FIERCE: Sixteen Authors of Fantasy

by Mercedes Lackey

  Elu’s mask throbbed. It whispered to him. No, it did not whisper, it spoke. But not to him. To the innkeeper. Elu’s mouth opened.

  “Your mask is not well earned, innkeeper.”

  The man stopped dead in his tracks. He slowly turned back to Elu, who could make out the barest tremble rippling through the man’s body. Mainly, he could see into the man through his mask, which appeared to Elu as no mask ever had—it was as if he could look into the innkeeper’s soul, and saw the black, fetid thing curled up, gnashing inside of him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Thora replace her servant’s mask, but his own continued to speak through him.

  “I tell you, innkeeper, your mask is not well earned. You know of what I speak.”

  The man visibly trembled now.

  “Wh—what are you talking about?” He forced a laugh, and slapped the backs of two men near him who joined him in laughter. “Go home, teacher’s son,” he said, grimacing—though how Elu could sense the contorted face beneath inkeeper’s mask he was not sure. Yet he knew what the man felt without seeing his face, for the innkeeper’s mask reeked of fear and loathing.

  “The graves of dead men may spin no tales, but your mask cannot lie to me. You do not deserve that mask—gained through ill-gotten schemes. Your shame is laid plain before me.”

  At this, the man took a few steps backward, then turned around and walked quickly to the next room and slammed the door shut. After a few more seconds of muffled whispers, the patrons resumed their conversations and laughing, but now with many eyes warily regarding Thora, and this strange boy standing tall next to her.

  Elu stooped to help Thora to her feet, and turned to leave, but before he walked to the door he raised a hand to her face and gently placed two fingers on the forehead of her mask.

  The sign of friendship. Deep and abiding friendship.

  He still felt like he hardly knew Thora, though they had explored the countryside together for many silent years. But he felt as if she needed that token. The knowledge that she was not reviled.

  Not by everyone, at least.

  Elu could see her mouth open, then close, but he left before any words could come out.

  Over the season that followed Elu worked night and day for the maskmaker, doing much of the basic upkeep of the house and the shop, for the man’s wife had died years earlier and flown to that other world. But most days the man ordered him to assist in the procurement of materials for the masks, and increasingly often as the season progressed, in their construction. And during the sessions where the master guided his young hands in the delicate task of building a mask, the man taught him mask lore.

  “Did you know, Elu, that your mask grows with you? Not its frame, of course, that stays fixed. But its knowledge grows. Its capacity for power increases. If used after the order and measure of its creation, it becomes filled with wisdom and light. But if used against the natural order of things, wisdom leaches from it, until it becomes filled with darkness and becomes a waking curse and nightmare to the wearer. Remember to honor your mask. Fulfill its purpose and it will enlighten you, fill you, teach you … complete you.”

  “Yes, master.”

  Elu concentrated on his task: an assortment of wood, jewels, leather strips, and a stylus—the tools he would need to complete the merchant’s mask the old man had assigned him. He carefully inscribed the runes of the merchant into the inside of the mask. The rune of wealth. The rune of speech and persuasion. The rune of honesty. The rune of industry. Into the face of the mask, already painted yellow, he attempted to set the jewels—not rare jewels, but symbols of wealth and power nonetheless. He could see the spirits awaking within and felt their power—this merchant would be successful, he could tell, and wealthy.

  “Master, tell me of the masks of power.”

  The man didn’t even look up from his own work. “The mage. The sorcerer. The wizard. The witch. The fortuneteller….” he paused, as if remembering.

  “Are there more?”

  “Of course there are more, boy! What? Do you think old age has addled my mind and saddled me with forgetfulness? I am concentrating on my work, as you should be.”

  “Forgive me, master.”

