Faces

by E. C. Blake

  He has all that magic in the basin and the reservoir below to draw on, she thought. Why does he need theirs?

  But she knew the answer. He didn’t need ordinary magic, he needed their magic, the deep, raw magic of their young bodies, not to do whatever he was doing to defend the city, but to protect and restore his own aging body. Just like the Lady, sucking magic from the unMasked she had murdered in the mines, he lusted for power with no thought of the cost to those he tore it from, callously cutting short others’ lives so he could extend his own.

  The anger in her burned as bright as the Child Guard’s bodies. She took a step toward the Autarch—

  His eyes opened again behind his Mask of gold. “At last,” he said. “At last.”

  And just like that, she couldn’t move.

  She looked down at herself. Red magic enwrapped her body, magic she could not touch, magic that had turned the air itself solid so that she might as well have been frozen in ice. She looked up again. “Did you really think,” the Autarch said, the scorn in his voice sharp as a knife, “that I could be fooled by that crude copy of a Child Guard’s Mask? I knew who you were the moment you entered the throne room.”

  “Then why didn’t you kill me on the spot?” Mara said. She felt helpless and foolish and furious and guilty. No guilt? She had no right to try to move past her guilt. Once again, she had failed. Once again, she had made the wrong decision. Once again, people would die for her.

  More shouts from outside the throne room. Mara could not see what was happening out there, but she could guess. The Sun Guards must be attacking, trying to fight through her companions to reach the Autarch. But the Autarch seemed unconcerned by the sounds of battle. “Kill you? Kill my old friend Arilla? The girl of my dreams?”

  Arilla? The Lady of Pain and Fire? “I’m not—” she started to say . . .

  ...but then, suddenly, she was.

  That strange disconnected bubble of rage wrapped in unnatural calm that had seemed so separate from her swelled like a bladder filling with water. It pushed Mara out of the center of her own mind, drove her to the edges, squeezed her into immobility, turned her into a spectator in her own brain. And suddenly, too late, she understood many things that had happened since she fired the crossbow bolt into the head of the Lady and Arilla’s overwhelming power had rushed into her: the strange sense that she had in many ways become more like the Lady than ever before, the knowledge of the Lady’s plans she could not remember how she had come by, the surprising ease with which she had altered the Masks of Greff’s parents and Greff himself. The Lady’s soulprint had not just changed her, it had possessed her. Some piece of the Lady survived in her body . . . and now it had seized control.

  “I think it is time to prepare the way for your final fate,” the Lady had said. Was this the fate she’d had in mind? Always had in mind? Possession? To discard her own aging body in favor of Mara’s young fresh one?

  But she died! Mara cried silently. I killed her before she could act!

  Not soon enough, apparently.

  “I have dreamed about you, too,” said Mara’s voice, but it was the Lady who provided the words. “I have dreamed about how I would kill you, the many ways you would suffer before you died. And now here I am.”

  “Here you are,” said the Autarch. “How is that working out for you?”

  He stood then, and came over to where Mara waited, frozen. “We are so much alike,” he said softly. “Variations of the same Gift. I cannot pull magic directly from the living as you can, but through my Masks I have that same power . . . as you see.” He gestured at the Child Guard, each as stiff and frozen as Mara. “And clearly you, too, have thought long and hard about how to use that power to live forever. I had thought I could simply save this body,” he gestured at it, “and I have done wonders with it, but I have known for some time that the ultimate solution is to take a new body. The difficulty, of course, is that that body must have the same Gift as ours, and that Gift is vanishingly rare. But then this girl came along.” He reached out and caressed Mara’s cheek. She would have shuddered at the touch if she had been able to move. “I allowed myself to be ‘convinced’ by the Mistress of Magic that she should be spared. I had thought to keep her around the Palace until I was ready to possess her. But that fool Stanik managed to let her escape. Thank you so much for bringing her back to me.”

  “You can’t have her,” the Lady said. “She is already mine.”

