Masks

by E. C. Blake

  “So where does the ore go?”

  “There’s a building, tucked up against the wall in the northeast corner of the camp, behind the Warden’s palace and the Watcher barracks,” Katia said. “Not a very big building. A gate opens from it through the palisade. The rocks go into that building for a while. Then they’re taken outside the walls and dumped into a ravine about a quarter of a mile from here. They look exactly the same when they’re dumped as they did when they were hauled out of here.” She gestured at the chamber. “But every once in a while, a wagon is driven up to that back gate and loaded with something other than rocks. And those wagons head off down the road toward Tamita.”

  Mara had a horrible thought. “Maybe there is no ore,” she said. “Maybe this is all just a ruse, just a scheme to keep the unMasked occupied, keep them from rebelling.” She looked up at the rock ceiling just above her head. “The Watchers are outnumbered. Surely we could—”

  “The Watchers are armed. We aren’t,” Katia said. “And it’s not just the Watchers keeping us in our place. The trustees like it here. They’re unMasked. They can’t go home. But here they get . . . privileges.” She leaned toward Mara. “If you’re a girl, some of the trustees are worse than the Watchers. If they like your looks . . .” Her voice trailed off, her gaze sliding to Mara’s smooth, unscarred face. “And even if we did somehow overpower the Watchers and the trustees and escape the camp, what good would it do us? We can’t go home, either. There’s nothing for any of the unMasked outside the walls of this camp except death: a slow death in the Wilderness, or a quick death at the hands of the Watchers.” She turned away, and angrily slammed her steel bar into the black stone wall.

  There’s the unMasked Army, Mara again wanted to say. But was there? They’d done nothing to save the children being brought to the camp. They’d even kept themselves secret from the bandit bands. They wouldn’t welcome a flood of unMasked fleeing this camp, she thought. Or they would have attacked it long ago.

  And so once again she had to face the truth: more than likely, they wouldn’t rescue her, either.

  Mara swallowed an upsurge of bile in the back of her throat and grabbed her own steel bar. Pounding away at the black stone suddenly seemed attractive. It was hard to think with that noise in her ears, and thinking was the last thing she wanted to do. But despite the crash of steel on stone, despite the growing ache in her arms and shoulders and the sting of sweat in her eyes, she couldn’t shut off her mind entirely.

  Eventually they produced another basket of ore. Katia sent her back to the shaft with it alone, this time, and as she pushed it ahead of her through the low tunnels, she couldn’t help thinking. But rather than let herself imagine her own bleak future, she instead turned her mind to the puzzle of what they were mining. What could be extracted from rocks without crushing, panning, or smelting? It didn’t make sense.

  The ugly boy took her full basket and handed her an empty one, without comment this time. She headed back to the tunnel, attached her lantern to the front of the basket, shoved it into the hole in the rock, and began pushing it ahead of her.

  Halfway back to the chamber where she and Katia were working, the basket banged hard into a timber. The lantern fell off, crashed to the floor . . .

  ...and went out.

  The darkness slammed down on her like a cave-in. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think: just crouched there, frozen, as if she were already dead.

  But of course she wasn’t, and after a long moment, when nothing else happened, she managed to draw a deep, shuddering breath. Katia is up ahead somewhere. All I have to do is keep crawling. There aren’t any side tunnels. I’ll see her light when I get closer. I’m not trapped. I’m not dead. Everything is all right.

  All right, as long as she didn’t let panic get the better of her.

  She forced herself to resume crawling. Push the basket, then move knee, hand, knee, hand; push the basket, knee, hand, knee, hand. She didn’t find the lantern, but she had no way to light it anyway. Presumably she was shoving it ahead of her with the basket.

  Something brushed her hair; a rock or timber. Her breath caught, and she ducked lower.

  And it was then, in the dark with her head down, that she discovered what they were mining.

  It was faint, almost invisible. Even the dim light of the candle lantern had been enough to mask it every other time she’d crawled through the tunnel. But now, in absolute darkness, there could be no doubt:

  In the rock beneath her ran a thread-thin filament of color, color that changed from moment to moment, red, gold, blue, violet, green.

