by E. C. Blake
Chell nodded thoughtfully. He looked to the right, where the stream ran in a clearly artificial channel, its constant rushing noise masking any sound of the Watchers they were pursuing, but hopefully also masking their own.
They had seen no light ahead of them, but the tunnels changed direction frequently, zigzagging in switchbacks to minimize the downward slope, the switchbacks alternating with stairs like the ones they descended now. Their own torches showed no decoration on any of the walls, but there were side tunnels and chambers carved in the rock, dark, gaping mouths that hinted of mysterious secrets, though many had collapsed, the torchlight giving glimpses of tumbled tons of stone.
If the Autarch is overthrown, Mara thought, someone really has to come back here and explore all of this.
But exploration would have to wait. They hurried on in the wake of the fleeing Watchers. And all the time, Mara kept her anger alive, deep down inside, a spark she could turn into a conflagration the instant she needed it—the instant she had magic to fuel it.
Some three hours after they entered the cavern, they descended a final flight of stairs and found themselves in a long corridor, gently sloping downward. The stream flowed alongside it down its artificial channel. Mara caught a glimpse of torchlight far ahead of them. “There!” she cried, pointing.
“I saw it,” Chell said. “Farther ahead than I’d hoped, but not as far as I feared.” He looked at Antril. “Double-time,” he said. “Let’s see if we can’t catch those bastards.”
“Aye, Your Highness,” said the young lieutenant. “You heard him, lads!”
And with that, the men started running. Mara would have dashed off with them, but Chell held her back with a hand on her arm for a moment. “I should be there if they catch them,” she protested.
“There are eighteen of them and only a couple of Watchers,” Chell said. “What would they need you for?” He frowned a little. “Unless it’s to suck down the Watchers’ magic?”
“You make it sound . . . disgusting,” Mara said.
“Sorry,” Chell said. “It’s just not something I can quite get my head around.”
But you’re more than willing to use the magic I “suck down,” aren’t you? she thought angrily. “We’ve waited long enough.” She charged after Antril and the others, Chell easily keeping pace with her.
Ahead, the light grew. There was too much now to be just from the Watchers’ torches. The cavern, Mara thought. The light wasn’t the multicolored glow of magic, however, but the familiar yellow of open flames. What have they done to that beautiful chamber?
She couldn’t see any details, just the glow of light, and the silhouettes of Chell’s men against it. Swords glinted and flashed, there were shouts and curses. She gasped as someone died and she was brushed by his escaping magic, though it didn’t reach her full-force because it was once more pulled into the black lodestone all around her.
She needed magic. She’d thought to use the magic filling the cavern, but she couldn’t feel it, couldn’t reach it. I need to get closer. Without even realizing it, she lengthened her stride, filled with new energy. The end of the tunnel swelled in her vision. She could see wooden platforms now, the lake, Chell’s men battling Watchers, unMasked cowering in the dark. What she couldn’t see, as she glimpsed the far wall of the cavern, was any sign of the vast storehouse of untouched magic the cavern had once represented, the magic she had counted on. They’ve already ruined it, she thought. They’ve already stripped the walls, crushed the stone, sent the magic to the Autarch. There had to be magic all around her, but buried deep in such an enormous mass of black lodestone, it would not let her draw it out in the amount, or as fast as, she needed.
But there was still magic to be had. So much magic, filling the unMasked. Magic she needed, magic she could ignite with the spark of rage inside her to do what needed to be done.
So she took it.
As she burst out into the cavern, the dozen or so unMasked closest to the tunnel fell to their knees, dropped their tools, and collapsed unconscious, the living magic they contained ripped from them like unripe fruit from a tree. The remaining unMasked screamed. But she knew she had killed none of those who had collapsed; she knew within the breadth of a hair how much she could safely take. The fallen unMasked would live. And so she did not spare them another thought, not with the power pouring into her. Filtered through the amulet at her breast, it did not hurt at all. Instead, it filled her, satiated her, satisfied the need that lurked always beneath the surface of her skin, like an itch that wouldn’t go away.
