Masks

by E. C. Blake

  It was the most beautiful, wonderful, joyful moment of her life . . .

  ...and then it all went wrong.

  The Mask writhed, like the others; but unlike the others, it did not stop. It squirmed and wriggled like a basket full of snakes, faster and faster and harder and harder. Mara gasped in terror, then screamed in pain, as she felt the skin above her cheekbones rip open, the skin of her forehead split, her nose break. She fell to her knees, eyes squeezed shut to try to protect them, scrabbling at the Mask with both hands, tearing at it with her fingernails, but it wouldn’t come off, wouldn’t come off, wouldn’t come off, it was going to kill her—

  The Mask shattered, the thunderclap of its destruction making her ears ring. A dozen pieces fell away from her face and crashed to the dais. Her blood, shockingly red, splattered the white tiles. She coughed and choked and spat out scarlet-laced saliva and mucus.

  Yellow toenails in white sandals stepped into her vision. Gagging, she looked up through bleary eyes to see the Masker looking sternly over her head at the Witnesses behind her. “This candidate has failed the Masking,” he intoned. “She cannot be made a citizen. In the name of the Autarch, clear this place!”

  She heard her mother screaming her name. She wanted to get up, go to her, beg her father to help, to do something . . . but the room swayed around her, and the thunder of the falling water seemed to pound down on her, pinning her in place.

  What’s happening to me? Nothing made sense. Is this a dream?

  The door to the Maskery slammed closed, cutting off her mother’s screams.

  SIX

  An Uncertain Future

  FOOTSTEPS SOUNDED BEHIND HER. Black-gloved hands seized her arms, pulled her upright. Her head swam and her vision grayed. Her neck seemed boneless. She couldn’t look up.

  A hand lifted her chin. The Masker’s yellow Mask swam in her blurred vision. “Another failure of one of the Gifted,” he said, his voice strained. “Until two years ago I had never seen even one. But recently . . .”

  “If I may?” said a woman’s voice behind her.

  “Of course,” said the Masker. He stepped back.

  Ethelda took his place. “Hold still, child,” she said. From a leather pouch hung on her blue belt she took out a flask of black stone. A metal clasp bound the stone stopper in place. She undid the clasp, pulled out the stopper, and dropped it back into her pouch. Then, holding the flask in her right hand, she upended it above her left palm.

  Magic flowed out: glimmering, shining, heartbreakingly beautiful . . . heartbreaking, because Mara, staring at it with blurry eyes and a mind fogged with pain, knew that she would never, ever, learn to use it to make Masks with her father.

  Would never see her father again . . .

  Tears rushed to her eyes. She gasped out a sob, and choked again on the blood still flowing into her throat from her broken nose.

  “Hush,” Ethelda said. “Lift your face to the light.”

  Mara did so. The movement made the wounds on her cheek gape, and she felt a new rush of warm, fresh blood, pouring down her face to drip from her chin.

  “Nasty,” said Ethelda. “But nothing that can’t be put right.”

  “It hurts,” Mara whimpered.

  “I know,” said Ethelda sympathetically. “And I’m sorry, but so will this.” She lifted her hand, coated with magic, no longer shifting and shimmering in a multitude of colors, but glowing a deep, sapphire blue, like some kind of elegant glove.

  For a moment Ethelda held herself absolutely still, brow furrowed. Then she took a deep breath, opened strangely unfocused eyes, and reached out toward Mara’s face. Mara forced herself not to pull back, though she couldn’t help going cross-eyed . . . and then the Healer touched her, and she gasped, too shocked even to scream, as pain such as she’d never imagined froze the breath in her throat and made her heartbeat go suddenly unsteady.

  If it had lasted more than an instant, she would surely have fainted; but almost before she registered it, the pain vanished: all the pain, not just the pain of the Healing but all the discomfort she had been feeling since the Mask had torn her face and broken her nose. Her face tingled, a feeling like the pins and needles she felt in her calves when she sat cross-legged too long. She raised trembling hands and touched her cheeks and nose, feeling smooth, unblemished skin beneath the slick of blood, the same straight and slightly upturned nose she had always known. Tears of relief sprang to her eyes: tears that in another instant turned to full-fledged sobbing. She threw her arms around the Healer’s neck and cried as if she would never stop.

