FIERCE: Sixteen Authors of Fantasy

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Elu?” a voice whispered through the door.

  Dil opened the door wide and pressed the satchel to Elu’s chest, who snatched it and reached inside. He felt the adventurer’s mask, the maskmaker’s mask, and, but wait … where was it … ah, his fingers grazed the smooth emerald set into the white gold of the mask of legend. He sighed relief. Maybe Dil told the truth. The spirits in his mask certainly felt guileless. If Dil was leading him into some other diabolical trap, he hid it well. And he had brought him back the Guardian mask—surely Dil had looked inside the satchel. But should he use it? Was his situation of sufficient urgency? He still felt the unease, the quiet terror within himself, but it had subsided somewhat … but no. It returned, stronger, nearer. Thora moved—he knew it.

  A terrific thud sounded out from the wall, as if it were struck by a giant boulder.

  Thora.

  “Dil! We must run. The Terror approaches!” he yelled at the befuddled man. Another great thud, even louder, hit the wall facing the street. Elu grasped at his prisoner’s mask and pulled, then tore at the straps behind his head with determined urgency. “Help me!”

  Dil reached at his side for the knife hanging against his thigh and meant to unsheathe it, but the third thud against the wall was the last, and it crumbled in a tumultuous noise, just as the wall had on that fateful day in the barrows. Elu still struggled with his prisoner’s mask, and Dil, panicked at the fallen wall reached over and cut the mask loose. Elu reached into his satchel and pulled out the first mask he touched—for he could not see in the dust—and pulled it over his face.

  “We must run!” Elu grabbed Dil and started out the prison door.

  “Maskmaker?”

  The voice sounded familiar. And it shook the building, it seemed. Had Thora grown in power?

  “Maskmaker, I’ve come to help.”

  Thora did not talk like that anymore. The dust had cleared somewhat and Elu looked cautiously around the corner of the door into the room now half-open to the street above.

  He was not entirely sure, but Elu felt confident that he stared straight into the face of a wyvern, whose head peered down into the room from the street above.

  “Maskmaker, it is I, Brea. The blacksmith’s daughter. Do not be alarmed.”

  Brea?

  “I—I’m not alarmed,” he stuttered, still peering cautiously into the room from around the corner.

  “Then come out where I can see you!” The wyvern’s voice made his mask tremble and nearly shook him to the core, but he stepped out from around the door and approached. Dil followed, cautiously. They climbed up the stones of the ruined wall and emerged onto the street above. It was no longer as crowded as earlier in the day but people yelled and pointed at the beast now hunched low next to the hall of justice. Most ran away as quickly as they could but some just stared in disbelief as the two men conversed with the wyvern.

  “I told you I’d help you, maskmaker,” she said, and as she spoke, she diminished, the scales of her skin shrinking down, changing from grey and green to a warm pink. Within moments, Brea, the blacksmith’s daughter, stood before them smiling behind her mask of power.

  “A wyvern’s mask,” said Elu, understanding the mask and its spirits at last. The longing, the nostalgia—not all made perfect sense, but the spirits were those of wyverns who had passed on to the other world, whose knowledge and power still inhabited the mask on Brea’s face.

  “Yes. The moment I touched it, I knew.”

  Dil broke his silence. “Are—are you really a wyvern then, come down from across the sea in human form?”

  She laughed. A confident, delightful laugh. The wyvern’s mask was actually rather small, covering only the eyes, nose, and the upper lip, exposing far more of the face than masks Elu was used to, far more than any woman’s mask he had ever seen. He wanted to avert his eyes out of shame, or out of fear for himself but he could not look away from face. Her eyes were afire, almost as Derry’s when he went out to face the Terror. Her cheeks glowed soft and smooth for she was still quite young, perhaps a year less than Elu himself.

  “No, I am not a wyvern. Not at the moment. I was born of my mother like you. But in the few moments I have worn this mask I have learned that the wyverns are not so different from us.”

  Elu glanced down the street. A troop of soldiers holding pikes approached, urged on by terrified city dwellers pointing down the street at the young woman.

