Masks

by E. C. Blake

  When they could see and hear again, they had seen and heard nothing. Every Watcher they could spot lay on the ground, unconscious or dead. As did Mara and Keltan. And the gate stood open.

  Edrik and Tishka had taken their chance, and Mara knew the rest.

  What Edrik pointedly did not ask her was why she had run after Katia in the first place. He had to know, and he had to know that she understood the gravity of her decision. He didn’t berate her for it.

  She almost wished he would. When she’d gotten in trouble as a child, her father or mother would punish her, and that would be an end to it: the trouble receded into the past and cast no shadow over the future.

  But this trouble—these actions, these memories, these dreams—were not receding into the past. And they cast a very long shadow indeed: a shadow that, as they approached the Secret City, crept out of her dreams and into her waking life.

  They were riding in gathering twilight, after a second day of travel, down the last stretch of the ravine that led to the Secret City’s cliff-walled cove. The purpling sky still gave enough light to see the trees and rocks, but between and beneath those rocks and trees the shadows lay thick and black . . .

  Then, to Mara’s breath-stopping terror, those shadows moved, coalesced, and stepped out into the light as the horrors of her dreams: Grute, naked and headless, blood streaming down his chest, arms outstretched, somehow still stalking toward her; the Watcher who had threatened Keltan, the forest behind him visible through the gaping red hole in his chest, face unMasked and covered with blood; Katia, her unblinking eyes blank and glazed above a grin stretched too wide by the rictus of death, the Warden’s gore dripping from the lank strands of her hair; Illina, arrow piercing her breast, rage contorting her face; the Warden, head flopped to one side above the terrible red smile of his ruined throat. All of them (except for the headless Grute) had their eyes locked on her face. All had their arms outstretched, their hands curved into terrible claws . . .

  Mara screamed and screamed and screamed, turning her horse around and around, but the shades surrounded her, the victims of all her stupid, childish decisions, of the so-called Gift she now knew, beyond question, to be no Gift at all, but a horrible, horrible curse.

  Grute’s dead arms reached up to pull her from her mount. She struck out blindly, kicking, slapping, and screamed and screamed and went on screaming . . .

  . . . right up until she fell from the saddle and into darkness.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Revelations and Discoveries

  WHEN MARA CAME TO HERSELF AGAIN, she thought for one horrible moment that everything that had happened since Katia broke her arm in the mine had been a dream: for sitting by her bed was Healer Ethelda, her blue Mask with its green gems unmistakable.

  But beyond Ethelda’s Mask Mara saw, not the wood of the camp hospital’s ceiling, but rough whitewashed stone, cast in sharp relief by sunlight streaming in from her left. Mara looked that way and saw a narrow opening in a stone wall, blue sky beyond, heard the cry of gulls and the rush of waves against the shore, and knew that she was in the Secret City once more, in the same sickroom in which she had awakened the last time she had returned from the camp. Everything she remembered had happened as she remembered it.

  And then she gasped, a scream trying to form in her throat, because what she remembered most vividly of all was dead people pulling her from her horse. That hadn’t been a dream! It had really happened! But—

  Ethelda patted her hand. “Easy, easy,” she said. “You’re safe.”

  Am I? She turned her head this way and that. A black urn stood on the bedside table. Mara knew, even without seeing inside it, that it held magic, presumably for Ethelda’s use. The magic felt like another presence in the room, but in fact, she and Ethelda were alone.

  Most importantly, no dead eyes stared at her from the shadows, no bloodstained hands reached for her. She took a deep breath. A hallucination, she thought. It must have been a hallucination.

  But it had seemed so real. In her memory, it still seemed real.

  Mara found her voice. “What are you doing here?”

  Ethelda snorted. “It’s not by choice. I was riding back to Tamita, escorted by a Watcher, when we were attacked. They killed the Watcher. They brought me here. They locked me up. No one said a word to me until last night. Then I was told, ‘You have a patient,’ and they brought me to you.” She straightened and looked down at Mara, her eyes sharp and narrow behind her Mask. “They tell me you have used magic,” she said. “A lot of magic.”

