The Same Mask
The same mask?
Chris looked down at Paron's mask in his left hand and, with his right, brushed the one still covering his own face. Paron's was crushed, and he couldn't tell whether the two were the same or only similar. To make the comparison easier, he peeled the mask from his face and laid it over the one in his hand. In that instant they clung together, as if they had always been a single thing.
Ah. So they are the same.
Confirming the guess was satisfying. It was also a problem. The two masks had stuck fast and would not come apart.
This is not good.
He tried to work a fingernail between them, the way one peels the skin from a squid, but there was no gap for a nail to enter. They were fused as completely as if someone had smeared a powerful adhesive between them. A faint light seeped from the rims, and the two masks became one. Overlapped, they ought to have been about twice as thick as before, yet the thickness had hardly changed. The eye couldn't catch it. Only a hand, feeling carefully, could sense the slight increase, and from that it seemed less a merging than an absorption.
He moved to put the mask on, then held back. Something about it felt unclean. He kicked Paron's abandoned head up onto the body, which was still burning hard, and only after the flames had taken the skull as well did he go to check on Art. When Paron had cast his earth magic, the boy had been shoved and rolled a long way, and he was still sunk in sleep.
Chris looked at him with worried eyes.
Did I lay the sleep spell on too thick?
It was the first time he had used the magic, and he hadn't been able to judge the strength. If he had miscalculated, Art might never wake.
"No. He'll wake up. He will."
He settled the boy into a more comfortable position, walked about fifty paces, and spoke.
"Get up."
Supervisor McKeon rose and offered an awkward smile.
"You knew I was alive?"
"Yes. I saw all of it. Art and I playing dead, and you and Lapin copying us."
"Aha. So that's how it was."
"You can speak freely."
"Aiyu, how could I speak casually to a great mage? If that vile Lapin hadn't picked a quarrel with you, there would have been no need to fight that wretch at all. A true pity. I lay right here, praying with all my heart for Sir Kamin's victory."
"Then I'm grateful you prayed for me."
"It was only my duty. You honor me too much."
"I have a question."
McKeon thumped his own chest.
"Ask anything. I'll tell you everything I know."
"What is the treasure?"
McKeon's face twisted.
"Ah. That, I don't know either."
"Truly?"
"If even the Guild Master and the Deputy Guild Master don't know what it is, how would I?"
"Then why did you go through the cargo?"
"Pardon?"
"The first thief. The one searching the carriage. That was you."
"No."
McKeon nearly jumped.
"Absolutely not."
"The build was exactly yours."
"You can't brand a man a criminal just because his build is similar."
"The walk was similar, too."
McKeon had nothing to say to that.
"So was the smell."
He lifted an arm, buried his nose in his armpit, and sniffed.
"Aiyu, and what smell would that be?"
"And the voice was identical. You thought your accomplice clubbed me in the back of the head and I passed out? I heard every word the two of you said."
McKeon turned to run. He couldn't. Earthen Shackles had closed around his calves. Chris shifted the ground and dragged him forward, then looked into his eyes.
"What is the treasure?"
"That, I truly don't know."
"You meant to steal it without knowing what it was?"
McKeon pointed at the dead mages and threw the question back.
"Did they know what it was when they tried to steal it?"
"A fair point."
"I was told that simply transporting it would solve our guild's financial troubles. If the transport fee is that high, how great must the thing's value be? Once I started thinking about it, I couldn't sit still."
"And your accomplice?"
"Over there."
Where he pointed, a supervisor he had been close with lay with a hole through his chest.
"Please spare me."
McKeon swallowed, his eyes flicking between the mask in Chris's hand and the beads of blood on Chris's face, left behind when the mask had come off.
"You think I'm going to kill you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you endured Lapin's abuse with skill like that. Because you wore a mask and changed your face."
His pupils trembled.
"You're hiding who you are, aren't you?"
Chris said nothing.
"I will never speak of you. Not a word."
He seized Chris's collar and hung on it.
"Honestly, I don't even know who you are, so even if I talked—"
Perhaps he thought the short distance would be enough. Mid-sentence he drew a dagger from his clothes and swung.
The trick had no chance against a man who had trained as a knight. Chris took the blade easily and drove it into his chest.
"Guh—"
He left McKeon to fold over with a groan and walked among the corpses. He stripped a set of relatively clean clothes and changed into them, then dressed a body of similar build in his own. After cutting off that corpse's head and burning it, he laid the body down beside Art.
