Masks

by E. C. Blake

  “And we’re going in there?”

  “Only for three or four hours. It’ll take us to another ravine, and that one leads us the rest of the way to the Secret City.”

  “Secret City?” Mara stared at him. “How can there be a Secret City? How do you hide a whole city from the Autarch?”

  Keltan shook his head. “Not—”

  “—your place to tell me.” She sighed. “I’m getting really tired of hearing that.”

  To get to the cave, they had to splash around the shallow edge of the lake. No one mounted. Even Grute walked now. His gag had been removed so he could eat and drink, and hadn’t been replaced, but his wrists remained bound behind his back, and Tishka still held his leash.

  By sheer bad luck, Mara found herself right in front of him as they reached the cave. “Mara,” he said, voice hoarse and mocking. “I’ve still got plans for you, pretty girl.”

  Keltan spun and backhanded the other boy across the face, the crack of skin against flesh so loud that even the unMasked at the head of the column, just about to enter the cavern, turned to look. “Don’t talk to her,” Keltan snarled. “Ever.”

  Grute jerked his head back to face the other boy. Blood trickled from his split lip. He caught Mara’s eye and licked the blood away, slowly, obscenely, then showed his teeth at her in a skull-like grin.

  Mara looked past him at Tishka, who flicked Grute’s leash. “Keep moving, you,” she growled. “And keep your mouth shut. Or I’ll gag you again. And I won’t use a clean rag, either.”

  Grute gave her a glance over his shoulder, then pressed his lips together and started forward. Keltan and Mara moved aside to let him pass. Alita and Prella had been behind him. “He talks to you again, knee him in the knackers,” Alita told Mara under her breath. “Works every time.”

  “What are knackers?” Prella asked.

  Alita gave her a look. Prella blushed. “Oh,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” Keltan said. “It’s just talk. He can’t hurt you. The unMasked won’t let him.”

  “They can’t keep him a prisoner forever,” Mara said.

  “Long enough,” Keltan said. “Either he changes, or . . .”

  “They should string him up,” Prella piped up. “By the knackers!” She turned bright red as she said it, but stuck out her chin and looked defiant.

  Mara couldn’t help it; she burst out laughing. So did Alita. Keltan looked faintly alarmed. Mara found that even more amusing.

  The glistening rock of the tunnel walls almost brushed the shoulders of the horses as the column passed through it, single file. Four of the unMasked carried torches. It wasn’t nearly enough light, in Mara’s opinion, but the flickering glow at least usually illuminated the rough places that could catch your feet or the stalactites that could split your scalp. The horses blew and stamped and shivered, clearly uneasy, but they kept moving.

  After a couple of hours’ travel, the party took a break in a large chamber from which several tunnels exited. Mara looked around uneasily. If you went down the wrong one, you could wander in the dark forever!

  They carried on, until finally, after another couple of hours, the tunnel widened, the ceiling drew away, and they emerged into an enormous cave mouth, gray evening light flooding in through an opening as big as Mara’s lost home. The view wasn’t much—yet another towering wall of rock on the other side of yet another stream—but Mara thought she’d never seen anything more beautiful.

  A blackened circle of stone near the mouth of the cave spoke of previous camps, and sure enough, Edrik called a halt. The riders stripped their horses of saddles and saddlebags and led them out of the cave and out of sight, presumably to some patch of grass. The other unMasked started unrolling bedrolls. Tishka lit a fire in the old fire circle, using wood from a stockpile in one corner.

  “One more day’s travel,” Keltan said as he and all five girls from the wagon stood near the crackling flames, warming themselves. “And it’s easier walking.” He nodded to the outside. “That ravine runs downhill, all the way to the sea.”

  “And that’s where the Secret City is?” Alita said.

  Keltan nodded.

  The sea, Mara thought, spirits lifting at the thought. She’d never seen it, could barely even imagine such a vast quantity of water. But then again, she’d seen a lot of things in the past three days she would have previously found hard to imagine.

