by Various
Heng had complained about being left to last so Crussman had laughed and clapped him on the shoulder and sent him in next. Heng came away looking unhappy with a mask pinched in his fingers, a fierce and glowering one whose features struck Jann as somehow still feminine. Sabila, thoughtful, was carrying a golden mask, the set to its eyes and thin mouth speaking to Jann of youth and determination.
Crussman had been the daring one. There had been three compartments at the back of the pannier, three that were sealed tighter than the grips could easily break loose. Crussman had peered this way and that through the crumpled hull over them and seen a way to draw out what was inside. It was a mask the colour of old, rusted pig-iron, worked with rough designs that could have been streaks of corrosion or dried blood, worked into a snarl of such savage malevolence that when Crussman had held it up the very air around it seemed to darken and the rest of them had flinched back as though struck. Whatever little joke he’d been about to make died and slid back down his throat.
The expression on that mask had haunted them all, and when the wind had picked up and Merelock had suggested they go below they had all unconsciously given Crussman a wide berth. He was still smiling and waggling the thing in front of him, but Jann could tell he was forcing it. She had gone to sit beside Sabila in the control deck as they worked to raise a link to the depot, sitting beside the vox terminal turning the white mask over and over in her hands.
When the screaming started, Jann never had a moment’s doubt what had begun it. Crussman had succumbed. He had put on his mask.)
And Jann was running again, pushing herself up the stairs to the roof-deck where the craft still sat in the holding gantry, lashed down against the wind. Both of the splintered lines of thought racing in her head were now revolving around that memory. The thing they had found, the crashed craft and the two containers they hadn’t opened. Sunlight, kingship, a golden sword. Surely there was help there?
She had forgotten about her last three crewmates, but not for long. On the roof of the tower, on the landing pad under the cranes and gantries, Crussman and Sabila were at war.
Jann found herself empty of surprise. This was just another piece of mad whimsy, even while it had the inevitability of night falling. Jann nodded to herself as she slunk into hiding beneath a crane gantry. It was all so obvious. Everything had led to this.
Crussman’s right hand gripped a cable-cutter from which he had stripped the safety cage. Whether by purpose or chance (purpose, Jann’s mind whispered, it’s all on purpose) he had cut his left hand with it: the palm glistened red and a steady stream of blood dripped from it as he moved. She gasped at the sight, couldn’t take her eyes off the bleeding hand as the skinny pilot brandished it, thrust it forwards like a threat, held it theatrically high to counterbalance the roundhouse swings of his cutter. She had known she was going to see it, should have been prepared: every time she had thought about Crussman now it felt like that bleeding hand was gripping her heart. But surely the hand was bleeding for Sabila, and surely Sabila was still alive?
And so he was, alive and fighting although he must have known as soon as he left Klaide crying below that he was good as dead. Creeping from cover to cover, Jann watched the cycles of their battle, circling back and forth across the wide circle of the landing pad, Crussman’s cutter arcing and smashing against the length of ceramite rod Sabila had taken from Gallardi’s machine forge, and which he swung at Crussman like a sword. The cutter rang off the rod, and though the impact sounded light Sabila was driven down on one knee. Crussman flung back his head and screamed, holding the cutter two-handed over his head, and the sound of it wrenched Jann down to her very core.
She crawled between the tanks of ornithopter fuel and then darted behind a crane stanchion, peering around it. Sabila was on his feet, squaring off against Crussman, holding his makeshift sword high in challenge as Crussman held out his bloody hand and howled. The challenge, the defeat, the one sword, the bleeding hand, timeless and ever-renewing, a cycle as unbreakable as summer’s decay into winter.
