Masks (28 page)

They spent the morning angling across the face of the mountain, Pixot and Turpit leading the way, Mara in the middle, the Watchers behind. At midmorning they emerged from the forest at the foot of a massive cliff face, easily two hundred feet tall. It certainly wasn’t made of black stone: in fact it was such a light gray as to be almost white. Nevertheless, they rode along its base. It went on for miles, growing taller and taller, while to their right the slope became steeper and steeper, until their path was little more than a ledge between the sheer wall to their left and a not-quite-sheer-but-quite-steep-enough-thank-you drop to their right. Far below, the tops of trees swayed in the wind whistling down around them from the peak, and Mara occasionally glimpsed the glitter of the river they had crossed the day before.

Mara held onto her reins so tightly her knuckles turned white, squeezed the flanks of the mule so hard her thighs ached, and sat as still as she could for fear of waking the beast from its plodding stupor, just in case it realized it had finally found the perfect place to rid itself of the annoying lump on its back.

Periodically, huge cracks split the cliff above them, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, as though someone had taken a giant cleaver to it. Most of the resulting narrow ravines were choked with tangled masses of undergrowth or the crisscrossing trunks of spindly trees, all fighting for the limited sunlight, but early in the afternoon they reached one that was different: larger, darker, and distinctly shy of vegetation. A stream poured out of it across their path, cascading away to their right in a long slash of white water not
quite
steep enough to qualify as a waterfall, hurrying to join the river far below.

Into that barren ravine the geologists turned, Mara’s mule following. Mara saw a few stunted trees, a patch or two of scraggly weeds, and piled and crumbled stone:
black
stone.

Then something blue and red caught the corner of her vision, and Mara turned her head to see, glistening in a shadowed corner of the ravine, the color-shifting sheen of magic. “I see magic,” she said to Pixot. It was the first time she’d spoken to him all day. She pointed. “Over there. Is that enough? Do I still have go underground?”

He shook his head. “The surface collection doesn’t matter. We need to know what’s in the body of the stone.” He looked up at the slice of sky far above. “All the black lodestone we know of is like this, embedded deep in ordinary stone like a pearl in an oyster. We only find it when it is somehow exposed to the surface. Some long-ago shrug of the mountains fortuitously split the cliff right where this mass of black lodestone lurks, revealing its presence. But how much is there? And how much magic has it attracted over the millennia? That’s what we need to know; what we need
you
to tell us.”

Mara said nothing. She couldn’t speak through a suddenly dry mouth and a throat grown tight at the sight of the cave she would be asked to enter—if you could call a crack in the rock barely as wide as her shoulders a cave. Out of it the stream poured, white and foaming, down wet black rocks. She looked up. The mountainside loomed perilously above them, tilted forward, riven with cracks. Numerous giant boulders that had obviously fallen from that tottering cliff littered the ground around the cave mouth.

She found her voice. “You can’t send me in there!”

“We have to,” Pixot said. He sounded both apologetic and utterly determined. “We have to know. The Palace demands—”

“I don’t care what the Palace demands!” Mara yelled at his impassive Masked face. “You think I care about the Palace anymore?
I won’t go in there!
”

The nearest Watcher kicked his horse forward, shouldering it between her and Pixot. “The Warden,” he said, eyes cold behind his black Mask, “told me that, should you prove reluctant to do as you are told, I was to say this to you: Katia.”

Mara’s heart flip-flopped.

Pixot trotted his horse in front of hers so he could face her again. “You have to,” he said. No warmth remained in his voice. “For all our sakes, including yours.”

Mara closed her eyes and took a deep breath that shuddered through her trembling body. That narrow opening in the crumbling cliff terrified her. But she’d ridden the river out of the Secret City. She’d gone down into the mine. She’d survived.
This can’t be any worse, can it?

“Katia,” the Watcher said again, softly, and she knew, as she’d really known all along, that she had no choice.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

“Now?” said Pixot.

“Why wait?” she snapped. “I’ll crawl into that crack. I’ll tell you what I see. Then you can go back and tell the Warden, and the Autarch, and you can all get together and figure out exactly how many unMasked lives it will take to mine it. Not that
you’ll
care.”

She got down from the mule, not without difficulty, since she felt as stiff and sore as . . . well, as someone who had ridden a mule for two days. One of the Watchers tied a rope around her waist, and gave her a small candle lantern on a loop of rope she could hang around her neck, to keep her hands free. It dangled there, uncomfortably warm but not—quite—burning hot.

