Unbroken (Rise of the Masks Book 2)

by EM Kaplan

  UNBROKEN

  EM Kaplan

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Elizabeth Snively

  Copyright © 2015 EM Kaplan

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1518638899

  ISBN-13: 978-1518638893

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  For my sister, Elizabeth

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  MANY THANKS TO

  Amy Bland

  Katherine Cruz

  Esther Kaplan

  Jeremy Kaplan

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  Prologue

  No more broken promises.

  Mel stood on the seawall of the northernmost port, staring at the icy water. If she focused her senses, she could see the momentum of the current and observe each wave’s crest, its length, height, and trough. Though she was no longer a Mask—a cloaked mystic trained to use special talents to observe and judge others—she had grown up as one. She knew how to increase her perception, how to push strength to her limbs, and how to heal others, if only a little, when needed.

  She glanced at her friend Rav, on whose quest they were now embarking. Somewhere in the red deserts of the south, Rav’s younger sister, Zunee, was waiting for Rav to come back. Rav had given her word to her family that she would return. Mel knew a thing or two about oaths not kept. When she had sworn to be a Mask, she had pledged to be an impartial servant to others, to mediate, to judge, to observe, and to end disputes—and she had failed to live up to her promise. While she still had breath within her body, she meant to help Rav get home to her sister. Mel would not break another oath.

  Behind Mel, the carved statues of the old gods loomed, standing guard over the port. Falcun of the sky, Pesca of water, Lutra, Insectoj, and the others. The six idols stood in a phalanx—bear, otter, snake, falcon, fish, and insect—fifteen feet each of pure, glorious green agamite, a show of wealth and dominance to all visitors who came ashore. Mel had gained an appreciation for this land, the frozen north, the land of the ancient gods. To her, the agamite throbbed with life and power, rich and alive. To others, the statues appeared simply green. Under her fur-lined hood, her mouth lifted in a half-smile. She never thought she’d regret leaving this harsh climate and these noble, stoic people.

  So much had changed in the past year and a half—Mel had lost her parents to murder because of her father’s arrogance in calling himself a seer. She bristled inside. There was no such thing as a Mask seer. To believe one had ever existed was pure folly. Her father, Ley’Albaer, had had steel gray hair, fair skin with a wrinkled forehead—what her mother had called a permanent scholar's scowl—the unsmiling countenance that was not an expression of anger, but one of intense concentration. He was lean, with a constant, rigid posture. Uncompromising as his beliefs. Unwavering as his self-involvement.

  Though seers didn’t exist, shifters were real—Mel had seen one with her own eyes. Her blood father, Jenks, was a shifter. Before she’d ever learned he was her blood father, she’d seen him shift. But now, he was missing. Gone underground to learn more about the trogs.

  Parents dead, and Jenks lost, true. But she had gained a mate. She watched Ott as he directed the boat’s stewards loading supplies. I’m enamored of him, she thought, her gaze locking on him, on his long limbs. Ott kept reassuring her he’d grown accustomed to the added length—the growth of his arms and legs—which was Mel’s fault. She had stirred up the agamite in his body, the threads of it that ran through his blood. She hadn’t meant to change him—only to save him. He didn’t blame her. The green mineral, harvested in the north and transported down the Uptdon River to the other cities, the ones that could afford it, had altered a great many lives besides Ott’s.

  More men than Ott suffered from agamite poisoning—even now that the subterranean attacks had obstructed the mining and stemmed the flow of mineral to the southern cities. Emerging from the underground as monsters, as trogs, the men and former miners carried a green taint in their blood. Mel had discovered she could control the agamite and that she could stir and cleanse the blood. She helped many trogs regain their humanity and shed their gruesome outward appearance. Horns and tusks, gray hide and foul stench. Mel thought she had found a purpose, a role which only she could fulfill.

  Then the trogs had stopped coming above ground. Whether they were gone or no longer wanted to be human, no one knew…But the creatures had stopped presenting themselves at the doorstep of the great snowy manor. Travelers from the south had reported trog sightings in the southern lands, so that was where Mel and Ott were headed. With an uncomfortable guilty shudder, Mel wondered if without the trogs she had no purpose in life.

  True, she had her friends, including Rav, from the red southern desert, who was now the mother of a baby girl. Mel turned to watch Rav and her man, Bookman, bundle their baby tighter for the start of their journey. Bookman, a former trog, was now a soft-spoken man, who was still learning to speak. He was wise, proving them wrong again and again in their judgments of the underground race of creatures. Now Ott’s bright green eyes flashed as he watched her, a speculative look on his face. His concern made her half-smile in return—his gaze never failed to affect her. He beckoned to her, indicating that it was time to say their farewells.

  “Take care of my brother,” Jenny told Mel. The tiny woman gripped her in a strong embrace. She shot Ott a sideways look. “He needs it. And if anyone can keep him in line, it’s you.” She stood next to Rob, the new lord of the northern manor, the “big house,” as his people called it.

  “You’ll be all right?” Rob asked Ott.

