The Shattered Mask

Chapter 16

Wyla found Magnus and Chade loafing in their usual hidey-hole in the loft, at the far end of the warehouse from her own cluttered little office. She often wondered that they didn't find a new haven in which to hunker down and shirk, someplace she hadn't yet discovered, but perhaps they were too lazy even to bother with that.

"Come on, sluggards," the thickset woman with the graying ponytail said. "There's work to be done."

"I guess," said Magnus, a stooped, middle-aged man with jug-handle ears. To her surprise, he didn't sound sheepish or put-upon, but instead, somber and worried as if he and his fellow laborer had been having an uncharacteristically serious conversation.

"Is something the matter?" she asked.

"You must have heard about the trouble," said Chade. A swarthy, rather handsome young man with a mellifluous baritone voice, he was as usual rather too well dressed for his job of lugging bales and boxes about. "The Uskevren heir and cadets were attacked yesterday. Captain Orvist and Master Selwick died in the fighting. What's more, it's rumored that Lord Uskevren himself hasn't been seen for a couple of days."

"Certainly I've heard about it," Wyla said. "What I don't understand is what it has to do with you two gentlemen of leisure stacking crates onto wagons."

"I know how things used to be," Magnus said. "Back when Lord Uskevren first came back to town. Enemy Houses attacked his caravans, shops, manufactories, and warehouses to try and ruin his family a second time."

"Those days are over," Wyla said. "Besides, if any rogues showed up here to make trouble, don't you think the three of us could show them off?"

She fingered the well-worn hilt of the long sword hanging at her side. She'd owned the blade since her youth, when she'd served the House of Uskevren as a warrior. Eventually a lamed leg had ended her martial career, whereupon Lord Thamalon, who'd realized her talents from the beginning, had made her one of his factors. She had little use for the weapon these days, and sometimes its weight made her bad leg ache, but she would have felt undressed without it.

"We'd damn well try to drive them off," said Chade, "and failing that, I suppose we could run away. But I'm not worried about us so much as Lord Uskevren himself. Do you think he's all right?"

"Absolutely," Wyla said, "and since I rode with him through the hardest and most dangerous of times, and saw firsthand what a cunning and doughty warrior he is, I'm in a position to know."

"I hope so," said Chade. "He's a good man to work for, not like some. Remember how he invited us all to Storm-weather Towers for that feast, and helped when Fossan-dor's mother was going to lose her cottage?"

"I do," said Wyla, "and I tell you again, whatever it is that's happening, he and his family will be fine. Unless all his workers shirk their tasks, and his trading empire collapses."

Magnus rolled his eyes. "All right, we get the point."

He and Chade clambered to their feet, stepped from behind the rampart of crates upon which they relied to conceal themselves from her view, and started down the ladder to the warehouse floor. Wyla followed. As with wearing her sword, negotiating the ladder was hard on her leg. With her muscular arms, it was actually easier to hoist herself up and down on the lift. She refused to resort to such a shift, however, lest it make her feel like a cripple in truth.

Magnus and Chade sauntered outside to wheel a wagon into position for loading, slamming the door behind them. Wyla limped back toward her office, through a shadowy, cavernous space packed with wood carvings, rolled carpets, kegs of nails, stoneware, cheap pine coffins, unassembled looms, and countless other items the House of Uskevren bought, manufactured, and sold.

A mild tenor voice said, "I'm sorry, but you're wrong."

Wyla spun around. A stranger dressed in a crescent-shaped Man in the Moon mask and a dark blue mantle stepped from behind a shelf laden with scythes, sickles, hoes, and plows. A creature of oozing darkness, its precise shape difficult to make out in the dimness, flowed out in his wake.

"You're the wizard who led the attacks on Lord Tha-malon's children," Wyla breathed.

"I am indeed," the masked man said, "and as I was observing, as a result of my efforts, I'm afraid the House of Uskevren is actually rather far from being 'all right.' I killed Thamalon and Shamur already, and with your help, I'm about to dispose of their children as well."

Wyla didn't understand what the spellcaster meant, nor did she especially care. She was too busy trying to figure out how she might possibly survive this encounter, for plainly, whatever else was afoot, the masked man must surely mean her harm.

It would be useless to scream. With its rows of shelving and stacks of goods piled everywhere, the warehouse swallowed sound. And, given her lameness, it would be equally futile to turn and run. The wizard would undoubtedly have sufficient time to cast a spell on her before she scrambled out of sight, and for all she knew, his shadowy companion might pounce on her from behind.

She had only one option, then. Try to get in close, hurt the masked man, and keep on hurting him until he was dead. Her old master-at-arms had taught her that was how you kept a hostile wizard from working any magic.

She'd have a better chance if she could somehow catch him by surprise. To that end, she said, "Just tell me what you want from me, and I'll do it. I don't want to die."

"Would that I could trust you," the wizard replied. "But I remember how devoted you were to Thamalon in the old days, I rather doubt you've-"

She whipped out her sword and charged him. Reacting instantly, the wizard skipped nimbly backward, snatched a small length of iron from one of his pockets, brandished it, and rattled off a rhyme.

Purple fire flared from the end of his polished staff, bathing her in stinging though tepid flame. Her muscles clenched painfully, depriving her of the ability to move. Off balance, she fell facedown on the floor.

Struggling to jump back up, all Wyla's rigid body could do was shudder. He took hold of her, and, grunting, rolled her over onto her back. Gazing helplessly up at him, she noticed the strange pale eyes peering from their holes in his blandly smiling mask.

"That ploy might almost have worked," he said, "except that two nights ago, Shamur Uskevren made a move and caught me flatfooted when I was in mid-sentence. I've been more careful since. Good-bye, Wyla." He took hold of a portion of his mantle, folded it to make a double thickness, then pressed it down on her face.

Bileworm watched avidly as Master smothered the woman. By his standards, it wasn't an especially long or excruciating death, but he could certainly imagine Wyla's terror and frustration as, deprived of all capacity to resist, she suffocated, and that gave him something to savor.

After a minute, Master took the folds of cloth away and held his hand above her mouth, making sure her breathing had ceased.

"Well, thank goodness that's done," he said. "I thought those two loafers in the loft were never going to leave."

"Shall I?" Bileworm asked.

"Of course."

The spirit spiraled upward, stretching his substance thin, then swooped down and slid through the tiny space between Wyla's upper and lower teeth. Once he was completely inside her, and had aligned his own ethereal limbs with the coarse matter of the corpse's, sensation came. The floor, hard and cold against his back. His hand clenched painfully tight on the sword hilt. A slight rawness on his face, where the weave of Master's mantle had chafed Wyla's skin.

He reached inside himself for the lame warrior's memories. For an instant, he glimpsed a chaotic jumble of images and sensations, loves and hates, joys, sorrows, and regrets. Then it burst like a bubble and left nothingness behind.

He frowned, prompting Master to ask, "What's the matter?"

"We have a problem," Bileworm said, climbing to his feet, surprised by the sharpness of the twinge in the calf of the bad leg. "I own the body, but her mind is gone."

"Don't worry. It shouldn't matter."

Bileworm hesitated. "Are you sure?"

"Of course. No one will doubt you're the person you appear to be. Why should they? Nor will our dupes, worried as they surely are, bother you with personal questions to which you have no answers. Their only concern will be the tidings you bring."