Unmasked (Rise of the Masks Book 1)

by Kaplan, EM

  Then the procession.

  Hands helped her remove her clothes. Her loose-fitting pants were untied at the waist and they fell from her hips to the floor around her ankles. She walked down the steps of the amphitheater, her bare feet on the cold floor. At the center of the meeting hall, on the platform, she stepped into a metal tub. Hands poured warm water on her from pitchers. Water, always water, the medium of birth, rebirth, cleansing, and baptism, here the same as the world all over. This rite was each of those. She was divested of her identity, and when she stepped from the tub still dripping, hands held out and swathed her in the cloak and cowl, the Mask.

  She stood feet set apart in resting stance, weight distributed for the next part of the ceremony, balanced and relaxed. The medallion slid around her neck, locking into place. The hands slid away from her and became still. Everybody in the room stopped. Heartbeats melded into one rhythm. One mind. She drew a deep breath and stilled herself. Then there was silence. Absolute silence. They stood in meditation—one body, one mind, one purpose—until the sun went down.

  Chapter 20

  "Daybreak. Three days from now," the wounded man managed to say through cracked lips so dry they no longer bled, his voice quavering with terror. He was a miner who had been captured during a fresh attack—any more of them and they would lose the mines completely. Rob had ordered they give the man warm broth, but he could not take it.

  The beasts had released him to crawl on his hands and knees to the big house, painting a red path through the snow with his own blood. He was a dying creature barely recognizable as one of their own. He was human, but beaten to a pulp and nearly mute from fear. They learned from the man, with the assistance of the biteweed, a powerful sedative, that his missing hand had been removed from his arm and eaten in front of him with great relish, bones of his fingers picked clean of meat and sinew and tossed at his feet. Rob sat near the man, leaning closely toward his battered face, murmuring nonsense words of comfort. He sat with the man until he died.

  Later, much later, Rob sat staring at his father—yet another dying man. The old man's rotting eyes were closed, his paper-thin eyelids run through with blue-gray veins. He coughed wetly and brushed his mouth with a stained cloth, eyelids still closed, then drifted back into sleep easily like a contented cat in the morning sun. The snow had let up briefly. The old tyrant had a considerable stockpile of anguish he had inflicted on other people. Rob thought sourly that the tyrant ought to be proud of himself. His spoils were the rich misery of others. He traded in the blood and toil earned on the backs of other men and women, the calluses and ripped skin of other people's hands. Rob stared down at his own hands, folded into each other so tightly his fingertips were devoid of blood.

  Just as Rob had predicted standing outside in the tent city looking up the frozen lawn at his father's mansion, his presentation of the troll's head to his father had gone over like another snow flurry in a blizzard. Unwanted and barely acknowledged. Now the jarred head, the gray-haired back of the dead beast's head turned toward Rob, sat on the floor next to the old man's chipped chamber pot.

  "What are you looking at?"

  Rob had not noticed that his father had awoken. Finished with his nap, apparently. The old man stretched in an abbreviated fashion, displaying a frailty that Rob didn't believe. Rob got to his feet out of habit, long ago drilled into the habit of standing at attention for the old man. Beaten into it in the past. Memories of himself passed briefly through Rob's mind—twenty years seeming only a breath ago—gripping the arms of a chair as his father punctuated each lesson of subservience with the whip of a lash. They were never far under the surface of his thoughts. Though the switch marks across the backs of his legs had faded into silver scars, he expected them to break open and start weeping again at any moment. The joke was, he himself would never cry, but the scars were free to do as they wished.

  He shifted his eyes briefly to the window beyond his father's bed. If Rob himself were free to do what he wished, he would have been across that snow-covered field knocking on Jenny's door, standing awkwardly with his hat in his hands in the corner of her low-ceilinged kitchen, just to hear her voice and see her face, flushed with the effort of whatever she was doing. Always moving. Whatever she did seemed far more important that what was happening around him. Always busy with her hands and her quick eyes, her dark, silken hair which she punished by pulling back with a tight band, so she could chase after her little ones. He would gladly stand in the corner and serve as a hat rack collecting dust if it meant he could stay close to her, serve her, if only just by adding a body to her house to keep it warm. But he didn't know how to serve her, how to throw himself at her feet.

