All around the cavern were openings into passageways. Kyra took the narrow passage that led to her own cell, trying to ignore the empty chambers yawning on both sides. Each Markswoman and apprentice had a cell to herself for sleep and meditation. But most of the chambers of the cave system were empty. The Order numbered just thirty-three these days, not counting the four novices, instead of the hundreds that used to inhabit the caves of Kali.
Before she had gone more than a few steps down the passage, a figure stepped around the corner holding up a lamp.
“Kyra,” came a mellifluous voice.
She blinked in the sudden light, and her heart sank as she saw the beautiful face behind it. Tamsyn.
“Elder.” Kyra bowed and made as if to move past her.
But the elegant, ebony-haired woman fell in step beside her. “Is it done?” she asked in a husky whisper, raising the lamp and peering at Kyra’s face.
No one but Shirin Mam had the right to ask her that. But Tamsyn Turani was the Hand of Kali, Shirin Mam’s executioner of choice. Her left arm was crisscrossed with scars, and the pelts of a dozen wyr-wolves carpeted the floor of her cell.
“It is done,” said Kyra. She hoped the disinterest in her voice would put Tamsyn off, but the elder laughed in delight.
“You hated it, did you not? But now you are a real Markswoman and not a mere apprentice. Oh, anyone can take down a wyr-wolf or two. But it takes a Markswoman to kill a man.”
Kyra didn’t want to think about Maidul as a man, to recall the look of surprise on his face when her katari passed through his chest. It was easier to think of him as a mark for her blade. She averted her face and brushed past Tamsyn. But the elder caught up with her again and grabbed her arm.
“Wait,” she said. “I want to see you.” She put the lamp down and pulled Kyra around to face her.
“You see me every day, Elder,” Kyra protested.
“Not like this,” said Tamsyn. She whipped away Kyra’s cloak and took a deep intake of breath. Her gaze traveled from Kyra’s blood-spattered robe to her tangled hair. Kyra tried not to squirm, but it felt as if she was being dissected, every moment of the last few hours analyzed and judged.
“As transparent as ever.” Tamsyn shook her head with a pitying look. “You can hide from her, but you cannot hide from me. What went wrong?”
Kyra suppressed her discomfiture as best she could. “Nothing, Elder. I achieved my first mark, and my initiation will be at dawn.”
“Indeed.” A smile slid across Tamsyn’s face. “After the ceremony, I shall give you a special private lesson. After your success, you deserve it.”
A private lesson with the Hand of Kali? As if it wasn’t enough, being punished by her every day in the Mental Arts class. “I have my regular classes to attend after the ceremony, Elder,” said Kyra. “I do not deserve, or indeed desire, special private lessons with you.” She bowed, catching the fleeting look of rage on Tamsyn’s face before it rearranged itself into its customary smoothness.
She ducked into her cell, but not before hearing Tamsyn’s parting shot. “We are more alike than you think, little deer. And Shirin Mam will not always be around.”
Kyra shuddered with indignation and something else—a chilling sort of anxiety—as she lit a candle and removed her soiled robe. She was nothing like the scheming elder. And why did she say that Shirin Mam would not always be around? Shirin Mam was barely sixty. She would lead the Order of Kali for a good many decades yet, the Goddess willing. It had been an odd threat, even for Tamsyn. Kyra didn’t like it.
She wiped herself with a damp cloth. A proper cleansing would have to wait till morning, when she could go to the stream-fed pool nearby.
After she had dried herself, Kyra slipped on a clean robe, reveling in the softness of the finely woven garment. Then she lay on the woolen rug, letting the fatigue seep from her body into the stone floor. How still it was, how silent. This quality of silence was what she loved best about the caves. No screech of wind or howl of wolf could penetrate their endless depths. Here there were only your own thoughts, your own memories.
Kyra breathed deep and slow, trying to relax into the first-level meditative trance. But Maidul’s face floated in front of her, dead yet somehow still alive—half-mocking, half-reproachful.
No. Maidul deserved what he got. She would not see him the way she saw the others. Her mother, sitting at the ancient wooden loom in their hut and weaving a blue rug. Her father, turning the spit to roast mutton at a clan wedding, giving that deep belly laugh she loved. Her younger sisters, trotting after her on chubby little legs, mimicking everything that she did.
Kyra had been in the privy behind their hut when the guns started firing and people started screaming. Instead of running back to her family, instinct made her seek the refuge of an oak tree, climbing to the highest branch she could reach. There she waited, cold and terrified. An hour passed, or perhaps two, before the sounds of the machines stopped.
She slithered down the tree, scratched and bleeding, her throat dry. She went past her own dwelling, averting her face from the two bodies that lay awkwardly at its entrance, refusing to see them. Because if she saw, that would make it real.
She wandered blindly through the village littered with corpses, coldness blooming in the pit of her stomach. She went from house to house, hoping that someone was still alive—a cousin, an aunt, a grandfather. But no one answered her calls; no one stirred at her footsteps. Finally she returned to her own hut. Perhaps she had imagined it; perhaps her family had fled into the forest when the bad men came.
But the scene outside her hut was unchanged: two blood-drenched bodies at the entrance, the open door leading only into darkness. Come in, the darkness beckoned. I have a gift for you.
She stood there a long while, biting her fingers until they bled. The sun rose in the sky, and still the darkness waited behind the door, and at last she could put it off no longer. There was a chance, a small chance, that her sisters might still be alive.
She stepped over the bodies of her parents and crept inside, praying please oh please Mother Goddess let them be all right, I’ll never be bad again. Her eyes burned with unshed tears of hope and fear.
But inside the hut was nothing but the stench of blood and death. Her sisters lay in a tangle of broken limbs and torn clothes. The side of Ishira’s head had caved in. Ishira the baby girl, who loved to comb her older sister’s long dark hair. Kyra went out and sat at the entrance next to her parents, hugging her knees, rocking herself.