She could control that need when she had to—but now she didn’t have to. Now she could give into it, and give into it she did.
Half a dozen Watchers battled Chell’s men. Chell was right, they didn’t need her: one Watcher was already down and the others beset. But she didn’t care. She saw the Watchers, and seeing them she saw all the Watchers: the ones she had known in the old mine, the ones who had stood by while her father was executed, and the ones who had attacked the Secret City and chased the unMasked Army along the shoreline. Most of all, she saw the cavern of blood where the Watchers they had followed here had slaughtered the unMasked workers rather than let them be rescued.
Rage-fueled magic leaped from her outstretched hands. She could have blasted the Watchers before her into white dust. But that was too clean a death. Instead, they exploded in a red rain of flesh and entrails, bone and blood. Their bodies’ released magic tried to pour into the rock, but she greedily seized it instead, “sucking it down” as Chell would have it, once more filtering it through the black lodestone crystal so it did not burn, so their death-twisted soulprints would not haunt her dreams. Her nightmares were a thing of the past: more largesse of the Lady, the Lady to whom she owed so much.
Ignoring the horrified stares of Chell’s men, ignoring Prince Chell himself, single-minded with focused fury, she stalked across the wooden walkway that had been built over the lake. The narrow passage she had crawled through alongside the stream had been shaped into a proper tunnel wide enough for two men to walk abreast. She strode out through it. No warning had made it out into the ravine beyond. The only Watchers she could see were standing atop the wall across the ravine’s mouth.
Her instructions were to open the gate: a trivial use of the power filling her. Instead, she raised her hands and, with the magic from the unMasked workers and the dead Watchers, sent a blast of red light the length of the ravine. Wall and gate alike blew outward in a thunderous rain of stones, timber and iron, mingled with red blood and white bone. She felt a dozen Watchers die . . . but not all of them. Some still lived in the ruin of the wall.
She strode through the ravine, sensed a Watcher cowering behind a boulder, flicked a hand, and sent the boulder crashing back against the ravine wall. Blood sprayed the rocks.
Out in the valley beyond the gates the unMasked Army, the Lady, and her followers rushed forward. Mara held herself still, rage still boiling beneath her skin. She saw the Lady hold up her hand, saw the villagers stop in their tracks. Behind them, the unMasked Army and remaining sailors likewise waited. She picked out Hyram, grim-faced, sword in hand, Keltan beside him.
She’d left them nothing to do. She smiled at that, a death’s head grin.
The Lady came on alone. “Well done,” she said when she reached Mara.
Mara inclined her head.
“Let the magic go,” the Lady said softly. “Give it to me.”
Mara narrowed her eyes. Who was this old woman to take what was rightfully hers?
The thought shocked her. She didn’t understand where it had come from. “Of course,” she said. She reached out her hands. The Lady took them. Mara released the magic she still held within her, gasping a little as she did so. Suddenly drained, she swayed. The Lady caught her arm.
“Now let me see what is what,” the Lady said. “Come.” She took Mara’s arm and led her back t
oward the cavern. Together they walked down the tunnel alongside the stream, emerging into the mine a few moments later. The unMasked workers were clustered together against the far wall. The ones Mara had taken magic from were groaning and beginning to stir. Chell and his men stood guard. “We were uncertain what to do with them,” Chell said. “Do we release them?”
“Of course you release them!” Mara exclaimed.
“Quiet, child.” The Lady let go of her arm. “Stay here.”
She strode the remaining length of the wooden walkway spanning the lake, whose water, already sadly churned with mud, was now tinged with red from the slain Watchers. Mara gripped the amulet at her neck. She remembered killing those Watchers. She remembered how she had killed them. In her rage it hadn’t seemed to matter. In her rage, it hadn’t seemed to matter that she had torn magic from some of these unMasked without permission, without even considering what it might do to them. The fact that the amulet had kept both actions from hurting her as they always had before, that she had not felt the impact of the dying Watchers’ magic, that she had not burned in agony with the influx of raw magic from living humans, did not change what she had done.