She went up to the cave mouth. “I may not get far,” she said to no one in particular, as she looked at the black gash through which the stream poured. “I may get stuck.”

“You get stuck, we’ll pull you out,” the Watcher who had tied the rope around her said.

“Maybe,” said the other Watcher. “Unless you’re
too
stuck.”

“Oh, I’m sure if we pull hard enough, we can at least get
part
of her out,” the first Watcher said, and they both laughed.

Mara didn’t bother looking at them. She took a deep breath, then climbed up the slippery rocks, the water instantly chilling her as it soaked her clothes. At the cave mouth, she looked back. Pixot gave her a small wave. Turpit stood with arms folded. The two Watchers watched.

Gritting her teeth, she got down on her hands and knees in the ice-cold water and crawled into the darkness.

The candle lantern, dangling at her throat, cast dancing shadows all around her. Wet black stone glistened, but only with water. She peered into the darkness ahead, took another deep, shaking breath, and crawled forward.

The biggest problem, she quickly discovered, wasn’t the narrowness of the cave—though it certainly
was
narrow, her shoulders brushing the stone on both sides—but the water. It sucked heat from her body as it rushed over her hands and wrists and around her knees, calves, and feet. The heat of the candle lantern now felt welcome, but despite its warmth, she was shivering before she’d crawled fifty feet. Yet she could not escape the water: it filled the entire bottom of the passage.

She saw no magic, saw nothing but the ordinary yellow gleam of candlelight on wet stone, until she was, by her rough reckoning, a hundred yards into the tunnel and she could no longer feel her hands. Suddenly, there
was
no tunnel anymore.

She stopped, gasping, as the ceiling opened up above her. She found herself on the edge of an underground lake, out of which the water poured. The candle lantern only illuminated a few feet of the glassy surface, but she could see the whole vast chamber clearly . . .

...because it
blazed
with magic.

Auroras of blue and green and red played along the walls. The water pulsated with the ever-changing hues of magic beneath its crystalline surface. Sheets of color raced across the ceiling, a good fifty feet over her head.

Mara had never seen anything more beautiful. For a long moment she just stared, entranced: and then, like a blow, she remembered what all this beauty meant. When she went back and told Pixot what she had seen, she would be condemning this place to ruin. The Warden would drive shafts into it, tear down its soaring walls, smash the stone, extract the magic, delve deeper and deeper into the mountain: and all would come at the expense of untold numbers of unMasked, crushed, beaten, starved, tortured . . . raped.

She reached out and touched the wall, and her hand came back covered with a thin sheen of magic. She stared at it, turning her hand back and forth.
I could lie
, she thought.
I could tell the Warden there’s nothing there
.

Yes, she’d promised to tell him the truth, but what of that? No promise to a man like that could hold her.

But if she did
that
it wasn’t just her own life she was playing with, it was Katia’s. The Warden might well decide that if there were no magic to be found here, Mara was of no further use, and therefore he no longer needed to keep his bargain regarding Katia.

“My blood will be on your hands,” Katia had said, and Mara couldn’t deny it.

Frozen by indecision, for a long time she simply crouched there at the mouth of that beautiful, breathtaking chamber of magic . . . until the rope around her waist twitched, tightened—and jerked her backward. She flung herself belly-down, the candle lantern hissing and going out as it hit the water, and grabbed at the rock beneath the stream, but couldn’t stop her slide. She banged back along the tunnel helpless, face down, fighting to keep her head out of the water, fighting to get onto her back, fighting . . . and failing. She wrapped her arms around her head, trying to protect her face and skull. Her shoulder banged into a stone so hard her arm tingled; her leg scraped over a rock so sharp she felt clothes and skin tear; and then she saw daylight glimmering on the rocks and heard distant shouts. The rope went slack. She rolled over and raised her head to look at the slash of light that was the opening to the cave, then screamed as a black silhouette filled it, lunged into the tunnel, and grabbed her ankles.

The man pulled her out and flung her into the stream, the water cushioning the fall but the impact still driving most of the air from her body. Helpless, literally breathless, she gaped up at the dark figure looming over her.

It was one of the Watchers. Something else dark and motionless lay to her left. She turned her head that way and saw, a dozen yards away, the second Watcher, staring blankly up through a Mask already crumbling away, revealing the sallow face beneath, slackened by death. Two arrows protruded from the red ruin of his neck.