  “Arilla,” the Autarch said softly. “You are only a ghost. Do you think I cannot tell? You are an echo of a fading song, a dying coal from a once-great fire. You are dead. I am alive. You cannot prevent me from taking her.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Yes,” the Autarch said. “We will.”

  He reached up and took off his Golden Mask, revealing . . . not what Mara expected. He looked younger than he should have, when she knew he was at least eighty. The effect of drawing magic from the Child Guard, she guessed. Yet apparently it was not enough. He wanted her. He wanted to possess her. To become her.

  As, it seemed, the Lady already had.

  Was any of this plan mine at all? Mara thought. Or was it all fed to me by this . . . ghost, this revenant, this remnant of the Lady?

  She tried to twitch a finger, move a foot, blink an eye, anything to prove she still had some control of her own body. But nothing happened.

  The Autarch reached out and pulled the silver Mask from Mara’s face. He tossed it aside. It rang like a bell as it hit the stones of the dais. “Beautiful as I remember,” he said. He wasn’t talking about the Mask. He touched Mara’s cheek. “Unmarked. How did she manage that, when her Mask failed?” He thought for a moment. “Ah. Ethelda. She asked if she could attend in my place. I didn’t know then that she was in league with the girl’s father. I was worried that I was drawing too much magic too quickly from too many of the Gifted when I attended their Maskings, and that was why the Maskings were failing. I did not want that to happen to Charlton Holdfast’s daughter. I wanted her to grow up to be my new Master Maskmaker.” He smiled. “But things have a way of working out. This is much better. She has grown up to be my new body instead.”

  “Your city is under attack,” the Lady’s ghost said through Mara. “Your attention is divided. I know what you are doing. As I did with my villagers, you are using the young people who received the altered Masks in the past three years as your soldiers. You have been training them to fight and now you have thrown them at the unMasked Army.”

  “I will show these bandits,” said the Autarch, “that the people of Aygrima will do whatever I ask of them.”

  “What you demand.”

  He shrugged. “It’s the same thing, really.”

  “You cannot force me out of this body,” the Lady said. “I am stronger than you could ever dream of being.”

  The Autarch laughed. “You still don’t grasp the truth, do you, Arilla?” He leaned close, so close that his eyes were all that Mara could see and she could feel his hot breath on her lips. She longed to pull back, but she could not. Neither the Lady nor the magic holding her in place would permit it. “You’re dead. It’s about time you started acting like it.”

  And then the Autarch of Aygrima hurled his consciousness into Mara’s mind.

  It was all she could do to hold on to the tiny sliver of herself she still commanded. Like a spectator at a wrestling match, she looked on as the Autarch and the fading remnant of the Lady struggled for supremacy, for control of her body. It was clear to her from the moment the Autarch launched his attack that he would win. He had told the simple truth, after all: the Lady of Pain and Fire was dead, and the remnant of her, hiding inside Mara since the moment at the minehead when she had fired the crossbow bolt into the Lady’s head, did not truly have the power of the Lady, because Mara did not have that power: not yet. The Lady had trained and honed hers for decades. Mara had barely even
come to grips with the fact that hers existed.

  And that was the Lady’s undoing. The Lady was like a slippery eel, trying to evade the Autarch’s hands, but he simply grew more of them, grasping and gripping, and she could not evade them all. Slowly, her control of Mara’s body was wrested from her. The Autarch filled more and more of Mara’s mind, squeezing Mara’s consciousness down to almost nothing. A little more and it would be gone . . . and if that happened, she did not think it would ever return. The Autarch would have her. The Autarch would be her. And how many more decades could he . . . she . . . rule with a new young body, one with a greater degree of the Gift than he had ever had, but with all his accumulated knowledge of how to use that Gift?

  Grute, all those months ago, had tried to rape her, and failed. The Autarch was succeeding, the violation more obscene, more repulsive, than anything Grute could have managed . . . and this time, she had no way to respond.