  "Wake up, you idiot," his father rasped at him. The old man had shoved back his furs and had thrown his stringy, naked legs over the side of the bed. Angrily, he gestured Rob away as he stood and gathered his robe together. He gripped his cane and stood on shaky legs, then gathered his strength with a spiteful narrowing of his deep-sunken eyes at Rob. The old man was all tendon and sinew through his neck and skull, incongruous fuzz on his bony pate. Though the years had curved his back and forced him to stoop so that his eyes met with Rob's chest, he could still make the boy cower before him.

  "We need to assemble the workers into platoons," his father said, working his way from his bed chamber to his sitting room where there was a high fire. The heavy gold chain and agamite-encrusted pendant of Colubrid, the snake god on their family crest, dangled over his collarbones. "I have given them industry—working in my mines has grown the muscles in their arms and strengthened their backs. They are not spoiled calves fattened for slaughter. Now they can use their axes to fight the trolls."

  Rob cleared his throat. "These creatures are strong. Our people are not trained. We will be massacred."

  "The workers have strength. They are obedient. They will fight."

  Oh God. How many generations had their family lived off the sweat of others?

  "There are children out there," Rob said, wanting to run a hand across his face, wanting to lash out at the old man, who now paused in front of Rob’s chair.

  "Why? Why do they have their children with them?"

  "They have fled their homes. They brought the children with them."

  "What? Perfectly good homes I gave them. Strong, made of good wood and stone," he said, turning slowly to guide his old body into the chair. He waved away Rob, who had found himself unconsciously taking a step forward to assist him. "Strong against the winter, the way I had them made. Those houses have plenty enough room for their families, but not enough for them to over breed." He arranged his robes around his legs and now gestured for a blanket to be spread over them. Rob complied, though he kept his back away from the fire. It was over-hot and made him feel febrile. As his hands placed the blanket in his father's lap, he imagined them snaking up to grip the gristle of the old man’s neck to choke the life out of him.

  "The creatures attacked their homes, sir. They were forced to abandon them and come here."

  The old man looked at him suspiciously. "Well. What do they want from me? Haven't I provided enough for them? Given them a good living?"

  "As they expect us to continue to do," Rob said. Maybe the house physician could prescribe the old bastard a sleeping drought. A lot of it.

  "And where am I supposed to come up with the food and shelter for the lot of them? What am I, a magician? A conjurer?"

  Rob sighed. It took every ounce of his self-control not to rub a hand over his face, which was a gesture of weakness that he'd been trained to hide. His time away from the old man had been a gift. Pure luxury. Wandering in the woods with Ott, topped off by that ridiculous costume party and ending in smoke, destruction, and death. A bubble of a dream punctured by reality. He wondered if Ott would ever be the same. He'd been a wily devil their whole lives, always a favorite with women. Good looking and lucky as a sprite. Rob gravitated toward him, full of envy. It hurt to see his friend turn taciturn and hollow, a ghost
of his former self. When the girl died, she'd taken most of Ott with her, Rob realized. The best part of his friend. What would Rob be if something ever happened to Jenny? He quailed to think of it. Having nothing left to hope for in this life would take away any fear of dying. Perhaps it would spur him to kill his father finally, after all these years of fantasizing about it, he thought ruefully.

  "It's settled then," the old man said. Rob snapped back to attention.

  "Sir?" Rob said, clenching his jaw.

  "Sir?" the old man mocked him, screwing up his face. He rasped, "Use the damned balls dangling between your legs unless, as I suspect, they never descended. I did my best with you, but I can't make you a man yet if you weren't born with a snake between your legs like the rest of us. You'll never further my house nor add to my riches. Always suspected your mother was weak. Damned Insectoj worshippers like her. All of them weak." He named the god of insects as if he were referring to a pile of animal dung. Rob didn't flinch. He'd long ago given up faith in any god. They were the idols of his childhood. Silent and abandoning just as he had later come to abandon them. His father grunted. “I said take care of it.”

  "The people?"

