Masks (14 page)

“Let’s find a table,” Hyram said, but as she started to follow him, someone touched her arm. She turned to see Edrik.

“The Commander wants to see you,” he said.

“But—” Mara looked longingly toward the food. “Couldn’t it wait until . . . ?”

“I’m sure she won’t keep you long.”

She?
Mara blinked.

Hyram and the others had stopped and glanced back when they realized she wasn’t with them. Hyram took a step toward her, but Edrik shook his head, and his son stopped.

No rescue
, Mara thought. Resigned, she turned her back on the good smells of the Great Chamber, and followed Edrik back into the Broad Way. He turned right, as though taking her to the underground lake, but only went a short distance before turning right again down a side tunnel, one that ran straight and flat, uninterrupted, for a very long way. It ended in a closed door, painted white.

Edrik rapped on the smooth surface with his knuckles. After a moment, a voice said, “Come in.” Edrik lifted the latch and pushed opened the door, and Mara stepped through.

She felt as if she had somehow stepped out of the caverns into a luxurious tent. Heavy tapestries, colors muted by age, hid the walls of the chamber, about the same size as the one the girls would share. Filmy white cloth draped the ceiling. Thick, intricately patterned rugs in red, brown, and cream covered the floor.

A slit of a window above a large white four-poster bed at the chamber’s far end showed only darkness, but let in the sound of surf, much louder here: this chamber, Mara realized, must overlook the ocean. An oval mirror above a wooden dresser to her left reflected the room back on itself; beside it stood a heavy wardrobe, taller than she was.

Lamps illuminated the room with a golden glow. A fire blazing in a hearth to Mara’s right added a hint of woodsmoke to the sea air.

Mara took it all in with a glance and an intake of breath; then her gaze riveted on the woman at the center of the unexpected luxury, seated at a round table of polished yellow wood in one of the four matching chairs that surrounded it.

Tiny, thin, snow-white hair pulled into a severe bun, face deeply etched with wrinkles, she wore a heavy black cloak pulled close around her. Fur peeked out from under the collar, though Mara found the room stifling. The woman’s hands, gnarled and knobby as old tree roots, rested on the table. But all the clues that spoke of great age were belied by eyes as bright, blue, sharp, and glittering as twin steel blades.

“Grandmother,” said Edrik. “I have brought Mara Holdfast.”

Grandmother?
Mara shot a glance at Edrik, then looked back at the woman. Now that the idea had been put into her head, she could see the resemblance: something in the nose, the line of the jaw, the height of the forehead, and definitely in the bright blue eyes, shared by Edrik and Hyram alike.

“Come here, child,” said Edrik’s grandmother, her voice cracked, but with a core of strength that brooked no disobedience. Mara walked over to the table. The old woman looked past her at Edrik. “Leave us, grandson.”

Edrik bowed and went out, closing the white door behind him with a soft click.

The old woman studied Mara for a long moment, then said abruptly, “I am Catilla, Commander of the unMasked Army. And you are Mara, daughter of Charlton Holdfast, Master Maskmaker of Tamita.”

“Yes,” Mara said. “But I don’t understand how you know that.”

Catilla shrugged. “It is enough that we do.”

“And I don’t understand how all
this
,” Mara waved her hands, “can even
exist
. Why hasn’t the Autarch found you?”

Catilla’s eyes narrowed. “Why should I entrust
you
with our secrets? You have not yet proved yourself a friend. And you have come to us under . . . unusual circumstances.”

Mara felt a flash of anger. “You kidnapped me!” She thought of the blood-soaked ground beneath the slain Watchers and wagon drivers. “You
killed
to kidnap me! And now you don’t know if you can trust me?”

“It is
because
we ‘kidnapped’ you—” Catilla’s eyes narrowed further, “—although some might say ‘rescued’—that I cannot be sure I can trust you.” She pulled the cloak tighter. “Always before, our recruits have come to us of their own free will, fleeing their Masking.”

“Like Keltan.”

Catilla nodded. “Some few,” she continued, “
very
few, have come
after
their Masking—long after, in some cases—fleeing the gibbet, knowing their Masks are about to betray their true feelings about the Autarch’s bloody reign to the Watchers.”

