The woman’s voice barked behind Kamala as she turned to exit the house. “Where do you think you’re going, little one?”
Kamala looked back, her delicate hazel eyes piercing the woman’s angry gaze. “Soup won’t be ready for a while,” she said, keeping her voice firm. “I thought maybe I should feed your horse. She looks tired.”
The redhead nodded, letting go of the older woman’s chin as she did so. “You do that,” she agreed slowly, resting her hand beside the blaster that was now holstered at her hip. “But don’t be long,” she added.
Kamala rushed from the house.
Standing under the branches of the apple tree, the girl glanced at the cottage, looked at the ground around her feet, back to the cottage, wondering what to do. There were windfalls here—maybe she could use those to feed the woman’s mount. Or maybe she should run, get help from the nearby monastery. Was that what her mother had meant? She knew all the monks; they would likely be sitting down to their simple repast at this hour as the sun set behind the mountains. They would come if she asked them to, but what would she say? How would she explain it?
She untucked a corner of her shirt from her belted skirt and made a bowl of the material, which she then filled with fallen apples. Then she walked around the stone cottage to the front of the house where the filly had been tethered, all the while listening for raised voices from the house.
“Learn to embrace his love,” she heard the flame-haired woman exclaim loudly, but there was no love left in her voice, only rage and hatred and spite.
Kamala stood feeding the chestnut horse windfalls for almost a minute, a hollow feeling in her stomach, wondering what to do. She had always been a shy girl, but she had never been afraid of people before, not even of strangers. But this woman, with her bubbling resentment held barely in check behind her sea-green eyes, frightened her.
She looked back at the cottage, seeing the woman standing at the window watching her, that cloud of hair like an angry, flaming halo around her face. As she watched, the woman turned away, her lips moving as she spoke to Kamala’s parents. By the time the hateful woman turned back, Kamala was gone.
Kamala could run. Since she was very young, she had outpaced children of her own age, her strides somehow longer, with never a hint of the exhaustion that the other children felt. By the time she was ten years old she could outrun grown men at the nearest village, fit men made strong by working on the unforgiving land of the mountains. Her father had marveled at his daughter’s speed and stamina, and her mother had described it as a special gift—not one that Kamala had chosen but one that had chosen her.
As she ran down the dirt track toward the monastery—a building made of the same gray stone as her father’s house—Kamala heard shouting behind her. She flicked her head back for a moment and saw the red-haired woman come striding out of her cottage. The spite-filled woman was calling to her angrily. Kamala turned her head back into the wind and ran, pumping her arms faster and driving herself toward the lights of the distant monastery that sat lower on the mountain path.
In a moment Kamala was off her father’s land and sprinting onward down the path, hurtling at breakneck speed toward the towering structure of the monastery. The monastery sat close to the farmstead of Tsakhia and his son, Sonam. Sonam was a couple of years older than Kamala, and her father said he was far too pretty to be a boy. Kamala was always shy and awkward around him without quite understanding why, and even now her heart fluttered in her chest as she got closer to the house where he lived, the room where he slept. But as she got closer to the farm she saw the trails of dark smoke billowing into the sky, hidden before by the darkness of the shadows cast by the mountains that overlooked them. Then Kamala saw more smoke, thick and black, spuming from the monastery that nuzzled at the mountain’s edge. The building was simple but beautiful, old beyond measure, its lines rough yet somehow perfect, an expression of simplicity. The nukecaust that had destroyed so much of the Western world had largely ignored Tibet, and life here had continued as it always had, the so-called Fall of Civilization mattering nothing to a people who cared little for technological advance.
Kamala stopped, her feet sliding a moment on the rough, frost-dappled path. The door to the monastery had been nailed closed, and the nails glowed like fireflies as the flames licked the walls within. Someone had set light to the monastery. Not just “someone,” Kamala realized—that woman, the one filled with hate. Who else could it be?
The monks had taken in visitors before, feeding them and sheltering them from the harsh winds and cold nights that swept across the mountains of Altyn Tagh. Kamala had no doubt that they would have welcomed the redheaded stranger, patiently listened to her as she told them of this Ullikummis deity, this promise of a new and better world. Then they would have smiled and shaken their shaven heads, invited her to stay or to leave as her whim chose. And in return the woman had set light to their home, locking them inside as the structure burned.
This close, the stones that made up the monastery radiated a punishing heat, and Kamala could go no closer for fear of having her own flesh blister and spoil like a rotten fruit. Behind the monastery, Tsakhia’s farmhouse was a burned-out ruin, the black smoke billowing from it like a flock of angry crows, dancing in the sky in their sick Terpsichore.
Kamala turned, heart sinking in her chest as she looked back to where her father’s house stood higher along the simple track that led into the range known as Altyn Tagh. Already she could see the dark smoke pluming into the sky, the mark of hate as the woman destroyed those she could not convert to her god.
Kamala knew nothing of the woman or of her history or destiny. All she could do was hide as the redhead preached from her gospel of hate.
Chapter 1
“That’s our point of entry, all right,” Kane mused as he checked the calculations he had scribbled on a small map. The fold-out map looked tired and worn, and so did Kane. He also looked irritated as hell.
Kane was a tall man in his early thirties, well-built with broad shoulders and long, rangy limbs. His dark hair brushed at his collar, tousled atop his head as the wind caught it, and the dark trace of a beard was beginning to show on his square jaw. There was a thin line by Kane’s left eye where something had cut him recently, and he brushed at it in annoyance as the breeze played against it.
“So what do you suggest we do?” asked the woman to Kane’s side. “Run away like scared little girls?” In her mid-twenties, the woman had an olive complexion, with long dark hair that trailed halfway down her back, and a wicked glint in her chocolate-brown eyes. Rosalia had been Kane’s almost-permanent companion over the past few weeks since an altercation up in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana.
The final member of the group—an imposing man with dark skin, short hair and the grizzled look of a fighter—chuckled at that, turning to the woman. “If you really believe that then you don’t know Kane so well, Rosie,” Grant said, his voice a deep basso rumble. “Me, either,” he added after a moment. “We never ran away from anything.”
Grant had been Kane’s combat partner for longer than either of them cared to admit. A little older than Kane, Grant still deferred to his colleague in moments like this, trusting the other’s uncanny instincts to keep them safe. He brought his hand up, brushing it against the drooping gunslinger’s mustache that he wore over his top lip, feeling the dark growth of stubble that was forming all around it.
Brushing her hair from her face as the wind caught it, Rosalia shot Grant a contemptuous look. “From what I’ve seen so far, all you Magistrates are the same. Big men when you’re safe in your villes with your special armor on and backup just a street away, but you run like schoolgirls when you’re faced with anything you didn’t plan for.”
The three of them were hunkered down at the edge of a ridge overlooking a ramshackle settlement constructed of wood and sun-dried clay bricks, with several struggling fields as its surround. Made up of two dozen buildings, the little run-down