  “Shhh,” said Ethelda, patting her on the back. “You’re unharmed.”

  Unharmed? Mara had heard what happened to those who failed their Masking. They were banished—no one knew where. And their faces . . . crisscrossed with scars, noses crooked . . .

  She drew back shakily from the Healer. “Will I . . . am I . . . scarred?” she whispered.

  “Not with me doing the Healing,” Ethelda said. She seemed unconcerned by the blood Mara’s hug had smeared across the front of her white robe. “You were fortunate I was here to represent the Autarch. Most who fail the Masking are sent to Healer,” she made the honorific sound more like an insult, “Ruddek.”

  “Healer Ethelda,” said the Masker from behind Mara. “Is the girl healed?”

  Ethelda turned her head toward him. “You can see that she is.”

  “Then your work is done. She is now one of the unMasked and no longer your concern.”

  Ethelda nodded brusquely. “Of course. I will return to the Palace and inform the Autarch of this lamentable occurrence.” She leaned forward and whispered, so low Mara was hardly sure she’d heard it, “Be strong. Don’t give up hope.” Then she straightened again, turned, and walked out of the Maskery, over the footbridge that crossed the foaming moat and out the bronze door, which swung silently open at her approach, letting in the morning sunshine. Mara heard a snatch of liquid birdsong, felt a breath of cool air on her still-tingling face, and then the doors slammed shut behind Ethelda with a sound like a coffin lid closing.

  She turned to the Masker. “Now . . . now what?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, her throat still raw from screaming and choking.

  The impassive yellow Mask regarded her for a long moment. Then the Masker glanced back at the Watchers. “Take her,” he said.

  As one, they strode forward, the sound of their boots echoing from the domed ceiling, seized her arms, and dragged her from the dais. Mara, helpless in their grasp, looked down at the blood splattered across the once-shining green dress. It’s ruined, she thought. For the moment, that seemed the worst catastrophe of all; everything else that had happened, that was still happening, was too enormous, too horrible, to even contemplate.

  Down the white-tiled stairs they went, her feet thumping nervelessly on each step. “Walk, damn you,” snarled the Watcher to her left. “It’s a long way to the warehouse.”

  The warehouse?

  “Walk, I said!” the Watcher snapped, and Mara struggled to get her legs to move, to put one foot in front of the other, and managed it after a fashion, though she felt so weak and shaken she knew if the Watchers let go of her arms she’d collapse where she stood.

  She couldn’t think, couldn’t grasp what had just happened. The Mask had rejected her. The Mask her own father had made for her had rejected her. And then her parents had abandoned her, left her in the Maskery with no one to turn to. If Ethelda hadn’t been there . . .

  Ethelda had healed her. Ethelda had told her to be strong, to not give up hope. But Ethelda was gone, and Mara didn’t feel strong, and she didn’t feel hope. She felt only numbness and despair.

  Children whispered horror stories about those whose Maskings failed. Some said they died on the spot, that their ghosts haunted the city’s dark alleys at night, and that the curfew for children and the laws forbi
dding even Masked grown-ups from traveling most of Tamita’s streets at night were to protect the city’s people from the vengeful spirits of those whom the Masks, and therefore the city and the Autarch, had rejected.

  But she hadn’t died, and she wasn’t a ghost. Not yet, anyway. She was still Mara. Mara, in shock, head swimming, stomach churning . . .

  ...stomach heaving. Her insides convulsed, and she threw up onto the white tile floor, the bread and fruit she’d had for breakfast spattering her bare toes. The Watchers swore and pulled her along faster. She did her best to keep up, but her legs felt like rubber and her stomach continued to roil.