They closed and battled again as Jann ran around the lip of the landing pad, Sabila’s movements swooping and elegant even as his slender arms shook with exhaustion, Crussman fighting back with a wild predator’s savage purity of motion. And now Jann could see another form creeping and stooping behind Crussman as he roared and fought. Heng was shadowing Crussman in a bouncing stoop, clutching at the air and jabbing his fist and stump back and forth in manic counterpoint to the clash of weapons. Each time Sabila was knocked sprawling Heng would give a shrill, reedy cackle that made Jann flinch down deeper into cover. She knew what would happen if Heng turned his
(but now I know who really owns that)
face towards her and set eyes on her. He would know her name, he would recognise her, cackle and call, and from then on every path she walked would lead downwards and every day the shadows would lean a little closer to her, and night would come slithering on velvet-soft scales. In the last moments before she managed to tear her gaze away and start crawling again, Jann saw that Heng too had wounded himself. His thick bare forearms were mottled with bruises and gouges from where he had clawed at his own skin, and bitten at the flesh of his wrist beneath the stump where Crussman had hacked away his hand. That struck a chord of familiarity with her, a ripple of understanding like silver wind-chimes in her mind, but some of the wounds were bleeding and that was wrong, as wrong as the endlessly-renewed battle between Crussman and Sabila was right. Shuddering, Jann crawled towards the crane.
It was in there. A face they hadn’t seen yet. She was sure it was the answer. The half-memory of it was in her mind now, like warm sunlight and her grandfather’s voice, soft, meaningless comforting words to the tearful little girl who’d scraped her shin. She knew it had to be there. She could feel it.
Crussman howled again behind her, and mixed with it were two other cries: genuine pain from Sabila, and angry dismay from Heng. All Crussman wanted was to end Sabila, because all Crussman’s nature understood was the ending, but somehow all three of them knew that ending it was wrong, something that would cast them adrift. Jann knew the reason, but she could barely have told them even if they had had mind enough left to listen. The wisdom was hers, not theirs, and that was part of the cycle too. The gritty bars of the gantry were under her hands now, and she grunted as she hauled herself up. Her reflexes seemed to belong to someone older than her but yet lighter, moonbeam-light.
She groaned as she closed on the craft and put her hands on it. Seeing it brought low like this grieved her, like seeing a beautiful dawn-bird cowering on the earth with a crippled wing, and she mourned for it with her heart even as the strange feel of its hull repulsed her skin. She stroked her fingers down the high spinal ledge, along the compartments ripped by the ugly metal arms, and found the final two, the ones they hadn’t been able to breach.
Her fingers touched it and her thoughts seemed to touch it as well. She couldn’t tell if she were remembering opening it, or thinking of opening it, or imagining opening it, or dreaming she had opened it. Behind her on the landing pad Sabila gave another cry, a choking, dying cry. Crussman’s voice was ragged, his vocal cords worn to tatters; Heng’s voice was the yowl of a cat in the dark. Jann barely heard them. This was salvation. Her senses were already reaching out for the voice she needed to hear. The sun-voice. The father-voice. The king-voice.
The compartment opened under her fingers. Jann retched, screamed, knew she was not dead but damned, poisoned, eaten, violated. Everything that was left of herself rotted in an instant. Her body seemed to go strengthless, boneless. She sagged, and would have fallen but for her torso wedging itself between two crossed struts.
Jann felt infinite desire and infinite contempt. She was paralysed, body and mind, except for the all-drenching cascade of fear. The face at the bottom of the compartment held her, ran her through as though she were a damsel-fly run through with a sleek stinger. She co
uld not even sense an effort in it, or a will: it was something in herself that made her helpless to it, held her fast. Tears stung her eyes and her vision doubled and blurred. That didn’t help. That face’s grip on her mind remained, iron-cold and silk-strong. Only when her balance finally gave way and she sagged and fell to the metal decking at the gantry base did the extra distance stretch and lessen the hold.
Still in a half-sprawl, Jann reached for a strut to try and pull herself up. She didn’t know what to do, couldn’t think of words or a plan. The thought of that wonderful voice and the touch of the sun on her shoulders, that was gone, dropped without a trace into the abyss that had opened under her mind. Trying to increase the distance between herself and the terrible, devouring silence that seemed to be welling out from under the open lid, she forced herself onto her knees and began to shuffle back towards the landing pad. Whatever Crussman did to her, she would almost welcome it now. Anything to dislodge the memory of that face.