  Two corners of the cave, screened by rocks, had been set aside as latrines. “I’ll be back in a minute,” Mara told Keltan and the others, and headed toward the women’s side, grateful that at least in this camp Grute would be peeing out of her sight.

  She did what she needed to do, trying not to breathe too deeply—several women had been in the space before her—then started back toward the fire.

  Something caught her eye, a glint of light deep in the darkness of the cave’s recesses. At first she thought it was a bit of shiny rock, reflecting the firelight; but as she watched, its color shifted, from red to blue to green to yellow and back again. She hurried over to it.

  In a hollow atop a large boulder of black stone, magic had gathered.

  There was very little of it, compared to the magic in her father’s stone basin, or even the magic Ethelda had poured from her small vial onto her hands before healing Mara’s face. But there could be no doubt that that was what it was.

  She hurried back to the others. “Come see what I’ve found,” she said excitedly.

  Looking puzzled, they followed her. “What is it?” Alita asked. “An animal?”

  “Gold?” Simona guessed.

  “Diamonds?” added Prella.

  “No . . .” They reached the place. Mara stared down at the seething color in the tiny pool, entranced. “Better!”

  The others followed her gaze, then exchanged glances. “Um . . . Mara?” Keltan said. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Just black rock,” Prella said.

  “Boring black rock,” Alita added.

  Mara stared at them, bewildered. She’d assumed that Grute had been lying to her about the Gifted losing their Gift when their Masking failed. Keltan, Simona, and Kirika shouldn’t be able to see it, of course, but Alita and Prella had also had the Gift. “But . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  Alita’s eyes suddenly widened. “Magic? Is it magic? You can still see it, even after . . . ?”

  “Yes,” Mara said simply. “I can see it.”

  “Oh!” said Prella in a small, wondering voice. “Lucky . . .”

  “But why?” Alita demanded. “Why can you still see it when we can’t?” She sounded almost angry. “I’ll bet it was that Ethelda, that Healer that came to your Masking. I’ll bet she did something to save your Gift. While Prella and I . . .” She pressed her lips together.

  Was that it? Mara thought. Had Ethelda healed more than her face?

  It was the only answer she had. She looked at the resentment on Alita’s face, and felt bad, but she couldn’t wish she’d lost her Gift along with everything else.

  Although she didn’t know what she could do with it. She was supposed to have started training to use her Gift just as soon as she was Masked. Now . . . who would teach her? Who would be able to tell her anything about magic or how it could be used?

  Or abused, she thought uneasily. There were a lot of old stories about magic being used for terrible things, and stories about Gifted hurting themselves and others by sheer accident.

  “What are you doing back here?” said a deep voice behind them, and Mara jumped—even though they were doing nothing wrong, that authoritative voice had triggered her naughty-child reflex—and turned to see Edrik frowning at them.

  “Mara can still see magic,” Prella piped up at once.

  Alita shot her a disgusted look, but Mara, reminding herself again she was doing nothing wrong, said, “Yes, I can.” She p
ointed at the tiny pool of color. “There.”

  Edrik glanced down, but clearly saw nothing. “Really,” he said, sounding skeptical. “I don’t see anything.”

  Mara felt a flash of irritation. “You don’t have the Gift.” It came out sounding much more insolent than she had intended.

  Edrik raised an eyebrow. “True,” he said. “But it is also true that your Masking failed. We have been told that those Gifted whose Maskings fail lose their Gifts.”

  Told by whom? Mara wondered again, but knew she wouldn’t get an answer to that question.

  “Why should you be any different?” Edrik continued, and Mara couldn’t answer that question for him any more than she’d been able to answer it for the others. He stared down at the stone. “So . . . assuming you’re telling the truth . . .”

  “I don’t lie,” Mara snapped.

  He raised a skeptical face. “Can you do anything with it?”

  Mara felt a chill, her misgivings rising again. “I . . . I don’t know. I . . .” She looked at Alita and Prella. “We were all supposed to start our training in the use of magic as soon as we were Masked.”

