by E. C. Blake
Edrik stood in the middle of the camp squinting up into the soft gray mass that had swallowed the peaks. “One more day,” he said. “There could be snow in these clouds, and if it snows, we cannot spend another night without fire.”
“I don’t think I can spend another night without fire whether it snows or not,” Illina said.
Edrik looked the other way, up the slope to the gray rock spire. “We all need warming,” he said. “And hot food. This cloud is so thick and the wind so strong no smoke will clear the ridge. At night a glow might betray us, so we must still sleep in the cold and the dark, but for now . . .” He nodded to Illina. “Light a fire,” he said. “Just one. Driest branches you can find.”
Mara relaxed a little. She’d been afraid Edrik would declare then and there that they would have to break camp and return to the Secret City, without even given Katia a chance to make an appearance. But it looked as if she would get her second day of watching.
The wind gusted, tossing the treetops. Yellow and brown leaves cascaded around her. Mara, shivering, wrapped her arms around herself. She did not think she would get a third day.
“Once the fire is built, warm yourself while you can,” Edrik told her. “You must stay on the ridge all day to watch for your friend.” Mara heard an unspoken “. . . if she’s still alive.”
Edrik set the watches. Tishka and Illina would join her for the first three hours. Skrit and Skrat would be her companions for the next three. And Keltan, having had the day to catch up on his sleep, would join Hyram in keeping her company during the last three hours, which would take them to back the edge of darkness. Mara didn’t know whether that was good news or bad. If the day wound down with no sign of Katia, and she had to do what she feared she would have to do, what would Keltan and Hyram do in response?
She took full advantage of the fire Illina soon had blazing, sitting as close to it as she could to bake the chill out of her bones and ease the morning soreness that was the residue of everything that had happened to her over the past few days. She massaged her calf. The cut seemed almost fully healed, but every once in a while it would jab her with pain, as though to remind her it wasn’t quite gone yet.
Illina handed her a steaming bowl of grain mush with a big dollop of butter in the middle of it, and she shoveled it down. It tasted like, well, like mush, but at least it was hot and filling. Meanwhile, Illina busied herself heating water in a pot, into which she tossed a packet of what looked like dry grass, taken from the leather pouch she wore at her side. She ladled some into a mug and handed it to Mara. Mara sipped it cautiously. It had a bitter, earthy taste. Mara made a face. “What is it?”
“Tellik tea,” Illina said as she handed out mugs to the others.
Hyram slurped his back as though it was redcherry juice. “Just what I needed,” he said. “Thanks, Illina.”
Mara took a second sip. It didn’t taste any better than the first. “It’s . . . um . . .” She hesitated, searching for the right word, not wanting to hurt Illina’s feelings.
But Illina just laughed. “It’s absolutely awful. You don’t have to tell me that. But nothing beats it for warming and waking you on a cold morning.”
Mara, who definitely felt the need for both warming and waking, drained her mug despite the taste, and sure enough, felt both warmer and marginally more alert once finished. Edrik stood a few paces away from the others, sipping from his mug while peering up at the sky. He drained the last of the tea and returned to the fire. “Daylight’s wasting. Illina, I’ll clean up. You and Tish and Mara need to get going. I’m sure Keltan is wondering where you are.”
Shortly after that, Mara and the two women made the arduous climb to the stone spire. They relieved Keltan, sending him down the hill with the good news that a fire and hot food awaited him, and then buried themselves in the cover of the copse.
The morning shift change had already passed. Only a few Watchers and trustees moved around the camp. The raw wind chasing the clouds down from the mountains kept flicking Mara’s hair in her face, forcing her to brush it back repeatedly until she finally got smart and tucked the stray ends under her ugly rabbit-fur hat. Unfortunately, no amount of twitching or rearranging her cloak seemed able to counter the wind’s disconcerting ability to get under the collar of her coat and send cold tendrils down her back.
