Prologue

      Altyn Tagh region, Tibet

      The redhead came to the farmhouse under the flag of truce. A Caucasian woman riding a powerful steed, she had wrapped her fur cloak tightly around her against the biting winds that cascaded down from the imposing peaks of Altyn Tagh. Svelte and beautiful, the flame-haired woman looked exhausted from her long trek through this, the most desolate part of Tibet.

       Kamala watched the redhead’s approach as she worked in her father’s field, repairing the broken stake that held the old scarecrow in place. A willowy girl, barely thirteen summers old, Kamala had met with few strangers from outside the village, just the occasional traveling salesman and the traders on market day or the silent monks from the nearby monastery who merely nodded as they went about their business. Kamala had long dark hair and brown eyes, and her sun-bronzed limbs had become long and gangly following the first flush of puberty, yet the rest of her body bided its time, in no rush to catch up. One day, perhaps, she might be beautiful like her mother, Bayarmaz, but for now she seemed awkward, all flailing limbs and sharp elbows and knees.

       Looking up as she bound the jagged struts of wood together, Kamala had noticed the distant rider making her slow approach to their family homestead some five hundred miles north of Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet. The setting sun stretched the visitor’s shadow far across the golden wheat fields, making of it a sinister, skeletal thing like the scarecrow Kamala toiled with.

       She looked to the east, spying the blind eye of the moon as it nudged over the horizon to take up its vigil in the cold evening sky as the sun set in the west. When she looked back, the flame-haired rider was closer and she could make out the glinting metal of her weapons, a gun resting between her legs as the horse jostled slowly along the frost-spattered path, a metal dirk sheathed at her hip. By the time Kamala had finished her repairs, the beautiful woman had dismounted her horse, secured it outside her parents’ simple lodgings and disappeared inside.

       Passing the old apple tree, Kamala entered the stone cottage through the back door and walked through the kitchen, stopping to smell the soup that her mother was cooking on the range. She could hear voices: her father’s and the faintly accented voice of the mysterious stranger. They were engaged in an animated discussion about the merits of the divine, and Kamala heard her father proclaiming that religion mattered little to a farmer, so long as he could work an honest day in his fields.

       “But you’d be better off, you must be able to see that?” the stranger was saying, an odd edge to her tone, as Kamala slunk into the room. Though the woman spoke the language it was clear that she was unused to the Tibetan tongue, forming the words awkwardly with Western lips.

       At over five and a half feet tall, the woman seemed to tower over Kamala’s mother as she stood in the main room of the cottage beside Kamala’s parents, and her height made the familiar room seem as if it was somehow smaller, the ceiling low in her presence as though cowering with fear. The stranger’s hair was like a radiant setting sun around her head, trailing halfway down her back in a cascade of beautiful curls, and her eyes were the emerald color of the sea. The green-eyed woman waited close to the window, pulling back the curtain with grubby fingers as she watched the dirt track leading to the cottage. She wore black armor of a supple leather that clung to her curves. Its blackness made her seem to Kamala’s eyes like some strange insect-turned-man, the perverted result of a sick metamorphosis. She held a glass from the sideboard filled with her father’s best apple brandy, her gloved fingers long and supple around its simple lines. She stepped closer into the room then, taking up residence in father’s favorite chair, her long, black-clad limbs shimmering like something liquid as she seated herself.

       Kamala’s mother was meticulously hanging the woman’s cloak, brushing frost out of its pile as the stranger spoke angrily to her father. The dark-haired woman looked fearful, lines of worry creasing her brow as she placed the cape on one of the pegs by the low front door.

       Sitting across from the red-haired woman, ousted from his favorite chair, her father looked up as he sipped at the brandy. “My daughter Kamala,” he announced, a proud smile passing across his lips, the lines around his eyes creasing in time with his smile.

       Kamala stood in the doorway, huddling into herself as she looked at the beautiful stranger who had appeared in her house.

       “A fine-looking girl, sir. You have my congratulations,” the woman stated, holding her glass aloft in tribute before draining it and smacking her lips contentedly. Kamala saw her mother’s eyes flash fearfully toward the stranger.

       Before Kamala could speak—as if she had anything worth saying—her mother urged her to check the simmering soup, and the moment had passed. Kamala saw pleading in her mother’s eyes. “Go,” she urged, “to the kitchen.”

       Alone in the kitchen, Kamala lifted the lid from the pot and used the nearby ladle to stir its bubbling contents, its meaty aroma filling her nostrils. She could hear her father and the mysterious woman in the next room as they continued to talk about the world that was coming. “Ullikummis brings the love that the world will know,” Kamala heard the woman say in her throaty voice, “and you will either embrace that love or you’ll be swallowed by its embrace.”

       She thought on that for a moment as she continued idly stirring the contents of the pot. The Caucasian woman didn’t seem that different from the people of the village. And yet a cloud of anger clung to her, evident in the manner in which she argued with her father, in the way that she seemed on edge. There was a drive inside the woman that made her different from the monks of the nearby monastery, a comprehension of religion that demanded victory rather than understanding, and was scared it might be challenged for something less than absolute. As she thought of the speaker and her intense anger, the conversation from the other room became louder once more, and there came a sudden shattering of glass.

       Kamala flinched, turning her head to look through the open kitchen door, but she was unable to see what had happened. Then her mother rushed into the kitchen on hurried legs, the shards of one of Father’s best brandy glasses held in her cupped hands, fear lining her beautiful face. Kamala could see tears forming in her mother’s eyes. “What’s wrong, Mama?” she asked, her voice low.

       Her mother shook her head and tossed the broken glass in the bucket by the door. “It’s nothing, Kamala,” she said quietly. “Just…the glass dropped. It’s nothing, baby.”

       Kamala smiled, her bright teeth shining in the dwindling sunlight that shone through the kitchen window. “We have other glasses,” the girl told her mother.

       The older woman laughed, just for a breath, and then she pulled Kamala close to her, her chin resting atop the girl’s head. “Get out,” Kamala heard her mother whisper. “Get out of here. Run away.”

       Kamala felt her mother’s hug tighten, pulling her so close, and she began to ask what she had meant. Just then a voice came from the doorway and Kamala looked up to see the red-haired woman standing there.

       “Where the hell’s that glass?” she snarled.

       Kamala’s mother let go of her and Kamala saw tears glistening on her cheeks. The older woman apologized as she reached into one of the cupboards and produced another glass. “Please, don’t use language in front of my daughter,” she said quietly, not looking at the woman.

       The woman’s arm darted forward in a blur and suddenly she had hold of the older woman’s chin. “I’ll speak however the hell I please in front of your daughter,” she said through gritted teeth. “Do whatever the hell I want. Your world is past. You understand that?”

       Kamala felt ashamed as she watched her mother nod, chin painfully held in the woman’s grip. The woman was a cloud of fury, of hate personified. Kamala couldn’t know it, but the