Angela grunted agreement, stood up, and walked straight into the square, Potluck right beside her.
King Noway brightened at the sight of the sack in Potluck’s hand.
“You got it! Honestly, I was thinking you’d just get killed and that would be that. But you pulled through for me, with a little help it appears. Amazing.”
“Where are your guards?”
“Oh, I had them all killed because they overheard my plan. Loose lips and all, you know.”
Begrudging respect welled up in Angela, but she swallowed it down and held out her hand. “Here’s your hairpin.”
“What? I told you to plant that!”
“Didn’t need to.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t need to? I told you it was crucial—”
“Listen, it’s taken care of. It would take too long to explain. Now do you want the sack or not?”
King Noway glared, but the sight of the sack squashed any lingering doubts. “Yes, of course. Give it to me.”
“As you wish.” Angela whipped out her daggers, Assassin’s Ass In leapt from the ground to defend the king, and Potluck’s last shrinking potion splashed in the night.
Clatter!
Assassin’s Ass In fell to the ground, King Noway’s hand now too small to hold it. Potluck upended the Magufin, dumping a raging, five-inch Candace onto the ground, and slammed the sack over the dripping wet, shrunken king. Angela spun and deflected Candace’s miniaturized Rat Bastard before it plunged into her shin.
“Potluck!”
“Innocencias Zero-percent-us!” Potluck shouted.
Candace froze mid-spin and toppled onto her side, stricken in a sweet, fully articulated action shot. Angela looked down at her and nodded grudgingly. “I guess you are a pretty good assassin, Candy Ass.”
“Bite me, Angie,” Candace said from the corner of her mouth.
Angela turned to Potluck. “I thought you were going to one-percent-us?”
“I, uh, didn’t want to risk it …”
“Fair enough. Okay, Candace, we got a little proposition for you …”
* * *
Angela leaned her head back as Potluck lifted the steaming pitcher as high as he could in the cozy confines of their ring-side box seats. Beside them, the sprite from King Noway’s cage sipped honeydew from a walnut mug with a little umbrella in it and raised a bruised, but healing, fist in the air as the next combatants entered the ring.
“And now for the main event of the evening!” The ring herald bellowed through a rolled-up hazelnut leaf, spinning so everyone could hear. “Candace ‘Candy Ass’ Butrello, the Candy Assassin, versus the regally dethroned, about to get owned, former king of this kingdom, Reginald Noway the Fiiiiiiiiiiffffffttttthhhhhhhh.”
The crowd erupted into cheers, the loudest coming from the fairies and sprites in the caged-off competitors’ area.
Potluck struggled to hold the pitcher up. “You know, if you had actually changed you would have stopped this entire inhumane affair.”
“Hey, I let Candace have this kill, didn’t I? Pixie steps, Potluck, pixie steps. Now shut up and start pouring.”
Potluck tipped the pitcher and poured the steaming red liquid all over Angela’s face and down her shirt, gagging into his armpit as he did.
“Come on, Potluck, it’s just cows’ blood.”
Potluck continued to retch.
“Hey, get more down the shirt. Down the shirt!”
In the ring, a gnome rang a bell, the crowd roared, and a five-inch-tall Candace leapt in for the final, sweet, sweet kill.
Those Who Look Back
Amelia Sirina
The celebration began with murder.
It was such a fine, bright day the way days before a heavy rain can be. The sun was too high, the air tangible in the summer’s haze, lying unwelcome over Adzeo’s skin and clothes. His whole body itched—with sweat, with a shiver running up and down his marrow as he followed the orderly lines of servants and guards to the palace’s grand entrance. The King and his wife were already there, greeting the court and the peasants who pressed from the back rows.
Queen Amanoori stepped into the sea of plum blossoms that servants had mindfully spilled from baskets onto the festive square. No tile was free of this pink-tinted snow, and the court trampled them, bruising the tender blooms without care.
Amanoori stilled as though listening to a whisper only she could hear.
