Unmasked (Rise of the Masks Book 1)

by Kaplan, EM

  And then at last it seemed that fewer trogs were climbing out of their hellish hole. The beasts pitched themselves back into it—not hesitating at the edge, just jumping down into the blackness. Harro couldn't tell how they were talking to each other, but they seemed as a whole to be retreating suddenly. They turned their thick-skinned gray backs, slick with sweat, toward him before they disappeared down the gaping hole that was a good three men across and just as wide. How in damnation had they dug a cavity that large and that quickly? Some kind of explosive? But no, Harro hadn't heard anything, hadn't felt the ground tremble in the minutes leading up to the attack.

  Harro wondered if the tide had turned in the favor of the humans. His fellow men were throwing snow on the embers of the burning tents. The hissing of fast melting ice into water vapor rose up as the grunts of beasts and dying people faded. Harro paused to look around him, still too tight with fighting ardor to lower his weapon. His eyes skimmed the tents in the darkness, picking out the dark shadows that leapt between the fabric to see which were caused by the dying fire and which could be an intruder.

  If the trogs were retreating, the people would need every last human to tend to the wounded and to retrieve the bodies. Corpses, blackish-brown, both human and trog, lay covered in mud. Harro wondered with a sudden, heaving shudder how many he had stepped upon unaware. He had heard that the trogs took the dead as well as the living. And as long as he was here to prevent it, they would get none of these people for their supper.

  Then the pit opened up like the lancing of a diseased boil as trogs surged over them all in a tide of gray skin and snarling mouths.

  Chapter 55

  With the reins of the sled in his hands, Guyse drove the sled through the gates as he reached the big house. He was as grim and silent as the remains of the two Masks he chauffeured. A houseman ran out to him before he came to a full stop. Guyse, in a fugue state of misery, was interrogated thoroughly, menaced with a spear that looked more like a cooking spit, and then let go with an abrupt and sharp intake of breath as the man caught sight of the sled's silent passengers. Two dead Masks, still impaled by arrow and trog-made spear, slumped across the bench inside the glass-enclosed sled. As the houseman stepped back, more aghast that the inhuman Masks were mortal—had been mortal—as any man, Guyse urged the sled forward, and drove the horses around to the back of the big house.

  Mel was buried in the mine and certainly dead; Ott was on a hopeless mission. All Guyse had now were the bodies of his brother. And Ana.

  Frozen as it was, the ground was too hard to inter the bodies, but it was not too cold to light a pyre. Guyse wanted the primordial comfort of standing in front of a fire. He wanted to see the ashes rise up toward the heavens. He wanted to burn the wooden weapons that had killed them along with their bodies. So, he found a place away from the house and away from the trees that wouldn't disturb the other burial sites. In the frigid night, air puffing from his mouth in clouds of white vapor, he transferred wood from the wood shed and constructed a makeshift platform, then padded it with kindling and some pitch he found in a holding tank on the far side of the house. In the darkness, with the moon shining on the snow, he lifted the two bodies of his beloved and his brother and laid them next to each other. Then he struck tinder and stepped backward, stumbling over snow. The flames licked up the dry wood, and he felt the heat on his face. The fire quickly became bright, and he closed his eyes.

  His only consolation was that nothing had been left unsaid between Ana and him. He remembered the way she looked. The well-guarded expression of her eyes. The silken texture of her hair. The way her smooth face covered a multitude of emotions, a tidal wave arriving under the surface of placid waters. She'd known from the very beginning how he felt about her. And he had known how she'd felt about him. Though she hadn't loved him, she had let him love her. Yet, here he was, with so much more life left than she had had. He felt cheated. He would wrap up his images of her to keep them safely preserved in his mind till his days ran out.

  Then he closed the part of his mind that contained Ana, and conjured thoughts of his older brother. An older brother who would now never stay older than him, yet remain frozen at his prime intellect, the pinnacle of his usefulness, the height of Ana’s love for him. It had been nearly impossible to exist as Ley’Albaer's younger brother, to have come out of the same womb as him, and to have been so entirely a failure in comparison. Their parents had lauded Ley’Albaer's every accomplishment and indulged his insensitive, bookish nature—and had feared Guyse since the moment he'd performed his first shift in the cradle and changed himself into a boy-cat.

