Unmasked (Rise of the Masks Book 1)

by Kaplan, EM

  He had a clean, outdoors smell. No fancy scent. No fine clothes. He was calm and steady, not bothered by her unease, yet not particularly aroused by it. He seemed to want to assure her of . . . she wasn't sure. Or maybe she just wanted him to seem that way. Suddenly, she wanted. And that in itself was new and disconcerting.

  She wanted to please him—she wasn't sure why. When her hands parted his shirt cloth, she didn't immediately set to work manipulating his muscles, stroking the soreness from his flesh. Instead, she stood back and stretched her arms above her head, displaying herself, though he was already sold on her services. She wanted his eyes on her, running the length of her body. She wanted him to want her. She cursed inwardly, feeling a rush of . . . shame. She knew she was clean. But she wanted to be that kind of clean for him, to remind him of the new flush of the spring season, to soothe him, and to take whatever he could spare. She wanted to make the right sounds, to smell just right, to stay in his mind after he left as he would surely stay in hers. She didn't know why. Nothing made a grain of sense.

  He lay down on his stomach on the blankets, his face turned toward her, meeting her eyes. She felt the world drop away and the breath catch in her throat as she began to stroke him, to ease the tightness from his shoulders and lower. She moved with him, uncontrollably, listening to his breathing and realizing that hers was the same. She shuddered.

  When it was done, he lifted himself. She watched him fasten his lacings back up. She ran her eyes over him, willing him to stay. The boots went back on. He flicked his brown eyes back to her, where she lay on the blankets, breathing like she had run a race. His eyes only reached up her belly before he drew his eyes away.

  Sometime after she heard the signal cloth being taken down outside the tent, she roused herself, cleaned off her hands, and drew her robe tighter against the chill. With a mostly steady hand, she took up her soup mug. It still had a bit of warmth to it.

  Chapter 27

  Rav was warm. She was dreaming, and in it, she was at home in the desert, the wide starry sky above her. She walked out of her tent where her younger sisters still slept. She took a deep breath, wrapped her arms around herself, flexing her bare feet in the sand warmed in the morning sun. Her bare legs stretched up to her hips, her smooth, flat stomach. Then, she knew it was a dream. And she woke.

  She was very warm. The earth radiated heat down here, down where she never saw the sky. The light was from the stones—a constant light, not a flicker from a fire with life, but a steady, unchanging green glow. It was all from the stones. As was the warmth. She slept on her side on soft furs, the smell of which she could no longer distinguish in her nose. She remembered when she first got there, everything stank. Not a stink from a dead animal, but of smoke and chemicals that burned when she breathed and made water run from her eyes. She ran a hand over her swollen, aching belly. She had been very, very sick.

  She sat up, meeting the large, glassy eyes of her keeper. He gestured for her to eat. Always demanding that she eat, that she drink. He was not cruel. He was, in fact, gentle in all interactions with her, as if he considered her fragile and . . . precious. And she, in turn, found that she was not repulsed by him. Not his brutish noises, not his odor. His skin was as rough as animal hide. Bluish, but still not as dark as hers.

  She worried that breathing the air down here would eventually kill her. It had made her sick at first. Two months of living below ground had nearly killed Rav. Eating their food, drinking their water, all tainted with the green stone, had distended her belly. She was as swollen as a pregnant cow. She worried only that she would not see the open sky above her one last time before she was called home to the gods. The Great Mother above, she thought, again detached. She had been separated from her people, from humans, and from her gods. They said the Great Mother would call them to her in the end, and they would be cleansed. Purified. Rav no longer felt any connection with her former gods. There was only her keeper and the green glow of the rock. She wondered, when her life ended, if her old gods would be able to find her here under the ground. Or would she forever lie looking up at the earthen ceiling above her? Floating, floating, scraping her face against the craggy scruff.

  He was watching her eat, satisfied with her appetite. She gestured at him again, with their hand signals that she learned. Up? Can we go up?

  Later, he said. You eat. Always the same answer, yet she never stopped asking.