Mara blinked at that. She’d never thought of someone fleeing Tamita while their Mask remained intact. But if they had, they might still be able to get back into Tamita, or at least into some of the smaller towns and villages, once or twice more before their Masks betrayed them. She shuddered, thinking of the danger involved; but it was the only way she could imagine that the unMasked Army could infiltrate Masked society, and plant the rumors of their existence they needed to maintain the flow of recruits . . .
and perhaps to buy things they can’t make themselves
, she thought, glancing at the dresser and mirror.
But if that’s true, what does it say about this woman that she would have people risk their lives for her comfort?

“However, we have never before snatched unMasked from the very clutches of the Watchers, en route to the mining camp,” Catilla continued. “And so I find myself on uncertain ground.”

“Then why did you do it this time?” Mara demanded.

Catilla’s blue gaze did not waver. “The others are of no importance. We would never have risked discovery for ordinary unMasked, those who chose to go to their Maskings willingly rather than risk all to find us as others have. No. We did not set out to rescue
them
: we set out to rescue
you
, Mara, daughter of Charlton Holdfast.”

“But
why
?” Mara asked again.

“We judged the potential reward outweighed the risks.”

“
What
reward?” Mara cried in frustration. “I don’t understand!”

Catilla regarded her. “Well,” she said after a moment. “Perhaps I must tell you at least
some
of our secrets.” She gave a wintry smile. “It’s not as if we will let you escape to betray them.”

Mara waited. The room was so hot, despite the open window, that a drop of sweat ran down her nose. She batted it away.

“Many years ago,” Catilla said at last, “more years than I care to remember, when I was a young woman only a little older than you are now, the old Autarch died. He died suddenly, under suspicious circumstances, and, almost immediately, rebellion erupted. The old Autarch had raised taxes to ruinous levels, thrown countless people into debtors’ prison when they could not pay, arrested those he suspected of crimes against the state—a category of wrongdoing which had a
very
broad definition in his mind—imprisoning or even executing them without trial, and on and on. The rebels sought to overthrow the Autarchy, to institute a new kind of government, one where rulers would be elected by the people, not born to privilege or seizing power by force.”

Mara blinked. She’d never heard of such a concept. Catilla carried on. “But though many supported the rebels, there were also many for whom the old Autarch, for all his tyranny, had represented stability. Far from suffering, many of those people had grown fat under the Autarch’s rule. They did
not
want change. And ultimately they prevailed.”

Catilla sighed. “The Autarch’s son, still a beardless youth, ascended to the Sun Throne upon his father’s death. Even while open rebellion still roiled in the streets and whole villages burned, he summoned Aygrima’s greatest mages and artisans. He wanted to be certain, once the rebellion was quashed, that he would never face another. He wanted a magical way to be assured, always and absolutely, of his subjects’ loyalty, a way to root out treason and sedition before it could break into open revolt. He
especially
did not want to die like his father had, screaming in agony as poison ate him from the inside out.

“Within two years, the rebellion had been quelled. And while the last of its fomenters still hung from the gallows outside the Palace entrance known ever since as Traitors’ Gate, the Autarch announced the solution his magic-workers had crafted: from the next New Year’s Feast onward, all adults of the Autarchy, everyone who had reached the age of fifteen, would be Masked—their faces encased, whenever they were in public, by a magical simulacrum of their features that would reveal their innermost being to a corps of Gifted warriors known as the Watchers, and betray them if they harbored rebellion in their hearts.

“Most of the Autarch’s subjects submitted—but not all. Some fled into the Wild, pursued by Watchers who hunted them down like animals. There are still some—a dozen dozen, perhaps—who live as bandits in the woods, mostly those who committed some crime and fled the Autarch’s justice. We have agents among them to ensure they never threaten our secrets, and to ensure they continue to raid villages and farms and murder the occasional Watcher.”

“Why?” Mara asked, bewildered.

Catilla raised a white eyebrow. “Surely it’s obvious? Because as long as the Watchers know those bandits are out there, they, and therefore the Autarch, will continue to believe
they
are the mythical ‘unMasked Army,’ built up by rumor and wishful thinking into something far greater than reality.” She tightened her grip on her cloak again. “As I said, rather than accept the Masks, some ran to the Wild. A few, in desperation, boarded fishing boats and sailed deep into the Great Sea, over the horizon, in search of whatever lies beyond the ocean—if anything does. Myself, I think they drowned or fell off the edge of the world.

