Masks

by E. C. Blake

  Flaming coals had already fallen into the crates of rockbreakers. It was too late to stop the explosion, but not too late to do . . .

  . . . this.

  The rockbreakers exploded, a hundred tons of explosives turning instantly into violently expanding hot gas. But the blast wave and the gas did not rip across the camp, flattening buildings, pulverizing flesh, incinerating and destroying. It could not escape through the barrier she had flung up around it, more solid than steel, invisible but impenetrable, a cylinder that directed the force of the explosion straight up into the sky in a raging, roaring column of fire, splitting the air with the sound of a thousand thunderbolts striking at once.

  For one instant, Mara gaped up at that swirling tower of flame, spreading out into black smoke a thousand feet above her, like dark leaves atop a fiery trunk. For one instant, she marveled at the swirling colors of magic mingled with the white fire of the explosion, every color imaginable, twisting, turning, and twining like jeweled vines. But only for an instant, because as the explosion spent itself and the magic released, she screamed, her body aflame with agony: a short-lived scream as the pain became so much her throat seized up. She fell like a toppled tree, gasping, lost in a world of pain such as she had never imagined, worse than when she had killed the Watcher at the tunnel, far worse, because that time she had passed out, and this time she remained horribly, horribly awake.

  If the pain had gone on indefinitely, she later thought, she would have died or gone mad, but the pain began to ease almost at once: slowly, and certainly not entirely, but enough so that, some interminable time later, she managed to sit up. Though soaked in sweat, she felt chilled to the bone and weak as a kitten. Hunched on the ground, she wrapped her arms around herself and looked around, blinking away the tears blurring her vision.

  Keltan lay close beside her, on his back, eyes closed, but she could see his chest rising and falling. He was alive! Relief flooded her.

  By the flickering light of the burning pile of timber that was all that remained of the stables, she saw other dark figures on the ground: Watchers and trustees, unconscious or dead. She couldn’t hear any sound from the longhouses. Only the rumbling of the water wheel and the unceasing creaking of the man-engine remained unchanged. Down in the mine they don’t know anything strange has happened up here at all.

  The rockbreaker hut, and Katia and the Warden, were simply gone. Where the hut had stood was a deep, perfectly circular hole, its bottom perhaps ten feet below the surface. Both the bottom and sides of the hole were glazed over with what looked like black glass, dark in the flickering firelight.

  Mara looked up, and saw a thick, heaving cloud overhead, tinged dimly red by the fires below.

  And then she heard running footsteps behind her. She turned, saw two figures charging toward her, and tried to scramble to her feet, but her arms and legs wouldn’t work, and all she managed to do was push herself backward across the frosted grass until she had her back pressed against the nearest longhouse, silent now, the shouts and pleas she had heard earlier from inside it no longer audible.

  The figures reached her. One bent over Keltan. The other loomed over her and held out a hand.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Edrik said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Restless Dead

  WITH TISHKA CARRYING Mara and Edrik carrying Keltan, they made their slow escape from the camp, through the wide-open front gate. There was no one to see them. Every Watcher and trustee lay motionless where he had been when the hut exploded. The stable, reduced to embers, cracked and popped; the blackened palisade wall behind it smoked. The horses had all fled in terror.

  Mara clung to Tishka’s back, her head resting on the woman’s shoulder. Every movement hurt. Her joints seemed filled with ground glass, her skin felt raw, her blood burned like acid, her breath scraped her throat. She couldn’t hope to walk. She wondered if she would ever walk again.

  What had happened to Keltan and all the others? Had the force of the explosion been great enough to knock them senseless, even though her magic had directed it upward?

  Magic . . . she had a hard time remembering exactly what she had done. She’d used the magic from the urn, but that hadn’t been enough. She’d gotten more from somewhere—it had seemed to be all around her—but where? There were no stores of magic in the longhouses. They’d serve no purpose. Maybe some had been stored in the hut with the rockbreakers . . . ?

