City of Masks

CITY OF MASKS

By

Kevin Harkness

City of Masks

Published by Tyche Books Ltd.

www.TycheBooks.com

Copyright © 2015 Kevin Harkness

First Tyche Books Ltd Edition 2015

Print ISBN:
978-1-928025-28-3

Ebook ISBN:
978-1-928025-27-6

Cover Art by Artist Galen Dara

Cover Layout by Lucia Starkey

Interior Layout by Ryah Deines

Editorial by M. L. D. Curelas

Author photograph: Karen Holland

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead would be really cool, but is purely coincidental.

This book was funded in part by a grant from the Alberta Media Fund.

THERE WAS A
pinch of frost in the air. Spring had arrived to warm the days, but the nights still belonged to winter, and the three men waiting on the hill felt it.

Or maybe they felt something else.

“Are you sure we are safe up here?” asked a young man who shivered in his fine, warm clothes. It was not the first time that night he had asked the question.

The man beside him shrugged, and the third man, a match in age and fine cloth for the first, laughed.

“Really, Lord Kirel, stiffen your spine! Your uncle Gost is just as frightened as you are. So am I for that matter, but at least we hide it better.”

“Proper respect please, Tarock,” the oldest of them said. “As an actual lord and not merely the son of one, my nephew outranks us both.”

Tarock gave a mock bow. When he straightened, the moonlight showed the strain in his face as he attempted to keep smiling.

“It’s close, isn’t it, Uncle?” Lord Kirel said. “Can’t you both feel it?”

No one answered him.

They didn’t need to. The fear had crept in with the cold and laid its fingers under their thick cloaks. It stroked their skin and dug into the muscles and bone beneath until they were almost paralyzed.

Almost.

“The distance tubes,” Gost said through clamped teeth.

Three tripods stood before them. On each was fixed a long brass tube with glass lenses set within each end. All three pointed down the hill into a high-walled pocket of stone and brush. Peering through the tubes they could see torches fixed along each side from the narrow entrance to the blocked end. A solitary figure stood in the light of those torches, a woman, it seemed, though she stood with her back to the watchers.

“Why is she alone?” Tarock asked. “Where are Adrix and his people?”

Without taking his eye from the tube’s lens, Gost answered.

“Calm yourself. Adrix and the others are leading it towards that defile. To its death, we hope.”

“Or to its dinner,” Tarock replied, though under his breath. He looked again.

“Can she really do it?” Lord Kirel asked. “I mean, I know she’s a Duelist . . .”

“Ex-Duelist,” Tarock said. “She’s a labourer now in our friend Chirat’s trading house.”

“Quiet,” said Gost, and it became evident who was in charge from the silence that followed.

Below them, the figure leaned down and picked up a long pole. Torchlight glinted off a narrow blade and thick cross hilt fixed to its end. She held the spear in front of her, towards the defile’s entrance, ready. She did not have to wait long.

There was movement, a trick of light perhaps, as one shadow seemed to separate from the others. It became more than shadow. The flickering light illuminated a long, beak-like mouth that split open to display rows of sharp teeth and a questing tongue.

“Heaven shield her,” Kirel said.

“And us!” Tarock added. The tube shook in his hands.

Gost said nothing.

Two ropy arms appeared in their lenses, tipped with nightmare claws. The creature walked on thin legs, oddly jointed things that carried it into the stone cut. Kirel could see that its small black eyes never left the figure standing at the other end of the defile.

“What, what is it?” he asked and straightened to wipe his mouth and cough.

“What do you mean?” Tarock demanded, perhaps glad of the distraction. “It’s a demon, you idiot. If you mean what kind, I don’t know.”

“Silence!” Gost said. “And watch. It doesn’t matter what kind. If she can withstand the fear it casts and kill it, she can kill any kind of beast we bid her to.”

There was a hiss that reached up to where they stood arguing, and the three men returned quickly to the distance tubes. The demon snapped its mouth shut, twice, and charged the woman facing it. She stood, spear outstretched, still as the rocks around her.

“Move you fool,” Gost whispered, “or this is all for nothing.”

The creature tore up great patches of the winter-killed sod as it sped forward. The watching men held their breath and willed the woman to break the demon’s spell and move.

She did. As the demon made its final leap, she thrust her spear cross-hilt deep into its chest. It struggled for a moment, though whether it was trying to pull itself off the spear or run through it to claw at the woman was unclear, even with the tubes.

The beak snapped once more and was still. The winner tipped the spear so that the horror slid off. Then she stabbed it again and again until the shaft cracked, and she cast the spear aside to kick at the corpse with a sustained fury.

Gost and his nephew looked at each other. Tarock chuckled.

“A toast,” the young man said and produced a wine skin from under his cloak. “The best wine the Twelfth Ward can offer!”

Lord Kirel accepted the skin and replied, “That must make it the best in the South, since you trade all along the river.”

He drank and passed it on to his uncle before taking one last look through the distance tube.

Two men, one large and limping and the other thin as rope, came into the defile and pulled the corpse away from the woman’s continued attack. The big man did something to the demon’s carcass, and the thrill of fear vanished. He stood up and loomed over the spear-woman. There were words, indistinct, and then she turned abruptly to look up the slope.

Kirel had an impression of blonde hair, so common in the South, and amazingly dark eyes, but all else was covered in a mask made out of thin stone slices weaved together with gold wire.

He blinked and turned back to his companions.

“The material for the masks, Uncle. You never told me how we acquired it.”

Tarock took back the wine skin and answered when it became obvious Gost would not.

“Through much wealth and a little bit of blood, Lord Kirel. My mother provided the wealth, but you’ll have to ask your uncle about the blood.”

Gost saw his nephew’s look and shrugged. “The chief of our Ward Guards is a resourceful man, and he only spilled the least amount of blood necessary to—how did you put it, nephew—oh yes, acquire the material.”

“To a change, both in profit and power,” Tarock said and drank. He passed the skin to Lord Kirel.

“Change is a hard horse to ride,” the young lord said. “And we don’t know if this will change a single thing.”

Gost took a long swallow of wine. It was good. He looked at the others and finally smiled.

“You saw what Shirin did just now. Everything has changed, and the Banehall is finished.”

Below them the torches were extinguished, one by one.

“
NO, NO, NO!
At the first sense of the demon’s jewel, you were supposed to get off the horse.”

Garet looked up at his Master, Tarix, from where he lay on the grass, still smarting from the fall.

“I thought that’s what I just did,” he said.

Tarix laughed and reached out a hand. The dust of grey in her short blonde hair and the metal brace on one leg didn’t keep her from hauling Garet straight to his feet. She raised one eyebrow.

“It was supposed to be your decision, not the horse’s.”

The horse in question was running off towards the distant city walls, Garet’s rope-hammer still coiled around the saddle horn. The two Banes started walking after it across the fields. It was hard going, for they were freshly plowed, but Tarix’s leg had improved so much over the last few months that Garet found he no longer had to slow his pace to accommodate her.

She turned her head towards him as they walked. “Why did you hesitate?” she asked.

Garet thought for a moment. He had been riding around in a questing circle, trying to sense the fear broadcast by the demon’s jewel placed by his fellow Bane, Marick, somewhere beyond sight. In truth, there was little to actually fear, since the small, stone-like organ was no longer attached to the rest of the demon, but the horse didn’t know that. This particular jewel had come from a Shrieker killed two days ago in the Third Ward.