  But through it all, her eyes were open, and her ears. She could hear the shouts and clatter of battle outside the throne room doors as her companions fought the Sun Guards. And she could see the Sun Throne, and the wall behind it, the tall glass windows brightening now as at last the sun broke the horizon.

  She saw the door behind the Sun Throne swing open.

  She saw Greff, still wearing his Child Guard Mask, step through. In his hand he held a dagger. He leaped forward.

  He drove the blade into the Autarch’s back.

  The Autarch screamed, both bodily and in Mara’s mind. In an instant he was withdrawing from her, rushing back to his own body. So intricately entangled with the Lady’s soulprint was he that he took what was left of Arilla with him, both of them slamming back into the old body that had just been so violently injured. Mara saw an intense flash of white magic in the Autarch’s eyes at the same instant that the magic holding her frozen and upright vanished. She dropped to her knees, raised her head to see the Autarch turn on Greff, who was staggering back, hand red with blood. The Autarch hurled scarlet magic into the boy’s face. The silver Mask turned white hot in an instant, and Greff screamed, a horrible, high-pitched, inhuman sound, as his hair burst into flames and his ears burned to shriveled black husks. He dropped to his knees, scrabbling weakly at the Mask, and then fell lifelessly to his side, smoke pouring from his head, resting in a noisome pool of smoking grease and blackened blood.

  But as Greff died, his magic slammed into Mara, who welcomed it eagerly, even though it burned her like the hot silver that had killed him. She gasped as her body filled with Greff’s magic and her mind with his soulprint, still blazing with the hatred and determination that had driven him to his final desperate act.

  All around the dais the Child Guard screamed, echoing Greff, as the Autarch, desperate for power, ripped it from their bodies. As one, they, too, toppled, whether dead or alive, Mara could not see. What she could see was the blade withdrawing itself from the Autarch’s back, magic flickering around the wound as he desperately tried to knit together the damaged tissue.

  In a moment the Autarch would have healed himself. He would turn on her again, and she would be unable to resist him.

  But she did not give him that moment.

  With the magic she had taken from Greff, she reached out for the only weapons at hand: the two Masks lying on the dais in front of her, silver and gold, hers and the Autarch’s. She poured all her magic into them—and hurled them at the Autarch’s head.

  He had just turned back toward her, triumph on his face, his wound healed, the ghost of Arilla no doubt destroyed as well. And then that look of triumph was wiped away forever. The heavy Masks slammed into his chin. In a spray of blood and shattered bone and pulped brain, the Autarch of Aygrima was flung off his feet and backward, to thud, headless and blood-soaked and very, very dead, into the Sun Throne. For a moment his body remained upright in an awful parody of a seated king; then it slid down into an ungraceful bloody lump on the dais.

  Mara expected the magic of the Autarch to tear through her like a hurricane. She doubted she would survive it. But though she felt the Autarch’s magic explode outward from his corpse, none of it touched her. Like the radiating rays of the golden sun behind the dead ruler’s throne, the magic, brilliant and blinding to Mara’s Gifted sight, blazed out of the throne room in all directions. She could not see everywhere it went, but she could guess, for some of it impaled the silver Masks of the unconscious Child Guard . . . and with the sound of ringing bells, every one of those Masks broke in half and fell away, revealing young and pale faces.

  It’s over, Mara thought. It’s really over. All the Masks . . . everywhere . . . they’re breaking. They’re falling apart. The whole Autarchy, unMasked.

  It’s over. We won.

  She staggered to her feet. Greff . . . she could not bear to look at the awful ruin of the boy she had promised to save for his parents. He had died a hero, but she didn’t think that would be much consolation to Filia and Jess.

  Tears filled her eyes. She turned toward the throne room doors, intending to go out to see how many of her guard survived, to see what had happened in the city beyond, but before she could take a step from the dais the doors burst open.