  She watched him watching her, and when she was finished, he took her scraps and ate them. She drank the green water from the wooden cup, and he watched till it was gone. From his close attention while she drank, she knew that the water was the key to her existence underground. Drinking some of the rock, pulverized in the water, allowed her to breathe the stinging air. If it didn’t kill her first.

  She rubbed a hand down her arm wondering if her skin would eventually take on the same hue as her keeper's. So far, she had not changed. Her skin was still darker than his, the same color it had always been. She wondered briefly if there were others from the Keep underground with her. Sometimes she thought she heard voices carrying through the rock, but she had never seen others like herself. Humans. And her keeper did not allow others of his kind near her. She suspected they had no females of their kind, which was why he treated her with reverence. As if she were precious.

  In all, Rav was not angry. All her life, she had expected to be traded to a warring neighbor in the south in exchange for a temporary, transitory peace in the desert. She might have been bartered to a former enemy at whose hand she could have experienced a much more violent arrangement than her current one. She did not curse her absent gods. She did not mourn the loss of her sisters or human companionship, though, strangely, she thought often of her beautiful, shifting friend Mel, the girl who looked different every time one looked at her. Sometimes brown haired, sometimes blonde. Sometimes plain like sand. Sometimes shimmering like the sun, like on the final night. Surely Mel was dead, too, like the girl called Liz. And like Rally, the young man that Rav had once allowed herself to think of as a future lover.

  She knew that her keeper and his kind ate the dead. She swallowed, her stomach rebelling in queasiness. He, at least, had not consumed anything terrible in front of her. He joined the others of his kind in the great meeting hall somewhere far off in the maze of underground caves. She heard their gatherings through the rock. The guttural sounds of their communication traveled to her chamber though he desired to shield her from it. The idea of eating their enemies was not foreign to her. Some desert tribes held that custom, too. They believed they could absorb the strength of the warriors that they vanquished.

  Rav missed the sky the most. Her people did not bury the dead. They burned the bodies so the ashes floated upward. Or they fed the bodies of their dead enemies to the animals. They did not dig holes in the sand to cover them up. Here, she was buried and alive, pining for air, for wind, for the embrace of the night sky and adornment of the stars. She locked her gaze on her keeper's face, unwilling to acknowledge the tear that escaped from the corner of her eye. A guttural cough came from his throat. Like the rest of his kind, he could not speak words, but he saw her. He understood her grief, though maybe not the cause, because he looked away, collecting her cup and leaving her alone again in their small shared chamber.

  Chapter 28

  Late in the day, as Ott climbed a ladder in the tent city, he felt Treyna’s eyes burrowing holes into the back of his jacket. She stood in the doorway of her tent, unoccupied. Jonas, on the ladder next to him, was equally idle, unless you counted his mouth, which he exercised endlessly. Ott pulled another nail from his pocket with frozen fingers and pounded it into a wooden beam. He was avoiding Treyna, and she was stalking him. Field mouse, meet mountain cat. Below him in the muddy thoroughfare between the tents, another dark eyed girl threw him a glance as she passed by. As did the older woman with the girl. He frowned as he hammered, wondering when the attention had become a curse.

  To distract himself, he turned his
thoughts to earlier in the day when he had returned his nephews to the house. Rob was sitting at the kitchen table looking for all the world as if he belonged there. And Jenny, face flushed from the kitchen, seemed content. Baffled, Ott had said nothing, but suspected that they'd finally worked out their differences, whatever had kept them apart this long. Ott had never understood the reticence. As the old folks used to say, “If the girl's willing . . .” At least, that had been Ott's motto. Mostly. Until now.

  Maybe Jenny was afraid for herself and her boys. Especially after her bastard of a husband. But Rob wouldn't hurt her, Ott knew. Rob would sooner hurt himself, and that was a lot easier to imagine, especially if either Rob or his sister persisted in tiptoeing around each other much longer. Rob had stayed for the late morning meal—Jenny's tasty, fluffy-white scratch bread—then suggested that Ott join the construction activity. Which was why he was here now.