  The old man let loose another string of obscenities that ended with a wet cough. "I don't care what you do with them. Just make sure they protect my mines. Without that agamite, what are we? Do you think I built this house with borrowed treasure? No." He slammed his bony fist on the worn arm of the chair. "I earned it. Every rug. Every cup. Every last stone. Every thread on your back. Paid for with agamite. Protect my mines. At any cost. Without them, I am lost. And you have no future."

  Chapter 21

  The heels of Rob's boots pounded on stone as he stormed down the hallway. He worked his empty fists, opening and shutting them. By the time he reached the dining hall, he had regained control of his anger. The smells of meals past and smoke-stained walls were as familiar to Rob as his own skin. The pounding of fury from his conversation with his father receded. Harro, Rob's ad hoc adviser, was sitting over the remnants of a midday meal, waiting for him.

  The man wasn’t meant to be an adviser. He wasn’t a scholar trained in warfare or stratagems. Harro was a stableman, rough around the edges, though he'd been inside the house for a couple years now. Surprisingly verbose when given enough drink—and only then, come to think of it. He was dark, with a full, neatly trimmed beard, and also unwaveringly loyal to Rob, who knew it and valued it beyond measure. Rough-hewn though he was, Harro's mind was sharp as a faceting tool for honing gems. His eyes glittered like black ice, the whites of his eyes clear as new snow, the kind of early snow fall called haut by the locals. Crystalline and pure.

  Harro said, "Well?"

  Rob sat. "No problem a little patricide couldn't fix." His remark was met with uncomfortable silence and the clearing of Harro’s throat, which he took for acknowledgment of fact.

  "Do we wait for the Masks?" Harro asked him. They were both grasping at straws. They were racked with indecision. Rob's indecision. The entire house was waiting for him to do something, to take command. Again, he felt like scrubbing his hand over his face but refused to let himself.

  "We don't have time. The creatures have given us till daybreak three days from now."

  "What are our options?" Harro asked again. They had been over their situation a thousand times, but each time, Rob was as willing to rake over them again hoping a new solution would present itself. Harro fingered the carved bear that hung from a braided leather cord around his neck. Dovay the bear, god of perseverance, a popular deity in these parts—god of hunkering down and waiting out the winter.

  "We could try to prepare ourselves to fight. We have no weapons, no training, or even food. If we attack them, we leave most of our families unprotected. We squander what meager defenses we have. However, if we defend against attack, we have more time to prepare, to protect the families, but we still do not have enough resources to shelter and feed all of them when winter truly arrives. Or," Rob continued, "we can send a delegation to negotiate a truce."

  "We need the Masks for that," Harro said with a shudder—they could make even a hardened outdoorsman tremble just thinking of them, their wraith-like facelessness. The stableman nervously picked at his nails, an incongruously tidy gesture for a man who had been accustomed to working with his hands in the stables his whole life, but he'd had the nervous habit as long as Rob had known him. Self-conscious of dirt perhaps, and low beginnings, though at the moment Rob would have traded places with a stableman in a heartbeat. Their inability to find a viable solution to their present situation was torturing Rob.

  "We need the agamite," Rob said sitting down at the table. Without the agamite, they might as well abandon the entire northern country. A small part of him flinched and wondered if he were merely parroting his father's commands. While he could easily picture himself living as a faceless citizen in a city far to the east or even in the southern desert, he could not abandon his people.

  His place at the table was set with a loaded plate. Someone was looking after him. Rob began to eat methodically and without feeling, without tasting anything. Roasted roots, roasted meat, well-prepared and well-laid out, but they could have been clods of dirt for all he cared. However, the people outside were eating worse and much less of it, so he forced himself to continue chewing and swallowing. After months on the trail dreaming of a soft bed and well-prepared food, he was now unable to appreciate so much as a bite of it.

  As if reading his mind, Harro stood and paced toward the window. Down the snow-covered slope of land in front of the house, through the barren branches of trees, and above the stone wall that lined the property, they could see smoke from the campfires, as well as the tops of the taller peaked tents. There had to be upwards of six hundred people squatting there in the camp town.

