Unmasked (Rise of the Masks Book 1)

by Kaplan, EM

  Not much resistance left in the old skin of this body, he thought in frustration. He would have liked to have seen some more of the seeds he'd sown lately come to grow and bear fruit, as sour and poisonous as it may have been to some. He would have liked to have seen the boy Charl one more time. The lad had such promise. Smart . . . quick . . . though not of his own flesh either. Col Rob had been unable to make any woman pregnant. That had been his curse. So many regrets. He would die alone instead of surrounded by sons. Or daughters who looked as beautiful as his dear adulteress of a wife.

  Then Col Rob was unable to hold his head up on his neck. He leaned to the side and let out his last sigh.

  Chapter 60

  Standing over the old man's body, Guyse stepped back and withdrew the blade. He had used Rob's shape to gain access to the old man's chamber more easily. But now standing over the corpse slumped in its chair, Guyse wondered at the old man's uncanny perception that he was not his son.

  That was for Ana.

  Because of the old man's inability to leave the delegation alone, Ana had died. He'd had to dabble in the Masks' affairs and fix the outcome so that the trogs would attack. Why? Why had Col Rob done it? Had they been just pawns in a game to a bored old despot? Would Guyse ever learn why Ana had had to die?

  And now, Guyse thought grimly, he would return underground and retrieve his daughter Mel. Or else never see the light of the sun again.

  Chapter 61

  Ott awoke belly-down under a highly uncomfortable blanket of debris and with a large knot on the back of his head. He sat up slowly and waited for the tremors in the ground to cease. Then he realized the ground was solid and that he was dizzy.

  How fitting. Killed by a rock when I'd been trying to kill a trog with a rock . . . when I first met Mel.

  He tried and failed to remember what had happened to pitch him under a pile of rubble. He sat grasping at the threads of his memory and trying to weave them together, trying put them together to create a reasonable . . . He lost his train of thought and leaned back. A stone dug into the small of his back. But if he didn't rest his head, he was probably going to throw up. Nausea made him think of bile, which was green . . . like agamite, which the trogs were protecting. Which meant he was in the mine, half-buried under yet another cave-in. Incapacitated by . . . what exactly had happened? He'd been picking at the great wall of rock ahead of him with his bare hands and there'd been some kind of blast, a wave of . . . sound?

  He sat up a little quicker than was wise, and black spots swam in his vision. After blinking for a minute until his eyes cleared, he used his bloody hands to haul himself into a reasonable facsimile of a standing position. Then he wiped his hands on his dusty torso and squinted into the darkness.

  He cursed. But it was a celebratory curse. Because the mine shaft was clear now. It wasn't walkable by any means, but he could see through it to the greenly-lit cavern ahead. A little crawling, a little wriggling, a little sloughing off of skin, and he'd be through to the cavern. He waited for the blood to recede from his brain and his eyes to clear from the rush of elation. Then he started forward.

  It took him a good hour to make his way downward through the newly opened tunnel. But what was time in a place like this? Nothing. Time was absolutely nothing here. Maybe it was an hour. Maybe it was several minutes. He went heartbeat to heartbeat, handhold to handhold, nicked skin to the next sore spot. But he never considered staying still because stopping himself was the same thing as stopping time, he thought deliriously; he was time itself, and that was why he had to move forward.

  When he reached the cavern, he tumbled in head first and landed hard on the floor, surprised that the latest cave-in had made his passage not at floor level but at chest level. He'd had more than his share of hard landings lately, so he got to his feet slowly to make certain he wouldn’t be going down fast yet again. The cavern was empty, no people and no bodies anywhere. The place was surprisingly untouched by . . . whatever it was that had knocked him flat and made his head feel scrambled. But waking up and finding that the tunnel had opened up left him optimistic; the impossible task didn't seem so impossible anymore. What was lost might be regained. Mel. Frankly, it was impossible that he'd lost her. He felt strongly that she was there . . . he just couldn't see her. He picked his way across the uneven, boulder-covered floor to the opposite side where the trogs had been standing before. There was the entrance he meant to take.

