Faces (7 page)

The waterwheel in the mining camp had driven the man-engine, a terrifying device for moving workers up and down within the mine. This one, too, drove a device for lifting people, but of a quite different kind. The ever-rotating shaft of the waterwheel disappeared into a wooden tower attached to the side of the cliff. At the top, where the shaft entered, it was fully enclosed. Below that enclosure, the tower was more open, though its structure of exposed wooden beams was split down the middle by a wooden wall. At the very bottom of the tower was a matching enclosure to the one at the top. And constantly rising up the tower, emerging from the lower enclosure and disappearing into the top one, was a series of platforms, attached to each other by thick ropes at all four corners. No doubt on the other side of the wooden wall the platforms descended, flipping over out of their sight at the top tower. It seemed clear enough what they had to do: step onto one of those moving platforms and somehow not fall off until they stepped off it again in the structure that protruded from the fortress wall like a carbuncle.

“Couldn't we just fly?” Mara asked weakly. She remembered the man-engine with something akin to horror, although this at least had the advantage of being aboveground. She looked up the cliff face and gulped, wondering if that was really an advantage. The platforms looked neither very large nor very stable.

“Waste of magic,” the Lady said shortly. “And dangerous. A moment's loss of concentration . . .”

“Never mind,” Mara mumbled, while a part of her gaped in the shocking knowledge the Lady did not consider flying impossible, unlike the Mistress of Magic in far-off Tamita.

The Lady dismounted. Mara did the same and, seemingly from nowhere, two men arrived to take the horses, leading them to a stable that was one of a number of workshops and other outbuildings at the base of the cliff but obviously associated with the fortress. The Lady, in her turn, led Mara to the lift.

The platforms really didn't move all that fast, so stepping onto one was easier than catching the alternating platforms of the man-engine. In a moment both of them, each with a grip on one of the ropes (white-knuckled in Mara's case) rose into the air. “What about the wolves?” Mara said, looking down at the pack staring up at them, tongues lolling.

“There's a footpath, as well,” the Lady said. “Hidden, narrow, and steep. They'll climb up on their own.” And sure enough, even as they ascended, the pack dissolved, the wolves, including Whiteblaze, loping away to her right and out of sight.

Mara watched the snow-covered roofs appear and then dwindle beneath them; after a hard swallow, she raised her head to look down the length of the valley. She saw the column of refugees and sailors at once, still distant, trudging along the road she and the Lady had already ridden. “Still two or three hours away, I judge,” the Lady said above the grinding of the lift mechanism and the rush of the cold wind around their ears.

Mara nodded. She tried to look up at the fortress, but she could see nothing but the underside of the platform above them. She looked down again and felt her knees grow alarmingly weak. “Are we almost there?”

“Almost,” said the Lady. “Be ready to step off.”

Mara nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

Two minutes later, they suddenly went from light to darkness as they entered the structure at the top of the tower, wooden walls sliding past, dimly lit from below by the opening through which they had just entered and from above by a yellow glimmer, a warm glow that waxed quickly until, suddenly, the wall in front of them slid away entirely and Mara found herself looking at a torch-lit chamber, its wooden floor giving way after a few yards to a stone corridor. At the end of that corridor, two figures descended a long, wide flight of stairs. “Now,” said the Lady. As the platform came even with the floor of the chamber, she stepped off. Mara hastily copied her, stumbling a little on what had already become a longish step down. She straightened and turned to look up as the platforms disappeared into darkness. On the other side of the wall that divided the split tower, a platform passed heading the other way, descending to the level of the village.
Well
, she thought,
I guess it's better than the mine's man-engine.

Of course, that wasn't really saying much.

The two people Mara had glimpsed coming down the stairs, a man and a woman dressed in white leather and fur, had reached the chamber entrance just as she and the Lady had stepped off the platform. “Lady,” said the man, who was slight, bald, and smooth-shaven. He inclined his head. “All is prepared.”

“Thank you, Galiot,” the Lady said. She turned her head toward Mara. “Galiot is the head of the house,” she said. “And Valia is my lady-in-waiting.” She smiled suddenly. “Which makes me sound like a queen. I assure you I am not. Not yet, at any rate. But the term fits the duties, so I don't know what else to call her.”