  “Now, as I was saying. The fortuneteller. The weatherweaver. The mender. And of course, the king, though I suppose his is more of a mask of legend. There are others of course, but the masks of power vary in their potency, according to the skill of the maker, and the potential of the wearer. A mask cannot be worn by anyone, remember. The mask chooses the bearer, and will always choose a peer. A kindred spirit. And then they grow in power together, each building on the other, each lending the other virtue and making an indelible imprint on the other’s substance. In this way, the masks of power grow more potent with each generation, if used properly. Many are not. And so any given mask of power will wax and wane over centuries of use and refurbishment. And of course, when they are presented to the new bearer, they are washed in the river. The idle, unclean spirits wash away, leaving the more potent, powerful, knowledgeable spirits of those worthy bearers that came before.”

  “What if a mask is not cleansed?”

  The maskmaker wove strips of leather together into a flat panel, his wrinkled fingers expertly flying over the material and binding it together, his lips breathing an unspoken chant as he labored. After several minutes, he replied.

  “I once knew a seer in the city of Falsten, many leagues to the south. His mask was given to him by the city’s magistrate, a corrupt man who loved money more than wisdom. I suspect that the seer’s brother, a rich merchant, paid the magistrate to choose his brother for the seer’s mask. When presented with the mask, he demanded that it not be cleansed, insisting that he desired the wisdom of every seer’s spirit that had gone before in that mask, and his wish was granted, possibly due to a few more coins from his brother’s purse. When I met him years later, I looked into his mask and saw—”

  He fell silent. His hands, paused during the recounted experience, now flew anew over the still unformed mask he labored over. Several more minutes passed.

  “Saw what, master?” Elu prompted him.

  “I saw rot. Chaos. The unclean spirits had, over the years of being borne by this seer, attracted a host of other spirits of menace, spirits of filth, to inhabit the mask as well, such that they were now legion, and rendered all that came out of the man’s mouth nonsense. The people of the city thought he foretold great wonders for he spoke as no seer ever had. He told of wondrous things. Awful things. Frightful things. The magistrate heeded everything the man said, and the seer’s visions became more terrible. He foresaw the gloom of an awful destruction come upon the city, and a plague from the gods. He warned the people that if they did not make an adequate sacrifice to the gods, that the destruction would come to pass.

  “The city was in a frenzy. The people demanded that the magistrate act, and quickly. The maskmaker of the city had sent for me months before, and that is when I arrived—in the midst of this chaos. I went to one of the seer’s pronouncements, a nearly daily event when the people gathered to hear the wondrous and terrible things that would soon come to pass. I looked into his mask from afar and beheld the spirits. That is the gift and power of a maskmaker: to see both into the substance of the mask, and the substance of the bearer. I saw the awful mask, and I saw the awful man, as he was, nearly powerless before the swollen ambition and power of the mask.

  “He demanded the sacrifice. He insisted the sacrifice be young. Innocent. I—“

  He fell silent again. Elu looked up at him, and saw a look of agitation about his mask. He noticed how the elmore wood frame seemed to melt almost seamlessly into the grizzled head of the maskmaker. He looked closer and saw the benevolent spirits of power ebbing under the surface of the wood, and the kind, tenderhearted spirit of the man himself—hidden under layers of gruffness and age—as he labored with his strips.

  “Master, why can I see into the masks as you do?”

  “What else would you
expect from an apprentice maskmaker?”

  Elu could not speak. He shook his head, believing he misheard the man.

  “Excuse me, master? I thought I was but your servant.”

  “Does a servant make a mask, or does an apprentice? You speak of servants with derision, as if their labor is beneath you. Remember, Elu, that we are all servants. Every one of us, if we are worth anything at all.”

  “So I am your apprentice in truth?”

  “Do you think me a liar?”

  Elu blushed beneath his mask. “No, no. Of course not, master.” Could this be? What good fortune had smiled down upon him! The gods must highly favor the son of the teacher of Gheb, he thought, to lift him up to this honor when just months before he was considered the most worthless of the young men of the town.