But despite the discomfort, which only grew as the hours crawled past, Mara stayed put all day, except for once answering the call of nature. As she hurried back from the far corner of the copse where she had relieved herself, she worried. If Katia had emerged while she wasn’t present, would the others even notice her? From this distance Katia might look like an adult, like one of the trustees. Mara trusted only herself to spot her.
But Katia did not appear: not during the morning, and not during the early afternoon, when Skrit and Skrat silently replaced Illina and Tishka. Mara stayed put through their quiet watch, and on into the final watch when, with the sun already westering, Keltan and Hyram joined her. “Any sign?” Keltan said.
Mara shook her head miserably.
“Are you sure . . . ?” Hyram began, but subsided when Mara gave him a fierce look.
The late afternoon wore away. Watchers and trustees moved from building to building. The trustee servant from the house once more dug in the garden, pulling out redroots, it looked like. Once Mara saw the Warden stride down the boulevard, over the bridge, and toward the minehead. He returned half an hour later. She pointed him out to Keltan and Hyram.
Occasionally unMasked emerged from the minehead and pulled/pushed wagonloads of stone to the nondescript building, in the left-hand nearest corner from their vantage point, where the magic was extracted. She pointed that out to the boys, too. Once a wagon loaded with black stone rolled through the smaller gate behind that building, trundling out of sight along a rutted track that led around the shoulder of a hill. Somewhere there must be an enormous waste heap, Mara thought.
Even from such huge quantities of ore, she couldn’t believe they were extracting much magic. The threads of magic she had seen when her lamp had gone out in the mine had been so minute, so insubstantial, she thought a ton of black lodestone couldn’t possibly yield more than a single urn of magic.
She also wondered how they drew it out of the rock, and how much magic was stored in the extraction building. Presumably that was also where the urns from the magic-wells were stored. She wondered how long it took to collect enough magic to create a full load to ship back to Tamita. She wondered a lot of things while she lay in the trees with Hyram and Keltan; but mostly she wondered where Katia was.
She kept glancing at the sky. The sun only occasionally peeked through the scudding cloud cover, but every time she saw it, it was noticeably lower. Maybe Edrik will give me one more day, she thought, as the already gray day began to dim toward twilight. Maybe . . .
But then Edrik himself wriggled into place beside the three of them. “Any luck?” he asked.
Mara shook her head.
“I meant what I said,” Edrik told her. “It’s not safe for us to linger here any longer. If your friend does not make an appearance before dark tonight, then tomorrow, we return to the Secret City.”
Mara said nothing.
Edrik took another long look at the camp below, grunted, and squirmed away again.
Hyram gave her an apologetic look. “Don’t blame him,” he said. “He has to do everything he can to keep his people safe—”
“I don’t blame him,” Mara said.
Keltan put a comforting hand on her shoulder. She let him.
But in truth, she was hardly aware of either of them. Her thoughts were entirely focused on what she intended to do when darkness descended.
That time came soon enough—too soon. The twilight deepened. Hyram and Keltan exchanged a look they probably thought she didn’t notice, then Keltan said gently, “We need to get back. Don’
t want to go down that path in the dark. Tishka must already be on her way up.”
“We gave it our best,” Hyram said. “I hate to say it, but—”
“Then don’t,” Mara said shortly. She took a deep breath. “You two go on back to the rock spire. I’ll be along in a minute.”
Keltan looked uncomfortable. “I don’t like leaving you alone up here to—”
She gave him a look. “I’ve been lying here for hours,” she said. “What I need to do I really don’t want you watching.”
He reddened. Hyram gave a muffled snort of laughter. “Oh. I didn’t . . . sorry . . . I’ll . . . right. We’ll just wait at the rock. Um, take your time.”
Mara rolled over and sat up to watch them move away through the trees. The moment they were out of sight, she got to her feet, but she didn’t follow them.
Instead she turned, took another deep breath, and started down the slope to the camp.
