Faces (15 page)

His magic hadn't come to her like that from Chell's men, though. Once again, it had flowed into the rock.

Chell had started toward the opening, now he turned came back to her. “Are you all right?”

“Why wouldn't I be?” she said.

“The deaths . . . before . . .”

“Things are different now,” Mara said. “Because of the Lady.” She touched the black lodestone crystal. “We should hurry. I think we've lost the element of surprise.”

“You think?” Chell said dryly. He shouted forward, “Antril! No more stealth! Find the Watchers.” He turned back. “Leave the bodies. We'll take care of our shipmates after we've eliminated their killers.” One of his men was just emerging from the now much-larger opening in the stone. “Drexel, is there a way through?”

“Not anymore,” the man said. “Might have been a tunnel, but she collapsed it.” His eyes slid from Chell to Mara and quickly away again. He looked frightened.

Chell nodded. “Then we keep moving forward. But I want every side opening thoroughly checked . . . and watched.”

“Aye, sir.”

The column moved faster now. The tunnel took on a downward slope, until it gave way to a staircase, smooth and even, carved into the stone. “The same rock-dwellers as the Secret City?” Chell said.

“I guess so,” Mara said.

“I wonder why they were so fond of caves?” Chell said. “What threat were they hiding from?” He shrugged. “At least it makes our descent much—now what?”

The column had come to a halt at the bottom of the stairs. The sailors had their bows out, arrows nocked, and were peering over the edge of an abyss. “Foot and handholds cut into the rock, Your Highness,” Antril said, as the back of the column bunched up with the front. “But if there are Watchers waiting down there, we'll be sitting ducks as we descend.”

“I think we can safely assume there
are
Watchers waiting down there, Lieutenant.” Chell peered cautiously over the edge. “No lights.”

Mara suddenly realized that the sound of steel on stone had stopped, though she couldn't have said how long ago. “Unless they're just running ahead of us,” she said. “Trying to get down to the mine and warn them.”

Chell nodded. “Or both. Leave someone with a bow down there and the rest go ahead.”

“And every minute we delay here they get farther ahead,” Antril said. “So enough dithering.” He paused. “Uh . . . Your Highness.”

Chell raised an eyebrow. “You have a plan, Lieutenant?”

“We were told there were twelve Watchers,” Antril said. “Four died up above, two in the entrance cavern, one behind us. That leaves five. They will send at least two to give warning. That leaves three. And there is no reason to leave more than one here. The others, if there are others, will lie in wait farther down the trail.

“The one below is waiting for us to use this stone . . . ladder, I guess you'd call it. So we don't use the ladder.” He pointed up. “See that?”

Mara squinted into the dimness. Directly above the shaft, someone had driven a metal ring into the stone . . . no, more than one. Remnants of some long-gone version of the Lady's lift or the mine's man-engine, she guessed: some way to move people and supplies up and down the shaft more easily than via ladder or rope.

“Ah,” Chell said. “Good thinking, Lieutenant . . . and good eyes to see that.”

“Thank you, sir,” Antril said. He turned toward a young sailor. “Staffel, you're our best archer. We're going to lower you into the cavern. Shoot whatever you find there.”

Staffel turned a little pale, but nodded. “Just don't let me spin, sir,” he said. “Weak stomach. All right on a ship, up and down don't bother me, but get me going in circles . . .”

“We'll do our best,” Antril said. He glanced at one of the four sailors disguised as Watchers. “Groll, you're carrying rope. Haul it out. You four will handle this end.” He pointed at an upthrust spire of rock attached to the stairs a few feet back. “Use that stalagmite to take some of the strain.” Finally he turned to Mara. “We need light for this to work. Can your Gift help?”

“Of course.” She could still feel magic inside her, thrumming in her veins, tingling along every nerve, warming her blood, making her feel . . .
alive
, she thought.
Very, very alive.
“I can light the cavern: very, very bright for a second, then more dimly for several minutes. If Staffel keeps his eyes closed, the first flash should blind anyone who is down there, then leave them lit up for him to see.”