Reach down inside yourself and find your rage and hate, the Lady had told her. Don’t fear letting it out. Learn to use it to power your magic. Do that, and there is almost nothing you cannot achieve.
The Lady had clearly been right.
She should have been happier about it. This is a war, she told herself. The Watchers serve the Autarch. To destroy the Autarch, we must defeat the Watchers. And look at what they have done to the unMasked . . .
But then, look what she had done to the unMasked.
Confused, troubled, she had been staring at the rough wooden planks of the walkway. Now she raised her head, and saw that the Lady had reached the unMasked.
She couldn’t hear what Arilla was saying, if anything. But she saw what she did.
She waved a hand casually, and Chell and his men sank unconscious to the wooden planking. Then the Lady reached out and touched the forehead of a young unMasked woman only a couple of years older than Mara, though with the pinched, hard look to her scarred face Mara remembered all too well from her time in the labor camp. The girl’s face went slack.
And then she collapsed, bonelessly, falling to the planks with the thud, like a sack of meal thrown from a wagon.
And Arilla stepped to the right, and touched the forehead of a burly, bearded man with a permanent sneer . . . and he dropped the same way.
The other unMasked trembled, faces pale, eyes wide, but they couldn’t seem to move. Her feet, too, seemed to have grown roots. With great effort she stumbled forward. “Arilla, stop!” she cried. She found it hard to speak, and suddenly realized why: there was magic flowing from the Lady, subtle magic, so that even with her Gifted sight Mara had not recognized it, had only thought it brighter in the cavern than the flickering torches could account for. “Arilla, what . . . ?”
“They are all broken,” the Lady said without turning around. Another touch, and a boy dropped lifeless. “The Masks rejected these for a reason. We cannot take them with us. We cannot leave them behind us. They are good for only one thing.” Another touch. This time it was a skinny dark-skinned man who rolled off the planking as he fell, falling into the muddy water with a splash and floating facedown. “I am taking their magic to make myself stronger. I am storing it up in my amulet. And I will use it against the Autarch who has made such evil use of them. In this way their miserable lives will have had some meaning.” A woman fell. A girl. A boy. “You left some magic in those you drew from. I will take it all.”
Mara felt sick, felt betrayed, felt . . . anger. Rage. The same kind of rage she had felt against the Watchers just minutes before. It roared up in her like a bonfire of dry wood. The Lady had drained her, but there was still a little magic to be had in the walls of the cavern, if she pulled hard enough. She struggled to reach it, felt some of it flow to her, but sluggishly, like syrup on a winter’s day. “Arilla, stop! You’re murdering them!”
The Lady rounded on her, and Mara saw that her eyes blazed once more with magic, as bright and white as the sun. “You can’t murder cattle,” Arilla snarled. She glanced at Chell and his sleeping men. Then, face twisted with fury, she turned back to Mara, who had slowed again as she approached the Lady, unable to penetrate the magic permeating the very air around her. “How dare you! How dare you question me! I have been working toward the overthrow of the Autarch since before your father was born. No one else can destroy him. Certainly not you.” Her voice dripped with contempt. “You will never be what I am. You will never even be what I was when I fought the Autarch as a young girl. You are a tool, nothing more. I needed you to breach the borders. You were of some use to me here, and will be useful again at the mining camp. After that, I have one final—one very final—use for you. Until then, you will remember your place, and keep to it. I will make sure of it. You will not challenge me again.” She paused. “And I think . . . yes. I think it is time to prepare you for your final fate.”
What fate? Mara burned with rage, but she had managed to gather only a flicker of magic to herself, and the Lady brimmed with power. She could do nothing against such a force.