  “Convenient,” Kirika said, the first word she’d contributed to the conversation. Mara glanced at her, and saw that her expression was closed and hard. What’s her problem?

  But her scornful tone had stung. Pushing aside her doubts, Mara reached out and touched the magic, remembering how magic had formed a glowing blue glove when Ethelda had poured it into her palm from the vial she carried. There wasn’t enough magic in the tiny basin to cover her hand, but the instant she touched it, it transferred itself from the depression to her fingers. When she straightened again, her fingers glistened with shifting colors, like oil on water.

  It didn’t feel like oil, though. It felt . . . alive, somehow; as though she were holding hands with someone . . . with her father, or . . .

  ...or Keltan . . .

  “I still don’t see anything,” Edrik said.

  “It’s on my hand,” Mara said distantly, all her attention on the strange sight and sensation. Now what? she thought. How do I make it do something? And what can I make it do?

  She looked at Kirika, who was staring at her fingers with a scornful expression Mara suddenly wanted to wipe off her face. Her gaze traveled down to the other girl’s cloak. At some point during the journey Kirika had caught it on something, tearing a gash about six inches long. Easy to fix, with a needle and thread or . . .

  Moved by instinct as much as by conscious decision, she reached out her magic-coated fingers and touched Kirika’s cloak.

  She gasped; it felt as if she had stuck her hand into a nettle bush, pain and prickling crawling across her skin. At the same time, the multiple colors of the thin sheen of magic faded away, leaving only a ruby-red glow that flowed into the cloak like a bloodstain.

  Kirika jerked away. “Don’t touch me!” she snarled. Mara lowered her hand. But she kept staring at the place she had touched. Red tendrils of light writhed across the tear in the wool for an instant, then vanished . . .

  ...as did the tear, mended so perfectly it might never have existed.

  Kirika looked down at the repaired cloak, then back at Mara. Her eyes narrowed, but all she said, in a voice hard as stone, was, “Don’t ever touch me without permission. Ever.” She raised her eyes to the others. “Any of you.”

  Nobody was listening. They were all staring at the magically mended cloth.

  “Wow,” Keltan said at last, breaking the silence.

  Both of Edrik’s eyebrows were raised now. “It seems you’re telling the truth.” He glanced around. “Is there more magic here? There are other things that need mending . . .”

  Mara shook her head. “I haven’t seen any more. And I used it all . . .” She paused, then leaned over the basin. Yes, she’d used all the magic collected there, but she could see more already seeping into the basin, a tiny thread, insubstantial as gossamer.

  Where does it come from? she wondered. And why does it collect here?

  She had no answer. Something else they were going to teach me, she thought bitterly.

  How many years had it taken that slender thread of magic to collect in the basin? And she had used it all up in an instant.

  She straightened. “There’s no more,” she said.

  Edrik looked thoughtful. “But if we could get more . . .” He stood silent for a moment, then shook his head. “A problem for another day.” He nodded back toward the fires. “You should eat and get to sleep. We have another long walk tomorrow.”

  They walked back to the fire. Kirika took herself off and lay down, back to them. Alita’s expression remained closed and resentful. Keltan kept stealing wide-eyed glances at her. Only Prella and Simona seemed unaffected by the news that she still had her Gift. Prella prattled on about how beautiful magic was and how much she missed being able to see it. Simona prodded the smaller girl along with questions but didn’t ask Mara any. She seemed almost . . . frightened.

  Mara didn’t know what to think. She still had her Gift. Wonderful. But what good was it? She might never see magic again, where they were going. All she’d accomplished, as far as she could see, was mend a torn cloak, and in the process, frighten Simona, make Alita jealous, annoy Kirika, and . . .

  She glanced at Keltan, who saw her look and immediately turned his gaze back to the fire, poking at it, completely unnecessarily, with a stray stick. “I’m not going to suddenly turn you into a pig, you know,” she finally burst out. “I had the Gift when you met me the first time. I’ve had it all along. I haven’t changed.”