  Magic!

  She jerked her head up, and paid the price as her skull cracked the rock. She winced, but kept her head raised, peering into the darkness.

  There . . . and there. Like a cobweb of color splayed across the rock. Now she knew why the rocks weren’t crushed or melted. This wasn’t a mine for silver or gold, iron or coal.

  This was a mine for magic. They were mining magic! And that meant there was magic all around them!

  She felt a moment’s euphoria, but it faded quickly. Those slender threads of magic offered nothing she could use. There were no glowing puddles like she had seen in the cave with the unMasked Army, or in the basin in the hut on the ridge.

  But somewhere, she thought, somewhere there’s a store of the magic taken from the mine, waiting for the wagon to Tamita. A lot of magic. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll get a chance to use it.

  The magical illumination from the rocks was too faint to light her path down the tunnel. She still had to feel her way, still had to keep her head low to avoid cracking it on the stone. But at least the filmy web alleviated the darkness enough that she didn’t quite feel like she’d been buried alive, and as it turned out, she didn’t have to crawl all that much farther before she lost the glow of magic entirely in the faint glimmer of Katia’s light.

  She emerged into the dimly lit chamber where they had been working and found it almost blinding. Blinking, she held out her candle lantern to Katia. “It went out,” she said.

  “Happens,” Katia said. She took out the candle, relit it from her own lantern, and handed it back to Mara. “I had to crawl all the way to the shaft in the dark a couple of days ago. Half convinced myself there’d been a cave-in and I’d never get out. My throat’s still a little raw from screaming.” She said it not matter-of-factly, but with the dull, dead voice of someone who expected such things to happen and knew there was nothing she could do about it.

  Mara didn’t know what to say. She’d only been down here a few hours. What would she be like after days . . . weeks?

  It won’t happen, she thought fiercely. The unMasked Army . . . and if not them, then . . .

  Magic. Back in the light of the candle lanterns, she could no longer see its faint glimmer in the black stone, but she knew it was there. Minute amounts, too diffuse for her to do anything with, but it was there.

  If only she knew more about the Gift. If only the Gifted were trained in the use of magic before their Masking, instead of after. She’d used magic three times now, and every time, it had hurt. That couldn’t be right. She had to be doing something wrong. But what?

  Her father had once given her a complicated little automaton, a wind-up drummer who would beat different rhythms on his tiny instrument depending on how you set the knobs on his back. The gift had come with a handwritten set of instructions from the craftsman who had built it. Too bad this Gift doesn’t, she thought.

  She didn’t tell Katia about the magic. She wasn’t supposed to have it anymore, not after her Masking failed. And what good would it do Katia to know the truth of what they were mining? She couldn’t even see the magic.

  But at least she’d know there was some point to all this, Mara argued with herself. That we’re not just breaking rock—and our backs—to no purpose.

  But though it hal
f-shamed her, her strong sense that she had to keep her secrets to herself, for her own benefit, her conviction that in this place she couldn’t trust anyone, even Katia, kept her silent.

  “Let’s get back to work,” Katia said. “We may not be on quota, but if we don’t show signs we can meet it soon, the supervisor may decide we need motivation all the same.”

  By the time the seemingly endless shift was over, Mara’s back and shoulders burned as if she’d been whipped, her fingers bled, and broken blisters stung her palms. Her head throbbed from banging it against the rock—not only when her candle went out and she saw the magic, but again the next time she took ore back to the shaft: staring at the floor, trying to see the veins of magic in the light, she had failed to see the low spot in the roof. She’d drunk her water too fast and hadn’t had any for an hour now, and all that time she’d been swimming in her own sweat, so that her mouth and throat felt raw as new-butchered pork. Dust gritted between her teeth. And she still had to face the terrifying ascent on the thing they called a “man-engine.”

