"How do you know of Kakzim? What has he done?" Bright eyes studied Ruari first, then Zvain before returning to Pavek. "He is a murderer. His face was the last face Father saw before he was killed...." Mahtra's composure failed. She looked down at her hands and contorted her fingers into tangles that had to hurt her knuckles. "I turned to Lord Escrissar, but he never returned. Another high templar sent me to Lord Hamanu, and he sent me here to you. Aren't you also a high templar? Don't you already know Kakzim?"

"Escrissar." Her loathing made a curse of the name. "You turned to that foul nightmare disguised as a man? What was he—your friend, your lover? Is that why you wear a mask? Rotter. Is it your face that's rotten, or your spirit?"

He'd never heard such venom in Akashia's voice. It rocked Pavek back a step and made him wonder if he knew Akashia at all. Were a handful of days, however tortured and terrible, enough to sour Kashi's spirit? What did she see when she looked at Mahtra? A mask, long and menacing fingernails, black cloth wrapped tightly around a slender body. Were those similarities enough to summon Escrissar's memory to her eyes?

Without warning, Akashia lunged toward Mahtra. She wanted vengeance, and failed to get a taste of it when Pavek and Zvain together seized her and held her back. The golden patches around Mahtra's eyes and on her shoulders glistened in the lamplight, distorting the air around them as sunlight distorts the air above the salt flats.

"Kakzim was Escrissar's slave," Pavek shouted, wanting to avert disaster but pushing closer to the brink instead. "His house would be the first place anyone would look."

"Get her out of here," Akashia warned, wresting free from them, no longer out of control but angrier and colder than she'd been ten heartbeats before. "Get out of here!" she snarled at Mantra.

"I go with High Templar Pavek," the New Race woman replied without flinching. She was eleganta. She made her life in the darkest shadows of the high templar quarter. There was nothing Akashia could do to frighten her. "With him alone or with any others who desire vengeance. Do you desire vengeance, green-eyed woman?"

Confronted by an honesty she couldn't deny and a coldness equal to her own, it was Akashia who retreated, shaking her head as she went. Pavek thought they'd gotten through the narrows, but he hadn't reckoned on Ruari, who'd come to Akashia's defense no matter how badly she treated him—or how little she needed it.

"She can't talk to Kashi that way. Take her to the grove, Pavek!" he demanded—the same demand he'd made when Pavek had arrived here, and for roughly the same reason. "Let the guardian judge her, and

her Father and her vengeance."

"No," he replied simply.

"No? It's the way of Quraite, Pavek. You don't have a choice: the guardian judges strangers."

"No," he repeated. "No—for the same reason we'll bury the templars and return their belongings. The Lion will know what we do to his messengers, and he knows how to find us. And, more than that, this isn't about Quraite or the guardian of Quraite. This is about Urik and Kakzim. I saw Kakzim making Laq, but I didn't go back to find him because I thought when he couldn't make Laq anymore, he couldn't harm anyone either. I was wrong; he's become a murderer with his own hands. Hamanu's right, it's time for me to go back. We'll leave as soon as the kanks and Mahtra are rested—"

"Now," Mahtra interrupted. "I need no rest."

And maybe she didn't. There was nothing weary in her strange eyes or weak in the hand she wrapped around Pavek's forearm.

"The bugs need rest," he said, and met her stare. "The day after tomorrow or the day after that."

She released her grip.

"I'm going with you," Zvain said, which wasn't a surprise.

"Me, too," Ruari added, which was.

Akashia looked at each of them in turn, her expression unreadable, until she said: "You can't. You can't leave Quraite. I need you here," which was a larger surprise than he could have imagined.

"Come with us," he said quickly, hopefully. "Put an end to the past."

"Quraite needs me. Quraite needs you. Quraite needs you, Pavek."

If Akashia had said that she needed him, possibly he would have reconsidered, but probably not, not with Hamanu's threat hanging over them. That, and the knowledge that Kakzim was wreaking havoc once again. He started for the door, then paused and asked a question that had been bothering him since Mahtra spoke her first words.

She blinked and seemed flustered. "I'm new, not old. The cabras have ripened seven times since I came to Urik."

"And before Urik, how many times had they ripened?"

"There is no before Urik."

As Pavek had hoped, Akashia's eyes widened and the rest of her face softened. "Seven years? Escrissar—"

He cut her off. "Escrissar's dead. Kakzim. Kakzim's the reason to go back."

Pavek left the hut. Mahtra followed him, a child who didn't look like a child and didn't particularly act like one, either. She slipped her arm through his and stroked his inner forearm with a long fingernail. He wrested free.

"Not with me, eleganta. I'm not your type."

"Where do I go, if not with you?"

It was a very good question, for which Pavek hadn't an answer until he spotted a farmer couple peering out their cracked-open door. Their hut was good-sized, their children were grown and gone. He took Mahtra to stay with them until morning, and wouldn't hear no for an answer. Still this was one night Pavek wasn't going back to Telhami's grove. He stretched out in a corner of the bachelor hut.

Tomorrow was certain to be worse than tonight. He'd get some sleep while he could.

How old are you?

A voice, a question, and the face of an ugly man haunted the bleak landscape of Mahtra's dreams.

Seven ripe cabras. A whirling spiral with herself at the center and seven expanding revolutions stretching away from her. The spiraling line was punctuated with juicy, sweet fruit and the other events of the life she remembered. Seven years—more days than she could count—and all but the last several of them spent inside the yellow walls of Urik. She hadn't known the city's true shape until she looked back as the huge, painted bug carried her away to this far-off place.

Mahtra hadn't remembered a horizon other than rooftops, cobbled streets, and guarded walls. She had known the world was larger than Urik; the distant horizon itself wasn't a surprise, but she'd forgotten what empty and open looked like.

What else had she forgotten?

There is no before Urik.

Another voice. Her own voice, the voice she wished she had, echoed through her dreams. Did it tell the truth? Had she forgotten what came before Urik, as she had forgotten what stretched beyond it?

Turn around. Step beyond the spiral. Find the path. What before Urik? Remember, Mahtra. Remember....

The spiral of Mahtra's life blurred in her dream-vision. Her limbs became stiff and heavy. She was tempted to lie down where she was, at the center of her life, and ignore the beautiful voice. What would happen if she fell asleep while she was dreaming? Would she wake up in her life or in the dream, or somewhere that was neither living nor dreaming?

Somewhere that was neither living nor dreaming...

Mahtra knew of such a nowhere place. She had forgotten it, the way she'd forgotten the colors and shapes on the other side of Urik's walled horizon. It was the outside place, beyond the memories of the cabra-marked spiral.

A place before Urik.

A place of drifting, neither dark nor bright, hot nor cool. A place without bottom or top, or any direction at all, until there was a voice and a name: