by E. C. Blake
The hut, when she and Hamil reached it, proved to be all but identical to the one, months before, where she had killed her would-be rapist, Grute, and discovered just how deadly her Gift could be. But it held no magic. “Recently harvested,” she told the Lady when they reunited. “That could mean there’s a Watcher not far ahead.”
“There is,” the Lady said. “Graymane picked up his scent at the hut and has been tracking him since.” She closed her eyes and stopped walking. “He is almost on him . . .” She stood frozen for a minute . . . two . . . then opened her eyes. “He is down,” she said simply. “Graymane is holding him for us.” She pointed ahead and to the left. “That way.” She turned to Hamil again. “We will interrogate this man. Tell Edrik and Chell to make camp.” She glanced at the sky. “The camp needs to be under canvas in short order.”
Hamil nodded and slipped away. The Lady set out into the woods without waiting for him to return. Mara, caught by surprise, had to run a few steps to catch up. She glanced uneasily at the sky, which had been clouding over all day. The Lady obviously expected rain, and soon. It was already late in the afternoon, and between that and the clouds, the forest had a dark and unfriendly look. “Shouldn’t we have brought a few men with us?” she said tentatively.
The Lady glanced her. “Really, child? What do we have to fear in the woods?”
Mara opened her mouth to answer, and then closed it again. “I . . . suppose you’re right.” The wolves surrounded them, and with their magic, she had brought down a mountain. Whatever the wolves themselves did not frighten away—or could not bring down—she and the Lady certainly could.
I’m powerful, she thought. For some reason it hadn’t really struck home until that moment, despite all that had happened. She had never thought of herself as powerful before; dangerous, unstable, a threat to herself and others, yes, but not powerful—able to choose to use her Gift, to control it, to bend it to her will.
Now all she had to do was choose to use it wisely.
Well, no pressure there.
They reached the Watcher after about twenty minutes’ walk. He lay in a clearing in the woods, flat on his back, Graymane standing over him, growling whenever he moved. The Watcher’s right leg, twisted beneath him at an unnatural angle, was clearly broken. The Lady bent over him. “You are in pain,” she said. “I can help.”
“Who . . . ?” the Watcher gasped out. “You wear no Mask.” His eyes, behind the eyeholes of the black Mask, flicked to Mara. “Either of you.”
“My name is Arilla,” the Lady said. “But you would know me better as the Lady of Pain and Fire.”
The eyes widened, jerked back to her. “The Lady . . . ?”
“I can ease your pain,” the Lady said again. “But you must help me. I need to know how many Watchers there are at the new mine . . . and how many workers, both Masked and unMasked.”
The Watcher stared at her. “You’re planning to attack!”
“How many?” the Lady said.
“I will not tell you,” the Watcher said.
The Lady sighed. “You will,” she said. “But I would prefer not to expend magic on you.” Mara shot her a startled glance. The Lady didn’t appear to notice. “Well?”
“I will not tell you,” the Watcher said. “No matter what you do.”
“I do not think,” the Lady said, “that you have the slightest understanding of what I can do.” With her right hand she touched Graymane, who whined a little but never took his gaze from the Watcher, and with her left reached out and touched the Watcher’s chest. Mara glimpsed a flash of magic—and with a sharp crack, the Watcher’s Mask split down the middle and fell from his face, collapsing into shards of clay as it hit the ground.
The revealed face was young, only a few years older than Mara, and frightened. But even as she watched, the fear melted away, replaced by a look of peace—incongruous, considering his circumstance. “How many Watchers at the new mine?” the Lady asked again, in a light conversational tone, as though commenting on the weather at a dinner party.
“Depends,” the young man said without a trace of reticence. “Full garrison is sixty, but of course there are always some out harvesting from the magic huts, and some on patrol, keeping an eye out for bandits. Generally more like forty of us actually on hand.”
“And how many unMasked?”
“Must be close to a hundred up there already,” the Watcher said. “Most of ’em are still at the old mine, but not for much longer. The ones at the new mine are busy building new longhouses and other buildings and some are already working underground, starting the new shafts and levels. There were more than a hundred,” he went on, “but the roof fell in on a couple of dozen last week. Mostly strong ones, too—almost all men, only a couple of women and maybe three young ’uns. Nasty waste. Kind of putting a crimp in the work until we can get more sent up from the old mine. Not to mention making a hell of a mess.”
Mara stared at the young man in horror, memories of her own mercifully brief time in the mine flashing back with almost as much force as the magic-driven nightmares she thankfully seldom had now, thanks to Whiteblaze. She touched his head and his tail wagged briefly, although he kept his eyes fixed on the supine Watcher.
“More Watchers at the new mine than the old right now, then?” the Lady said.
The young man pursed his lips. “No, still more at the old mine, I’d say. Maybe seventy or eighty. Probably five hundred unMasked. Should be more Watchers than that, of course—but a bunch of Watchers were sent out west. Heard that was in case you showed up, ma’am,” he said respectfully to the Lady, “but I didn’t really credit it. No offense, but I thought you were a myth.”
“None taken,” the Lady said. “Now tell me about the new mine. What does it look like inside?”
“Well, it all started with this huge natural cavern, right?” the Watcher said.
The Lady looked at Mara. “The one you found, presumably.”
She nodded, remembering how beautiful it had been, the walls glistening with more magic than she had ever seen in one place before or since.
“Big underground lake in the cavern, water pouring out into the ravine,” the Watcher went on. “But when they went in farther, they found that the water pouring into the lake comes down a long passage from high up the mountain. An underground cascade. They’ve harnessed that, of course.”
“A waterwheel?” Mara said.
The Watcher nodded and flashed her a grin. “Got it in one, miss! They’ve just started sinking shafts—been busy mining out the big cavern—but eventually they’ll put in a man-engine like they got in the other mine. Right now they’re just using it to run a rock-crusher—helps them extract the magic.”
The Lady looked at him thoughtfully. “Is this underground cascade natural?”
“Funny you should ask, ma’am,” the Watcher said. “It ain’t. That chute it comes down is smoothed the whole way. And there are stairs and passageways climbing up the mountain alongside it. Someone carved them all out. Must be centuries ago now. Probably the same folks who carved that Secret City we cleared the rebels out of.”
“Fascinating,” the Lady said. “And where do those stairs and passageways lead?”
“Right up to where the water pours underground. It starts way up near the peaks, see, in a glacier-fed lake. You look close from down in the valley, you can see it cascading down the side of the mountain. Where it goes underground there’s a second entrance to the cave system—and more magic, too: there’s a small crew of unMasked up there already, opening things up for mining.”
“And is this second entrance guarded?”
“’Course it is,” the Watcher said. “We’re not idiots. Got a permanent garrison up there, watching the entrance, riding herd on the diggers. Poor bastards.” Mara could tell he wasn’t referring to the unMasked. “Kind of a punishment duty. Nobody’s ever going to fi
nd that hole without knowing it’s there.” A slightly confused look crossed his face. “Not supposed to say anything about it,” he added. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
The Lady smiled at the Watcher, but there was no warmth in it. “No one who doesn’t need to know.”
His face cleared. “Well, that’s all right, then.”
“You’ve been very helpful,” the Lady said softly. “Thank you.”
“Fix my leg now, then, will you, ma’am?” the Watcher said. “Whatever you done made it stop hurting, but I’d like to get up. If your pet will let me, of course.”
“Fix your leg?” the Lady said. “No, that won’t be happening. But I can guarantee it will never hurt you again.”
Before Mara could quite grasp what she meant by that, she reached out her hand again and touched the Watcher’s chest once more. She saw a flicker of blue, the color of Healing, but no Healing took place.
Instead, the Watcher gasped slightly. His strangely trusting eyes, staring up at the Lady, widened, and glazed over.
He was dead.
Mara saw the magic rush out of him, the rush of magic that had so often before poured into her, causing pain and nightmares. But none of the magic streamed to her: instead, all of it went to the Lady, pouring into her black lodestone amulet.
The Lady stood up. Another flick of her hand, a flash, and the Watcher’s body was gone, leaving behind only white dust . . . the same dust that had been all that had been left of Grute when she had burned away his naked, headless body from the magic-collection hut where he had attacked her. Her stomach twisted. He had been the first person she had killed with magic. He hadn’t been the last. She didn’t want to kill any more. But the Lady had just slain the young man she had been talking to an instant before as casually as swatting a fly. “You killed him!” she choked out. “Why?”
The Lady shrugged. “He could not be set free, to warn the mining camps, and we cannot spare a man to watch him day and night. Easier and cleaner this way. And he told us what we need to know.”
“And that made it all right to kill him? You used him and discarded him like . . . like a dust rag. As though he were nothing to you!”
A flicker of irritation crossed the Lady’s face. “What do you think we mean to do to the Watchers at the mine, Mara? Sit them down and explain to them the error of their ways? This is war, or soon will be. We will kill many Watchers at both mines, just as I killed this one . . . and at that, he is more fortunate than most. A simple death at my touch is far preferable to bleeding out from a sword blow to the thigh or dying in agony from a spear through the gut. His fate would have been the same no matter what. I hastened and eased his passage. I showed him mercy.”
Mara looked down at the ground where the Watcher had lain, at the white dust still being scattered by the breeze. “He was only a little older than me.”
“And already a cold-blooded little bastard,” the Lady snapped. “With callous disregard for the suffering of the unMasked. He was an extension of the will of the Autarch, Mara. And if we are to bring the Autarch down, we must sever from him his only means of extending that will beyond the walls of the Palace: the Watchers, and magic.” She turned away from Mara and strode back toward the camp. “Come,” she said. “I must tell Edrik and Chell what we have learned. We have plans to prepare.”
As they turned away, the rain began, washing the dust from the weeds of the clearing, all that remained of the first casualty of the Lady’s invasion of Aygrima.
The first, but certainly not the last.
EIGHT
Through the Back Door
“THIS ISN’T GOING TO BE EASY,” Chell muttered, late the next morning. The rain had poured down for hours, but cleared sometime after midnight, and now the sky was bright blue. Chell rolled over on his back and slid down the damp grass a little bit to get below the ridgeline from which he and Edrik had been studying the split in the mountainside hiding the magic-filled cavern Mara had found, and from which the unMasked Army had rescued her.
That had been in late autumn. Now it was mid-spring, and the Autarch had clearly not wasted the intervening months. The opening into the narrow ravine, clearly visible more than a mile away across a broad, barren, river-carved valley, had been blocked by a high wall of stone, penetrated by a single iron-bound wooden gate. Watchers patrolled the battlemented top of the wall. Beyond that wall smoke rose into the sky from the ravine itself.
“When we rescued Mara,” Edrik said, “we climbed the mountain over there,” he pointed right, toward a shoulder of the peak, “and came down on them from above.”
“Clearly they remembered,” Chell said. “Since they’ve also built a wall around the top of the ravine.”
The Lady stood a few feet away, eyes closed. She hadn’t bothered to climb to the ridgeline. Mara knew she was studying the situation through the eyes of her wolves, ranging somewhere in the valley or up on the mountain above the ravine.
Now her eyes opened, and she looked at Chell. “You still do not understand,” she said. “This war against the Autarch will not be decided by force of arms, but by force of magic.”
“Good thing, considering the size of our force,” Chell muttered.
“If you can take the mine using magic, why do you need our people?” Edrik demanded, turning like Chell before him and sliding below the ridgeline. He stood and brushed uselessly at the mud on the seat of his pants. “Why should we risk our lives? Blast the Watchers and be done with it.”
