Faces (21 page)

The Lady laughed. “As if you have a choice.” She turned toward Mara and raised her hands toward her, palms out. “You're becoming a nuisance. I'll deal with you shortly. For now, stay still.”

White light poured from the Lady's hand, surrounding Mara, pinning her in place, immobile as a statue. She tried to access her own Gift, tried to pull some of the Lady's magic into her as she had absorbed attacks from ordinary Gifted in the past, but she couldn't.

But in that moment, while all the Lady's attention was focused on Mara, Keltan staggered up from the shadows beyond the dead villager, where he had been lying unseen. A cut in his forehead had turned his face into a Mask of blood. He'd lost his helmet and his sword, but he drew his dagger, eyes fixed on the Lady.

Mara's glance might have betrayed him, but her eyes could not even flick in his direction.

Keltan lunged, plunging his knife into the Lady's back.

The magic holding Mara in place vanished. She dropped hard to the wooden floor, just at the edge of the shaft. She saw Arilla turn. The knife flew from the Lady's body, clattering against the wall. The wound it had left had already closed. Magic wrapped Keltan, held him as Mara had been held. “Watch, Mara,” the Lady snarled. “Watch as I crush the life from your would-be lover and take his magic for my own. See the fate of all who oppose me.”

But though Mara no longer had any magic left, she was no longer frozen in place. And there, right at the edge of the shaft, lay the crossbow Keltan had dropped earlier, cocked and loaded.

Mara grabbed it, raised it. The Lady must have seen the movement from the corner of her eye. Her head started to turn. Her eyes flared white—but Mara's finger had already tightened.

The bolt tore through the back of the Lady's neck, angled upward so sharply the point burst through the top of her skull in a spray of blood, bone, and brain. Keltan fell to the wooden floor, gasping. The villagers still fighting on the stairs dropped as if clubbed, two at the top thudding down the first flight like sacks of meal. The Lady's eyes blazed in Mara's Gifted sight like twin suns . . . and then went out. Arms still outstretched, the Lady toppled backward into the shaft, dropping out of sight into darkness.

And all her magic slammed, unfiltered, into Mara.

Two screams echoed in her head: hers, ripped from her throat by the agony of that impact, and the Lady's, a scream of fury and betrayal and denial that could not be coming from Arilla's plummeting body but Mara heard nonetheless. Her own blood turned to acid in her veins, invisible knives flayed her skin, her brain seemed to burn and boil in her skull. If she had had nowhere to send that magic, it would have slain her, for she was not the Lady, and had not the Lady's endless decades of study and practice and experience.

But she
did
have somewhere to send it. She lay at the very edge of the shaft, and though the mine was all but played out, there were still vast deposits of black lodestone below her, lodestone to help draw the magic out of her.

She hurled the Lady's magic after the Lady's corpse. She poured it into the mine, down to the very bottom, filling every shaft, releasing it with the force of tens of thousands of the rockbreakers that had almost destroyed the camp once before. The ground heaved and shook. The mechanism atop the man-engine twisted, and then broke. The vertical beams and their hated platforms collapsed into the shaft, and with that, the reciprocating beams, suddenly unsupported at their ends, slammed down, still moving, smashing the wooden flooring into splinters and continuing to grind away at it.

They came within a hairsbreadth of crushing Mara beneath them, but strong hands pulled her out of the way just in time: Chell. “We have to get out of here,” he said.

Mara couldn't speak. She was seeing double, as though looking through two sets of eyes. Yet the world seemed strangely dark. Where had the bright light of magic gone? Limp, she let Chell pull her toward the stairs. Hyram, still clutching his bleeding flank, was already climbing them. Keltan staggered after them. Whiteblaze, whining, had clambered to his feet and pushed past Keltan to be closer to Mara. Mara could only think that the Lady had somehow immobilized him on first emerging from the mine. He seemed unharmed now, but she felt so emptied out inside she could barely muster relief at the fact.

“Out!” Chell shouted at Edrik, who had just appeared at the top of the stairs, bloody sword in hand. “Everyone out! Evacuate the camp! Everyone!”

The ground shook. The giant moving beams, splintering the wooden flooring, suddenly caught on some floor support they could not move. With a terrible cracking sound, they froze. More tearing and breaking noises came from outside, from the direction of the waterwheel.

Somehow they made it to the top of the stairs, which were bucking as though trying to throw them off. They emerged into the night air. “Out of the camp,” Chell said to the men there. “Get everyone out—all the unMasked, everyone!”

Mara turned her head as, with another enormous cracking sound, the waterwheel, caught between the force of the water and the jammed beams, tore free of its axle and fell over onto its side, smashing the boardwalk. The water poured over it and down the trench. In the silence following, with the rumble of the waterwheel finally stilled, Mara could hear a far deeper and more ominous rumbling coming from the shaking ground itself.