  “Brea?”

  “I do not fear them. Only Coron Indibar ever slew a wyvern, and his mask was powerful.”

  In the blink of an eye she transformed back into the wyvern and roared a warning to the approaching soldiers. They paused. She growled deep in her chest and howled at them, spitting a flaming missile of brimstone, which landed, just paces from their feet, causing them to scatter.

  Elu looked up at her. “Brea, we need to do something about this judge. He is a tyrant over this city, and abuses his mask. It should be a beacon of light for an abused people seeking justice and mercy but instead he has corrupted it. Ruined it.”

  “I will bring him here.”

  She flew into the air, howling at the reassembling guards, and shot up to the upper story of the hall of justice where an ornate balcony looked out at the street below. She passed out of sight for a few moments and Elu and Dil heard the tearing of stone and wood. A minute later she reappeared, clutching a terrified chief judge in one of her clawed hands. She dumped him on the street before Elu and hovered there in midair, flapping her gigantic wings majestically.

  The cowering judge rose to his feet, still bowed over with his hands covering his head, ducking as if to avoid the flapping beast. A crowd of people began to gather, curious at seeing the chief judge—the man who had pillaged half the city and coerced the other half to conspire with him—shrink and wail before the wyvern. And though they still feared the wyvern, it had not yet attacked anyone, save the chief judge. So really, how bad could the beast be?

  “I will see you all unmasked and flogged to your deaths for this!” the judge shouted at them. Elu simply smiled. He tried to imagine the soldiers, still hanging back from the wyvern, trying to brave the beast’s claws and fire to fulfill any order of the judge.

  His thoughts drifted, directed by his mask, to his old master, Goshorn the maskmaker, and how he reached out to grab the Terror’s mask. The spirits of his mask began to speak to him, whispering a chant and bringing it to his lips. He began slowly, almost inaudibly, unheard over the din of the wings and the murmur of the crowd.

  The people hushed, seeing that the maskmaker chanted, and strained to hear the words—not that it would have helped them, for the chant fell from his lips in the ancient language of the first maskmakers, whose authority imbued those first masks of legend with unspeakable power. His voice rose in timbre and volume, amplified by the power of his mask to the ears of all that heard.

  He stopped. All was silent. Brea alighted behind him next to Dil and held still.

  The words came to Elu as they had come to him with the innkeeper, spoken by the mask, the memory and art of all those spirits channeled through his.

  “Chief Judge. You do a great evil here. Your mask is ill-gotten, and you have defiled and perverted it. You have enslaved this people, squandering their trust and the authority the king placed in you. Do you have anything to say to them? Anything at all?” he said, motioning towards the people who gathered in number and gawked at the cowering judge.

  “How dare you! You—you filthy—” he began, spittle dripping down his mask.

  Elu interrupted, “Very well. There is nothing more to say.” He chanted once more, picking up where he left off, and his mask shone. Not as brightly as the Guardian mask had, but it shone with the light and power of the ancient maskmakers.

  Elu reached forth his hand, remembering the motion of his master, and placed his open palm on the judge’s mask.

  It split in two with an earth-shattering crack, a massive sound that belied the mask’s small size. It fe
ll clattering to the ground. The judge covered his face with his hands and collapsed to the earth, crying and moaning. Elu looked at the mask with sadness and regret—it could not ever have been saved. No immersion in the river or the sea would have rid that mask of the corruption the old man sowed in it.

  The crowd burst out into a cheer. They waved at him, shouting praise to the strange, foreign maskmaker sent to deliver them from their tyrant. Elu held up his hand to ask for silence.

  “This man here on the ground is finished. He is to have a vagrant’s mask, or the like. But do no harm to him for all the many evils he committed against you. Let him go free, for the knowledge of his evils and his feverish desire for the wretched mask that is no longer will be punishment enough for him.” He turned to Dil, pointing to him. “This man here will be your judge, for I give him the mask of his father. I have seen its spirits and know Dil’s heart, and they are properly matched—” he paused, looking at Dil, “—and he will be a fine judge. And a merciful one.”