  He went through the opening in the rock and stood for a minute to let his eyes adjust. It wasn't too badly lit in here. Greenish, of course, but he was getting used to that now. Even his skin mixed with dust looked greenish. And with his new height thanks to Mel's healing—something burned in the lower part of his stomach just remembering lying in bed with her—he almost looked like a baby trog, he thought.

  Don't be stupid. A baby trog?

  Forty steps later, the smell hit him. Thirty more steps and he started to hear voices. Trog vocalizations. Grunts and hoarse rasping.

  He'd come to the end of the tunnel. He paused, thinking the time was now or never. There was no turning back. Mel was not behind him. There was no reason to go back. So, he braced himself and stepped forward.

  Less than a minute later, Ott was belly-down yet again, having taken another hard landing, possibly the worst yet, and ended up with two trogs on his back. His body was humming with . . . something . . . but there was no battle fury tinting his vision. They weren't pummeling him, just sitting on him, pinning him to the cave floor. He turned his head wishing whoever was talking and pleading with them like a scared child would shut up, then realized it was him babbling at them incessantly. So he stopped. There was no point. They didn't seem to understand him and they weren't speaking either, at least in any way he could discern with one eye and one ear pressed wetly into the dirt.

  Then the pummeling began.

  Chapter 62

  Rob was just getting to the good part, his mouth on Jenny’s. He'd found the perfect stroke of his tongue, the perfect rhythm. Jenny's face was flushed, shining, and gorgeous, her dark mass of hair tumbling over her shoulders on the pillow. Then the pounding on the door started.

  "The door is solid. Made from local dried hardwood. Been there for a century or so. Ignore it," he told her, though she looked doubtful.

  Then the shouting started. It couldn't be anything good. He cursed, thinking that word had come back about the delegation to the mine entrance. But they seemed to be saying Rob's father had been attacked in his bed chamber. That didn't sound plausible. The old man was on the top floor and surrounded by a veritable army of servants and sycophants; he had to be carried up and down the stairs to the great hall.

  "Go on," Jenny said, giving him a shove that failed to move him away from her.

  "No," he said. "You might be carried off by trogs again." But he got up and searched for his overshirt.

  "I wasn't carried off by them before," she said. "Only by my own stupidity."

  He gave her time to fix her hair and straighten her clothes. He pointed at her, though it was less of a command to her than a fervent wish that he could control everything in the entire living universe around him. "Stay there. I'm coming back." Then he went out.

  A houseman stood looking pale and ill. "It's your father, Rob," he said. "He's been killed. Stabbed to death."

  Rob frowned, shaking his head, not willing to believe it. "In his room?"

  “Well, he weren’t in the tents,” the man said, not disrespectfully, just at a loss.

  The houseman gestured for him to start walking as he talked, and Rob mourned the warm woman he was leaving behind more than he would ever mourn the old tyrant.

  Col Rob was dead? The thought was shocking, certainly, especially the chilling idea that they had a killer moving among them in the house—that left Rob icy cold. But the news that the old man was dead was nothing but a longed for and inevitable end to a life full of misery-making and deceit.

  Rob didn’t wonder who had wanted to kill Col R
ob, but rather which one of the old man’s many victims had actually done it. And he felt relief. Maybe Rob was going to be damned to an afterlife of eternal misery, but his overwhelming response to the news was relief that he hadn't been the one to kill his father after years of imagining it.

  "Col Rob was discovered in his room, dead of a wound to his chest. He was sliced clear to his gut," the houseman told him. "The body was still warm when it was discovered. His usual boy Charl was sent away from the house some time ago."

  "I did that," Rob admitted. "I sent him to the tents to tell people to come up here and take shelter in the great hall."

  "Well, apparently, when the house maid went in to ready Col Rob's bed for sleeping, she discovered that he was dead."