  Ott cursed himself now for not acknowledging them having overcome their obstacles and finally pairing up. He was just so frozen inside, his reactions as slow to build as a snowdrift without wind, in straight-down snow that fell like sugar. Azerus, that was called. Jenny and Rob. Together. Finally. Something they all could look on as a good thing. Ott should be happy. Happy for them. Lutra knew Jenny had suffered enough. Rob as well. Yet, Ott didn't have the good grace to push around his face so it looked like a smile. Somewhere inside of him, he supposed he was happy. But on the outside, on the surface, nothing. Belatedly, he realized he’d just smashed his thumb with the hammer. For one instant, he felt no pain. Then, it burned and throbbed. He cursed and sucked it into his mouth.

  It was not entirely true that he felt nothing. There was a vast void in his soul, if he had a soul. The better part of it was nothing, true, but there was also . . . red. Pure, unadulterated fury lurking just below the coat of his numbness. In fact, he was fairly certain that it was the numbness alone that made him fit to be among other people right now. He had sometimes in his life cursed the goddess Lutra, their family diety, for his luck when, in fact, he'd had nothing but good luck for most of his life. He had never starved. His sister and her boys were healthy and among the living. He had had nothing with which to fault his deity in the past. Until now. And this was how the balance was restored—one swift tilt of scales and fortune was taken away.

  Mel.

  He could barely approach the edges of her name in his mind without feeling the lick of red fury spreading across his face, burning his nostrils, and blurring his vision. The anger was taking control of him more and more unless he gave up and let the numbness take him. If he forced all memories of her away, the blur of nothingness took over, buffering him from feeling anything at all.

  Mel.

  His mind touched the memory of her again, lingering over it just as his hands had slipped over the soft sheath of her dress that night at the Keep in the garden. Red fury rimmed his vision and blended with fiery images. His hands breaking bones, ripping tough hide from the face of a trog. His uncontrolled hands changed to mallets in his mind, smashing into the beasts. His feet on the chest of another as hands again gripped the head and twisted it from its neck. His hands, fueled by red fury.

  Then, later, waking to Rob's uncertain gaze. Ott's hands, again, covered in dark, bluish blood. And the numb stupor that followed when the fury was gone. Even now, the flicker of memory sped Ott's pulse. He pushed it away. Ott, on the ladder on the lawn in front of Rob's house, hammer in hand, forced himself to keep moving. Numb. Numb was better. Around him, miners—builders, now—pounded nails into wood beams. What in Lutra's name did they think they were doing? Taking a walk in winter? The cold was going to come for them. And they were not in their homes. There was no doubt in Ott's mind that everyone outside would die. They would not be spared no matter how many of the poor souls prayed to Dovay, bear god of ruthless, unrelenting hope.

  "Couple more of these. What do you think?" Jonas, the panderer, said at Ott's elbow. "As good as being under a roof." The older man's hand rubbed the beam. Ott grunted noncommittally, sensing the pretty-faced predator Treyna drawing closer to his ladder. He took a handful of iron nails from the stout miner on his right when the pail was held out to him. "Mark my words," Jonas continued. "The trogs have given up. They've retreated back into their tunnels now that the winter is setting in. What are they? Nothing but dumb, foul-smelling animals. How do we know this? Look at us. Then look at them. How do we look? That's right. We wear clothes. We have property. Currency. Wages."

  Ott stoically considered how Jonas's wages were made by Treyna, by her toil.

  But the man persisted, his bony features flushed with his vigor. "How many of them could there possibly be? Two times ten? A few dozen at most. If they are as big as they say, how can they possibly have homes underground? Where are their pups? Do they even have females? Perhaps they eat what they excrete. Who knows? They are beasts after all. And we—we are men! Far superior." He leaned toward Ott, tapping his own temple with a clean, uncalloused finger. "Superior intellect. Superior powers of reason. And . . . " He jabbed a finger at the sky. "Superior weapons. Superior gods."

  Ott blinked, annoyed. He glanced at the man to his right, a stout miner who hammered on, oblivious.