  The crowd continued its cheer, made greater by the news that Dilly as well would no longer judge them but that his son would be the chief judge. Apparently Dil’s reputation as a man of fairness outpaced his reputation as a conversationalist.

  The chattering slowed. Brea, the wyvern, wailed and reared her head. Elu looked around himself, and felt the fear rising in the crowd, who looked not at the wyvern but all about themselves. Some looked to the sky. Others fell to the earth and wailed.

  With a crack that sundered the air she appeared.

  Thora stood next to the still weeping man once known as the chief judge. She looked down at her feet, and curled her lips in disgust.

  “Brother, is this the company you have been keeping? I should have known….”

  With a motion of her head, the maskless man flew high into the air, screaming, and careened into the brick wall of the hall of justice with a crack. He crumpled to the earth, bloody and unmoving.

  Brea reared on her legs and wailed at Thora, breathing a torrent of fire towards her, punctuated with hunks of brimstone. Thora calmly held up her hand and the fire stopped just a pace away, enveloping her all around with scorching heat.

  Elu, afraid of another confrontation with her but fearing worse if he did nothing, removed his mask and slipped the Guardian’s mask over his face. He looked at the Terror, and let his anger fly.

  His mask shone nearly as bright as the now setting sun, stinging the eyes of any who looked directly at him. Thora flinched from the light shining on her and held up her hand to ward it off, but she had no power over it.

  “Go, Terror, and never come back. Leave this land forever or I will destroy you.”

  Thora laughed. “You can’t destroy me. Nothing can destroy me. Even when I slept all those long years I was not dead. I was not destroyed. Even as I lay slumped over the forge, shoved there by my drunken father, the fire eating my face, I knew I would rise again. You can not rob me of my power and withhold from me my claim.”

  She had never told him about her face. In all their wanderings he never thought to ask, or rather, never felt like he could. And that man. Her father. How he survived and his own master had not burned him inside. It made him hate her.

  “And what claim is that?”

  “Justice,” she whispered. “I am not woman. I am not mortal. I have no cares or needs. I only do what must be done. Did he not deserve it?” she added, pointing at the broken form of the judge.

  “It is not my place to decide if he deserved it, I only know—”

  “Ha! You finally learn after all these years. You are right—it is not your place.”

  That made Elu snap. The image of the unfortunate cooper who unknowingly crossed Thora’s path on the road outside of Gheb—the vile innkeeper suspended helplessly in the air of the inn, the memory of the dead form of his master on the healer’s table—these spurred him to action. He howled in anger, and concentrated his light on her. On her dreaded mask. She must be stopped. She was evil. Evil to the core. It wasn’t just the mask—somehow she had fooled him all those years, hiding her nature deep within herself, only to reveal it when her power allowed her not just to show her true self, but to flaunt her twisted soul. And who knew what horrors followed her in her travels? How many months had passed since he loosed her?

  The light smote her and she cowered under it. But the Terror lashed out with her own assault, and Elu felt the wind knocked out of him as he soared backward, hitting the cold brick wall of the hall of justice. He landed close to the chief judge, whose motionless body held no spirit—none that he could see through the Guardian mask. And that was when he noticed it.

  He could not see the judge’s spirit, for it had left. But he saw everyone else’s. Dil’s, the city folk’s, the soldiers’. He saw them all, not as he saw their spirits through the maskmaker’s mask, for with those eyes he saw purpose. Utility. With those eyes he matched people with their masks and discerned kinship and likeness. Not with the Guardian mask.

  He saw their … he couldn’t place it. They all, each of them, appeared different. Dil looked noble, shy, and patient, and Elu understood the patience for he had labored long under his father and the evil judge, tolerating their ways in the hopes of better days ahead. He looked at Brea still in wyvern form, but that did not mask her true nature as a woman, and yet, more than a woman. Her spirit smoldered almost like a wyvern itself—wild, ancient, wise, and dangerous, but virtuously dangerous, as if none but the oppressors need fear her.