  Mara nodded. The power, rushing through her but burning like acid . . . “Yes,” she said. “I had to.”

  “Have you used it to kill again? Since Grute?” Ethelda said intently.

  One Watcher blasted into dust by the magic from the cave, another’s chest blown apart by the magic from the urn. “Yes,” she whispered. “Twice that I know of. There may have been other deaths.”

  “May have been?” Ethelda’s voice sharpened. “How can you not know?”

  And Mara, with a sense of vast relief, poured out her story, what she thought she had done, how she thought she had reached into everyone around her in the camp, sucking magic directly from their bodies to hurl against the force of the rockbreaker explosion. “Keltan was so weak and shaken afterward, and he’s young,” she said miserably. “So many people in the camp are weak and sick. I’m afraid some of them . . .” Her throat closed on the words.

  “Mara, oh, Mara,” Ethelda whispered. Fear and awe mingled in her voice.

  “What is it?” Mara pleaded. “What’s happened to me? What’s happening to me?”

  Ethelda’s breath came in strange, ragged gasps. “Mara . . . what you did . . . what you are capable of doing . . .” She stopped, took one long, shuddering breath, then leaned forward. “You are not the first with this ability. But I know of only one other alive today, and he . . .” She stopped. “He does not have this ability in the same measure,” she continued after a moment. “He could not have done what you did. At this moment in history, you are unique.”

  “What? No, I’m just an ordinary girl.” But remembering what she had done in the camp, Mara knew even as she said it that it was a lie.

  Ethelda ignored her protest. “You see all the colors of magic. I told you in the camp how unusual that was. Now I find you can also use all the colors of magic, combine them at will. What you did in the camp would ordinarily require a dozen Gifted, trained practitioners, and an enormous store of magic, to even attempt. And they would probably fail. You are, in short, potentially the most powerful woman in all of Aygrima.”

  Mara gaped.

  “That alone makes you unique,” Ethelda continued inexorably, “but you combine that ability with another: you do not have to touch magic to use it. You can draw it to you from whatever source is at hand: when you killed the Watcher in the mountains, you called the magic from the reservoir within the black lodestone deposit inside the mountain.

  “But even that is not the end of it. You have another ability.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And if I tell you all I know about it, my Mask will shatter.”

  “Then don’t tell me,” Mara said. A vast panic welled inside her, threatening to escape in a scream that she feared, if she let it begin, she would never be able to stop. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want any of this. She didn’t want to know. “Don’t tell me!”

  “I must,” Ethelda said, still whispering. “For until you know what you are capable of, until you learn to control what you are capable of, you are a danger to yourself and everyone around you.” She stopped speaking. For a long moment she sat perfectly still: and then, to Mara’s shock, she reached up and took off her Mask.

  The woman behind that Mask was younger than Mara had thought, no older than her own mother. The Healer had a round, pleasant face, pale as a lily since no sun had touched it since childhood, with jus
t the beginnings of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, wrinkles that seemed related more to smiles than frowns. But no smile touched Ethelda’s face now. Both her lips and her hands trembled as she set the Mask to one side.

  “Don’t!” Mara said again. “If you shatter your Mask, you can never go back to the Palace.”

  Ethelda laughed shakily. “Child,” she said. “It’s been clear I’ll never return to the Palace since the moment I was brought here. The only reason I haven’t removed the Mask until now is that . . .” She reddened. “I feel naked without it. But at the same time . . .” A slow smile spread across her face. “I have to confess it feels wonderful to set the evil thing aside forever.”

  Mara couldn’t return the smile. “It’s not too late. You don’t have to . . .”

  The smile faded. “I do.”