  Yet, Guyse still loved them all. It was his nature to love and to forgive, as much as he craved both love and forgiveness from others. He imagined that he had it now, though all of them were now dead and departed from this world. Guyse had been raised to believe in a single, omniscient god, but he often invoked the gods of the people around him, depending on the skin he wore. Now, he prayed to all of them, and hoped with his entire being that he might see his Ana again someday.

  But if not, he understood the reason. And he accepted it.

  Then, he opened his eyes to watch as they left him forever, as ash rose into the night sky.

  Chapter 56

  A trog came for Mel not long after she took Rav's pain. She hadn’t told Rav that the father of her future human child would be her keeper, the beast; Mel didn’t understand it. Rav had slipped into a deep sleep, lulled by Mel's presence and respite from pain, and when the trog came for Mel, she refused to scream and wake her. She had known that eventually one of them would come for her. Heavy footsteps sounded on the tamped earth in the tunnel outside Rav's room.

  Now? Is it happening now? Is this it?

  She lurched to her feet. There was only one way out of the room. The trog lunged, grabbed her arm in its thick-hided hand, and dragged her down the tunnel. She dug her heels into the floor and flailed, hitting and kicking to no avail. She was pulled, feet scuffling, through more dank underground twists to a chamber that had a pile of rugs and furs like the ones that Rav had been lying on. A bed.

  Mel looked around with wild-eyed dread. Just a pile of rugs illuminated by the green glowing walls. She knew exactly what was expected of her and knowing what was about to happen only amplified her panic. Rav had said they had no females of their own. They wanted human females to bear their young. Willingly or not. Definitely not willing. She redoubled her efforts in struggling but hardly seemed to budge the trog. His grip on her remained the same. She was succeeding only in injuring her own arm where she fought the huge manacle of his hand.

  She screamed incoherent words; none made sense, but all of them meant the same thing. Her fingernails didn't make a scratch in his thick hide. Her forehead didn't even cause him to flinch when she butted his chest. He was a filthy stone wall. She didn't care what he smelled like or what he was made of, if he was dirt-encrusted or clean, or whether he was just following a biological urge to procreate or to dominate. She just wanted to get free. Truly, she was damned, whether she lived through this or not.

  Why was she being punished? Was it because she'd gone away from her training and denied her role as a Mask? Guilty, she thought. The guilt was crushing, but it in no way justified being raped. She could find better ways of punishing herself. And why, if she were meant to be a Mask, had she been rewarded in finding Ott just when she had given it up? Because finding love was the biggest reward, the most positive, fulfilling point of her life. Maybe it was the very meaning of life. To be fulfilled by emotion and justified by being the recipient of that emotion equally returned. Freely exchanged. In all of her jumbled, frantic thoughts, the one that most often came to the surface was to wonder whether it made things better or worse that she had been with Ott, experienced his caresses, and still could feel the lingering sensation of his mouth on her skin. It was worse, much worse. And she couldn't even shut down her mind and escape into numbness. She was escalating into panic, climbing its steep cli
ffs, heartbeat erratic, her breaths gulps between screams.

  Since entering the mines, the familiar dizziness had assaulted her. She experienced that same loss of control over her emotions and ability to divert her strength and energy. Her loss of self-control had begun in the forest outside Cillary Keep. Meeting Ott had compounded it. The effort of taking Rav’s pain furthered the loss of control more. But now, terror was finishing the job. It was the same wretchedness that she had felt earlier in the summer when the trog had grabbed her out of the carriage outside of the Keep. The stench in her nose and muddling confusion in her mind made strengthening her limbs impossible, but she still intended to fight. Whatever she had left in her, she would use it against the trog.

  But God, she was terrified.