“But I had a better plan.” She leaned forward. “My father was very high in the rebellion. When it all began to crumble, when he knew it was only a matter of time until he was arrested, he entrusted me with a great secret: the location of a hidden redoubt, a complex of caves inhabited and expanded by the ancients but abandoned for centuries. Late in the rebellion, he had stumbled upon it while fleeing the Watchers. He had hoped that it might provide a base where the rebels could regroup and from which they could eventually strike back. But by the time he returned to Tamita, he saw it was already too late: the rebellion, and almost everyone who had supported it, were dead.” Her eyes suddenly turned bright and tears trickled down both cheeks. “As was he, far too soon: arrested and beheaded on the spot . . . on the front steps of our house.”

She blinked and scrubbed her face with the back of her right hand, her left still clutching her cloak. “Damn the sentimentality of old age,” she muttered. She leaned forward again. “I had married, at age sixteen, just before the old Autarch’s death. My son was still an infant when my father was executed. My husband, only eighteen himself, frightened they would come for him next, disappeared, leaving me to care for our child alone. And then came the proclamation about the Masks . . .

“I would not don the Mask myself, and I most assuredly would not raise my son to be Masked. So I fled, with my son and a few like-minded associates, a week before the decree took effect. Ostensibly we were visiting friends in Snowdrift, but we never got there—never went anywhere near it. Instead, we came here, and here we stayed.”

Catilla leaned back, and looked around the overly warm chamber. “I have slept in this chamber now for more than sixty years, for as long as there have been Masks. I raised my son here. His wife died in childbirth and he died shortly thereafter, and so it also fell to me to raise my grandson, Edrik.” Again she wiped her eyes with an impatient hand, without pausing in her tale. “And slowly, so slowly, the unMasked Army has grown. Every year, there are some few who come to understand, before they are Masked or after, that to wear the Mask is to be a slave. They flee. The lucky ones make contact with us.” Her face turned grim. “The unlucky end up with the bandits, or as naked corpses hanging from the gallows at Traitors’ Gate.”

“What about the ones whose Maskings fail? Like mine?” Mara said. “They’re unMasked, too. Why haven’t you tried to rescue them, link them to your cause? Keltan said we’re the first ones you’ve ever freed from the wagons!”

“Until recently,” the Commander said, “most of those whose Maskings failed would have been worse than useless to us. Until recently, you could almost predict which children’s Masks would fail. Even at fifteen, some youths have already gone well down the road of crime or violence. Others, though neither bad nor trending toward badness, were just . . . odd. Withdrawn, perhaps. A little slow. Developing a romantic interest in those of their own sex. Different.”

Mara stared at her. “And even knowing
that
, even knowing they weren’t all bad like . . . like Grute . . . you never tried to save them . . .
any
of them?” Mara heard the anger in her blunt accusation. Catilla heard it, too: her eyes narrowed. Mara wondered if she had just stepped over a line that would have her thrown into a cell like Grute . . . or maybe (horrible thought)
with
Grute. But the thought of all those children, children just like her, turning fifteen with a mixture of hope and trepidation, a little uncertain what life behind a Mask would be like, but happy, excited, party planned, friends invited . . . all those proud parents watching their children on the dais, half their thoughts on the celebrations to come . . . and then the terror, the pain, the blood, the screams . . . the anger surged higher. “Not even
one
?” She hurled the words at Catilla like a dagger.

Catilla’s lips drew into a tight white line in her wrinkled face. “Don’t you
dare
judge me, child!” Her voice, though barely above a whisper, conveyed deadly warning, like the venomous hiss of a snake. “My concern is not whether
this
or
that
child escapes the Mask. My concern is overthrowing the Autarch so that
no
child ever faces the Mask.”

“And how’s that going?” Mara snapped, while a part of her quailed and wondered,
What are you
doing? But only a
small
part. The larger part, furious, frightened, hurt, hungry, wary, weary, was more than halfway to
hating
this old woman, crouched at the heart of the Secret City like a poisonous spider at the dark center of a vast web. “The Autarch still reigns. The Masks are still made.
And children are still suffering!
”