  I don’t want to hear this! Mara thought again. I don’t—

  But Ethelda continued, in a voice that trembled only a little, “All magic comes from living things. Ordinarily it departs them when they die, and either dissipates or is drawn to black lodestone. Most Gifted can only access magic after it is freed from the living creatures that created it, after it has collected in black lodestone in sufficient quantities.” She nodded at the black urn. “But a few, a very few, a handful through all of recorded history, have had the power to draw magic right from its source: to pull it directly from living creatures. It is possible to gain enormous amounts of power that way.” She paused again. “You have this rare ability. So does one other I know of, though to a much lesser degree.” She swallowed, and glanced at her Mask. “The Autarch.”

  With a grating, screeching sound like an animal in agony, Ethelda’s Mask writhed, like Mara’s on the day her Masking failed, and then shattered. The shards scattered across the side table around the urn of magic, some falling to the stone floor. Ethelda made a sound halfway between a gasp and a sob. Mara stared at the Mask, then at Ethelda. “The Autarch can draw power from people?”

  Ethelda turned away from the shattered Mask and said in a shaky voice, “Yes. But his ability is weak, compared to you. He cannot draw it directly as you do. He requires help.” She locked her eyes with Mara’s. “He does it through the Masks.”

  Mara gaped. “Through the Masks? Has he always . . . ?”

  “Not always,” Ethelda said. “Just since the Masks changed. At least, that is what we believe.”

  “We?”

  “Your father and I.”

  The hairs stood up on the back of Mara’s neck. “Father knows?”

  “Suspects, at least.” Ethelda shook her head. “I had better start at the beginning.

  “Some of this is only a guess, Mara. But I have been Healer to the Autarch and the Circle for twenty years. I have been called on many times by those in the Circle, for illness or injury or simply to alleviate, as best I can, the inevitable infirmities of age. Yet through all those years, my only service to the Autarch has been an annual examination. And every year, he remains healthy. Impossibly healthy. Impossibly young. He is almost eighty, and he looks half that. Even his hair remains the dark brown of his youth.

  “It took no great insight on my part to figure out that the Autarch has the ability to use magic to maintain some semblance of youth. I thought he must be a self-Healer, an unusual Gift, but not unheard of. I cannot Heal myself, but I have known of one other who could.

  “But recently I’ve realized there’s something else going on.” She paused. “You know of the Child Guards?”

  “Of course,” Mara said. She remembered the white-Masked youths riding behind the Autarch in the Outside Market, the young boy at the end who had looked up at her . . .

  “An honor for the best, most-Gifted children of the outlying towns and villages,” Ethelda said. “So it is said. So it is perceived.

  “But I know differently,” she continued, her voice suddenly flat and hard. “I treat those children. They do not thrive in the Palace. They weaken. They do not develop normally. If they have not reached puberty, it is unnaturally delayed. They are frequently ill. They are troubled by nightmares and headaches. And on six occasions—six, in just the five years—there has been a Child Guard who has died. Four girls. Two boys. I could do nothing for them, because I did not understand what was wrong with them.

  “Your father came to me with his fears. We had known each other for years, of course, and he trusted me; trusted me enough to tell me that, at the same time that the Child Guards unit was formed, the ‘recipe’ for the Masks had been altered by the Palace.”

  Mara had learned what that was during her two years’ pre-apprenticeship to her father: while some of the magic in the Masks was imbued by the Maskmaker, using his personal Gift, a portion came straight from the Palace, as vials of black dust. A small portion, a spoonful, no more, of that dust was mixed with the clay of each Mask, and suddenly Mara understood why. “The dust,” she said suddenly. “The ‘recipe.’ It’s black lodestone?”

  Ethelda nodded. “Black lodestone, with carefully crafted magic clinging to it. Your father’s Gift is powerful enough that, though he could not tell the purpose of the alterations, he could tell that the magic had changed. And as time passed, he realized that the Masks were also changing those who wore them. There seemed to be a strange loss of will, a flattening of personality.”

  Sala, Mara thought, remembering how her newly Masked friend had cut her dead in the street.