“My blessed wife?” The king offered her a hand to descend the steps together and start the parade amidst the flowers. She didn’t take his hand—she lurched as though to run, and the king had to catch her wrist and hold tight to not make a scene in front of all the court. Then Amanoori plunged a wooden knife into his throat.
Everyone’s eyes were on the king, falling. Except for Adzeo. He’d watched the queen’s shadow all this time, standing in the first rows of servants behind her. He saw when her shadow shifted, even anticipated it. Then the blood sprinkled the petals in a fan pattern, and Adzeo did nothing to prevent this. It was all his fault.
Poor Amanoori.
Adzeo couldn’t bear the betrayed look in her eyes when she turned to him, couldn’t bear the silence that drowned the great square in seconds, spreading outwards from the spot where the queen stood. He ran.
Through the colonnade into the palace and the arched galleries—away, away from people. His face felt as though it was melting under his fingers as he tried to hold it together. The back of his head hummed and throbbed.
He’d done something wrong with the mask he had given her. He had failed her. He’d failed the king. He’d failed Master Toyou and the Guild.
What a coward. He should have stayed behind and taken it, whatever would come.
Too bad the mask he’d received right after being born—the one covering the back of Adzeo’s head, sunken deeply into his skin, into the essence of who he was—was the mask of Hirisa. The Survivor. Never before had Adzeo thought it was also destined to make him a coward.
His eyes blurred. The mask he’d chosen to wear today—the temporary one—was hot like coals on his face. Blind with pain, Adzeo crashed into a festive column alive with flower ribbons and fell to his knees.
No. Don’t remove the mask, he begged himself, thoughts thrashing in his head. Prove it’s who you are.
The agony was unbearable. His fingers clutched his face, dug deeper than the skin by the temples to find that faint outline of the mask’s edge. He was a survivor, above all. This, he couldn’t deny to himself.
The mask of Zunzitsu Jun, The Loyal Servant, slid off his face, and the pain lifted in an instant. Adzeo’s cheeks still stung with the tears that followed. He’d wanted to prove himself. He’d wanted for everyone to see how faithful, how true to his king he was.
But he was no Zunzitsu Jun. The mask clacked on the floor, wood against wood, and its eyeless sockets looked back at Adzeo in disgust.
Soldiers and guards were storming through the halls and down the stairs. A stampede, a chase, a hunt. Hirisa at the center of Adzeo’s mind charged him to rise and run, freeze quiet in the niches, wait for the guards to pass—then run as fast as he could bear.
* * *
“My son’s a Survivor. Rejoice,” Adzeo’s mother used to tell him when he’d been young and silly, crying in the dust in the backyard most days after school. She cited the Mask master who’d looked at newborn Adzeo and said this: “You’re a Survivor, Adzeo. Everything bad will pass. You will stay.”
A mask given after birth was meant to protect its wielder from evil spirits. A second face, put on the back of the head, with the hidden, watchful eyes. It defined the person who wore it. They became one. Most people—normal people—wore the masks of Angun, the Lucky; or Kyin, the Clever; or coveted Rinei, the Popular. There were plenty of others, but each was meant to inspire a life to greatness, to always seek fulfilment, to strive to be better.
Hirisa, the Survivor was the absolute baseline of existence—so much it was even insulting. No
one could get better at surviving. One either did it, or one died.
Adzeo always felt that some great injustice was dealt to him by the fate or by the folly of the Mask master. But at least that decided his life’s ultimate goal. He chose to become a Mask master himself and maybe save some other poor child from the same foul mistake in the future. No one should suffer as he had.
His current master, Toyou, didn’t carve or give out the sacred masks that defined newborns, though. She made the other ones. The masks that people paid ridiculous amounts of gold for, then put on their faces to hide who they truly were.
Oh, Adzeo turned out to have a gift for those.
“The most important thing to consider is the clash between the masks we wear.”
She had such a kind, wrinkled face, like creased oil-paper. The inner face of Kua, the Kind One, hid at the back of her head. Her eyes had that spark in them, a laugh, only hidden. As if in a joke, she put masks on her face to show Adzeo the result. He didn’t know how to react, to be frank. None of the other masters played around with the craft.