Chris stretched out in a likely spot, cast a concealment spell, and waited. Wild things came—crows, vultures, wolves—and tore at the dead. One small crow pecked at Art's calf. A wolf was creeping closer as well.
He broke the concealment and stepped out to drive it off. That was when Art's eyes opened. The boy saw the animal and jolted.
"Gah!"
He thrashed, and the wolf, more startled than he was, sprang backward. The crow burst up with a harsh caw. Once the wolf retreated, the boy got to his feet, looked around, and sank down in blank despair. Then he found the headless corpse, and the tears broke out of him.
"Brother! Brother Kamin!"
He didn't cry for long. Spotting a carriage whose horses were still alive, he ran to it, climbed onto the driver's bench, and cracked the whip. The horses, which had been fretting at the sight of the wolf, were glad enough to move their legs at the young driver's command.
Chris followed from a good distance. He buried Paron's robe and staff, along with the dozen or so spatial pouches in which Paron had stored what he had looted from the mages and the carriages. The silver he would need at once, he kept, and slipped it into his pocket.
3. Examining the Mask
The convoy's campsite and the Imar branch of the Senfo Merchant Guild lay a day's travel apart. Kamin drove at full speed and reached the branch around sunset.
Chris trailed the carriage from far behind. Once he was sure it had gone all the way inside the branch, he turned away, crossed the city wall on a flight spell, and dropped into the forest. He went deep, into country even hunters rarely walked, and by moonlight he studied the mask.
It looked whiter than before, and smoother. He might have been imagining it, but a faint baleful energy seemed to run over the surface. He lifted it. Should I put it on? Then he lowered it again. Maybe not. He blinked twice and raised it once more. Should I? Something about it still felt wrong. Don't.
He stretched out on his back and looked at the sky. A full moon hung there, round as a face.
I have to change my face.
His original face—Chris's face—was posted as wanted by the magic tower.
"Haa."
Setting a knife to his face again unsettled him. He endured pain well enough, but that didn't mean he couldn't feel it, or that he liked it. He only clenched his teeth and got through it.
If I wear the mask, I won't have to cut my face.
On the slim chance it might be safe, he raised a wall of mana over his skin and set the mask against his face. It seated itself and clung tight. He felt nothing boring toward his brain. After watching Tenbo come leaping out of a mirror, he had frightened himself for nothing. Nothing felt different from before, and Chris let out a relieved breath.
Right. A mask is a mask. Two of them joining shouldn't change what it is.
Reassured, he shaped the mask by the method he had learned from the evil spirit Tenbo and changed his face. In a water mirror the nose looked wrong—too straight, too high, awkward for being so fine. He bent the bridge a little and brought it down, and it sat naturally.
Good enough.
Satisfied, he dismissed the water mirror and linked with the mask. The second window was gone. It had been absorbed into the No. 4 mask, its existence erased completely, and through that he understood that Paron had been one of the Children of the Mask.
Paron was No. 2.
Chris muttered to himself.
"Come to think of it, I've met all five of the Children of the Mask."
He had fought No. 2, No. 4, and No. 5. Of the three, No. 2 had been the strongest, No. 4—Cyril—in the middle, and No. 5—David—the weakest. Given that the man behind the No. 1 mask was Stan of the Ring Binding realm, the masks had been handed out in order of strength.
Three of the five Children of the Mask, killed by me. I never even had a plan. How did it turn out this way? Is this fate as well?
If it was fate, then it was fate.
On impulse, he sent Stan a thread of telepathy.
It was the dead of night, but the answer came at once.
No answer came.
A sharp voice stabbed into his brain.
Chris had given Stan exactly that report while he was playing at being David.
Chris's eyebrow twitched.
Now the story's getting interesting.
Tenbo seemed to have settled into Mick Magic Tower without trouble.
Talented, that one.
And we agreed to pretend we didn't know each other...
He wondered what the spirit had let slip. Even if Tenbo had said everything he knew, nothing serious would come of it. There was a limit to what Tenbo knew.
Chris cut him off.
A short silence followed. Chris scratched his head, then went on.
"Pressed who?"
Stan's anger flared.
He sighed and went on.
Right. Cyril was never that strong.
Chris was not the original owner of the No. 4 mask. But calling himself Seed was not, in itself, a lie. After he killed Cyril, No. 4, the one who had played at being Seed was Chris. From the first to the last, Seed had been Chris's name. The original owner of No. 4 had never once used it.