  After twenty yards or so the corridor turned sharply right for a few yards to meet up with a cross corridor, this one lacking the gleaming tiles but instead chopped out of solid rock, lit by torches at widely spaced intervals. To the right, the corridor ran in the direction of the Palace; to the left, it ran in the direction of the Market Gate, and it was to the left that the Watchers took her, from pool of flickering light to pool of flickering light through long stretches of darkness. Periodically, they descended flights of stairs.

  Mara’s thoughts also traveled long stretches of darkness, with far fewer patches of light. The warehouse? she thought. It can’t really be a warehouse. Is it a prison of some sort? Am I going to spend the rest of my life in a cell?

  But I haven’t done anything wrong! she cried silently. I did everything right! I welcomed the Mask, I wanted the Mask.

  Maybe something was wrong with the Mask . . . ?

  No! She rejected that idea instantly. My father made my Mask. He’s the Master Maskmaker. He could never make a mistake like that.

  It’s my fault. It has to be. And then it came to her. She suddenly knew exactly what she had done to poison her Masking; she had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up again. That boy, Keltan, I didn’t tell anyone about him, even though he was a criminal, on the run from his Masking . . .

  I should have turned him in. I should have told the Night Watchers where to find him. But I didn’t. And the Mask knew. The Mask knew I had already betrayed the Autarch. That’s why it rejected me!

  Guilt crashed down on her, black as the darkness between the flickering torches, more painful than when the Mask had wounded her, more painful than when Ethelda had Healed her. She’d wrecked everything. Everything her parents had worked for, everything they’d hoped for her, their only child. Everything she’d hoped for herself.

  Her life was over. She’d just turned fifteen years old, and her life was already over.

  She wished then that she really was dead, but wishing didn’t make it so. She kept breathing. She kept hurting. She kept walking.

  By her reckoning, they had descended far enough, and walked long enough, to have almost reached the city wall, when the tunnel at last ended in a door of rough black wood, bound with rusty iron. One of the Watchers unlocked the door with a large key from his belt. The other Watcher pushed the door open. Together, they ushered Mara through.

  She winced and flung her arm across her eyes as she stepped into a beam of bright sunlight, slanting down from a window high up the far wall of the building they had entered. The next instant she was in darkness again, but, dazzled, she still couldn’t see much of the building’s interior. From the echo of the Guards’ booted feet on the flagstones, though, she thought it must be enormous. It really is a warehouse, she thought. One of the warehouses by the city wall, like the one that used to be my grandfather’s.

  As her guards led her out into the middle of the vast room, she had the distinct impression she was being watched. She glanced around. The contrast between the patches of sun on the floor and the deep shadows everywhere else still made it hard to see, but as her eyes adjusted, Mara realized cells made of iron bars lined two walls of the warehouse, six on a side. Both of the other two walls were mostly taken up by huge double doors, large enough for wagons to drive through. There were no windows except the small ones high up under the eaves.

  Most of the cells were empty, but not all.

  Some of them held children.

  She counted three girls and a boy, each locked inside a metal cage maybe ten feet deep and eight wide. Besides the child, each cage contained only a covered bucket and a narrow wooden bed. She couldn’t see the children’s faces clearly, but their watching eyes gleamed wide and white in the gloom.

  A fourth girl stood in a beam of sunlight in the middle of the room, in front of a seated fat, bald man who wore a plain gray Mask. He held a pad of paper in one hand; the other grasped a long piece of charcoal that scratched the page as he stared at the girl.

  Taller than Mara, the girl wore a gray, shapeless smock that had been pulled down to expose her dark brown shoulders, which shone like polished wood in the patch of sun. One hand clutched the smock at her breast to keep it from slipping off. She stood very still, her head tilted back, staring up into an empty corner of the warehouse ceiling.

  She was beautiful—or had been; as the Watchers brought Mara right up next to her, she saw the half-healed scars, white and pink, crisscrossing her dark skin.

  The girl’s brown eyes flickered in Mara’s direction as she approached, but otherwise she didn’t move.

  The fat man looked up at the Watchers. “You’re in my light,” he complained. Then he saw Mara and his eyes widened inside the gray Mask. “Her face,” he breathed. “It’s unmarked!”