  But no. The magic hadn’t been in the hut. It had surrounded her. She was sure of it.

  Where had it come from?

  She couldn’t think clearly. Her head hurt, as though her aimlessly tumbling thoughts were bruising the inside of her skull as they rolled around and around. Again she wished she could pass out, be as unconscious as Keltan, but wishing didn’t make it so. So she suffered, moaning when the pain became too much to bear, as the two of them were carried out into the darkness and away from the camp, finally joining Skrit and Skrat and Hyram in a hidden glade behind the shoulder of a hill. The unMasked Army’s horses shivered and rolled their eyes as they were mounted. Mara was shivering, too, so she couldn’t blame them. She rode double with Edrik, remembering how the very idea of doing so had been dismissed out of hand when she’d first been rescued because it would be hard on the precious horses: no one seemed worried about that now. Keltan rode behind Skrit. Skrat and Hyram brought up the rear, Skrat leading Keltan’s horse, Hyram leading Mara’s . . . and Illina’s.

  Keltan, though still not awake, wasn’t quite unconscious anymore, either. At least he seemed aware enough of his surroundings to hold on to Skrit’s waist, although his wrists were bound together just to be safe.

  They rode away from the camp, from the roiling mass of black smoke slowly dissipating above it, from the smell of burning wood and hay and the sound of the constant slow grinding of the water wheel. But Mara carried it all inside her, in her mind and in her aching body, and the tears she cried as they rode through the darkness had little to do with her own pain and everything to do with Katia, the girl she had tried so hard, and failed so badly, to rescue. And she grieved for Illina, the kind young woman who had helped her with her nightmares and paid the ultimate price for Mara’s folly. Mixed in were even tears for the Watcher she had killed to save Keltan, and the Watcher the magic had killed in the mountains. Three lives she had taken now. I’m only fifteen, she thought. I’m too young to be a killer!

  But she could not deny it: a killer she had become, not only taking lives herself but costing others theirs. The trustee in the Warden’s house. The Warden’s secretary.

  Illina.

  She sobbed and thought she would never stop, but sometime in the night she dozed off despite the swaying and jerking of the horse and the bouncing of her head against Edrik’s back. Sleep didn’t last: a nightmarish vision of the hole she had blown through the Watcher attacking Keltan snapped her awake almost at once, gasping.

  “It’s all right,” Edrik said, reining the horse to a halt. “We’re stopping.” Mara peered blearily around in darkness more complete than before; the moon had set. They seemed to be in an open space, defined by the forest’s trees on one side and a rocky bluff on the other. “They’ll have their hands full at the camp without worrying about a few ‘bandits.’ I doubt they’ll even try to track us once they wake up, if they wake up. Even if they do, it won’t be for hours. We’ll be long gone with no tracks to find by then. But we must sleep, and see to you and Keltan.”

  Mara straightened with a groan. The pain had faded, but not gone. Her body felt abused, and her mind somehow pale, washed out, as though, like the basin of the magic-well, it had been completely emptied and was only now beginning to slowly fill again. She wanted more sleep, desperately wanted it; but she feared what dreams might come. And Illina is no longer here to comfort me, she thought, a sob slipping from her throat.

  Then, with a hopeful leap of her heart, she remembered
the herbs Grelda had given her, to make the restorative the Healer had given her in the Secret City sickroom. “A fire,” she said. “Can we have a fire?”

  Edrik frowned. “A fire? Why?”

  “I need a potion. Medicine. Please.”

  Edrik glanced over his shoulder. “All right,” he said. “But only long enough to brew it. Then we douse it again.”

  “Where are we?” she asked as Edrik slid from his saddle, then turned and helped her down. She staggered, and he caught her arm.

  “Halfway between the camp and the spot where we attacked the wagon,” he said. “We will take the same path home, to ensure there is no trail to follow to the Secret City. Let them think we were just bandits, unMasked scraping by in the Wild, who made a particularly daring raid.”