TWENTY-ONE
Fire in the Night
THROAT DRY, HEART RACING, Mara picked her way down the ridge. She had realized the day before what she would have to do if Katia did not appear, if she wanted to be certain she had done everything in her power to save her friend. But a full day of thinking about it still hadn’t prepared her for the awful reality of deliberately returning to the one place she never, ever wanted to be again.
Yet somehow she pushed aside the choking terror and kept going, down the slope, through the trees and brushy undergrowth that played such an important role in the unMasked Army’s rescue plans, right up to the palisade. Just as Edrik had predicted, no one challenged her: the sentries were all looking in, not out.
Nor could they possibly hear her above the constant rumbling and grinding of the big water wheel and the man-engine it drove. That suited her: the last thing she wanted to do was give the Watchers a hint as to which way she had come from, lest the Warden send out an exploratory patrol that might stumble across the others.
Staying so close to the palisade that she could only be seen by a sentry if he leaned over and looked straight down, she made her way around the camp toward the main gate. She wondered if Keltan and Hyram had yet decided she was taking too long and returned to find her gone; wondered how they would react; wondered if they were even then looking down with horror at her tiny figure creeping through the shadows.
She wondered even more what Edrik would do when he found out. She knew what she was counting on him to do: realize that he would have to go through with the rescue he’d originally planned, for her, if not for Katia. Her plan, such as it was, was to find Katia and make sure they both escaped when that rescue came.
Assuming Katia was alive.
But it was also possible that Edrik would refuse to risk his small band to save her after she had so deliberately flouted his orders, and would ride back to the Secret City, perhaps to plan and launch another attempt later . . . or perhaps not.
In which case, when she entered the gates of the work camp for the second time, it might also be for the last time.
The thought actually brought her to a stop, back against the unpeeled logs of the palisade, chest heaving. I could still escape, she thought. Get up the slope without being seen, return to the camp . . .
But if she did that she would be abandoning Katia to a terrible fate, and that she could not bear. Better to face the horrors of the camp than the horror of leaving Katia in the hands of the Warden and Watchers.
She forced herself to start moving again. She crept to the corner of the western wall, turned along the southern wall, and finally reached the main gate. There she abandoned stealth and pounded on it with both hands. She’d thought long and hard, during the endless day hiding in the woods, about what she would say. The important thing, she’d decided, was to sound frightened and breathless.
She didn’t think that would be difficult.
She kept pounding on the gate until it swung inward, and then fell forward onto her hands and knees, crying, “Thank you!” She looked up then, and sure enough, both fright and breathlessness came naturally as she found two gleaming sword tips not five inches from her face, and saw beyond them the grim black Masks of Watchers. “I’m Mara,” she gasped out. “Warden sent me out with the geologists . . . bandits attacked us . . . I escaped . . . I’ve got to see the Warden!”
The Watchers exchanged glances. One of them sheathed his sword, stepped forward, grabbed her arm and hauled her roughly to her feet. “Close the gate,” he said to his partner, and then half-led, half-dragged her up the long, broad boulevard, between the silent longhouses on either side, tattered banners of smoke streaming from their chimneys in the ever-more-bitter wind.
The Watchers patrolling the boulevard stared at her as she passed. The big house at the end of the crushed-rock path also seemed to stare at her, its glowing, diamond-paned windows like glittering insectoid eyes. The smell of woodsmoke mingled with the mouthwatering aroma of roasting meat. Her stomach growled: she’d had nothing but a little bread and water since her porridge and tellik tea that morning.
The Watcher led her up the stairs to the ironbound door, and rapped on it with his fist. After a moment, Mara heard impatient footsteps clattering across the marble floor beyond. The door swung open a crack, and a stern white Mask with black scrollwork on each cheek peered out. Mara recognized it from her time in the house; it belonged to the Warden’s secretary, a man whose name she’d never learned. She heard him gasp, and then he swung the door wide. “I’ll tell him you’re here,” he said. “Wait in the study.”