“Both Mara and I have drawn magic heavily from the wolves the past few days, so they are not at full strength,” the Lady said. “My Cadre is likewise weakened, and with possible combat imminent, I do not want to risk drawing from the other villagers, partially incapacitating them just when they must fight. I do not think either your people, Edrik, or yours, Chell, want me taking magic from them. I could, of course, take magic from the Watchers themselves . . . but not from this distance, and not without putting myself at more risk than I think is wise.”
“So what is your plan?” Chell demanded. “I presume you have one.”
“My plan,” the Lady said, “depends on Mara.”
Chell and Edrik looked at her. Mara remembered when Chell’s first reaction on seeing her had been to smile, when his expression had always been one of open friendliness. That had changed after their frosty encounter in the Lady’s tent en route to the fortress. Now it was . . . carefully blank. Whatever he thought of her, he showed nothing of it. Nor did Edrik. Considering her actions had brought the Watchers down on the Secret City, she suspected that was for the best.
She shoved the old guilt aside and schooled her own face to stoicism. Guilt and doubt belonged to the old, powerless Mara. Not to the right hand of the Lady of Pain and Fire. I am powerful, she reminded herself. And in control. And if my opening of the pass did not demonstrate that to my old allies, perhaps this will.
“The heart of this mine of magic is—or was, they’ve probably destroyed it by now—” (she felt a pang for lost beauty) “a natural cavern with an underground lake, smaller than the one in the Secret City, but large enough. We learned from the Watcher we questioned that the lake is fed by an underground stream that pours down from the glaciers at the top of the mountain; that there is a second entrance to the caves far up the slope; and that it is possible to reach the main mine from that entrance, along stairways carved in the rock, like those in the Secret City.” She pointed toward the glimmer of ice high overhead. “There is a garrison of about a dozen Watchers at that ‘back door’ . . . but it is still the weakest point in their defense. And there is magic to be found at that end of the cavern, as well.
“So,” she continued, carefully enunciating the plan the Lady had spelled out to her, though the military terms didn’t exactly come naturally to her, “rather than mount a frontal assault, we will take a small force to this alternate entrance, overpower the garrison,
and descend from there. While our main force keeps the Watchers’ attention focused outward, we will surprise them from behind. I will use magic to blow open the gate. Caught between my magic and our small force inside the wall, and the Lady’s magic and the larger force outside it, the Watchers will quickly be overpowered.” She glanced at the Lady, hoping she’d gotten the details right.
The Lady nodded approvingly.
“And you’re going to lead this force?” Chell said. “Mara, I know you have magic, but—”
Mara felt her face heat. “Do you doubt my power?” she said, and though she recognized the echo of the Lady’s words, it did not concern her. The Lady was no longer what she feared she would become, but what she wanted to become. “It’s true I will not be swinging a sword. But I don’t need to.”
“I don’t doubt your power,” Chell said evenly. “I was in Tamita when your father died. I was with you every step of the way north to the Secret City. I saw what you did to the Watchers in the boat from the Secret City, and on the beach. I saw what you did in the pass. But you didn’t let me finish. It is not your power I doubt. It is your ability to lead: to lead my men, and Edrik’s.”
“My people will not follow you,” Edrik said flatly. “You cost too many of them too dearly.”
“They will follow her if I say they will follow her,” the Lady said. “Or they will pay the price.”
“They have already paid the price,” Edrik snapped. “Will you kill them? Torture them? Force them to your will with magic? You said yourself your power is not unlimited. And every time you hurt one of the unMasked Army, or one of Chell’s men, or kill one of them, or force them to do something against their will, you are laying a trap for yourself. Because eventually you will be in a position of vulnerability, and one of them will seize the opportunity to take revenge.”
The Lady trembled with anger. Mara could see, though she knew both Chell and Edrik were oblivious to it, magic, bright as the sun, shining in Arilla’s eyes. She stepped forward hastily, interposing herself between the Lady and the two men. “Lady,” she said softly. “Please.”