She stopped dead when she saw them come out of the shadows.
Six of them made a half-circle that closed smoothly on Crussman. As fatigue took the pilot and he started to sway and then stagger a step this way and then a step that, the six moved with sinuous ease, step and counter-step, the formation never breaking. Crussman’s murder-scream was now not much more than a rasping moan, but still he had enough fury to drive his muscles: he lifted up the cutter, ready to drive it through the dying Sabila’s skull at his feet. Maybe he hadn’t seen the figures, maybe he didn’t care.
Either way, there was nothing he could have done. The semi-circle parted, three scintillating figures darting one way and three darting the other in graceful unison, and through the centre of the gap they opened up came another figure, leaping and turning in the air, wrapped in shades of red and flashing gold that sparkled and dripped in the early evening gloaming. It landed on the balls of its feet and pirouetted, wheeling and spinning around Crussman’s sagging, grubby form. The tails of a long coat whirled around it, now a rich blue, purple, silver, green, scattering shards and coins of light. A high crest of silver – hair or feathers, it was hard to know – ran up its hood and down between its shoulder blades, and Jann could hear the soft shh-shh as it whipped from side to side.
The bright shape froze in a deep fencer’s pose over Sabila, and after a moment the dazzling sparks that had swirled around it coalesced onto it. Jann could see its lithe limbs, the crested hood, the outline of its coat and mask. One slender arm was up, staying the cutter’s death-stroke. Dimly, she became aware that the six other strangers were echoing its stance in perfect, precise unison.
The newest stranger held its pose for a moment, and then suddenly its face and then its whole body flashed golden, pouring out a deep and beautiful light like sunlight that set Jann’s heart leaping for a moment with a hope she couldn’t quite understand or describe. But then its colours sank into black, shot through with coiling veins of red like cracks in the crust of a lava flow, and its upraised arm flicked through three curt, precise motions. For the first time since the faces had broken them all Crussman seemed to be speaking, or trying to, but now with his throat so delicately open he could not make the words. He crumpled, his legs folding and his arms falling into segments where the shining figure had cut them apart.
Heng, groaning and crooning, tried to scrabble away from Crussman’s killer, and the figure straightened to its full, frightening height and watched him go. Its companions closed in, now moving in low crouches that put them almost on all fours, keeping their colours muted so that lined up on each side of their master they looked almost like shadowy wings. As Jann watched, their colours shifted from smoke-grey to the dirty white of old bones, and their faces blurred and arranged themselves into screaming harridan masks bursting from shocks of scarlet hair. Wailing, they scrabbled forwards hard on Heng’s heels, caught his ankles and pinned them, caught his wrists and pinned them, held him writhing and gasping until the master stranger, still a shape of coal-black and smoulder-red, shot an arm out again. This time, instead of sparks of light, the arm was surrounded by dancing specks of blackness, swarming like cinders borne up from a great fire, and with each twitch of the arm Heng’s body shuddered, bled, died, bled more and finally came apart.
The masks, the grief, the madness, the deaths: Jann had little left to her now, but somewhere in the ruins there was still the survival urge, and the capacity for fear. She found her feet, turned, made to flee and hide before they could turn their attention to her.
It was standing behind her. Staring up, her gaze met the darkness of its hood.
This was not the horror that the simple mask had been. The darkness beneath the deep fold of cloth was a space. A neutrality. Her eye and mind could find no purchase in it.
Jann stood perfectly still. Her muscles seemed to relax, as though they understood that all this was finally ending.
The hooded figure’s cloak whispered as it took a step towards her. Its arms were held demurely in front of it, the hands folded below the cloak-folds of its chest. The hands were five-fingered, slender, longer than a human’s, and now they rose up to push back the hood.