  He started, then glanced at her a little sheepishly. “I . . . I know,” he said. “It’s just . . . I’ve never actually seen anyone use magic before. The way you just touched the cloak, and it knit itself up again . . .” He looked back into the fire. “It was creepy.”

  She sighed. “Well,” she said, “you’ll probably never see it again. That may be the last magic I ever see.”

  Keltan said nothing more about it, but at least he quit looking at her as though she’d sprouted a second head.

  Despite her exhaustion—or maybe even because of it—it was a long time before Mara slept that night. It seemed she could still feel the magic, clinging to her fingers, waiting for her to use it . . . and now that she had felt it once, she found that she wanted to feel it again, and feel more of it.

  What else could I do with it?

  She didn’t know; couldn’t know without more magic. But someday, she hoped she’d find out.

  The next day, at the end of a long but relatively easy walk down a broad ravine, they finally arrived at the Secret City.

  NINE

  The Secret City

  NOT THAT MARA even saw the Secret City at first glance. She had eyes only for the ocean.

  The ravine ended in a sandy cove, shaped like a horseshoe, surrounded on three sides by towering walls of black stone. Directly across from the returning party, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, water began, and what amazed Mara was that it never ended: at least, not until it met the half-set sun on the distant horizon. The sea rolled endlessly in toward the shore, breaking in long, shadowy waves, black against the orange fire pouring across the water from the sunset. Mara gaped. She’d never imagined anything so big or so beautiful: almost as beautiful as magic. The masts of a half-dozen boats pulled up along the shore speared the red sky.

  But the sun made the ocean too bright to look at for long, so she tore her gaze away and instead studied the cliffs. Thin tendrils of smoke, lit orange by the sun, rose from the cliff to her left, presumably from unseen chimneys or fissures high above. Narrow window slits punctuated the rock face at ground level and for three or four stories above that, and one large opening gave access to the cliff’s interior from the cove. Other black openings gaped at the base of the cliff on the right, though none higher than ground level,
and no smoke rose from that side of the cove.

  Through the window slits to her left she glimpsed glowing lamplight and flickering hearth light and dark, moving figures. Then suddenly, from the large opening at ground level, men, women, and children poured out like ants from an overturned nest.

  Mara drew back instinctively as people ran toward them, until she found herself back to back with Alita, Prella, and Simona. Kirika stood apart, fists and jaw clenched, as though daring anyone to come near. Keltan, on the other hand, moved forward. He clasped hands with another boy, a head taller and perhaps two years older, and brought the youth over to the rescued girls. Thin as a broom, with a thatch of black hair, he had startlingly blue eyes and white teeth. Both flashed in the last of the sun’s light as he gave them a friendly smile.

  “Mara, Alita, Prella, Kirika, Simona,” Keltan said, “I’d like you to meet Hyram, Edrik’s son.”

  “Hi,” Hyram said. “Welcome to the Secret City!”

  “City?” Alita said. “All I see is a bunch of caves.”

  Hyram laughed. “Well, what is Tamita but a bunch of man-made caves? People lived in caves a long time before they built buildings. In fact, they lived in some of these caves; we’ve found their wall paintings.”

  Prella shuddered. “I don’t like caves,” she said. “The one we came through on the way here was horrible. I don’t even like the idea of caves. In stories they’re always full of bats and snakes and bears and . . . and monsters.”

  “I can honestly say,” Hyram said, smile widening, “that I have never seen a monster in the Secret City. And I’ve lived here my whole life.” He jerked his head toward the entrance. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Mara hesitated, glancing toward Edrik. Were they allowed . . . ?

  But Edrik, busy kissing the tall, black-haired woman who had her arms around his neck, seemed singularly uninterested in anything they might do.

  Hyram followed her gaze, and laughed again. He’d already laughed a lot since they’d met him. She couldn’t help smiling in response. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You won’t get in trouble. Mom told me to get you settled.”