  Rob swallowed, washing a bite down with a swig of bitter tea. "And defense? We needed to defend the mines when we were still there, not now that we've fled from them. It's too late for that. We've lost the mines. We're defending our people against the winter now."

  "So bring the people in," Harro said. "We'll figure out how to feed them. Bring them inside the walls. We'll build temporary shelter that we'll try to heat. Under the trees and away from the worst of the wind. Let the most feeble and youngest come into the stables now."

  Rob thought briefly about the shriveled old tyrant lying in his silken sheets and woven blankets by his over-warm fire on the other side of the house while children were losing their toes to the cold. He slowly lay his fork down on his plate and looked at Harro. "Bring the people in then. Inside the walls. Build roofs. Whatever walls we can. Before the weather arrives."

  Harro turned and looked at him. Slowly, he straightened his back, stood fully at attention as a sign of respect. He nodded at Rob. "Yes. Consider it done."

  Chapter 22

  Jenny took advantage of the calm weather to beat dirt from a rug out on the front porch. She chewed a tiny wad of mint gum, an indulgence, switching it to the other cheek. Her stash would be gone soon, but she was celebrating a moment to herself. Though it was frigid enough to make clouds out of her breath and require her to wear her badly knitted wool mittens—she had always been terrible at knitting, probably because she was frequently distracted—the sun was out and the wind was gone for now. The heavy rug hung over the side rail of the porch—the one that her middle son had recently broken and she'd struggled to replace. A carpenter, she was not. The repaired section of the rail was not entirely in line with the rest it, but it was sturdy, in there for good, which she found when she'd gone back and tried to square it up. Wasn't that always the case? The most crooked things were the hardest to budge. Her mind flew back and forth. Where was that boy anyway? She wrapped her fingers around the end of his flatball bat and took a hard swing at the rug, sending up a cloud of dust—a half-year’s worth, at least.

  The sun on the snow made her squint, and she heard the boys' laughter coming from inside the house. They ought t
o be outside tiring themselves out before the storms started rolling in. She usually set them to doing their letters and reading on bad mornings. Afternoons were for wearing themselves out and destroying the house. But her brother was home. She paused for a minute, hearing the low cadence of Ott's voice, but not making out the words. Their mother should have named him Lutros, the male variation of Lutra, after their otter goddess. He was clever and sleek and stinking with luck. Most of the time. When she didn't want to kill him. She sighed, not sure if it were her brother or her sons she was thinking about. Sometimes, at her most tired, they all blended together into one troublesome boy.

  She had bread dough rising in the kitchen and wanted to make a special meal for her brother. He and Rob sometimes traded game for fresh food on the trail, she knew. But it had to have been a while since they hit the snowline coming north, and supplies and people to trade with would have become scarce. She tried not thinking about Rob though she hadn't seen him in weeks. She wondered if he were as thin as her brother, though that was hard to imagine. That man was a mountain, as solid as one and just about as quiet. He wouldn't be like her brother. Ott had returned with a strange and forlorn gauntness about him that she'd never seen before. A tightness around his eyes. He was lackluster with the kids, though she saw he pushed himself to be cheerful for them. He looked like he'd rather curl up in a corner somewhere and pull a blanket over his head the way he used to when they were little. Worrisome. Something had happened out there on the trail this time. Maybe something to do with those underground animals coming up. They brought something into the air with them, an underlying menace, the feeling that the very ground she and the rest of the people walked on, herded animals on, and built their houses on was unstable and riddled with holes like an ant colony.

  She pushed the frenetic pace of her thoughts toward what she could straighten and clean next now that she had a chance. She wanted to sweep out the house, but great lady above, though her hands were busy, her thoughts were traitorous and turned back to Rob. Her throat closed up thinking about him. She wished he could forgive her. One terrible mistake after another. Marrying, having three children so closely spaced together, not that any of them had been conceived in joy. Eight, seven, and five years old now. The birth of the youngest one had almost killed her, tearing her, nearly bleeding her out, making it so she'd never have children again. Three children—good, rambunctious boys like hers—were a bounty, especially in a place like this where a person had to be hearty to make it to adulthood, and either lucky or stubborn to live much beyond that.