  When she finally stepped off of the horrible contraption, her legs shook so much she almost fell back down the shaft to her death. Fortunately, a trustee standing close at hand grabbed her arm and pulled her to safety. “First day’s the best, girl,” he sneered. Then he shoved her toward the stairs so hard she slammed down onto her hands and knees, adding new bruises and stinging scrapes to her already impressive collection.

  Katia came off the platform a moment later and helped her to her feet. “Let’s get out of here,” she muttered. She helped Mara climb the three flights of stairs, up past the constantly moving beams of the man-engine, but another trustee stopped them at the exit. “Supervisor sent up a note with your last bucket,” he said to Katia. “Says you aren’t trying hard enough to meet quota.”

  “Supervisor also told us we’re not on quota,” Katia shot back. “Not until Mara has—”

  “Supervisor thinks you need to try harder now,” the trustee said. He grinned at her. He had a patchy black beard that hadn’t grown where his face was scarred, and was missing five teeth. “You’re for the Watchers tonight. Barracks B. Go.”

  Katia had been holding onto Mara’s arm. She released it. “That’s not fair!” The words sounded squeezed, as though she’d had to force them through a throat suddenly too small for them. “We were off quota. The supervisor said—”

  “It’s fair if we say it’s fair.” The trustee’s grin twisted to a scowl. “Go! Or I’ll drag you by your hair.”

  Katia’s fists clenched. Mara saw them tremble. But then, convulsively, she pushed past the trustee and disappeared.

  Mara’s heart banged against her ribs. “Me–me, too?” Her voice sounded as strange and tight in her ears as Katia’s had.

  The trustee turned his piggish eyes back on her. “No,” he said. “You’re lucky.” The leering grin returned. “Or maybe not. Warden wants to see you.” He jerked his head toward the outside, and Mara, looking past him, saw a Watcher standing on the boardwalk that ran along the top of the trench. Whether it was the same man who had escorted her that morning, she had no clue. All Watchers looked alike, except in size.

  Escorted by the Watcher, she retraced the steps she had taken that morning, though she hurt so much she felt as if she had aged a hundred years in those few hours. Then, the sun’s light had barely begun to brighten the gray clouds. The clouds had blown away, but she still couldn’t see the sun: it had slipped behind the ridges to the west, down into the hidden ocean, and stars already pricked the clear, dark-blue sky. All winter, Mara realized, the day shift would see no light at all. They would wake in darkness, descend into darkness, rise into darkness, fall asleep in darkness . . . over and over through the endless, frozen months.

  How long has this been going on? Mara thought numbly as she stumbled along after the Watcher. How many years—decades—has this camp been here?

  How long had the unMasked been digging in darkness like worms, eking out a few miserable years of existence after the failure of their Masks, until malnutrition, mistreatment, or the menacing mine itself brought their miserable lives to a miserable end? And all to gather the bits of magic that clung to the black stone, shipping it off to serve the Autarch, sitting in his palace like a bloated black spider at the dark heart of a tangled web.

  The magic in my father’s basin, she thought sickly. The magic I thought so beautiful. Did it come from here? From the sweat and blood of the unMasked?

  Fury suddenly gripped her heart, fury such as she had never felt . . . fury, and fear. If the unMasked Army did not come for her, if Catilla decided she wasn’t worth the risk, then she, too, would live and die in this hellhole. And soon enough, it would be her turn to make the walk to the Watchers’ barracks, maybe because she’d missed quota, maybe because she’d said the wrong thing . . . or maybe just because, behind his black mask, one of the Watchers saw her unmarked face and lusted after her.

  Or would it be one of the trustees who took her first? One of the old ones, rejected by his Mask because of some already blossoming nastiness inside, like hidden rot at the core of an apple. The one with the patchwork beard and missing teeth, maybe—Grute, all grown up.

  Unbidden, the image of Grute’s face in his last moment of life appeared in her mind: the face that an instant later had vanished in a red-and-gray explosion. I did that, she thought. I killed him. I touched him with magic, and I killed him.