‘No’, Jann wanted to say. Nothing more than ‘no’. It was all she could think of. But the hood fell back.
It was Jann’s own face she was looking at, and it made her weep. The beautiful maiden-face, upturned to watch the white moon, the sacred circles shining on its skin. One of Jann’s own hands crept up and wonderingly traced the lines of her own features.
Then the face opposite her began to change. It stretched, deformed. It became a caricature of itself, an exaggerated travesty of grotesque eyes, canted cheekbones, a tapered chin and high forehead that mocked the lines of Jann’s own… her own…
…face.
Her hands pressed in on the side of her head. The figure opposite her did not move, except that now its features changed again. Now it became a bestial face, a vermin face. Crude and gawping, the features lumpy, meaty, the eyes muddy, the mouth slack. A repulsive face. An alien face. The face she had carried all her life.
Jann’s fingers began to work. She dug them into herself, drawing blood with her broken and dirty nails. She found sweaty, gritty skin on which her fingers skidded, and smooth and cool skin with a firmness that her touch did not recognise. She dug and gouged and a bright bolt of madness sheared through her. Her fingers seemed to slide into her very flesh and she could feel her skull soundlessly parting. Her thoughts whirled and swarmed out of her into the cooling air like moths. She felt herself split and part. There was a sensation of bone cracking, tissue tearing, but no sound, no blood, no physical pain.
The white mask landed softly at her feet.
And now there was no kinship left with any of these strangers, no familiarity. There was the stink of blood and offal where poor sweet slow-talking Heng lay dead, and the butchered body of twinkle-eyed Crussman, and here she stood, and what was her name now? What was her name?
She jerked and fell backwards, rolled, got her feet under her by nothing more than blind chance, and ran, shrieking and wailing, not a scrap of mind left in her any more. She ran with nothing more than a merciful roaring void inside her, a perfect hollow, and her course took her away from the strangers, away from the gantry, towards the edge of the roof-deck. The rail was not high, and she hit it at a flat run.
Jann was still thrashing her limbs as she fell, trying to flee, but it was only a moment before the packed earth at the tower’s foot ended it.
Quietly, without haste, they assembled on the roof. They made their way up through the stunted, squalid spaces where the animals had lived. They moved in soft procession, angular and high-stepping like bright wading birds, moving through precise sequences of poses both careful and utterly relaxed. Their colours and masks flickered gently in the dusk. None of them spoke.
They made a circle around the roof, then the circle became a spiral, leading them inwards, until t
hey broke the spiral and spread into a pattern that made the fire-rune, the rune of lost glory and the dream of rekindling, with Ehallech at its crux.
Ehallech carried a bright mask in his hands, the Fire Mask, the visage of Vaul. Ehallech was learning the craft of the weaponwright and the myths of the crippled god of the forge had great meaning for him. It was only right that he be the one to take the mask from Gallardi, whose corpse now lay next to Tokuin’s amid silenced machines below them.
The troupe broke after a moment and then silently formed around Lhusael, who carried the dark-green mask she had taken after her blades had killed Merelock. Lhusael was a devotee of her people’s most primal, heartfelt stories, the stories of their parents and progenitors. Already she had mastered the spirit of Isha, danced that role, sang the grieving-songs, learned the intricate blade katas that represented the harvest-mother’s tears. Now she was completing her grasp of those story-cycles by learning the role of Isha’s husband, silent Kurnous, the god of the hunt, whose face was in the Hunter’s Mask that had driven Merelock to prowl the dark paths with a spear in her hand. Behind her, moving in beautiful synchronicity, came Melechu, who had spent so long behind a bone mask dancing in the retinue of Nysshea the troupe’s death-jester. Now was the time to balance the role of death with the role of a life-giver: Melechu’s bridge into that role was Isha’s sacred grief, and so she had taken the Mourning Mask from Klaide, the visage of Isha of the harvest, weeping for her dead champion and her lost children.