“I don't mind, Lady,” said Valia. Round instead of slim, with a mass of curly dark hair, and at least a head taller than Galiot, she might have been designed to be his opposite. She gave Mara a friendly smile and a sly wink, and Mara found herself smiling back. “There's a hot bath waiting for you, young lady. And a hot lunch after that.”

“And then,” the Lady said, “we will begin your training in earnest.”

Mara blinked at that. “That soon? But the unMasked Army will be arriving—won't you be going down to meet it?”

The Lady made a dismissive gesture. “I have arranged for them to be met, assisted in setting up camp, and fed,” she said. “There is no need for me to descend.”

Mara imagine Catilla arriving . . . and being ignored. She would be furious. So would Edrik and Chell. They'd demand to see the Lady. Keltan would probably demand to see Mara. She didn't think any of them would have any success.

But she had no desire to make her own way to the village to greet the others, even if it were permitted. The unMasked Army, after all, blamed her for what had happened. Chell, she was convinced, saw her as nothing but a tool that could be discarded and picked up at will. Keltan seemed to think he owned her, just because she had allowed him to kiss her. Only the Lady understood her, understood what she had suffered. Only the Lady had the knowledge to end that suffering.

She smiled at the thought, and at Valia. “A hot bath and hot food both sound wonderful.” She turned that smile on the Lady. “And so does the rest.”

The Lady returned the smile. “Excellent,” she said. “Then let's go up.” She offered her arm, and Mara took it. “Welcome to my home.” Her smile widened. “
Our
home.”

Feeling warmer than she had for a very long time, Mara climbed the stairs into the fortress of the Lady of Pain and Fire.

M
ARA STOOD ON
the ramparts of the Lady's fortress, staring down at the village wreathed in smoke and steam far below, and, half-masked by that fog, the tent city of the unMasked Army beyond the walls. A month had passed since she had ascended to the Lady's stronghold. She had yet to pay a visit to her old compatriots.

Winter had at last begun to yield reluctantly to spring: though it had snowed twice since their arrival, water now ran in the streets, the river had thawed and was beginning to swell, and the trees had long since shaken themselves free of their thick white burdens.

For the first couple of weeks in the fortress, she'd hardly given a thought to the unMasked Army, the Secret City, Catilla and Hyram and Chell and all the rest of them. They seemed to belong to a past life, a life that had nothing to do with either her present or her future.

Even Keltan had rarely surfaced in her thoughts. He
had
shown up in her dreams—which, thanks to Whiteblaze's presence, were now only dreams, and not nightmares—and she did miss him when she thought of him, but in some ways she'd been grateful to be cut off from him. His presence would have been a distraction—a pleasant distraction, but a distraction nonetheless—from what was most important to her, more important than anything else could be: learning what the Lady could teach her.

And she had already taught Mara so much.

She lifted the amulet that hung around her neck and held it up, admiring anew the way the light caught on the tube of clear glass, capped with gold on both ends, and the highly polished multifaceted piece of black lodestone it held, shaped something like a crystal of quartz, but man-made.

The very afternoon she had arrived at the fortress, after the promised hot bath and hot lunch, Valia had led her through the fortress' maze of corridors to the Lady's private quarters, in the central tower of the keep. “Welcome,” Lady Arilla—as Mara now knew she was called—had said as Valia closed the door.

Mara had looked around with interest. The Lady, like Catilla in the Secret City, had made herself very comfortable: finely carved chairs and table, dresser and wardrobe, tapestries on the walls (featuring bucolic landscapes from around Tamita, whose unmistakable tiered shape rose somewhere in the background of all of them), a thick rug woven of blue and gold, a canopied bed likewise hung with rich blue fabric and covered with a gold bedspread. But Arilla had hardly given her time to take all that in before opening one of the two inner doors of the chamber. The room beyond was far less grand. Small and windowless, it contained a round wooden table with a simple chair shoved beneath it, a much more comfortable-looking armchair, a small cabinet of dark wood, and no fewer than four lanterns, each fitted with a mirrored reflector, together providing brilliant illumination. A thick, circular red rug covered the floor.