  “Master, does this explain how I was able to see into the innkeeper’s mask, and tell him things that—that surprised me?”

  “Oh?”

  “I am not even certain of what I said, but the mask caused me to speak. I looked into his eyes and his mask and saw that they did not belong with each other. I saw other things, but—but I’m not sure I understood all of them.”

  “You saw and spoke correctly.”

  “But how? If I was but your servant, and not a maskmaker? Not even his apprentice?”

  The maskmaker’s eye twinkled, ever so slightly, in the weak candlelight. “Surely by now you realize that I never gave you a servant’s mask.”

  Elu could not speak.

  “As I said, you saw and spoke correctly. But that is not our place to intervene. Let the mask’s spirits convict his soul. Come now.”

  He stood up and directed Elu to the closet where he kept the store of maskmaking supplies.

  “See here, Elu. We require elmore wood, wrobly feathers, and the eggs of the hundir lizard. Tomorrow I must construct a bard’s mask, and the spirits of the bard require that a paste of the egg’s shell be rubbed into the grain of the wood before painting.”

  “Yes master,”—he hesitated—“I know where to find the elmore wood, and feathers, but I am afraid I know nothing of the eggs. Where are they to be found?”

  “To the south, at least ten leagues or so from town—the hundir lizard despises man, and avoids all contact with him. Look in the crevices between rocks. I suspect you will have luck among the rolling hills to the south and west. Go tomorrow. It is late.”

  Chapter IV

  The Barrows

  THE HILLS WERE LUSH ONCE again with the coming of spring and Elu, for the first time in many seasons, now wandered among the trees. He headed south but made no particular hurry, not knowing when he would have the chance again to explore as he once did.

  But exploration was not his task. He must try to focus, he thought. Enjoy the wide spaces and the green and the wild, moving life all about him, but also focus on his task.

  The trees soon relented to the vast plain of the south and he turned west to the barren, rolling hills. He scaled up and down the nearer ones, looking in the tangled grass behind large stones for the elusive eggs. He held still and listened for movement, hoping that a hundir lizard might lead him to her nest. His ears strained, and he heard something. Water. He bounded down the hill, following the beckoning laugh of the stream.

  It was icy cold, fed by the snows of the mountains to the north and west. He tilted his apprentice’s mask to the side, dipped his hand in the water and drank. He looked to the other side of the bank and saw large stones scattered across the shore, abutting the abrupt rocky edge of the next hill, which slanted down sharply toward the stream and ended in a nearly vertical rock wall.

  He splashed across the stream and began looking behind the stones. Sure enough, after several minutes of looking he found a nest of hundir eggs, eight in all. He gingerly lifted two into his satchel, and then held out his outstretched arms to the nest, calling the spirit of the hundir in greeting and in promise—to leave her remaining eggs and never return, thanking her for the sacrifice she unwillingly made.

  The task complete, he looked up the rock wall. It sloped down to the water’s edge a hundred paces away, and he set off to hike to the top, from which he looked out further west and south.

  The forbidden barrows loomed ahead, just three hills in the distance. They called him. He yearned to see them. Explore them. Discover their secrets and penetrate their mysteries, as he had free reign to do for all his childhood. Enough responsibility. Enough craft and work and toil, he thought. Just one last time before I commit myself to manhood. And besides, do not men explore? Did not father himself wear the adventurer’s mask before he became the teacher? Before he met mother?

  He reached up and unfastened his mask and pulled it from his head, letting the cool spring breeze flow over his sweaty brow.

  Movement near his feet caught his attention. He froze. A hundir lizard—a massive one, lay close and deadly just steps away. Its long tail and lithe, powerful legs twitched—the sign of alertness and defensiveness. But the lizard was not looking at Elu. He followed its gaze to the south to a small encampment of several tents and a wagon. A dozen posts dotted the ground, a few with people sitting at their bases. He spied four men sitting together, laughing and drinking. He squinted closer at the people sitting by the poles. Their arms extended behind them, as if tied to the poles, and white masks covered their downcast faces.

