Mahtra adjusted the clasps that held the mask in place.
"Now, child, from the beginning."
The beginning was a hot, barren wasteland, with the makers behind her and the unknown in front of her. It was running until she couldn't run anymore. It was falling onto her hands and knees, resting, then rising and running some more—
"The cavern, Mahtra. Begin again with the cavern however many days ago it was. You lived by the reservoir. You were going home. What happened? What did you see? What did this Father-person say to you?"
Perhaps it was only the sun moving overhead, but the creases in the august emerita's face seemed to have gotten deeper and her eyes even harder than they'd been before. She sat on the edge of her chair, as arrow-straight as she'd paced, with her palms resting lightly on the pommel of the walking stick. The pommel was carved in the likeness of a hooded snake with yellow gemstones for its eyes. Mahtra couldn't decide if the snake or the august emerita herself unnerved her more.
She went back to that not-so-long-ago morning and retraced her steps: cabra fruits, cinnabar beads, and Henthoren's eerie message. The snake's eyes didn't blink, and neither—or so it seemed—had the high templar's. Indeed, there was no reaction from the far side 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."