Arilla indicated Mara should sit at the table. Then she knelt, folded back the rug, and with a practiced tug lifted a loose stone from the floor beneath. From the dark space it revealed she drew out a small wooden chest. “I keep it here in case of fire,” she said. “And thieves, I suppose, though no one from the village would ever steal from me.”
She sounds remarkably sure of that
, Mara thought.

The Lady placed the chest on the table, then pulled a tiny key on a silver chain from beneath her white robe and inserted it into the chest's lock. “As I told you on the road,” she said, “when my father fled Tamita, he did not go empty-handed. Aware of my unusual Gift, he helped himself to certain ancient items from the Palace Library.” The key clicked in the lock. “If you were to go there now, you would find next to nothing that references the Gift you and I . . . and to a lesser degree, the Autarch . . . share.”

She opened the chest's lid, revealing two tattered leather-bound books and three wooden scroll-cases. Mara stared at them.
Father
, she thought, feeling sick. Her father had gone to the Palace Library to try to find out more about her Gift . . . and had been arrested for it, the arrest that had revealed how he had modified his Mask, and had ultimately led to his execution. And all for nothing. Here were the very items he had been searching for.
They were never there at all.

Her heart ached, but she could hardly blame the Lady, who had known nothing of her father's search and could have done nothing about it if she had. She schooled her face to be as impassive as possible and simply nodded.

“Even in these,” the Lady said, “there is little enough. Our Gift arises once or twice a generation and is not always identified when it does. And many of those with our Gift prove . . . unstable.”

That's putting it mildly
, Mara thought. Several of their predecessors had become the great villains of their ages. In Tamita, children were taught the Lady of Pain and Fire was one of them. And then, of course, there was the Autarch . . .

“However, there have been one or two opportunities for scholars to work with our kind, and a few things were discovered. Some of these you already know, by virtue of having this Gift. But there are many things in these scrolls that have proved immensely valuable to me. Especially this one.” She pulled out the ancient book, undid the tarnished silver clasp that held it closed, and carefully opened it to a place marked with a bookmark of red cloth. She put the open book on the table in front of Mara.

Mara blinked at it. “I can't read it,” she said. “I don't even recognize the letters.”

“I'm not surprised,” Arilla said. “It's in a language no longer used in Aygrima. But my father was a great scholar, and he had learned it so he could read the ancient texts. He taught me, during our long flight.”

“Will you teach me?” Mara said.

Arilla smiled. “Someday,” she said, “you will read these texts with your own eyes, I promise.”

What an odd way of putting it
, Mara thought. But only in passing: her gaze had been drawn from the indecipherable words to a small drawing inserted into the text, showing a complex shape, accompanied by many arrows and symbols. She pointed at it. “What's that?”

“That,” said the Lady, “is
this
.” She held up the amulet Mara had noted many times before: a crystal cylinder, capped with gold at both ends, containing a black stone about the size of the Lady's thumb . . . carved, Mara saw now, in the exact shape of the drawing in the book.

“It's beautiful,” Mara said.

“It is,” the Lady said. “Black lodestone, carved in accordance with the instructions in this book, by a talented artisan in the village.” She held it up and turned it this way and that, the light reflecting from its polished facets. “When I draw magic to myself from living things, I draw it through this carved stone. And the stone smooths and blends it, so that it does not hurt me.”

Mara's mouth opened in surprise. “Oh,” she said. It made perfect sense. The magic drawn from living people hurt because, Ethelda had explained (she still felt a pang when she thought of the old Healer, slain on the beach during the battle with the Autarch's Watchers), it was not filtered through black lodestone like the magic used by ordinary Gifted. “Do you use it when you draw magic from the wolves?”

“Usually,” the Lady said. “Although the magic from the wolves does not hurt like the magic from humans. The breeding of them was something else I was inspired to attempt by reading these texts.” Her hand touched one of the scroll cases. “A predecessor with our Gift had some success with dogs. I extrapolated his work to wolves. It was also from his notes I learned to see through their eyes, no matter how far away from me they are.”

Mara nodded. “When . . .” She hesitated, uncertain if she should even ask the question. “When will I learn to draw magic from Whiteblaze?”