“Bitch,” the Watcher snarled. He straddled her, his weight pushing her down into the icy water, sharp stones digging into her back. “They killed Karx without warning, then called to give you up or they’d kill us all. But they’ll kill me anyway, so the only way they’ll get you is the way I’m going to give them to you—with your throat slit from ear to ear!”

He grabbed her hair and pulled it back, exposing her throat. In absolute terror, Mara shoved at him as hard as she could, desperate to get him away from her, desperate to save her life—

Only a little magic still clung to her hand. But it wasn’t
that
magic that answered the silent scream for help that filled her mind, unvoiced because her lungs held too little air for her to produce a sound: instead, it was the magic inside the mountain.

It surged from the mouth of the tunnel, and this time Mara did not see it as made of many colors. This time it was pure white, white as the sun. It poured from the cave as though riding the surface of the rushing water. It enveloped her . . .

...and it
burned
. Pain like nothing she had ever imagined blotted out the weight of the Watcher astride her, blotted out the sight of the looming cliffs, blotted out the sky and the clouds, blotted out everything she had ever seen or done, heard or tasted, smelled or felt. Her world, her life, dissolved into burning white agony. She screamed, or thought she did, and out of desperate instinct to save her life and sanity, threw the magic away from her, threw it the only place she could—

—into the Watcher.

She didn’t see what happened to him. All she knew was that suddenly, absolutely, and with finality his weight vanished . . . and so did the all-enveloping pain.

She gasped one shuddering, lung-filling breath, exhaled in a rush, and fell into darkness.

“
I Have to Rescue Her
”

D
ARKNESS:
but not the darkness of dreamless sleep. This darkness was both less deep and more black. Less deep, because she dreamed. More black, for
what
she dreamed.

Grute. Over and over, Grute, naked, coming toward her . . . her hands on his head . . . the magic dripping from her fingers like clotted cream . . . the burst of light, the explosion of red and white and gray; Grute, headless, dropping to the ground, blood fountaining, spreading in a scarlet lake across the floor as his body twitched away the last of its life . . .

The Watcher, pulling her from the tunnel’s mouth, straddling her, dagger drawn, the tug of his hand in her hair, then the rush of power, of light, of unbelievable, searing pain . . .

Those same two images, over and over, not real and yet, in some ways,
more
real than waking reality. She lay trapped in her own brain, unable to wake, unable to hear, unable to break through the thick black walls of the prison the flood of magic from the cavern had made of her skull.

But, slowly, oh so slowly, those black walls thinned. Other dreams began to creep into her mind: bad dreams, but ordinary dreams, real and terrible enough, but without the glittering, hard-edged
superreality
of the images of Grute and the Watcher.

She dreamed of the mine, darkness of a different sort, the weight of stone, the body-soaking humidity, the ache in her shoulders and back, the shock of Katia’s bar slamming into her forearm, the sickening snap of the bone . . .

She dreamed of the moment of her Masking, the moment when the clay twisted and stiffened, the agony of her cheeks splitting, her nose breaking, and worse than that, the horror of her mother’s scream, the knowledge she would never see her parents again . . .

Bad dreams, terrible dreams, but still, only dreams. And then, finally, she stopped dreaming altogether . . .

...and then she woke.

She stared up at a ceiling of whitewashed stone, tinged blue by the light of early morning or late evening. It was not the ceiling of the camp hospital. It was not the underside of the bunk above hers in the longhouse. It was not the painted ceiling of her room in the Warden’s house. It was not the inside of the tent. And it most certainly was not the ceiling of her own room in her father’s house in Tamita, with its loose skylight providing easy access to the roof.

So where was she?

And
how
was she?

She lay without moving for a long moment, probing her own internal workings as though poking at a loose tooth with her tongue. She felt . . . weak. Thin.
Stretched
. Like a piece of linen pulled taut to make an artist’s canvas;
too
taut, so that it threatened to split down the middle at any moment.

Physically, she ached, every inch of her. Her right calf, which she remembered cutting on the rock as she was dragged from the cave, was bound in a clean white bandage. It throbbed slightly. She had other scrapes and bruises, though nothing else was bandaged.

She wore a thin white shift, and beneath that . . . a diaper. Again.
At least it’s clean and dry
, she thought.