“Can’t you even chuckle? You’re a bore, Adzeo,” she told him.
“Yes, Toyou.” Masters know best. Good pupils can only agree.
She scoffed and brushed her hand along the wall where hundreds of masks hung from the pegs, as though searching for the one that would make Adzeo finally crack a smile at her.
Carved from wood and stone and paper and silk, masks lined the rows—faces likened to foxes, sneering, and bears, snarling, and humans with eyes rolling mad and spittle frothing the open mouths. There were also the demure, reserved masks of pretty youths made of porcelain, glazed with varnishes of all the colors. And, lastly, those eerie ones which looked exactly like human faces. Exactly. Adzeo’s gaze rarely lingered on those.
“Gak, the Evil one,” Toyou said and barely touched her face with the mask’s inner lining, then flinched, a hiss of pain on her lips. “This one does not agree well with the mask at my core.”
“What would happen if you put it on?” Adzeo didn’t lift his eyes off the rosewood plank from which he carved a mask of Miri, Pretty Face, inch by inch.
Toyou laughed and threw Gak onto the table. It wasn’t valuable, really—no one cared to buy it. “Ah, my boy. I surely would die.”
“Die?” Adzeo drew back. His fingers with the knife were too unsteady to continue now. Hirisa chanted its old mantra in Adzeo’s heart: not me, not me, not me. He put the knife away, far from himself, then splayed his hands on the table, forcing their tremor to subside. “Is there a mask I can die from?”
“Oh no. I doubt that.” She went to pat his shoulders and steady his slumped back with her warm touch. “There’re not many with masks as strict as mine. Most people, given an unsuitable mask, would simply go mad.” At this she gave him a “so what?” smile and an old-lady-sweet shrug.
Adzeo couldn’t go back to his task for a long time after that. And as though to wipe away his fears and the crushing weight of responsibility for the profession he chose, Toyou told him, “That’s why we, Masters, need to know—and imagine—all the consequences within the masks we make. It’s not easy, not at all, my boy. But you’ll learn.”
He had. It hadn’t been enough.
* * *
Now the king’s murder was on his hands and most people didn’t even realize it. They must still think the fault was entirely Amanoori’s.
At night, he ventured out of the royal forest’s farther reaches and ran down into the tunnels. Only the moonlight came through the grates overhead, so when he crossed beneath the palace’s walls and was ready to get back into the city, he groped blindly for the secret door’s lever.
He had to keep himself together. His breath flushed so loud in his ears, he couldn’t hear if there was anyone on the other side of the door. Guards, hunters, king’s spies? He had to know for sure—not for the fear of his life, but only to know if she’d sold him out. As she should have.
The door slid aside, and there was no one.
Sweet Amanoori, she hadn’t told them. She’d kept him safe even after what his mistake had cost her. It almost made him feel better—then, so much worse.
The city tasted of smoke. The muggy rain pressed it down into the streets and the lights were extinguished to mourn the King as was proper. At the street corner by his house, Adzeo finally stopped clinging to the shadows under the eaves. He had to do this on his own terms. He wasn’t going to go down like a coward.
In his tiny rooms, the shadows stirred with the motion of the curtains by the open windows. The furniture inside was scarce, but Adzeo had never needed any. He needed only walls. He needed only pegs on them, in rows and lines, and the jeering, feral, amicable, savage, and grotesquely sad faces hanging from them.
Adzeo closed his eyes and reached for the mask in the center of the display with his unsteady hand. Yungu, the Brave One, lay painfully familiar under his fingers. It licked his face with warmth, then dissipated into his skin and hid beneath it. Like before, barely weeks ago—with her.
He was not a coward. He would go back to stand under her gaze and give himself to the fury of her guards. In a moment. Or another.
His fingers went clammy, twined together in a prayer he couldn’t remember.
“Coward.”
The voice rustled through the door Adzeo had haphazardly left open. Then another voice came from beyond the window, on the roof of the next house. “What a coward, Adzeo.”