  It had happened three days ago, but the memory suddenly hit her with as much force as if it had been three minutes. Her knees turned to jelly and the Watcher had to grab her to hold her upright. She felt her gorge rise, and swallowed hard to keep from throwing up all over his shiny black boots.

  She pushed away all the images from that night, Grute, naked, coming toward her, Grute’s headless body falling to the floor, the thump it made as it hit, the bits of flesh and bone on her skin, on her clothes, in her hair, on the walls, and everywhere the blood, the blood, the blood . . .

  But the images wouldn’t go away. Now that they had broken through whatever tissue-thin veil her mind had wrapped them in, they were just there, as fresh as though they had just happened. She swallowed and straightened and tried to walk tall, tried to be brave. But the memories of Grute’s death danced around in her mind’s backstage, ready to come down center at any moment.

  The interview with the Warden was mercifully brief. He asked her again if she had anything to tell him. She told him again she didn’t. He asked her how she had found her first day in the mine. She lied and said it hadn’t been as bad as she’d thought it would be. He frowned and his eyes narrowed: then they widened again and she saw his lips curl into a cruel smile behind the Mask. “In that case,” he said, “I will not ask you again for some time. Let’s say . . . three days. In three days, I will call for you.” The smile widened, white teeth flashing. “It will be the last time—one way or the other.” He nodded to the Watcher, who took Mara back out into the camp. But he didn’t take her to either the longhouse or the mess hall. Instead, he stopped at another large square building, smoke rising from its tall chimney. “Women’s bath,” he said. “From here you go to the mess hall. From there you go to your longhouse. Got it?”

  She nodded numbly. He opened the door for her, and she stepped into warm, damp air that puffed out into the cold in a cloud of steam.

  The door closed behind her, and she stood still for a moment to get her bearings. The wall in front of her ended a few steps to both left and right: it was really just a barrier to block cold drafts—and possibly prying eyes, though she doubted in this place anyone had much concern for privacy.

  She could hear voices, quiet, subdued. She walked to her left and stepped out into the main body of the building.

  A large pool filled the middle of the room. At the far side flames flickered behind the metal grillwork of a huge cast-iron oven set in a red-brick hearth. A pipe extruded from
the brickwork, steaming water pouring from it into the pool.

  A dozen women of varying ages were scattered around the pool, some wrapped in toweling and sitting on the edge, others soaking in the middle. All were painfully thin, ribs standing out beneath their breasts. Near the hearth two fully dressed women scrubbed clothes in a wooden tub. As Mara watched, one of them picked up an armful of gray cloth and spread it on racks attached to the oven’s bricks.

  An older girl, maybe eighteen, entered the bathhouse behind Mara and brushed past her without a second glance, hobbling around the pool to where the women were washing clothes. She stripped, dropped her clothes into a basket next to the washtub, then limped to the water and let herself down into it with a sigh.

  Mara, feeling self-conscious but desperate to be clean, followed her example, walking around the slippery stones to the washwomen, who didn’t even look up from their work as she struggled out of her own clothes and underwear, dropped them into the basket, and then hurried to the pool, sure everyone must be staring at her even though in fact nobody was.

  The warm water felt wonderful to her aching arms and legs, though it stung the scrapes and cuts, and she relaxed into it. “I didn’t expect this,” she said, really to herself, but the older girl close by glanced at her.

  “They give us baths,” she said. “They give us food. But only so they can get as much out of us as they can get.”

  “As much work?” Mara said.

  “Not just work,” the girl said bitterly. And with that she closed her eyes and sank down so that her ears were below the water, effectively ending the conversation.

  Mara soaked in the warmth for a few moments longer; then a harsh gong sounded outside. The women, variously groaning or silent—one wept quietly—got out of the water, toweled off, and began pulling on their clothes.

  Mara’s had never made it into the wash tub, and the washerwomen had simply stopped work and walked away when the gong had sounded. She had no choice but to pull back on the filthy, sweat-soaked drawers, undershirt, tunic, and trousers. The girl she’d spoken to was in the same boat. “Are the washerwomen here every day?” Mara asked.