  He loomed over her, overwhelming her nose with his odor. The sound of his rasping breath through thick nostrils. The strange bluish skin that reminded her of the blue-leaved trees at the Keep. It's happening all over again, she thought. Her abduction. The harsh reality that the end of her life was near. Although this time, there was no Ott to help her get free. No one to drop a boulder on its misshapen, enlarged head.

  She fought back as the trog ripped open first her shirt, then her loose-legged pants.

  NO. NO. NO.

  She said it a thousand times aloud and in her head, imprinting the word over and over, the next one arriving before the previous one faded. It was all she could think. She screamed with anger as he shoved her onto the rugs and trapped her there with one arm while he shoved his leather pants open. She raged as he lowered his body onto hers. She panted and bucked against him, thrashing her legs. She tried diverting her strength to her limbs to push him off, but moved him only a fraction of an inch, even powered by fear and adrenaline.

  She pushed at him, trying to contain her terror, trying to shut out his hoarse breathing on her neck. He was so huge that her feet kicked at his gnarled kneecaps. He pressed weight on the tops of her feet, kneeling on them to keep her in place. Their skin met, knees to feet, his chest against her face, his chin on the top of her head, and suddenly, at all the places where they touched, Mel felt the agamite in his blood. He was saturated with it, through and through; not a single particle of the trog was free of it.

  Agamite. Like threads of it in the ground outside the big house. Like particles of it in the wood in the sled. Like Ott's green eyes. She reached with her mind, and punched through the agamite, using the chips of it that had gone into her forehead and been absorbed into her blood as a conduit through the trog's bluish gray skin and into his blood.

  It's the agamite, she realized, slowing down thought, time, and motion. It was the same as the blue of the tree leaves at the Keep, like Jenks’s experiments with the colored water drawn up through the flower stems. Agamite was what determined the color of the trog’s thick skin. There was agamite running through his veins just as sure as there was running up into the trees around Cillary Keep. How did it get into them? Was it eaten? Inhaled? And why? Maybe to enhance their strength, their terrible size and power. Maybe to survive underground.

  "Whatever your reason, you're my puppet now," she said through gritted teeth.

  Time regained its true tempo. She had been inside Ott's private hell, the dark inky river in which he'd nearly drowned. Because of him, she knew pain and she knew rage. She recognized it in the trog and she looked forward to embracing it closely within her. And now, she punched through the trog's blood, coalescing the agamite into a tight, mental fist. She gathered it in a huge inhalation and she shook him, racking his body and brain as she controlled the agamite and drew it through his body toward her. Above her, stunned and scrambled inside, he seized up and fell off her. He lay on his back, eyes rolling in shock. He struggled to get off the bed, but his limbs betrayed him, stiff at his sides. She wasn't finished with him. No, not by a long shot.

  Rage still gripped her. Whatever his race needed to survive, whatever this one thought he was going to take, it was not her. Never. And, so help her, if she had to she would make every last one of them know it before she was finished.

  She needed the skin-to-skin contact. More skin. More points where she could call the agamite out of him. She climbed up so she knelt on his chest, hands to either side of his face, her clothes hanging in tatters off her shoulders and back. With her head bent down she closed her eyes and tore into him viciously, calling every particle of agamite to her, charging each to vibrate and whip into a million tempests. Between her hands, his head shook. Under her knees, his ribs rattled and creaked. She clamped her teeth together in fury and concentration, gathering everything in him to her. Further. Then, even further, and she heard his bones begin to shatter, one by one. She twirled and twisted the mineral in her mental grip, like the clenching of her jaw. Tighter and tighter, faster and faster.

  And then abruptly, like the dispersing of a tornado’s fury, she let it all go.

  The shockwave rolled outward from her leaving a mind-obliterating vacuum in its wake. She felt it spread into the earthen walls of the ground around her, traveling farther and farther away. Mel's spine arched. Her head and arms were flung backwards. Her knees sank through the liquefying remains of her attacker to meet the drenched furs underneath.

  Part 6

  Ascend

  Chapter 57

  Harro was certain this was his last hour, here and now in the tent city which they were losing to the trogs.