“Run!” Chell shouted.

But Mara couldn't run. She could barely move one foot in front of the other, and stumbled as she did so, uncoordinated, unable to control her own movements. Whiteblaze kept pressing against her leg as though to support her, but that only made her slower. Keltan and Hyram weren't in much better shape. All of them trailed the rest of the unMasked Army and Chell's men, who were spreading out through the camp, urging everyone to get out. A mob of people, workers freed from the longhouses, unMasked Army fighters, Chell's sailors, villagers no longer controlled by the Lady, even a few surviving Watchers, ran and scrambled and limped toward the fallen southern stockade wall through the flickering light of the torches still alight throughout the compound.

Mara and Whiteblaze and Chell and Hyram and Keltan brought up the rear. They weren't quite to the fallen wall when the ground shook so violently all of them but Whiteblaze were thrown from their feet. Mara hit hard, rolling over and over. Once again Chell helped her up. But now they were both facing into the camp, and they both froze, staring.

From the minehead out, the ground simply fell away.

The tower that had supported the waterwheel toppled into the trench and vanished into darkness. The minehead collapsed and disappeared, its dim light extinguished. The Warden's house shook and shattered into rubble and then sank into the rapidly widening hole that had already swallowed the mess hall and the baths. The first row of longhouses vanished. The second. The third.

The line of destruction and darkness raced toward them, swallowing the camp and the torches that lit it. Chell turned again, urging Mara to run. Whiteblaze, whining, stayed by her feet. Hyram and Keltan limped ahead of them. But they couldn't run as fast as the ground was collapsing. It would engulf them in seconds, entomb them in the ruin of the mine . . .

And then, just like that, the shaking stopped. The roar of falling earth and stone and timber faded away. Panting, Chell stopped and, with Mara, looked back again.

The mining camp had vanished, devoured by a round crater whose bottom, dozens of feet below, was a jumbled mass of broken buildings and broken stone, lit by flames now flickering in the wreckage, where oil lamps had ignited tumbled timbers. By that hellish light Mara could see that the stream now poured down the western edge of the crater, vanishing without a trace into the mess below.

The edge of the hole was just a dozen steps from where they stood, and Chell, after that one horrified look, urged Mara and Keltan and Hyram farther away from it.

They joined Edrik and Captain March outside the camp. Antril found his way over to them; Mara was pleased to see he'd survived. Hyram collapsed onto the ground, face white. Keltan sat down heavily, breathing hard. All of them stared at the destruction and said nothing.

Here lies the Lady of Pain and Fire
, Mara thought. The circle of complete devastation seemed a fitting grave marker.

A wet nose nuzzled her hand, and she looked down at Whiteblaze, who gazed back at her with amber eyes and made a whuffling sound. She rubbed his head and wondered what had happened to the Lady's wolves. Had they died when the Lady's magical link was so violently severed? Or were they running free in the forest, nothing but ordinary animals once more?

And then Chell asked the question that Mara had been dreading.

“Now what?” he said.

“W
E CANNOT CONTINUE,”
Edrik said. The sun had risen at last, but behind such a thick gray curtain of cloud that it cast only a wan gray light, and no warmth at all, across the overcrowded camp, where the refugees from the mine had spent an uncomfortable night cheek by jowl with their rescuers. All had shared alike in the shock of what had happened.

And then there were the villagers, those who remained, who had collapsed when the Lady had died but had been far enough outside the camp not to be swallowed by its destruction. They had regained consciousness perhaps half an hour after the ground had stilled and were now under guard in a segregated section of the camp: perhaps eighty men and youths in all.

Dawn had revealed the answer to the question of what had happened to the Lady's wolves. Five gray bodies had so far been found, all lying where they had fallen in the forest near the camp, scattered in a semicircle around it with their noses pointed at its heart, as though they had been rushing to the Lady's aid when Mara's bolt had taken her life. Mara could only think that once their magical links to the lady had been severed, the magic had rebounded, striking them down where they lay. That was why the villagers had collapsed, and the wolves had been more closely linked to the Lady than even the members of her Cadre . . . of whom only one remained: Hamil, who had been fighting outside the walls. It had taken him many hours more to recover from the shock of the Lady's death than the ordinary villagers.

Whiteblaze, at least, remained. For that she was grateful. She did not know what nightmares might have awaited her during her restless and abbreviated sleep if he had not been there. Even with his presence, her dreams had been troubled, confused, with snatches of strange images: unMasked in the streets of Tamita, Watchers battling unMasked in the woods, the Lady's fortress oddly half-built, none of it familiar, bubbling up from who-knew-where in her magic-addled subconscious.