  They made it up the stairs, Rob on the houseman’s heels. Stepping into the upper hallway outside Col Rob’s chambers, they were confronted by a gathering of house servants and aides that the old man had kept close to him. They were murmuring and standing around trying to look scandalized and mournful. Very few of them were successful. Rob grimaced. He squared his shoulders and pushed his way through them with a feigned arrogance. He'd need to rid himself of most of them unless they could prove they were trustworthy and not hanging on just for the privilege or associated power. For now, he didn’t trust a single one of them. They could all take a walk in winter, every one of them, for as much as he trusted them.

  The doorway to his father's chambers was blocked by gawkers. Rob moved them aside, putting his hands on the closest shoulders and firmly pulling each obstacle out of the room. When they saw who was moving them they immediately bowed out, deferring to him in a manner that made him cringe even more. In short order, they cleared the room and shut the door behind them, and soon it was just Rob, alone with the old man's body.

  Col Rob was slumped over in his usual seat by the fireplace, his lap blanket still tucked around his hips. His eyes were closed and his chin tucked serenely into the side of the tall-backed chair, as if he had simply fallen asleep in front of the warm fire, though the dark wounds down his chest and the blood that soaked into the blanket testified to the contrary. Rob stood in front of the old man and stared. After a minute passed, he realized that the old man would never call him to attention again. Or mock him. Or scorn him. Or, for the love of Lutra, though it hadn't happened in years, beat him again.

  The door behind him abruptly opened, and Jenny walked in clothed in a robe, her eyes wide with horror and something else . . . pain. The hallway was empty behind her. She gestured feebly, "I asked all of them except for a few to go down to the great hall, where people need help. I think we're beyond help here." She stared at Rob, who was frozen where he stood in front of the body of the man who had been his father. For Rob, having her here in the old man's bed chamber was strange, even with the old man immobile in death. It seemed as though he should blink his eyes open and lash out with a disparaging comment.

  Rob ran a hand over his face. Blood swam in his head. Everything was going downhill, a straight descent into the depths of hell. Jenny's small hand wound around his arm and pulled him a little away. It was just the sight of him—Col Rob. It seemed impossible that he was dead, though his skin was now turning grayer.

  "I can’t believe this," Rob managed to say to her as she led him around a dividing curtain out of sight of the body.

  "It's all right," she said, making him take a seat in a solid wooden chair pushed up against the wall. "But horribly shocking." Her dark eyes, so close to his as she leaned toward him, made him feel a little better. He made an effort to pull himself together. The last thing he wanted was for the old man to be able to affect him in any manner, especially now when the man wasn't even alive. No. Col Rob would not manipulate, humiliate, or otherwise torture Rob again. Ever. Not Rob. And not the people Rob cared for.

  A body suddenly loomed in the doorway, and Rob barely had time to grab for his dagger, which wasn't at the belt on his hip. Harro's face reared up on top of a black, mud-covered body.

  "Gods above," Harro whispered hoarsely, "It's true then. He’s dead." He looked with wild eyes at Rob.

  "I didn't do it," Rob said.

  "Where's your dagger?" Harro said with a glance at Rob's waist. Rob narrowed his eyes.

  "I don't wear it in my room," he said sharply. Then he thought, I gave it to Charl, my father's faithful companion, when I sent him away from the house. Yes, that looks innocent.

  Yet he knew that he was blameless in this matter. He also knew that as much as he had hated the old man and had wished a million times he were dead, Rob hadn't actually wanted him dead. Because that meant that the house and the mines were Rob's. And Rob didn't want them. He didn't want the heartache. He didn't want the responsibility for hundreds of people. He didn't want to condemn Jenny to a life in this frigid wasteland if she didn't want it. And above all, he didn't want her to leave him. He would do anything to prevent that, even if it meant failing to fill the shoes the rotted-souled tyrant had left behind.

  He sat for a while with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees. Then Jenny drew close and put her warm hand on his back. The touch of her hand sent heat through him, and disgusted with himself, he resisted the urge to pull her onto his lap and hold her close.

  "Funeral pyre," she murmured. And he had the urge to make an inappropriate remark. He nearly laughed. He shook his head to clear the humor that was not true levity.