  My life is done. And it was all for shit.

  The trogs swarmed over the edge of the pit and flowed toward him in a vast, dark, snarling tide. The mass of bodies was taller than him by a head and as broad across as the pit itself. It was a solid wave of trogs coming to sweep him away, take his life, and trample his flesh into the filthy mud. He had always hoped that when his time was up he'd face it stoically and with acceptance. Instead, to his dismay, he felt self-pity. Though he stood with a small band of men, he felt absolutely, utterly alone. Humans now numbered about forty. Many of them had fallen when three trogs pushed through their weakening line and dragged some into the dying tent fire’s flames. The fire was not burning as hotly as before, but a fire was still a fire when it came to flesh. It still boiled and melted. It still made you scream.

  Where was his brother Haught? Perhaps his cold, better-looking brother had taken his wife and his son away from this mess. He and his brother were the last of their family. Stablemen, servants, men-at-arms, but always favored at the big house: they had always been more than simply servants. Harro's brother Haught was an arrogant man though, arguably, he had much cause for pride. Perhaps Col Rob had kept the boy Charl close to him because the boy was a favorite up at the big house. Harro wished his brother had kept his progeny far away from the old man. But staying in the old man's good graces had let them have a lives far better than those of stablemen. Better even than Harro’s life, though he had eventually gotten inside the house as well. Harro wished his brother well and preferred not to think of him as one of the muddy corpses at his feet.

  And what about Treyna? . . . But he had no time for more thought in that direction. The trogs surged forward, and all thoughts of life and brotherhood and women fled in the face of self-preservation and self-pity. Harro was brought to his knees by blows from the taller beasts. With his last efforts, he blocked inhumanly powerful blow after blow. He kept nothing in reserve. There was no point in saving anything for later. There would be no later. The mud splashed up into his eyes, across his beard and into his mouth. Tears ran into sweat.

  He waited for the finishing blow, but somehow, it never came.

  Instead, he heard cheers. Shouts of astonishment, disbelief, and pure relief. Bellows erupted from the trogs as they clutched their heads and stumbled. Yet they weren't the only ones suffering from an invisible onslaught. The miners were also temporarily felled, hands to their heads, ears, chests, dropping to the ground and writhing in pain. The trogs turned on their heels and fled back to the pit, some dropping their spears and axes where they stood, simply aband
oning the fight. Harro didn't feel a thing. He was numb.

  But I was dead, wasn't I?

  Harro felt oddly cheated, kneeling in the muck, looking around in bewilderment at his strange and sudden reversal of a loss that had seemed inevitable. Slowly, the miners regained their senses. They stood haltingly, slick and covered in mud, turning to help each other up. Self, then brother next. The blood thumped in Harro's temples. He thought he might pass out. Then, a hand was extended to him. He looked at it uncomprehendingly, then took it and stood up.

  "We won!" a hoarse voice shouted. More cries went up, and Harro struggled to comprehend the exhilaration in them. He felt no joy or elation. Only weariness. He staggered to his feet and looked around at the mud-covered faces, some mirroring his own confusion. They stood alone, no trogs among them.

  "Harro? Where is Harro?" someone called. It was a man's voice, young and full of fear blended with anger. Through the tangle of survivors, Harro could see his nephew Charl with a dagger strapped to his side. It looked like Rob's dagger and it was unsheathed and clean-looking, Harro noted. That was good.

  "I'm here," he tried to say. He had to clear his throat more than once before any sound came out. When it did, it was still only a croak, but his words were taken up by others. "He's here. This way. Come this way." The shouts went up and carried Charl back to him.

  The boy—no, the young man—came to him. Charl was nearly Harro's height, though his eyes were wide and panicky as a child's would be on a night such as this. "To the house," his nephew said. "We have to get the people to the house, uncle. The master says . . . Rob says to bring all the people to the great hall. We have to get them to the house." He was repeating himself, caught out loud in a mantra he had probably been saying to himself over and over.