The Watcher dragged Mara into the room where she had first met the Warden, blessedly warm even though the fire had burned down to embers, turned her to face the door, and stood close behind her. Too close; she was uncomfortably aware of him looming behind her. Two minutes later the Warden rushed in, still tying the belt of a long blue robe, his longish, steel-gray hair dripping water on his shoulders and down the forehead of his black-and-red Mask. I got him out of the bath, Mara thought with a flash of bitter amusement. Good. Maybe he’ll catch pneumonia.
This time, the Warden didn’t sit down behind the desk. He strode up to Mara and glared down at her, his eyes narrowed behind the Mask, mouth set in a stern frown. “Tell me what happened. Now!”
Mara began her carefully prepared tale. “We got to the cave where the black lodestone is. I went in, and—”
“What did you see?” the Warden interrupted. “Did you see magic?”
Mara shook her head. “Only a little,” she lied. “No more than I saw in the rocks here in the mine. But I didn’t have much chance to look. All of a sudden one of the Watchers started dragging me out. Then just before I reached the opening, the rope went slack. When I went out . . . they were all dead.” She remembered the Watcher straddling her, the hand in her hair, that sudden rush of magic, and a convulsive swallow came naturally. “All of them. The Watchers, the geologists . . .”
“Dead?” The frown on the Warden’s Mask deepened. “How?”
“Arrows,” Mara said. “From above. And just as I came out, the ones who had shot them came howling into the ravine . . .” She shuddered. “Bandits. UnMasked. Half starved, filthy. Mostly men, but a few women. One man grabbed me. I screamed. I thought he was going to kill me, or . . .” She let the terror of the moment when the Watcher had put his knife to her throat fill her voice. “But then a woman stopped him. She said I might be useful. As a slave. Or for other things.
“They took me away. They had a camp . . . over there somewhere.” She waved vaguely to the southeast, away from both the Secret City and Edrik’s camp in the next valley. “It took us two days to get there.”
The Warden’s frown did not soften. “So how did you end up back here, alone?”
“I escaped. Two days ago. I don’t think they thought I’d run away. They kept telling me I was better off with them than I was here.”
The Warden’s eyes ref
lected brief yellow sparks of candlelight as he leaned forward, until he was so close she had to crane her neck back to see his Mask. Water that had flowed from his wet hair down his Mask dripped from its gleaming black nose onto her cheek. She raised a trembling hand and wiped the moisture away. “I’m surprised you didn’t agree with them,” the Warden said softly.
Mara instinctively tried to step back, but all that accomplished was to press her up against the Watcher’s hard, unyielding body—hardly an improvement. “No!” she said. “They were awful. Awful. And the men . . . they kept . . . looking at me.” She shook her head violently. “No. I don’t like it here, but I’m valuable to you. I have the Gift. I didn’t have any value to them except as another body.” She decided to let out a little bit more of the truth. “And . . . and you have Katia. As a hostage.” She stared into the Warden’s eyes through his Mask, and asked the all-important question. “She’s still here, isn’t she? In the house?”
“She’s here,” the Warden said. “Although she wouldn’t have been much longer. A search party was heading out tomorrow to look for you. If they hadn’t found you . . .” He shrugged. “She’s of no value on her own except as—in your words—‘another body.’”
You cold-blooded bastard, Mara thought, hate for the man hidden behind that fancy Mask burning like acid in her chest. None of us are of any value to you except me; and I know just how long that will last. If I lose my Gift, or I don’t find you a new source of magic, then I’ll be as worthless to you as Katia and all the rest of the unMasked. And then it’s back to the mines.
The uncomfortably warm bulk of the Watcher behind her, pressed into her back, reminded her of the only other possibility.
Or into the barracks.
“As to your own value,” the Warden went on, “it is perhaps not as great as you think.” Her body shifted from overheated to chilled as he echoed her thoughts of an instant before. “The cave you went to explore is our best hope for a new mine. Yet you tell me it is worthless. And that my geologists are dead. We have found no other deposits of black lodestone that will require your unique ability to assess. Nor do we have anyone with the expertise to resume the search.”