She shuddered and dug her fingers harder into Whiteblaze's fur. But she also spoke up, as calmly and forcefully as she could. “We must continue,” she said. “We have begun this, we must finish it.”

“How?” Edrik said. They sat in his tent, he and Chell, Mara and Hyram and Keltan, but with a gesture he took in the larger camp outside. “Some Watchers escaped. They fled the camp's destruction and kept running. My men chased down a few, but not all. Even now they're hurrying to the Secret City. Within four days, five at the outside, the Watcher Army will be on the move. The Watchers will come here first, and then they'll follow us. If we advance to Tamita, they will crush us against the walls, even if they don't catch us beforehand . . . which they almost certainly will. We cannot move quickly with so many people to shepherd, many of whom are barely able to walk.”

“And, Mara, even if we reach Tamita,” Chell said, “what good will it do? The Lady is dead. Can you destroy the Autarch single-handedly as she clearly believed she could?”

“No,” Mara said. “Not in the same way. Nor would I want to. It's clear now she only needed us to get her this far. From here, charged with magic from the ravine and its unMasked and the unMasked here—and magic from you and all of your fighters, as well, had she lived to take it—she would have simply marched straight to Tamita, blasted open the gate, strode into the Palace, and killed the Autarch. That's what would have happened had we not stopped her.”
Had I not killed her.
She swallowed, remembering the terrible sound of the crossbow bolt tearing through Arilla's skull, the spray of blood.

“But we did stop her,” Edrik said. “And without her, we cannot defeat the Autarch.”

“You're wrong,” Mara said. “The Lady had another plan, if her first failed. I know what it is. And it can still work.”

Edrik's eyes narrowed. “The Lady told you this plan?”

“Of course,” Mara said. “How else would I know it?”

“When?”

Mara opened her mouth, closed it again. “I . . . can't remember,” she admitted.
How odd
.
I know exactly what she planned if the attacks on the mines failed and she did not get the magic she was counting on from each. I know it in every detail.

But I can't remember when she told it to me.

Clearly not all of her memories had returned when she'd killed Mayson. She wondered what else she had forgotten.

She wished she could forget killing Mayson.

“I can't remember,” she repeated. “But what difference does that make? I
do
know her plan. And I can still make it work without her, with a few alterations.”

“You trust the Lady's plan?” Edrik demanded. “Even after what happened yesterday?”

“Her first plan failed. That doesn't mean her second will.”

“And you are strong enough to carry it out?”

“Yes, I am. With, as I said, a few alterations.”

Edrik still looked skeptical.

“What do you have to do?” Chell interjected.

“I have to make Masks,” Mara said. “Not inert ones, like Catilla wanted—but functioning ones, ones with magic inside them.”

“Why would we want
those
?” Edrik demanded.

“Because they would not contain the Autarch's magic,” Mara said. “They would contain the magic of the Lady.” She frowned at her own turn of phrase. “Mine, I mean.”

“To what end?” Edrik said.

“To allow us to infiltrate Tamita without being detected by the Watchers, of course.”

“The whole army?” Chell said skeptically.

“No,” Mara said. “I could not make that many Masks.”

“How many
will
you make, then?”

“Three.”

Edrik blinked, then laughed harshly. “Three? What good would that do us? Perhaps the Lady could do something with a ‘force' that size, but she's dead. What could you possibly accomplish with only two companions, even if you got into the city?”

Anger surged in Mara. “I did enough when I was trapped there and escaped through the wall!”

“Not enough to overthrow the city,” Edrik said.

Mara took a deep breath and forced the sudden fury down . . . instead of tearing magic from someone and strangling Edrik with it, as she wanted. She had to learn to put aside the anger that came so quickly now. Anger was the Lady's tool. For that reason alone it shouldn't be hers.

Anger drove me to pull magic from the unMasked at the ravine. Anger drove me to kill Mayson without a second thought. The Lady told me to release it, but instead I have to learn to control it. Otherwise I'm still becoming what the Lady wanted me to be.

“I don't have to overthrow the city,” Mara said. “I just have to kill the Autarch.”

“How?” Edrik demanded. “How will you even get close to him?”

Mara took a deep breath. “I will infiltrate the Child Guard.”

They stared at her as if she were crazy. She wished she could be certain she wasn't.

Her memory of the Lady's backup plan had returned to her during the night, as she lay awake between snatches of troubled sleep. With the Lady dead, her first thought had been, like Edrik's, that the mission had failed, that the best they could hope for was to slink back to the Lady's village and permanent exile . . . though that would likely be short-lived, since it would not take long for the Autarch to discover the pass through which they had infiltrated Aygrima and send his Watchers north to root them out and destroy them.