  "Yes," he said. Harro rejoined them, as they turned their backs on the corpse of Rob’s father. The stableman listened intently to his instructions. "We'll light the funeral pyre tomorrow night. These circumstances call for break with custom." Instead of waiting the usual two days' time to allow a viewing period, he meant. He didn't mean to imply any guilt on his part or suggest that any evidence needed to be destroyed. He would wait to meet with the other advisors and see what formal declaration they would make as part of the death ritual.

  A houseman entered and interrupted them. "The advisors must come in and make their final viewing. They have been rousted from their beds and summoned."

  "Please wait here for them. Give them what they require. And when they are finished, have the body prepared and taken to the wood shed for storage overnight," Rob said, his plea unnecessary. The man nodded, following his words as if they were commands. "Harro—" Rob frowned suddenly, focusing on the big man next to him, on his gore-covered clothing. "That's not mud."

  Harro's face was stonelike. "No, it is not. And I have further news. The men have captured one of the trogs. They are housing him under guard in the old cellar."

  Rob clenched his jaw. The cellar already housed bad memories for him. It was where his father had taken him for the most severe of his punishments. Harro, too, knew it, and he was watching Rob with carefully guarded eyes.

  "Do you need to take food and rest?" Rob asked Harro, who shook his head. "Fine. Clean yourself up then, and supervise the prisoner until I can get there. I need to go down to the great hall first." And find the boy Charl, he thought. And tell him that Col Rob was dead. Charl was the one person who would mourn him honestly.

  Jenny removed her hand from his back. "I'll go with you," she said, and Rob felt strangely buoyed. As if in the midst of this madness, things still had a chance of being all right again. Someday. Somehow. He didn't know how, but if he ever saw the slim chance of a path to getting there, he would take it.

  Chapter 63

  After stabbing Col Rob and leaving him with his life blood seeping into his lap rug, Guyse the shifter—now, assassin—left the big house and slipped through the trees down to the tent city. Silently, he made his way through the charred and muddied tents and was unmolested for his efforts. The slashed tent cloth flapped gusts of smoke all around him, and he used it to his advantage. No one saw him. No one was watching the hole now that the trogs had retreated. The withdrawal was considered a victory, and the people were no longer on guard, too exhausted to care, at least for now. Guyse made his way to the edge of the cavity and lowere
d himself down into the pitch black of the pit using his fingertips to find handholds in the frozen edges of dirt. Deeper and deeper he descended.

  He shut down his sense of smell immediately before the fumes affected him, and filtered the poison out of his system before it became overwhelming. Hopefully Mel had had presence of mind to do the same, though she didn't seem to be skilled at that kind of thing.

  What in the world had they been thinking, taking an untried novice—my daughter—along with them? False confidence born of intellectual arrogance. Guyse blamed his brother. Curse Ley’Albaer, the so-called seer, for failing his daughter, and cursed him again for dying.

  Guyse’s eyes adjusted to the dark while he crouched at the bottom of the pit, hoping that no trog stood sentry, hoping that they were just as foolish as the people aboveground in leaving the boundary between human and trog worlds unprotected and ignored. He looked around in the dark, noting two tunnels leading into the pit. Maybe an entrance and an exit. He scoured the ground, but found only footprints leading out. Not surprising. The trogs had used both tunnels for their rapid departure. Without hesitating any further, he chose the tunnel on the right. At fifty paces, he heard them. It was like approaching a barn full of cattle—stamping on the impacted dirt, hoarse lowing and rasping breaths, and the smell of beasts. He drew closer, following the brightening of the green glow of agamite. At the end of the tunnel, Guyse paused, and then stepped purposefully into the den.

  To his surprise, many of the creatures were stooped low, resting on their haunches and holding their heads as if weak or ill. A few sprawled, leaning against the outward walls of the small cavern. The effect was that he towered over them. And they all saw him. Those who had been conversing with their language of hand gestures—surprisingly fluid, using their fingers in different combinations, as well as their wrists and occasionally forearms—paused to look at him warily. The closest to him tightened their grips on their weapons. But Guyse was unarmed except for the blade he had used to kill Col Rob, which remained sheathed at his waist. He halted, slowly raising his arms up to show that he didn't intend to draw his weapon.