  “How’s Keltan?” Mara turned to look around her, but with only starlight to illuminate the forest, she could see nothing but indistinct shapes of horses and people as Skrit, Skrat, Hyram, and Tishka set up camp.

  “Stirring, but still not awake. What happened?” Edrik began, but then cut off his own question. “No, not now. Rest.” He led her forward a few feet. “Here’s your bedroll. Lie here until the fire is ready.”

  She knelt down, felt the familiar rough weave of her blankets, and crawled into them. They had been laid on a thick bed of pine needles, and it seemed her body, at rest, was at last able to insist on its needs being met despite the chaos in her mind. She dozed within moments; woke startled and afraid moments later when Edrik touched her shoulder to tell her the fire was ready; made her potion and drank it, while the others hung back and exchanged disgusted looks; and lay down, the pain subsiding, hoping the potion would also give her dreamless sleep.

  It didn’t. The dead awaited her. Grute. Both Watchers she had killed. The images of all three sharp, clear, real. And then, in her ordinary nightmares, Illina. The Warden. Katia . . .

  When she woke at last, she struggled up from thick black depths of slumber that, like stinking mud in the bottom of a pond, kept trying to drag her back into the dreams of horror that had gripped her all night. Finally she gasped in air and forced her eyes open to stare up into a sky once more shrouded by gray, scudding cloud. Never waking, she realized, was far worse than all the nights she had woken crying out in terror. Better to wake screaming than scream silently a hundred times but never escape the hallucinations and dreams.

  If her mind felt anything but rested, at least her body didn’t hurt as much, presumably thanks to the potion. She sat up and looked around. Edrik, Skrit, and Skrat were saddling their horses; Tishka and Hyram were nowhere to be seen; and (her heart leaped) Keltan sat on a rock, spooning into his mouth what had to be old, cold gruel, since no fire had been lit. Dark shadows clung to the deathly pale skin beneath his eyes, and his hand trembled as he lifted each spoonful to his mouth, but at least he was awake—and alive.

  In her heart she leaped up, ran to his side, and gave him a relieved, welcoming hug. In reality she struggled to her feet, hobbled over to him, and groaned as she joined him on the rock. “How are you?”

  “Terrible,” he said. “I feel like someone stuck a wire brush into my head and scrubbed real hard.”

  Mara blinked, and gave a sort of gasp of amusement that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You know, that pretty much describes the way I feel, too.” The proto-laugh died on her lips. “What happened to you?”

  “Not a clue,” Keltan said. He frowned. “I saw . . . or think I saw . . .” His head snapped toward her. “Did Katia kill the Warden?”

  Mara nodded.

  “I saw that, then,” he muttered. “Wish I hadn’t. And then they both fell into the rockbreaker hut, and I saw the roof start to fall in, and I thought, ‘This is it!’ and . . . and . . .” His voice trailed off. “Something pulled me inside out.” He shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what it felt like: like someone had reached right inside me, down here, somewhere,” he gestured in the vicinity of his belly button, “and pulled everything that was inside me out through my ears.” He shrugged. “Crazy. But that’s what it felt like. And as it went rushing out of me, it took me—well, my consciousness—with it. Then there was kind of a long confused period of being not quite awake and not quite asleep, and then a blank stretch, and then I woke up here.” He looked at her. “So why aren’t we a pale pink mist floating over the camp?”

  But Mara hardly heard him. It felt like someone had pulled everything that was inside me out through my ears. She remembered what she had felt, the sense of magic rushing to her from all around her, the power she had suddenly found to hurl at the rockbreaker hut, containing the explosion that would have killed them all. And she knew what had reached inside Keltan.

  She had. She had been the force that pulled him inside out. She had drawn magic from him, and every other person surrounding the rockbreaker hut, stole it from them, ripped it right out of their bodies, throwing him and everyone else over the cliff of unconsciousness.

  No, she told herself. No! That’s not possible!