  "Will our gods desert us in this time of need? No. Absolutely not. Have we not tithed greatly enough with our efforts, with our sweat every day of our lives? Have we not lived cleanly, earning our just reward?"

  Would the man not shut his mouth? Ott heard Treyna muttering to herself from the base of his ladder. He glanced at her, and found her looking up at him. She gestured at him with a mug of water, so he descended, realizing that hours of work had passed without him resting. He drank, looking up at the very little progress his own efforts had made in that time.

  Jonas, thankfully, had taken his drink inside the tents. Treyna handed a second cup to the man next to him. She had a beautiful face, Ott thought, in a detached way, the same way he had sometimes walked through a marketplace looking at goods he wasn't interested in buying, like girls at faraway inns who had sometimes blatantly offered themselves to him though he wasn't interested. He glanced at Treyna, but he felt not the smallest spark of interest. Though willing hands and body might get a rise out of his physical self, his mind was repulsed by the idea. Physical intimacy without emotional desire was no longer appealing to him. When had he become so fine, he wondered? But he knew since when.

  Treyna, standing beside him with her shawl wrapped tightly around herself, muttered again. It sounded like she cursed. At Ott's look, she shrugged it off but stood her ground. The man next to him asked her for a refill, which she obliged him. Ott sipped his water slowly. She spoke suddenly, in a calm, clear voice, her pretty face smooth and serious. "It's not that I care much about them. I just want to do right by them. They're not really mine. By birth maybe, but not in any other way. But they're innocents."

  He looked around, wondering if she was talking to him, if he hadn't stumbled suddenly into the middle of a conversation for which he'd not been present at the beginning. She had been looking off to the left of him over his shoulder, which further confused him, but then suddenly she looked directly at him.

  "When we're dead and gone, I want those little ones looked after. The three of them, all. The middle one can't talk." She caught the surprise on his face. "Don't look at me like that. I know what we're facing. If the monsters don't get us, the winter will. And Lutra knows you're the man to survive it." She turned abruptly and left him frozen, staring at her retreating back.

  Chapter 29

  Mel wanted out of the cursed sled. Hour after hour passed. Then, finally, the first signs of life in this barren, icy wasteland arrived in the form of sound. Hammering. Hewing. Sounds of construction. Their horses were tired, but the sounds of activity lifted their hooves. Mel’s head pounded; it had itched and swelled where the wound was drying. She could quell the pain, but she stubbornly did not. She was irritable, anxious, and raw. And she knew they all knew exactly what she felt. She could f
eel her mother's eyes on her even though her mother was wearing her Mask. And Mel was petulantly glad that she didn't have to meet anyone's eyes.

  Because her father had commanded her not to wear her Mask, Mel shrank back from the sled windows as their sled carried them through the gates of the estate. Still, she saw the activity—people creating frames for shelter—and even through the thick, insulated sled windows, she could sense the bitter cold coming and knew that the shelters would not be enough to prevent deaths from exposure. Her body was being ridden hard by overwhelming emotion, cords of it whipping through her like flood waters. Without reining any of it in, she grew tired quickly and felt used by it, as unaccustomed as she was.

  A fierce, bearded man on horseback escorted them through the gates. He had met their sled a couple miles out and rode alongside them all the way to the house. Though the man glowered, Mel took her cue from Guyse, who appeared at ease with the man, so she tried to calm nerves. The sled slowed to a stop in front of a massive stone mansion, even more imposing than the Keep at Cillary, with its dark balustrades and steeply sloped, brooding roof. Mel watched her parents, waiting for a cue, exposed and awkward without her Mask, uncertain of her role. She gingerly ran her fingertips across the dried bloody welt on her forehead as she considered the impression she would make, and again, questioned her father’s intentions. It seemed uncharacteristically dramatic. Aggressive, even—an opening move in a game. What was the purpose? What did her father know that she did not? She touched her head again. At least she had managed to clean most of the dust off her face, though she could feel bits of rock still embedded in the wound. She would need a bowl of water and a cloth to wash it before she healed it.