“Such a coward they’ll name the next Kiogisa mask after you,” the first person repeated, silking through the gap in the door, three shadows of his fellow apprentices following him.
Adzeo withdrew until his back hit the wall. The wooden masks on it clacked softly.
The guildmates of his year, four? five of them? They came uninvited, but maybe at the perfect time.
Hassuna, Kyoda, Umenasyo, among others. Those he thought his friends. He could not focus on anything else but the masks they chose to wear tonight. All now wore the empty-white, grim masks of Genzhi, the Executioner, beneath their faces.
“I … I am going to the palace, to give myself up … right now.” Adzeo’s voice broke on the first word, but Yungu made him carry the sentence on. Yungu would make him go through with all of this—a perfect choice for one in his situation.
“Yungu won’t help a Hirisa like you and you know it,” Kyoda said, solemn. “The Guild decided you might need help with this.”
“We take care of our own,” Hassuna added, her voice almost gentle.
The meaning behind those words hit Adzeo like a slap. Yungu told him to stay, Hirisa whipped his mind to run. In between the two, he was heaving with strain, slowly pulling away along the wall.
The Executioners mirrored his step, drawing together in a half-circle around him.
“Stay, Adzeo. It will be quick and you won’t feel a thing,” Hassuna told him with a sweet, sweet promise in her whisper. Adzeo wanted to listen and agree and yield to this kind voice—but then, he also knew what mask Hassuna had at the back of her head. He knew, but he always preferred to forget.
Gaksin, the Cunning One. The liar.
Had it not been for Yungu, Adzeo wouldn’t dare fight. He would plead and beg on his knees, or try to wriggle like a worm out of the knives’ gleaming tongues. But Yungu mixed with Hirisa was a dangerous combination indeed.
He swung between Kyoda and Hassuna, grabbed their armed hands and twisted. From his shove, Kyoda flew into the others and Adzeo slipped past the lazy blades. He had no time to steal any other masks off the wall. With Yungu on his face and Hirisa at his heart, he ran out the door. He bounced off the narrow walls and climbed the stairs—up, up to the top of the building.
The deadend. He ripped through the paper screen of the nearest window and jumped onto the tiled slope. There, under the blind moon, he stopped.
His itching nerves rang as though struck and his pulse pumped.
They were following him, he heard, and still his feet wouldn’t move. He kn
ew why. Quickly, he dug his fingers through the skin of his jawline, catching the edge of Yungu and lifting it, through ache, off his face.
“You sure about that?” Hassuna called from the window behind. Beneath the surface of her skin the wild grimace of Shoza, the Hunter, now loomed.
Adzeo didn’t need to reply. His legs, fleeting-fast in the opposite direction, were all his answer.
* * *
He knew all the true masks on them. Cunning, Forceful, Clever, Gifted, and the worst of all—Lucky. Umenasyo now covered his face with Shoza as well, and that combination meant bad luck for Adzeo.
Fortune and lovers and clients and the favor of the Guild masters flowed to Umenasyo as easy as gravity. Of the five Hunters on Adzeo’s trail, he would be the one to catch his prey first. There was no doubt about that. He rarely failed in anything.
Except that one time, a strange, strange day two weeks ago. The day when the new Queen arrived at the Maple Leaf palace and the guild received its biggest client yet.
She had such a miserable mask at the back of her head—of Kenduan, the Forbidden One. Only three people in the entire written history had ever received such a mask: a man who became a hermit, a woman who spent her whole life in an asylum, and now the clear-eyed Amanoori—the princess promised to a King.
The mask of Kenduan warped her existence. It made having friends, loving relatives, or a husband in need of an heir such a torment, a never-ending struggle. The Tanaya guild-masters had toiled for months to relieve her. The Sacred Capital guild had taken its turn next, without success.
Most couldn’t even try. Amanoori was so terrified of pain, having been tested and probed and given new masks to try on for years. And every single new mask hurt her. Every single one came in opposition to Kenduan. Not Forbidden, people called her. Forsaken.
Guilds & Glaives Page 28