  She couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t tell anyone. Not until she was sure.

  Maybe not even then.

  Magic didn’t work that way, did it? You couldn’t just yank it out of other people. Could you?

  And even if you could, even if that was what she had done, it had felt wrong. Bad. Even though it had saved all their lives. As if the magic pouring through her had been corrosive: power, but the wrong sort of power. Whatever she had done, she had a very strong feeling she shouldn’t have done it, and that she should never do it again.

  But the power, a part of her whispered. All that power. You contained an explosion. What else might you be able to do with that much power?

  She kept all those thoughts tucked silently away inside her, and only said, “I used magic.”

  “Wow.” He stared at her. “Good thing I had that urn with me.”

  She nodded.

  “If you two can ride,” Edrik said, coming over, “we should get going. Tishka has scouted back along our trail and sees no signs of pursuit, but that may not last much longer. Hyram has returned to the ridge above the camp to keep watch and race after us with warning if need be. We’ve left Illina’s body for them,”—he looked grim, and Mara felt as if someone had stabbed her in the heart—“but they know there were more of us. We want to be long gone, and the trail long cold, before they even think to begin to track us.”

  And so began the weary journey back to the Secret City. The first time, Mara had been anxious, concerned, excited, wondering what lay ahead. Now she felt grim and weary and far older than her fifteen years. How had everything gone so wrong? How had her noble goal of rescuing the girl she’d made a hostage to her good behavior turned into so many dead—almost so many dead they would have been uncountable, and herself among them—without her goal even being achieved?

  It doesn’t work that way in stories.

  Skrit and Skrat and Tishka remained distant and reserved during the journey, barely speaking to her, avoiding her at meals, placing their bedrolls on the far side of the fire from her own. Keltan rode with her, but he seemed to be taking a very long time to recover from whatever had happened to him.

  She still shied away from what she very much feared was the truth, that when she had needed more magic than she’d had at hand, she had ripped it from the living bodies of all those within her reach—including Keltan. She could have killed him, without even knowing what she was doing.

  Magic comes from living things, her father had told her, long ago, when she had still been a child and her only concern had been whether her mother would catch her wearing her too-short tunic in the street. But it must be carefully harvested . . .

  She hadn’t harvested it. She had pulled it out roots and all. And if it had struck Keltan so hard, Keltan who was young and healthy, what might it have done to some of those in the longhouses, the older me
n and women, their health already damaged by long hours in the mine, cold nights in the barracks? Had she killed more than she knew, people she had never met, people who had done her no wrong?

  She could hardly bear to think it. She found it difficult to eat, difficult to do anything but go through the necessary motions of travel. She mounted her horse, rode silently all day as they splashed through the stream and up the ravine, and rolled into her blankets in the cavern where she had discovered she could still see magic. Sleep should have offered surcease, but it offered no such thing, for in the night, the visions came: naked Grute, head bursting like overripe fruit at her touch; the Watcher blasted into dust at the cave; the Watcher with the hole in his chest, dropping soundlessly on top of the prostrate Keltan. Even when the visions of those she had killed directly faded, she saw bloody, screaming Katia, ripping out the Warden’s throat, falling into the rockbreaker hut as the flaming roof collapsed, and Illina, tumbling nervelessly across the black, weed-strewn ground. The next morning she was as hollow-eyed and trembling as Keltan had been the morning after the attack on the camp.

  Edrik questioned her, trying to find out what had happened after they were separated. He also told her what he and Tishka had done, how they had burst into the extraction building to find it deserted, and broken out through its gate into the darkness outside the walls, slipping through shadows until they could make a dash for the woods, the Watchers on the palisade spotting them too late to do more than waste a few arrows in their direction. They’d retrieved Hyram, then circled to where Skrit and Skrat lay in hiding on the bluff that had given them clear bow shots into the camp; had watched from there as everything unfolded. They had seen the spear of flame stab the sky, had been pounded into the ground by its shattering thunder.