Faces (The Masks of Aygrima, Band 3) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

E.C. Blake was born in New Mexico, “Land of Enchantment,” and the state’s nickname seems to have rubbed off: he started writing fantastical stories in elementary school and wrote his first fantasy novel in high school. He’s been a newspaper reporter and editorial cartoonist, a magazine editor, a writing instructor and a professional actor, and has written (under another name) more than 30 works of nonfiction, ranging from biographies to science books to history books, but his first love has always been fantasy. He now lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, with his wife and a daughter whose favorite stories all involve “sword-fighting princesses.” Come to think of it, so do his. He can be found at ecblake.com.

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ONE

Shelter from the Storm

The dead lay on the beach, row upon row, the snow gently wrapping their disfigured forms in shrouds of purest white, hiding the horror, hiding all differences. Had she not known how they were arranged, Mara could not have told which were Watchers and which members of the unMasked Army.

Except for the smallest corpses. There had been no children among the Watchers.

She stood, Keltan to her right and the Lady of Pain and Fire to her left, on the hillside landward of the gathered corpses. Keltan’s presence warmed her. No one else had dared come close to the Lady and the wolves clustered around her feet. The survivors of the unMasked Army . . . though “army” seemed far too grand a term for what had been whittled down to no more than eighty fighters and perhaps two hundred men, women, and children in all . . . huddled together in small groups across the rows of dead from the Lady. Edrik stood with his wife, Tralia, both of them supporting Edrik’s grandmother, Catilla, commander of the unMasked Army. Hyram was there, too, his arm protectively around the shoulders of Alita, the dark-skinned girl who had been rescued with Mara from the wagon taking them to the mining camp. Two other girls who had been in that wagon, Prella and Kirika, held each other close. Chell’s men who had survived . . . about fifty in all . . . stood with their prince and their captains on the seaward side, where the sinking sun turned them into faceless silhouettes as though they wore the black Masks that had crumbled away into dust from the Watchers’ faces when they’d died.

Whatever words were to be said over the dead had already been said by the surviving members of the families . . . those families where anyone survived. Not far from where she stood, Mara saw three corpses gathered together: man, woman, and young daughter. An entire family wiped out.

A family like mine once was.

Among those corpses lay that of Simona, the baker’s daughter who had been the fourth girl rescued from the wagon with Mara.

No tears dimmed her vision. Her ability to weep, like so much else, seemed to have been stripped away from her this day. Instead, her grief coiled, with her anger and fear, somewhere deep inside her, down where the nightmares lurked, the nightmares created in her mind whenever she used her Gift of magic to kill, whenever she absorbed the magic of those who died in her presence.

Though she had killed few if any of those on the beach before them now. The Watchers had killed those of the unMasked Army. And the deaths in turn of those Watchers, and the psychic burden they imposed, could be laid directly at the feet of the Lady in white fur by her side.

“The burial ceremonies are complete?” the Lady said now to Mara, in a voice only she—and the wolves; she saw their ears flick at the sound of their mistress’ voice—could have heard. The Lady had stood upon the hillside, watching silently, while the corpses were gathered and laid out.

“Yes,” Mara said.

“So.” The Lady raised her hands. In Mara’s Gifted sight, they began to glow brighter and brighter, until they seemed like twin suns come to the beach. She knew that those around her who were not Gifted, like Keltan, saw nothing at all. She still found that hard to believe.

The Lady made a pushing motion. Mara saw a ball of white fire spring forth from her palms, spread into a towering wall of flame, and sweep across the beach. As the fiery wave passed, the bodies vanished, dissolving into white dust that the flame pushed ahead of it into the sea.

One instant, the corpses were there. The next, they were gone, and the snow fell onto empty, level ground, already softening the human-sized blotches of bare stones where the bodies had lain an instant before.

Mara heard a kind of collective gasp from the unMasked Army and the men of Korellia, followed by renewed weeping from those whose loved ones’ remains had just vanished. She’d gasped, too, but for a different reason: for the first time she had seen where the Lady obtained her power. This close to her, she had sensed its flow.

Most Gifted could only use magic collected and held in containers of black lodestone, the strange mineral that attracted magic to itself. But the Lady of Pain and Fire, the Autarch, and Mara herself could draw magic directly from other living things, including people, though the Autarch’s power was limited in that he required those people to be wearing magical Masks for him to access their magic.

The Lady had just drawn magic from the wolves.

Mara looked down at them. They grinned back at her, tongues lolling.

“I see you glimpse the truth,” the Lady said softly to her. “But this is only the beginning of your understanding. Once we reach my stronghold . . .” She looked out to sea, and frowned. “But first, we must reach it.” She glanced at Keltan. “Boy.”

“Keltan,” he muttered, but she hardly seemed to notice.

“Tell Catilla we have to leave at once. The storm is returning.”

“But you stopped it,” Mara said.

“No. I only quieted it, locally, for a short time.”

“But didn’t you start it in the first place?”

The Lady shook her head. “The land of Aygrima has magical defenses, established centuries ago. That ancient magic created this storm. It will last for however long those who crafted that magic decreed it should last.” She spoke to Keltan again. “If we are not off this beach before full night, there will be more deaths. We must move now.”

Keltan frowned, glanced out at sea, froze for a moment, and then dashed off without another word. Mara followed his gaze, and saw what had given him pause.

The sun was vanishing, but not yet falling below the horizon: instead, it was being swallowed by a rapidly rising line of black clouds, whose towering peaks it outlined in flame as it disappeared behind them.

“I’m not sure they can be off the beach before the storm comes back,” Mara said, turning to the Lady. “Can’t you quiet it again, at least for a time?”

The Lady shook her head again. “I came down to the shore holding as much magic within myself as I could, and I drew much more from the dying Watchers, but I also used a great deal destroying the remaining Watchers and cleansing the beach.” And destroying Chell’s ships, Mara thought, glancing at the crippled Defender lying heeled-over and broken-keeled on the beach, and uneasily remembering the gleeful fury with which the Lady had savaged it. But she didn’t mention that out loud.

“The wolves provide some, but they are not inexhaustible,” the Lady continued. “No. I can do nothing more against this storm, or stop the rising seas that will soon lash this beach. But as I have said, I have prepared food and shelter a short distance away, to see us through the night. After that. . . .” She pointed into the hills. “We are three days’ journey from my stronghold, and that is three days as I travel. It may be a week with this ragtag bunch, and the journey is difficult.”

Mara felt a surge of anger. “Then leave without us, if you’re so worried. Save yourself. What do you care about this ‘ragtag bunch’?”

The Lady raised an eyebrow. “I need them,” she said. “I need people. And, as I have told you already, I need you in particular. If...