Faces by E.C. Blake

Author:E.C. Blake
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2015-06-21T19:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Desperate Measures

“MARA! Are you all right?” Keltan reached her in an instant. His arms encircled her. He smelled of smoke and sweat. Blood smeared his face, but she didn’t think it was his.

“No,” she gasped, clinging to him as her knees threatened to give way. “I didn’t know . . . she blocked my memories . . .”

“Didn’t know what?”

“The Lady. She’s not rescuing the unMasked. She’s killing them. Draining them of magic. Storing it up for her assault on the Autarch.”

Keltan stared at her. “What?”

“At the ravine . . . what did she say? What did she tell you had happened to the unMasked?”

“She told us you killed them,” Keltan said.

“What?”

“Unintentionally, by failing to control your magic. She told us she had blocked your memories to keep the horror from you, and we could not say anything to you about what had really happened for fear of what the knowledge might do to you. Chell and Antril remembered entering the cavern . . . and that was all, until they woke to find both the Watchers and the unMasked dead.”

Mara shook her head miserably. “She lied. She killed the unMasked. And she’s going to kill all the unMasked in this camp, too, unless we stop her.” The room swayed and she gripped his arm. “Have you opened the longhouses?”

“No,” Keltan said. “The villagers won’t let us. They’re standing guard. ‘The Lady commands,’ is all we can get out of them. They seem . . . bewitched. In thrall. Short of killing them . . .”

“They are bewitched.” She took a deep breath. “The Lady is in the mine. We have to get there.” And do what? a part of her wondered. “You will never be what I am,” the Lady had told her in the ravine. How well she remembered it now, remembered the contempt in Arilla’s voice. “You will never even be what I was, when I fought the Autarch as a young girl. . . .”

How many unMasked had Arilla already slain, in the depths of the mine? How much magic had she absorbed?

And what would she do with it?

She’s making herself so powerful she can destroy the camp, the unMasked Army, Chell’s men . . . all of them. She will descend on Tamita like a hurricane and suck its inhabitants dry to defeat the Autarch . . . and when he is defeated, she will set herself up as a tyrant a thousand times worse. She won’t need the Masks. She can do what the Autarch does without them. She already is, with her villagers.

But she still needs me. She remembered the Lady’s strange words about Mara’s “final fate,” and something about “preparing the way” just before she obliterated Mara’s memories. Does that mean she won’t kill me? At least, not right away?

A slender thread on which to hang the hope of survival, but it was all she had. Perhaps it would at least give her time to mount some kind of attack before Arilla crushed her.

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