The Lady smiled. “Very soon now. I warn you, though, you will find it . . . ‘tastes,' I suppose is the word . . . quite different from that of humans, or magic stored in black lodestone. Also—and here is your first lesson—you must be careful not to draw magic from Whiteblaze too fast.”

“Why?” Mara said. “Will it hurt?”

“Yes,” the Lady said. “But not you. It will hurt
him
. It could even kill him.”

“But how can I control it?” Mara said anxiously. “Whenever I've had to take magic from people, it comes in a rush . . . all at once.” Remembering that rush, she suddenly longed to experience it again, and found herself licking her lips. She pulled in her tongue in a hurry.

The Lady touched her amulet again. “This helps with that, as well. It's like . . . a tap. It helps you control how much or how little magic you take from living things.”

Mara thought of all the times she had lashed out with magic, the uncontrolled fury that had destroyed the city wall, killed Watchers, almost killed the unMasked in the mining camp even as she saved them from the rockbreaker explosion. “Oh!”

“You begin to understand.” The Lady smiled. “So now . . .” She turned to the cabinet and opened its hinged door, revealing a decanter of wine and a single glass and, resting next to them, a box of black wood, much smaller than the chest she had pulled from the hole in the floor. She took it from the shelf, turned, and held it out to Mara. “Open it.”

Guessing what it must hold, Mara took it with a suddenly trembling hand. She opened the hinged lid. In a bed of red velvet lay an amulet, twin to the Lady's. Mara lifted it out. “It's beautiful!”

“Put it on,” the Lady said, and Mara unclasped the chain and put it around her neck. Her shaking fingers couldn't manage to fasten it again. The Lady smiled at her fumbles. “Let me help,” she said, and came around to Mara's back. Her cool fingers touched the nape of Mara's neck, raising goose bumps, as she deftly fastened the clasp. Mara looked down at the amulet nestled between her breasts and lifted it to get a better work. “When . . . when can I learn to use it?”

“Soon,” the Lady said. “Soon.”

“Soon” had seemed “long” to Mara. But a few days after that she had drawn magic from Whiteblaze for the first time (though the attempt to look through his eyes had been a failure, resulting in a killer headache for her and a lot of whimpering from him; the Lady had frowned and said they'd put that lesson aside for the time being), and today, at last, she would truly put the amulet to the test, drawing magic from some volunteers from the village the Lady had assembled for the purpose.

She desperately hoped she wouldn't hurt them. The day she had taken magic from Whiteblaze he had whined unhappily, earning her a rebuke from the Lady for drawing too fast, though she had soon gotten the knack of it. His magic hadn't
hurt
, exactly, but it had felt very odd, even after passing through the amulet.

But drawing magic from people . . . what if something went wrong?

You can learn this
, she told herself. After all, she had learned the fine control of magic taken from black lodestone from Shelra, the Mistress of Magic in Tamita. But still . . . whenever she had drawn magic from other people, using her special Gift, it had come in a terrifying rush, and it had taken Keltan days to recover after he had been one of her unwitting sources in the mining camp.

Of course, typically when she had drawn that power, she had been in imminent danger of death or facing some horror like her father's execution. The amulet was supposed to keep her from feeling the searing pain of unfiltered magic, and that was wonderful, because she never wanted to feel that pain again.

Except . . . the scary thing was that the memory of the pain
did
fade. Once it was gone—leaving only a faint shadow of its true horror—the memory of the power, the heady rush of raw magic, lingered. And
that
she wanted very much. In fact, the longer she went without tasting it, the more she wanted it.

If what the Lady told her was true, and she could draw on that power
without
pain . . . just how was that different from telling a drunk he could drink all he wanted without vomiting, blackouts, or hangovers? Freed from all consequences, such a man would happily drown himself in wine. Some did so even
despite
the consequences.

Mara's hand closed tightly around the crystal cylinder.
I can control it
, she thought fiercely.
I have to. The Lady needs my power. Even the unMasked Army needs it, however much they hate me right now. I need to control it so that we can destroy the Autarch and his evil Masks once and for all. For everyone.

For Daddy.

A bell rang in a tower high above, marking the quarter hour, and she turned away from her view of the village and the unMasked Army.
I'll visit Keltan soon
, she promised herself, pushing aside her niggling guilt yet again. But now it was time to go to the Lady.