  A man in silver mail and white surcoat exploded through, a bloody sword in one hand, a bloody dagger in the other. He wore half a Watcher’s Mask, the bottom half having fallen away. More blood spattered his tunic, and dripped from a wound that had laid his cheek open, exposing the skull-like gleam of teeth. He charged Mara, screaming, sword raised. He’s going to kill me—

  Something hit him from behind and he went down hard. Whiteblaze leaped over him and stood between him and Mara, growling. The wolf advanced, teeth bared, and Mara, still in shock from what she had just done, what had just happened to Greff, reacted too slowly to what was about to happen in front of her. She had just started forward when the Sun Guard lifted himself and drove his dagger into Whiteblaze’s side.

  The wolf howled and turned white with magic as he collapsed, and Mara, screaming, took that magic and tore the Sun Guard limb from limb, painting the floor of the throne room red with his blood and scattered entrails. She scrambled forward on all knees to where Whiteblaze lay still as death, and buried her face in his bloody fur.

  She was still clinging to him when something struck her in the back of the head and in an explosion of shock and pain she fell into darkness.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Outcast

  FOR AN INDETERMINATE TIME, Mara bobbed in and out of consciousness, surfacing and submerging like a twig caught in a mountain stream, never fully escaping its icy clutch. At one point she thought she heard Keltan shouting. She heard the clash of steel. She heard a vast roaring sound like a mighty wind or an enormous crowd. Her eyes flickered open to see the carved wooden beams of the Palace’s main-floor corridors passing by overhead. She opened them again to find herself in a bed and a woman in the blue dress of a Healer, though unMasked and with a strained, pale face, bending over her. She glimpsed the blue glow of Healing magic.

  And then she slept.

  Nightmares awaited her. She had absorbed too many deaths without the filtering effect of the black lodestone amulet. Old ghosts resurfaced: Grute, oldest of all, naked and headless; the Warden, throat ruined; the Watchers she had killed; the Lady, trailing blood as she dropped into the mine shaft; the Autarch, headless and bloody as Grute . . .

  But the worst were those she cared about most. Her father, who in her nightmare just stood and stared at her, hangman’s noose still around his neck, voiceless in grief and disappointment; Ethelda, who whispered over and over again, “Monster . . . monster . . . monster . . .”

  And Mayson. Her best friend from childhood. The boy who had always wanted to be a Watcher, when none of them knew what that meant. She saw him lying wounded on the floor of the Warden’s house, heard him trying to speak, “Mmmm . . . mmmm . . .” He had tried to speak her name, to save himself, to stop
her from murdering him . . . and she had snapped his neck like a twig.

  “Monster . . . monster . . . monster . . .” Slowly the whisper from Ethelda grew in volume and scope, until all her nightmare victims were gathered around her, repeating the word in unison. “Monster! Monster! Monster!” They closed in on her. She screamed, tried to wake up, but something was holding her asleep, holding her trapped in her mind, and she thought her heart would burst from terror and grief . . .

  ...and then she felt a familiar furry head under her hand, and terror bled away, the nightmare images flowing out from her like wine through the tap of a barrel, and she fell into a far deeper darkness where no dreams waited, one joyful thought following her down.

  Whiteblaze is still alive!

  The next time she came to consciousness it was to full wakefulness at last. She lay in a soft white bed, staring up at a ceiling that looked strangely familiar. For a moment she just blinked sleepily up at it. There was something on her face. Why didn’t they take off that silver Mask? she wondered—then remembered that the Autarch himself had stripped her of her Child Guard Mask, and she had used it to kill him.

  More memories rushed back. Whiteblaze . . . nightmares . . . Greff . . . why was she wearing a Mask?

  She lifted a hand, trembling with unexpected weakness—how long had she been lying there?—and explored her face.

  Horror filled her. She was not wearing the silver Mask she had made. She was wearing a half-Mask, a Mask made of cold, pitted iron. A prison Mask, like the one the Mistress of Magic had placed on her when she had come to the Palace the last time, a Mask that blocked her Gift, prevented her from using or even seeing magic. And that ceiling looked familiar because this was the magically shielded room where she had trained with Shelra, the room no magic could enter or leave.

  What’s happening? I killed the Autarch! Why am I a prisoner?