  “He came to me to ask, cautiously, if I had noticed any of this in my duties as Healer. I had. Masked, we could hardly discuss our suspicions except in the most roundabout way. It’s astonishing,” Ethelda said bitterly, “how adept one becomes in the Palace at talking around things that cannot be said straightforwardly.

  “But your father found a way around that, too. That Mask,” she nodded at the scattered shards on the side table, “was not the one I received at my Masking, nor yet the one I was given when I was made Master Healer. Instead, it was carefully crafted by your father for me, altered—as much as he could alter it without drawing the Watchers’ attention—to allow me to speak more freely. He gave it to me the day I came to your house.”

  Mara blinked; she remembered that day well, since it was after that that she had been barred from the workshop.

  “Wearing it, I still could not openly say things that violated my oath to the Autarch, but it gave me somewhat more leeway than a normal Mask would have. Your father, of course, also made one for himself and donned it that same day: and with those in place, I was able to tell him my growing conviction that the Autarch was somehow drawing magic directly from the Child Guards, drawing so much of it he was making them ill. And he was able to tell me his suspicion that the change in the Masks was designed to do two things: to change people so that they could not even begin to formulate rebellious thoughts against the Autarch, and to make it possible for the Autarch to draw minute amounts of magic from everyone wearing one of the new Masks. In fact, the two things were linked: by drawing magic from the new Masks, the Autarch draws off a small part of the wearers’ souls; just a small part. Just the part containing the flicker of independence that might make them question their obedience to him.” Ethelda’s voice turned caustic as lye. “Just the part that made them fully human.

  “Sharing our knowledge over the next few weeks, we suddenly understood the reasons for another disturbing trend: the increasing failure of Maskings, for Gifted and unGifted alike. Some unGifted people are presumably more resistant to having magic drawn from them than others. The Masks, already designed to weed out those who threaten the stability of the regime, interpret that resistance as a reason to reject the Wearer, and so you see more and more innocent children being sent to the mining camp.” Ethelda shook her head. “I had no idea what a horror that was until I saw it for myself,” she said in a low voice. “It made me ashamed of my years serving the Palace, ashamed of my use of the magic extracted at such a cost.”<
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  “And the Maskings of the Gifted?” Mara demanded. She had a nasty suspicion she knew the answer, and Ethelda confirmed it.

  “The Autarch has made it a point, for two years now, to attend almost all Maskings of the Gifted,” Ethelda said. “And one out of ten of those he attends fail. I believe that his need for magic is so great that, in the moment of the Masking, he often draws on it too eagerly, ripping it from the Gifted child with so much force that the Mask shatters, and the wearer’s Gift is lost.”

  Mara felt a chill. “Then if he had come to mine . . .”

  “But he didn’t,” Ethelda said. “I did.”

  “How did you arrange that?”

  “I didn’t,” Ethelda said. “Oh, I had plans to—I intended to request the honor of representing the Autarch at your Masking because I was ‘an old family friend’—but in fact, before I even made my request, the Autarch announced on his own he would not attend.”

  Mara blinked. “Why?”

  “I can only guess, but I suspect he knows, at least at some level, that he is causing the recent failures of the Gifted’s Masks. If that’s the case, he may have chosen to stay away from your Masking for fear of endangering your Gift. After all, Maskmakers are crucial to feeding his need and you were to be apprenticed to your father, one day perhaps to be Master Maskmaker yourself. Whatever his reason, his decision worked perfectly for our plans.”

  “You and my father?”

  Ethelda nodded. “Your father confided in me that, just as he had made special Masks for each of us, so he was making a special one for you: one he knew would fail, without ever letting the Autarch draw on your magic. He said he had also arranged for you to be rescued on the way into exile. He told me no more than that. I knew nothing of this place,” she gestured at the cavern walls, “or of the unMasked Army. I thought he must have bribed some of the bandits known to infest the Wild, and wondered that he seemed so confident they would uphold their end of the bargain. But again, I was Masked, and even with the special Mask your father made for me, I dared not learn too much or ask too many questions for fear of . . .” She gestured at the shattered shards of blue.