She knew as well as Edrik that their small force could not take Tamita by force even with her magical help—not even if she were committed to pull power from the city's citizens as the Lady would have, because she could not hold as much magic as the Lady. Not yet, at least, and having seen in the Lady the end result of the unbridled use of her Gift, she did not want to. Despite all the horror of the day before she
still
felt the pull of the magic in the people around her . . . felt it, and
wanted
it. Even now, even here, the thought had crossed her mind that she need not convince Edrik and Chell that her plan had a chance of success, that all she had to do was reach out into their minds and twist them a little so they would agree . . .

She pushed that temptation aside. She could convince them. She had to.

She could not—no,
would
not—execute the Lady's backup plan as the Lady would have. The Lady had intended to don a fake Mask, enter the city, and then tear magic from the citizens of Tamita to give herself the power to enter the Palace and strike down the Autarch. But Mara had realized in the night, as she tossed and turned, that she didn't have to launch such a frontal attack, one the Lady might have pulled off but she knew she could not. Stealth would serve her far better. If she could get close to the Autarch without his being aware of her presence, she could strike at him with far less magic, or even without magic at all. He was as vulnerable to physical attacks as the Lady had proven to be.

Who was always close to the Autarch? The Child Guard.

She dug her fingers even harder into Whiteblaze's fur. “Listen,” she said. “The Child Guard are not completely cut off from their old lives. They receive messages. I know one of the Guard, a boy named Greff. More importantly, I know his parents . . . they were the farmers who took me in the night the dog frightened my horse on our journey to Tamita, remember? With their help, I can make contact with Greff . . . and then take his place.”

“You would kill him?” Edrik said.

“No!” Mara snapped. “Convince him. Offer him a chance to return to his parents. He will leap at it. Any of the Child Guard would.”

“And you could disguise yourself as this boy?”

“The Child Guard wear loose robes,” Mara said. “I was told I'm of a height with him . . . close enough, anyway.” Although she was uneasily aware that boys had a nasty habit of gaining several inches over short periods of time . . . just how tall would Greff be now? “I can take a . . . soulprint . . . from him, and impose it on a Mask of my own making, so that any Watcher will see me as Greff.”

“The Autarch, too?”

“The Lady assured me, when she taught me how to make Masks, that they would fool anyone. Including the Autarch.”

“So once again we must rely on the goodwill and truthfulness of the Lady?” Edrik growled. “She had neither.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Mara countered. “Besides retreat and eventual defeat, I mean?”

Edrik grimaced. “What is our role in all this?”

“You still need to march south,” Mara said. “I will have better luck infiltrating the Palace if all eyes are focused outward. An attacking army should do it.” She frowned. “And I'll need a small force inside the walls with me. Bodyguards. The most likely place for my confrontation with the Autarch is within the Palace somewhere. His Sun Guards will move to protect him if he realizes he is under threat. I'll need my own guards to hold them off. I'll also need someone to accompany me, disguised as a Watcher in another Mask of my making. A girl traveling alone might attract unwanted attention. One escorted by a Watcher should not.”

“This ‘small force' you need,” Edrik said. “How will you get
them
inside—inside the City
and
the Palace? More false Masks?”

“No,” Mara said. “No time to make that many. But I know a way.”
If it's still there, and if we can get to it
. “I know the walls of Tamita well, especially near the Market Gate. We can't open the Market Gate itself: it's too well guarded. But two towers over from it there is a door—what I think they call a sally port. Narrow, just big enough for one man to pass through at a time. It's tucked around the curve of the tower, completely hidden from the Market Gate. I've never seen a guard on it. I don't even know if the Watchers remember it's there. The city, after all, has never been threatened . . . until now. Locked and barred, of course, but magic should make short work of opening it.”

“And once they're inside the city? How do you get into the Palace?”

“I know a back way,” Mara said. “The path the unMasked follow as they start their exile. The path
I
followed.”

Chell was giving her a faint smile. She almost thought it was of approval. But Edrik wasn't through with his objections. “So you want
us
to attack Tamita from the outside to buy
you
time inside,” he said. “But why should the Autarch even react to us? Our force is tiny. He can simply sit behind his walls and wait for his Watcher Army to crush us.”

“He could sit and wait if the walls were intact,” Mara said. “But they aren't. Not since I blew down a large chunk of them. Strike there, where they are still rebuilding, and he will have to respond. Focused on that threat, he'll be less likely to spot the true danger inside his own Palace. Then, once he is . . . dead . . . you'll have to be ready to seize control of the city. Most of the Masked will turn against the Watchers. Even some of the Watchers will side with the people . . . but there could be bloodshed and chaos if there's a complete power vacuum.”