She was thirsty. Parched, in fact. She could barely summon spit enough to swallow. And her stomach cramped with emptiness, though that didn’t seem nearly as important as her thirst.

How long had she been unconscious?

How long had she suffered those terrible visions of Grute and the Watcher, those horrible dreams of the mine and her Masking?

And again,
where was she?

She took a deep breath, and by dint of enormous effort, raised her head.

Hewn out of white-painted rock, the smallish room contained three other beds, all empty, interspersed with side tables and simple wooden chairs. An earthenware pitcher and a glazed tumbler stood on the table by her bed.
Water!
She looked at them longingly, but they might as well have been in Tamita: she couldn’t summon strength to reach for them.

A red curtain hung over an archway near her bed. A cool, salt-flavored breeze flowed in through a narrow, slit-like window in one wall, cut through several feet of rock. It was early morning, she decided; already the glow outside seemed brighter.

Her neck ached and her shoulders quivered from the effort of lifting her impossibly heavy head. She let it drop back to the pillow, and, bathed in cold sweat, lay there, shaking. At least, from the stone walls and narrow windows, not to mention the smell of the sea, she thought she knew where she was: the Secret City.

But how had she gotten there?

The last thing she remembered was that agonizing rush of magic. But how had it happened? She had had almost no magic on her hands, certainly not enough to do anything to the Watcher. But she hadn’t needed it. The magic had simply
come
, answering her call from its chamber deep inside the mountain like an eager dog rushing to its master . . .

...except, like an eager dog that didn’t know its own strength, it had almost killed her when it reached her.

Her father had never even
hinted
that such a thing was possible. He had said he could only use the magic from the basin—made of black lodestone, she knew now—filled for him from the stores of the Palace. And she had always heard, from her father, from her tutor, from
everyone
, that the Gifted had to
touch
magic to use it.

Maybe it didn’t really happen
, she thought.
Maybe I hit my head when I fell into the creek. Maybe everything else was a hallucination.

Maybe this is.

She looked around the room. “Hello?” she called, her voice so weak and thin it sounded like it belonged to someone else. “Hello?”

A young woman in a blue dress and white apron swept in through the red-curtained archway, frowning down at a tiny green-glass bottle she carried in her right hand. When Mara said “Hello?” again, her head jerked up so suddenly she bobbled the bottle and barely managed to regain control of it before it smashed to the stone floor.

Then she turned toward Mara, brown eyes wide beneath an unruly mass of curly black hair. “You’re awake!” she said. It sounded almost like an accusation.

“Shouldn’t I be?” Mara croaked.

The young woman blushed. “Sorry, I . . .” She took a deep breath, and smiled, so warmly that Mara’s momentary annoyance melted away like snow in the spring sun. “Sorry. My name is Asteria.”

Mara smiled back. “I’m Mara,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I startled you.”

Asteria laughed. “I don’t mind, believe me. I’ve been looking after you for the past two nights and I’ve been afraid you would never wake up at all!”

“In that case, I’m
glad
I startled you,” Mara said, and Asteria laughed again. Mara worked her dry mouth. “Could I . . . could I have a drink of water, please?”

“Oh! Of course!” Asteria turned to the side table and filled the tumbler from the pitcher. She bent down with it, put her arm under Mara’s head, and lifted her up so she could sip from the tumbler. She took several swallows. Her empty stomach cramped as the liquid hit it. She nodded, and Asteria put the tumbler back on the side table and lowered her to the pillow again. Mara winced as her stomach cramped again, then said, “How did I get here?”

“Edrik brought you in the day before last. He said they found you unconscious, and hadn’t been able to wake you. Hyram looked mad with worry. So did that other boy, Keltan.” Asteria grinned. “They’re both smitten with you, you know.”

“Um . . .” Mara felt her face redden. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“You should,” Asteria said confidently. “Believe me, I know about boys. My Maris is . . .” She stopped, and now it was her turn to blush. “Well, I know, that’s all.” And then her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh! I forgot! I shouldn’t be talking to you!”

“What?” Mara said, confused. “Why?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean . . .” Asteria stopped, took a deep breath, and made a pushing-down motion with her hands. “Let me start over. What I meant was, I was told to fetch Grelda the moment you woke.
If
you woke.” She paused, then added in a rush, “Um, which of course you have! Obviously.”

Mara laughed. “Obviously. So who’s Grelda?”