  “I could ask the same of you,” Ott said. They hadn’t been apart from each other for years—inseparable, as close to brothers as two friends could be. The two men stared at each other in a manner so full of unspoken words that Mel wanted to look away.

  “We’ll do the best we can, as always,” Rob said. He smiled with confidence, yet exhaustion underscored his eyes.

  In truth, Mel knew there was no immediate need for them to stay and help Rob at the big house in the north. Though they had need of rebuilding miners’ homes, the trogs had stopped attacking, disappearing and taking with them several missing loved ones, Mel’s blood father among them. Though he was a shifter and could alter his appearance for his own safety, she worried she might never see him again.

  Mel watched Rob and Ott grasp hands and grip each other’s shoulder, their embrace lasting longer than usual. Then Jenny flung herself into her brother’s arms, the siblings’ difference in stature more marked than ever with Ott’s added height.

  As Mel boarded the ship with Ott, she cast one last look at the port and people, and wondered for the thousandth time when she would return.

  She’d spent two winters in the desolate, frozen north where the cold seeped in through cracks in the walls no matter how strong and sturdy a house seemed. She had forged connections with these good people, her new friends, some who felt like family. Now she was leaving…with both trepidation and hope.

  No more broken promises.

  Part 1

  Drowned

  Chapter 1

  With the breeze on her face, Zunee stood on the red sand of her desert homeland, watching her childhood friend take aim and draw his spear back. Keeping silent, crouching downwind from the animal, she willed Deni’s spear to be true. She was the better shot—she’d always had a knack for knowing where the wind blew—but he was in a better position to tak
e down the animal. Typical Deni, he liked to taunt her, to claim that he was the better marksman, although they both knew the truth. He could be annoying, but when they hunted together the time passed quickly, occupied as she was by his verbal sparring. His spear flew with the whisper of a whip and struck the bony cabra in its narrow neck. The animal went down, dropping like a stone. An impressive strike, she acknowledged, with a wry smile. Deni gave a triumphant shout and skidded down the sandy slope toward the carcass. She joined him an instant later.

  “It was as dumb as that deadwood, Lantus Chok.” Her father’s old enemy. “Also half-starved. Too weak to run away,” she told him, her arms crossed, her hip jutted out in a way that never failed to irritate him. Deni rolled his eyes, the night-dark centers standing out against the bright white surrounding them. Both of them were covered in a layer of fine red dust from their bare shoulders to their sandaled feet. She could even see the sand on his eyelashes and eyebrows, silt standing out on his dark hair. Dust probably covered the top of his head as well, though he was too tall for her to see.

  “Half-starved like you, you bony thing,” he said. Squatting by the animal’s body, he took the rope where it looped over his shoulder and began to truss its legs together. The goat had very little flesh on it—she could tell already—but some meat was better than nothing. And the carcass was small enough that Deni would be able to sling it over his shoulders for the long walk home. As he squatted to tie it up, she saw that yes, his shorn head was covered with dust, which was good. The soot protected them from the sun as well as allowed them to better blend into the rusty landscape while they searched for more prey.

  Zunee looked down at herself, at the short brownish-red zari wrap that covered her from chest to thighs, her long legs, as slender as a deer’s, ending in feet planted far apart. She was half-starved, her ribs standing out more than she’d ever seen them before in her life, but she thought she’d hidden it well. She gave a snort of derision. Deni, on the other hand, looked the same as always. Broad, brown shoulders that were so familiar to her. A comfort…yet an annoyance at the same time. However, she had greater things to worry over, so she let her momentary pique pass without further bickering, though it was their favorite pastime. Without a doubt, hers.

  Many months ago, Zunee’s older sister had disappeared. Rav had gone north to the land of the green mountains and the white stone fortress to spend the summer at a school. The journey to Cillary Keep was said to be long and arduous—many weeks in duration—and required passage by boat, which made Zunee shiver to think about. Rav was to have stayed at the Keep for three months, then return at the end of their summer season. She’d promised Zunee that she would return. As next oldest sister, Zunee was now in charge of their household and all of its occupants. She didn’t like the responsibility one bit, not even the smallest grain of it. The burden of taking care of other people chafed her usual carefree self, but she was stuck in this position until her sister returned. So far, Rav had not come back, even all these months later.

  With the herds of the scrappy desert goats dwindling and nothing to hunt near their sheltered cluster of tents between the red rock formations, Zunee had had to travel farther and farther away for any fresh kill, even for meager game like the scrawny goat across Deni’s shoulders. One emaciated cabra would not fill the bellies of her ten younger sisters. But still, it was better than nothing and a reason to feel more optimistic than before. Maybe Lena could make a soup. They all knew Zunee was no cook.

  When at first the kitchen pot grew empty too fast, she blamed the shortage on the speed at which her sisters’ appetites grew. Frustration mounted among them all. The youngest of her sisters was five years old, the eldest sixteen. Most of them were the traded gains from other families, brought home by their father. Collected, valued, and even prized, most of them. She thought of Lena’s sharp tongue and snorted. All right, all of them were treasured, even Lena. The girls were growing, as all creatures did, and required a lot of nourishment. Later, she blamed herself for not bringing home enough meat. Then she’d realized there wasn’t any game to be found. The once-plentiful herds had withered, dwindled…and vanished. Now, the drawn looks on the little ones’ faces made her chest tight with anxiety. She was failing them—not fit to be their leader, their caretaker, their mother.