  “She had a better Healer than most,” said the Watcher. “But she’s yours now. She’s to go out with the others.”

  “Tomorrow,” said the fat man. He leaned forward, never taking his eyes off Mara’s face. “UnMasked, and unscarred,” he murmured. “I must draw her!” His eyes snapped to the other girl. “You, back in your cell.”

  The dark-skinned girl’s gaze snapped down. She nodded without speaking, gave Mara an unreadable glance, pulled her smock back up over her shoulders, then turned and walked away, not hurrying, to one of the cages whose door stood open. She stepped inside, turned and gave the fat man a haughty look, and pulled the door shut. The metallic click echoed in the emptiness of the warehouse.

  “You’re good, then?” said the Watcher who hadn’t spoken yet. “Don’t need us no more, right?”

  “Yes, yes, on your way,” said the fat man. He got to his feet as the Watchers, without another word, went back the way they had come. “First things first,” he said. “Follow me.”

  Mara, stumbling a little in the high-heeled shoes that had seemed so beautiful and now seemed sad and ridiculous, followed him into a dim corner of the warehouse, furnished with a few chests and a table on which rested a chipped white basin and a blue pitcher full of water. A couple of rough towels lay beside the basin. “Take off your dress and shoes,” the man said, “and wash off the blood.”

  Mara turned toward him, shocked. “What? Here? Now?”

  “You heard me. Yes, here. Yes, now. Dress is ruined, but I might make a silver or two off the shoes.” The fat man had turned away to fling open one of the chests. He pulled out a gray smock like the one the dark-skinned girl had been wearing. “Put this on instead. Then I want to draw you.” His gaze moved over her body from head to toe. “With your clothes on, I think. It’s your face they’ll be interested in, not that skinny body. When you’re ready, come back to the chair.” With that the fat man turned and strode away.

  Blushing furiously, Mara turned to the basin. She gripped the edges of the table for a moment and then, hoping it was too dim in the corner for the fat man or the boy she had spotted in one of the cells to see, convulsively stripped off the bloodstained green dress, letting it puddle to the ground around the silver shoes, which she stepped out of a moment later. Wearing only her drawers, naked from the waist up, she kept her back to the fat man and the cages and scrubbed the blood from her chest and belly. Then she pulled on the rough gray smock. It was slit alarmingly far down the front and too big for her. All t
hat kept it from slipping off her shoulders were two strings at the neck that she tied tight.

  Dressed—or at least half-dressed—she turned and walked barefoot across the warehouse’s flagstones to the pool of light around the wooden chair, where the fat man waited, pad of paper open to a fresh page on his lap. “Stand there.” He pointed at the patch of light. “Let the sun fall on your face.”

  Mara stepped into the sunbeam, and closed her eyes for a moment. The warmth of the sun felt good on her cheeks after the damp chill of the long tunnel from the Palace and the cold-water scrubbing.

  “Eyes open,” snapped the man. He stood up, dropping his pad of paper on his chair, stepped forward and, before she realized what he was about to do, had untied the neck of the smock. Then he grabbed the shoulders and tugged. Mara gasped as the smock slipped down to her waist. She snatched it just in time to keep it from falling off entirely, and pulled it back up, cheeks flaming with embarrassment. But the fat man hadn’t even looked at her body; his eyes were on her face. Holding the smock like the other girl had, her exposed shoulders cold in the warehouse’s chill, she endured the fat man’s touch as he took her chin and tilted her head this way and that. “Perfect,” he breathed. “Now stand still, or you’ll ruin everything.”

  He returned to his chair and picked up his charcoal and paper. Mara, clutching the top of her smock, stared into a corner just like the dark-skinned girl had done.

  The fat man kept her standing there for an hour, though he had her move twice to follow the sunbeam as it slowly slid across the floor. But finally he stopped drawing, and looked at his picture critically. “Excellent,” he said. “I can charge double for that. Maybe triple. Never had a completely unmarked face before.” He snorted. “Only thing you’ve got going for you.”