  Slavers. He watched the hundir lizard. It did not so much as heed him, though he stood but three or four paces away. It just watched the encampment, occasionally growling in its low, guttural voice when she saw movement among the men. He stepped backward. Then again. Still she paid him no attention. He took another step.

  She turned and looked straight at him. Her eyes penetrated his. His still naked face faced hers, wild and armored with thorny scales. He felt vulnerable and weak sensing her gaze on his unprotected cheeks. His brows, his nose, his chin. Yet she did not strike. She did not move. Her eyes, locked on his, only told him, thank you. Thank you, and, leave.

  He continued his slow retreat and replaced his mask, and as the eyeholes moved across his eyes he saw the lizard as a maskmaker. Her spirit was revealed, laid bare before him in its wild majesty, and he understood.

  He had acted well, fulfilling the measure of his mask. He had taken her eggs, but left most of them, respecting her and her honor, and she accepted the act. She would not strike. She understood the necessity of his actions and considered the unwelcome encampment as the real danger. She turned her head back to the south and continued studying the strangers intruding on her territory.

  He returned to the maskmaker’s hut and presented the finds to his master, who took them with glee back to his workbench. He cracked the eggs open and tipped the contents into a clay basin. He replaced the basin’s lid and handed the container to Elu.

  “Take this to the healer. She will have use for the unformed lizards,” he said, already in the act of grinding up the eggshells with a small ceramic pestle.

  He remembered the healer from long ago—the last time his smaller brother, Lo, followed him into the forest. She was a formidable woman. Stern and cold. But there was no mistaking the power emanating from her mask, the black oak set with bone. As the maskmaker’s apprentice he partially understood now the presence of the bone fragments set into the mask’s brow. The spirits familiar with the workings of the flesh would be attracted to the artifacts of life, and thus called to inhabit the mask.

  “Master, the healer’s mask is a mask of power, is it not?”

  The man grunted. “All masks are masks of power, in their own way.”

  “Yes, master. But—”

  “It is a mask of power as you understand it, yes. I should know. I made her mask many years ago.”

  “Really? So you have made a mask of power,” Elu said, excitedly.

  The man continued grinding the shells into a fine paste, the clink of the pestle chiming against the solid mortar. As was his way, he worked silently awhile before responding.

 
“I have made three masks of power in my time. The healer’s you know. There is a wizard in the land of Ro Tarlain who required a mask for his apprentice. That mask took me nearly a year to complete. The third mask was actually my first. I was young and arrogant, and having just completed my apprenticeship and become a maskmaker in my own right I set myself an audacious and vain task. My patron, a prince of the land of Varnor, was as presumptuous and arrogant as I was and he demanded a mask of great and terrible power. I, to my folly, complied. But I will not speak of it now. In the prince’s possession it became an evil, twisted thing and it ruined him. The prince and the mask destroyed each other in the end, but only after great harm and bloodshed.”

  Elu stared wide-eyed in awe of the old man hunched over his bench. He had no idea that his master had been involved in the great and high events of the world, associating with kings and wizards and war. He imagined himself travelling to the distant lands and kingdoms of the world, greeting high men of power and authority as equals. Peers. Not stuck in this small town at the edge of nowhere that saw little of magic, or of wars. No one had even seen the king in this part of the land in ages.

  “Deliver that basin, Elu, and stop dreaming of that which you cannot control.”

  “Yes, master.”

  He made the delivery, and for days he set himself to faithfully executing the tasks the maskmaker gave him. He occasionally pestered the old man for more stories about the men of power and authority, of the majestic courts and fine palaces of the kings, of the masks of power, and, had he ever encountered a mask of legend? But the maskmaker’s stories dried up, and he answered his queries with only vague references and admonitions to avoid tempting the spirits of the legendary masks, for they were not all entirely stable.