The Lady strode toward Mara. She reached out her hand. She touched Mara’s forehead.
In a soundless explosion of white light, the world went away.
TEN
Sequestered
MARA WOKE IN the Lady’s pavilion, wearing only her underclothes, wrapped in her blankets atop her usual bed of fragrant pine boughs. She stared up at the sloping white canvas, her mind a blank. What day was it? Where were they? What had happened?
Nothing came to her. She heard a whine from her right and turned her head to see Whiteblaze looking at her alertly. He gave a short yip and licked her left hand, which lay outside the blanket. She didn’t remember entering the tent or lying down. In fact, the last thing she remembered was the discussion with Edrik and Chell of who would lead the strike force up the mountain to the new magic mine’s “back door.” Then she’d . . . gone back to the camp?
Gone to the Lady’s pavilion?
Gone to bed?
That didn’t seem likely.
What’s wrong with me? she thought with a touch of panic. What’s happened to my memory?
Whiteblaze yelped again, then turned and trotted out through the tent flap. Mara turned her head to watch him go, but she didn’t try to sit up. She felt weak, drained. Her black lodestone amulet still rested on her chest, a reassuring weight, but she could sense no magic anywhere. It was almost like . . .
She blinked. It wasn’t almost like, it was exactly like wearing the iron Mask placed on her when she had been taken prisoner in Tamita. Someone had blocked her Gift. And the only person with the power to do that, at least here, was the Lady.
But why would the Lady have done so? And had she also blocked Mara’s memories in the process?
Could she do that?
Mara was uneasily certain she could. Hadn’t she talked about how the way magic was bound up with a person’s soulprint made it possible to manipulate people with magic? The Autarch did it through Masks. The Lady didn’t need Masks.
Had Arilla removed her memories? And if so . . . what else had she done to Mara’s mind?
She tried to raise her head, to get up and go in search of the Lady. But weariness held her down like a lead weight, and she slumped back again, breathing hard.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to find the Lady. The Lady entered the tent a moment later, following Whiteblaze, three of her own wolves with her. She came over to Mara’s side and looked down at her, unsmiling. “How do you feel?” she said.
“Like a lump of wet clay,” Mara said. “What happened? Why can’t I remember anything? We were planning to go up the mountain . . .”
“You did go up the mountain,” the Lad
y said. “And successfully opened the gate to the mine. We have taken it. The Watchers who guarded it are dead.”
Mara blinked. “I opened the gate?” She closed her eyes, tried to find the memories. But there was nothing. She opened her eyes again. “Why can’t I remember it?”
“You were careless,” the Lady said. “There was considerable death around you during the attack, and you let some of the released magic slip around the amulet. The soulprints tore through your mind.”
“And destroyed my memories?” Mara said. “That’s never happened before.”
“No,” the Lady said. “I have blocked your memories. I was afraid that if I did not, you might not wake at all.”
Mara frowned. It made some sense. When she’d killed the Watcher outside the very cavern they’d been trying to find a way into, she’d awakened days later in the Secret City, in the chamber where Grelda placed those she expected to die. That had been when Grelda had introduced her to the noxious potion she had relied on many times since to block the nightmares. Grelda, though not Gifted herself, had said she had been suffering from “a surfeit of magic.” But the circumstances had been quite different. She had killed the Watcher, and certainly his soulprint must have slammed into her with great force, but the real problem had seemed to be that she had drawn too much magic to her too quickly, the incredible store of it in the cavern tearing through her like a hurricane. She’d had no control at all of her Gift then. Now, she had, thanks to hours of practice with both Arilla and, before her, Shelra, the Autarch’s Mistress of Magic. A mere “surfeit of magic” would not affect her now the way it had then. But why would the impact of multiple soulprints? She’d experienced that before, too, and though she’d paid the price in nightmares, she’d never been close to death herself as a result. What was different this time?