“Good.” Antril looked at Staffel. “Got that, Staffel? Keep your eyes closed until you see light through your eyelids. When it fades, open them and loose at will.”

“Yes, sir.”

First, though, Staffel's archery skills were put to less bloody use: a thin bit of cord was attached to the end of one of his arrows, and the other to the end of the climbing rope Groll had produced from his pack. Staffel shot the arrow through the metal ring, nailing it on the first try. The arrow hit the roof and then dropped, swinging close enough on the end of the string for one of Chell's men to grab it. He pulled on it, tugging the rope in its turn through the metal ring.

Again Mara wondered about the ancient race that had built the Secret City and this place. They had left no records that anyone had ever been able to decipher—just stone ruins and a few very odd cave paintings that showed creatures that certainly did not exist in Aygrima now.

Had they had magic? No one knew.

Maybe they had it, and it destroyed them
, Mara thought.
Maybe the threat they were hiding from in their stone cities was someone like the Lady of Pain and Fire. Someone like me.

She put that unsettling thought out of her mind.
Ancient history,
she told herself firmly.

In a few minutes everything was set. Staffel tied one end of the rope into a kind of complicated sling that looped around his chest, his stomach, and between his legs. The rope ran through the metal ring in the ceiling back to Groll and the other three sailors wearing Watcher garb. It looped around the stalagmite. Groll and his fellows all had a firm grip on it; the slack lay in coils behind them.

“Haul away,” Antril said. The sailors backed up, the rope sliding easily around the stalagmite's smooth, wet stone surface, and Staffel gasped a little as the rope pulled him off the ledge until he hung in space.

“Lower away,” Antril said, and Staffel, bow in hand, sank silently into the depths as the four sailors let out more rope, hand over hand.

Mara reached inside for her remaining magic. The Lady had taught her this use of it and for just this purpose: she had told Mara it might prove useful in the battles they could have to fight. She had to be looking at the spot where she would conjure it, though, so she stretched out full-length on the stone and stuck her head over the edge, waiting for the signal.

It came: a brief whistle. Mara hurled the last of the magic she had absorbed from the dead Watchers down into the cavern below. Light exploded, blinding her—why hadn't she thought to close her own eyes?—then dimmed to a more tolerable glow and began to slowly fade away.

She could see Staffel now, a spider-like black blot at the end of the rope, and strangely glistening rock at the bottom of the cliff.
Must be water down there
, she thought. Staffel loosed a single arrow that flashed through the waning magical light and disappeared beneath the bottom of the opposite wall of the chasm. A moment later Groll shouted from behind her, “He's on the bottom!”

Chell looked over the edge. “Staffel?” he called. “Staffel, report!”

A long moment's silence, then, “Here, Your Highness. All clear. But there's . . . something you should see.”

“The light will fade in a moment,” Mara warned.

“Are there torches?” Antril shouted.

“Yes, sir,” Staffel shouted back. His voice sounded oddly strained.

“Light them. We'll be down in minutes.” Antril glanced at Chell, who nodded at him. He turned to the others. “Same order as before. Groll, let the rope go over the edge—we'll coil it up when we get down. Let's move!”

In a few minutes they were heading down, using the handholds cut in the stone, Mara once more second-last in front of Chell. She kept expecting to hear the chatter of conversation down below as the men reached the bottom, but it stayed strangely silent.

And then she reached the bottom herself and saw why the rock had glistened so strangely in her conjured light: not from water, but from blood.

Gore covered the floor of the chamber into which they had descended, high and vaulted like the Great Chamber, a lake of blood that had poured from the bodies that lay everywhere: unMasked men and women and boys and girls barely past their Masking age, beheaded, gutted, split from crown to crotch. The room stank of voided bowels, mingled with the coppery scent of blood and the reek of vomit. Mara fought hard not to add her own stomach's contents to the noxious mix, and though she'd always had a weak stomach, succeeded—because the white-hot rage choking her left no space for anything to rise through her throat.

Rage. The perfect fuel for her magical Gift, the Lady had taught her. She made no effort to control it, because she knew exactly how she would use it. “They slaughtered them,” she growled. “Like animals.”

“So they wouldn't slow them down,” Chell said. “And to bring us to a halt.” He glanced at her. “You didn't feel their deaths?”

“There's too much black lodestone around,” Mara said. “It sucks away the magic unless I'm right on top of it like the men killed up above.”

Antril stood wide-eyed and white-faced, staring around him with face slackened in shock. Chell strode over to him. “Get a grip, Lieutenant,” he said in a low voice. “Give your orders.”

Antril's gaze shot to him. “Yes, Your Highness,” he said. He took a deep breath and turned to the others. “You see what . . .” His voice broke, making him sound, for a moment, even younger than he was, but when he spoke again, he had regained control of it. “You see what we're fighting against. And the ones who did this are getting away. All except that one.” He pointed at a Watcher flat on his back in the gore, an arrow protruding from his left eye, his Mask in shards, his face wearing a look of blank surprise, bow still clutched in his lifeless hand. “Staffel did for that one. Could be four left. We need to get them all before they get to the main garrison down below. We need them to pay for this.” His savage gesture took in the whole room. “So let's move out. Groll, leave the rope. We've got more.” He pointed at the only exit from the room. “That way. Move!”

With a growl of assent, the men moved forward. Mara fell into her accustomed place in the line, fury seething inside her. She grabbed onto it as the Lady had taught her, shaped it into a white-hot flame at the core of her being.

The Watchers would pay for what they had done. All of them.

Leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the smooth black stone, the strike force hurried after the Watchers.

···

“Will we be able to catch them?” Mara asked Chell privately as they descended yet another long flight of stairs carved by the ancients. The anger still burned in her, like a fire banked overnight, ready to break out the moment she needed it.

“Probably not,” Chell said in a low voice, the sound of booted feet on stone masking his words from the sailors around them. “The best we can hope for is to be so close that whatever warning they give has little time to be effective.” He glanced at her. “You'll have to be ready to open the gate as soon as we reach the bottom of the mountain.”

“I'll be ready.”

“You'll have enough magic?”

Mara, remembering the cavern she had discovered, the rainbow glow of pure magic painting its walls in ever-shifting colors, simply nodded.

“It looks like the ancients have provided us with a path all the way to the bottom,” Chell said. “Did you see any sign of their work down below?”

Mara thought back to that terrifying journey into the heart of the mountain, rope tied around her waist, Watchers at the other end. She frowned. “I didn't think about it at the time,” she said, “what with being terrified out of my wits and all, but . . . the passage the stream poured out of was very straight. It could have been shaped. The cavern I found looked natural . . . but I didn't explore it. I didn't have time before they were pulling me back out into the open.”

Chell nodded thoughtfully. He looked to the right, where the stream ran in a clearly artificial channel, its constant rushing noise masking any sound of the Watchers they were pursuing, but hopefully also masking their own.

They had seen no light ahead of them, but the tunnels changed direction frequently, zigzagging in switchbacks to minimize the downward slope, the switchbacks alternating with stairs like the ones they descended now. Their own torches showed no decoration on any of the walls, but there were side tunnels and chambers carved in the rock, dark, gaping mouths that hinted of mysterious secrets, though many had collapsed, the torchlight giving glimpses of tumbled tons of stone.

If the Autarch is overthrown
, Mara thought,
someone really has to come back here and explore all of this.

But exploration would have to wait. They hurried on in the wake of the fleeing Watchers. And all the time, Mara kept her anger alive, deep down inside, a spark she could turn into a conflagration the instant she needed it—the instant she had magic to fuel it.

Some three hours after they entered the cavern, they descended a final flight of stairs and found themselves in a long corridor, gently sloping downward. The stream flowed alongside it down its artificial channel. Mara caught a glimpse of torchlight far ahead of them. “There!” she cried, pointing.