  Following Deni’s larger footsteps, Zunee scanned the wide open desert beside them. They followed a sparse dotting of dead tree trunks that poked upward, like black thorns stabbing through the red ground. Neither of them hesitated to turn in the correct direction toward home. The row of blackened tree skeletons, a remnant of wetter seasons long past, marked their path. They’d explored almost this far away as children. Then, it had been for fun.

  In the months since Rav had left, what had once been a harsh and inhospitable land had become even more so, tenfold so. The once-plentiful herds of cabra had vanished. With them had gone the carrion birds, the smaller parasitic birds, and even many of the insects that used to keep them in their cloaked tents at night to avoid being covered with bites. Weren’t they all just parasites, she thought, feeding upon the backs of others?

  The drought—and Zunee no longer hesitated to call it that—was so extreme, even for a desert, that the neighboring families, local warlords who used to trouble them, now left them alone. Whether the other combative families were dead, gone, or dying within their own tents, Zunee didn’t know. She knew only that none of them had attacked in recent times. Ashonti, Lohani, Chok. Not a single aggressive overture by any of them. So none of them knew how vulnerable she and her little sisters were, how their father had died at the end of the last season, leaving them unprotected. Thank the Great Mother none of them had attacked.

  “Look. Do you see that? What is that?” Ahead of her, Deni had halted his steps and now was squinting toward the south, looking odd in the hot sun with his furred carcass stole across his shoulders. An ancient tribal king instead of a poor hunter. She snorted just thinking about it. As if Deni could be anything as great as that. Was he handsome? She didn’t know. He was just Deni, the boy who’d been butting heads with her since they’d been old enough to stand.

  Zunee stopped beside him and searched the horizon. Though he was a head taller than she, her eyes were better, and she located his target without hesitation. Still, at first her mind couldn’t form thoughts to describe what she saw. Drawing a great breath into her chest, she watched in horror and awe.

  A storm. A red dust devil. None of her words fit the sight. She’d experienced sandstorms—she’d been caught in one when she was a child and had almost choked to death—but this was not like anything she’d seen before. She needed the more poetic powers of their fore-mothers and fathers, the ones who had composed the songs they still sang at night around their fire. This red beast was no storm. A normal whirlwind made of dust and dirt had a shape like a nest of angry wasps, round and rotating, flexing and shifting. But there was more to it. This…thing had tendrils, arms, appendages that reached outward, skyward, and beckoned at them. Her mind, she knew, was playing tricks on her—the dust devil looked as if it had a wind-whipped face, blurred and smeared in the lines of its rotating layers. It roared like a creature from her worst dreams. Even from this distance, she could tell it was enormous—not like a storm front, but more like a…maligna, an evil spirit trying to climb its way into the heavens, trying to gain its everlasting immortality by jumping into the stars. Counting, she tracked its size and movement as it swayed toward them, looming in its enormity. When she reached the number five, she and Deni exchanged worried glances. Without a word, they broke into a run in the direction of the rocks that sheltered their home.

  In the desert, one did not stop to ponder the majesty of the unknown. Even Zunee had learned, despite her stubborn mind, that the unknown could kill her. Their sandaled feet hit the red dirt in quick, even steps, their long bony legs stretching to span the distance. They could hear the howl of the storm now, and she knew they would not reach shelter in time. Compared t
o it, they were nothing but ants on the ground. Passing the first blackened tree, she felt the sting of sand on the backs of her arms and neck, her legs, too. Though the dead wood painted a zigzag, dotted line, they ran straight ahead. The howl in her ears became a roar as they ran on. Soon, they wouldn’t be able to hear each other. Or breathe.

  Still, Zunee didn’t panic. It wasn’t her nature to do so. The desert had birthed her. She had been fed by its wild winds and hot sun and if she were meant to die this day, the desert would take her back. All she could do was try as best as she could to extend this day, this moment, as if it were her last. She did spare a moment to feel sorry for her sister, Lena, though, who would be left in charge.

  “Run faster,” she demanded. “Quicker than the wind.” Her long legs had caught up to his. She glared at him as if the whole situation were his fault.

  “All right,” Deni said, picking up his pace. “I’ll run faster. But I’m not dropping this goat.”

  Chapter 2

  In the dining cabin of the riverboat, Mel and Ott laid out their plans while they ate. The two of them sat at a rectangular wooden table along with Rav, Bookman, and a young woman called Marget, the girl who had been in charge of keeping the fires lit at the big house. A broad-shouldered young man named Charl also had decided to travel with them. He said he meant to go at least as far as the large city of Tooran where he wanted to look for work. He sat with them, chewing a piece of dried meat with enough force to make his jaw flex and pop. A divot appeared in the side of his cheek as his teeth moved behind closed lips.