  And he saw Thora. He was right—it was almost as if there were two parts to her: one was the old Thora, whose natural anger and hatred had twisted with her inner strength and will until, under the influence of the Terror and without fear of punishment, she surrendered herself wholly to her anger under the aegis of justice. The other part was … opaque, inscrutable, and incontestable—like a being of pure power and aloofness and … utterly uncaring about anyone. And he understood now—she would not stop. In her eyes he had wronged her, and she must pay it back—with equal measure. He had summoned his master and he had tried to kill her—destroy her mask, at least, which to her would be a death, and so she would—must—kill Elu too. There was no way around it for her. There was no choice. Only action.

  An action that he decided he must make first, or die like Goshorn.

  And so he flew. He leapt off the ground and summoned the power of his mask, calling upon the spirits within to aid him, to lift him off the ground and assail her. But still the spirits grumbled at him. He had noticed it before, at their last meeting. He tried to match power for power with her and had come up short. They resisted him. He was not kindred. He was foreign, and they felt reproach at having dealings with someone so ill-fitted to their task. They obliged, but grudgingly. And with only a token of power—with but a fraction of their potential.

  Walls of force sprouted from his hand, pushed on by his will, and struck her. She flew backward onto the ground, but then laughed.

  “Oh, this is great fun. Is that all you have? I sense your mask has not taken to you as it once did,” she said, rising to her feet. She disappeared.

  The people began to panic, fearful of the terrible magic on display before them, and started to scatter. In the confusion, Thora appeared behind Elu and grabbed his neck, lifting him into the air above her. He struggled against her powerful grip and kicked at her. He begged the spirits of the mask to grant him more strength as his vision sparkled and began to fade. They obliged, but warned him to remove the mask or face dire consequences. He kicked at her head, connecting with the terrible mask, and he fell.

  She moaned and held her face in her hands. Good. She felt pain. Now to finish the job.

  But could he do it? As evil as she had become, was she still Thora? Maybe. He hesitated. He stretched his arm to her but the spirits warned him again: do not presume to use us. His face began to burn where his scars connected with the mask and he cried out, unstrapping it from his head. He yanked the adventurer’s mask over his face and ra
n, calling out to Brea.

  “Can you bear me away? She will kill me.”

  The wyvern bowed low to him, and she said, “Climb on. She cannot harm me. Her mask has no power over mine.”

  He did not understand this but climbed up anyway, and she kicked off the ground and soared high above the tumultuous scene. Thora stood, now recovered from his kick, and rose into the air after them, attempting pursuit. Brea swooped higher and higher, speeding away like an eagle. Thora, even with the terrible power of the dread mask, fell behind. Soon, she disappeared behind them in the distance.

  The people looked up and saw the man escape on the wyvern. Some remembered the legend of Coron Indibar and reckoned his spirit had returned from that other world, harnessing the power of the wyvern he tamed and slew. Others, recognizing her as the blacksmith’s daughter from when they saw her transform, called her Brea Indys—the woman of wyvern blood.

  And all remarked at the Terror that appeared that day—how the hated judge paled in comparison to the dread she brought—but also at the Guardian who stood in her path and shielded the people from her, and cast her down with his radiant power—if only momentarily—as if with the light of that other world.

  Chapter X

  Hartree

  FOR OVER AN HOUR BREA and Elu flew north and east, following the coastline. The sun had set, casting dark shadows of twilight across the gray terrain below, and when the darkness completely engulfed the land Brea descended, for they saw flickering lights far beneath them.

  “Where is this? Where are we?” whispered Elu in her ear.

  “The city of Hartree, where dwells the high king of Varnor. My father often sells his wares here.”

  They landed, and in the darkness none in the city suspected that a wyvern now stood at the outskirts.

  “Maskmaker. Thank you for freeing me. I hope I have been of some service.”

  “Brea, you have saved me from a terrible fate and I consider myself in your debt.” He bowed low to her in salute. She likewise lowered her head solemnly.