“Head Healer,” Asteria said promptly and proudly.

“A Healer?” Mara felt a surge of excitement. “Then she has the Gift?”
Someone to teach me how to use it!
she thought.

“The Gift?” Asteria looked puzzled for a moment, then her face cleared. “Oh, you mean magic!” She laughed. “No, no, don’t worry, there’s no magic here in the Secret City. No, she’s a
regular
Healer. She knows how the body works, how to fix the things that go wrong, herbs that help, that sort of thing.” She leaned closer and dropped her voice to a near whisper. “I’ve heard she can even cut open a living man and fix what’s wrong inside him, then sew him up again. But I’ve never seen it.” She shuddered. “Don’t want to!”

Mara felt more confused than ever. “But aren’t you her apprentice, or something?”

“Me?” Asteria giggled. “No, no. I’m her granddaughter. I couldn’t do what she does. Blood and . . . and other things. Yuck.”

“Then why are you . . . ?” Mara said, bewildered. She had the feeling bewilderment might be the natural state for anyone who spent much time with Asteria.

“Sometimes I help Gran with the stuff that’s not messy. She said you weren’t any trouble, you’d just lie here, maybe mutter or cry out, but not to worry, and not to wake her unless you actually woke up, or, or your diaper needed, um . . .” She blushed; then she looked stricken. “Oh! And now you’re awake! Look, I really must go get Gran.”

“I wish you would,” Mara said, but kindly; you couldn’t stay mad at Asteria. It would be like kicking a puppy.

Asteria rushed out. Mara, still feeling weak, but more alert by the minute, and much better since she’d had a little water, stared up at the whitewashed ceiling. A day and a half she’d been there, Asteria had said. At least two days’ travel before that. It must be six days since she’d left the camp. She felt a chill. How long would the Warden wait before he decided something was wrong and send out Watchers to look for his missing geologists?

How long would he wait before blaming Mara for it, and making Katia pay the price?

I’ve got to go back there
, she thought in sudden desperation.
I’ve got to save her!

The deaths of Grute and the Watcher already dragged on her soul. She thought it would collapse completely under the additional weight of Katia’s suffering in her stead.

Asteria returned with “Gran” within a quarter of an hour. Mara heard Asteria’s chatter a good twenty seconds before she swept in through the red curtain, her grandmother in tow.

Grelda proved to be a woman of the same vintage as Catilla, and, like Catilla, tiny: no taller than Mara, and a good head and a half shorter than her granddaughter, who pointed at Mara with proprietary glee, as though personally responsible for her waking up, and said, “See!”

“Yes, child,” Grelda said in the tone of voice one would use to quiet a skittish horse. She came over to Mara’s bedside and bent down. “Hold still,” she said. For the next few moments she poked and prodded, lifting Mara’s arm and letting it fall, taking her pulse in her wrist and in her neck, feeling her abdomen, feeling her forehead, peeling back an eyelid to get a good look at her eyes, making her stick out her tongue and open her mouth wide. In the end she leaned back. “There is nothing obviously wrong with you,” she said. “But there has not been anything obviously wrong with you since Edrik brought you back. Except, of course, you would not wake up. So why were you unconscious? Did you suffer a blow to the head? A shortage of breath? A disruption of the rhythm of the heart?”

Mara shook her head. “No,” she said. “It was the magic.”

Grelda’s eyes narrowed. “Magic?”

“Yes,” Mara said. She told Grelda what had happened, how the rush of magic that had come from the cave had almost killed her—and presumably
had
killed the Watcher.

Grelda’s lips thinned as she listened. “
No one
,” she said in a low, angry voice, “told
me
you had the Gift.
No one
told me your condition might have been caused by magic.” Something about the way she said “no one” made Mara think she had a very specific
someone
in mind.

Grelda turned to Asteria. “Fetch Edrik,” she snapped. “And then inform Catilla that I intend to have a word with her.” From the way she said it, Mara thought it clear that Grelda had no fear Catilla would refuse that word.
They’re almost of an age
, Mara thought.
I wonder . . .

“Were you one of the original ones?” she said. “One of those who founded the Secret City?”

Grelda watched Asteria bustle out of sight, then turned to Mara again. “I was,” she said. “My family, and Catilla’s, and three others.” She frowned. “This is common knowledge. Why do you ask?”

“It’s not common knowledge to
me
,” Mara pointed out.