Shadows (The Masks of Aygrima, Band 2) - Softcover

Blake, E. C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0756409632 ISBN 13: 9780756409630

Verlag: DAW, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Second novel in EC Blake's dystopian fantasy Masks of Aygrima series

In Masks, Mara Holdfast's life changed forever. As the daughter of the Autarch’s Master Maskmaker, she had a clearly defined future: a quiet, ordered life in the capital, making Masks with her father and doing work important to the ruling Autarch. 

But when her Mask, specially made by her own father, cracked and fell to pieces during her Masking ceremony, Mara was exiled from everything she once knew.

Now she has become part of an underground rebellion, rejecting the unjust rules of a Masked society. She must try to understand her unprecedented ability to use all types of magic—and to tear magic from the living bodies of those around her. But Mara has yet to discover just how horrifying her power can be….

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

E.C. Blake was born in New Mexico, “Land of Enchantment,” and the state’s nickname seems to have rubbed off: he started writing fantastical stories in elementary school and wrote his first fantasy novel in high school. He’s been a newspaper reporter and editorial cartoonist, a magazine editor, a writing instructor and a professional actor, and has written (under another name) more than 30 works of nonfiction, ranging from biographies to science books to history books, but his first love has always been fantasy. He now lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, with his wife and a daughter whose favorite stories all involve “sword-fighting princesses.” Come to think of it, so do his. He can be found at ecblake.com.

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ONE

The Stranger from the Sea

The mask gleamed white against the dark surface of Mara’s workbench, like a pearl in an ebony box. It looked perfect, priceless, a masterwork of the Maskmaker’s craft . . .

...and it was completely, totally, fatally wrong.

“It looks good,” Prella said from behind her. The other girl, the same age as Mara—fifteen—but smaller, had taken to spending all her free time hanging around Mara, ever since Mara had saved her life by healing her with magic after she’d suffered a terrible injury. Mara understood that, and ordinarily was rather touched by it, but she would have been just as happy not to have a witness to her repeated failures.

Like this one. “It isn’t,” she growled. “Watch.” She reached out and poked the Mask’s gleaming cheek. As though her touch had infected the shining face with some terrible disease, the Mask cracked at that point . . . and kept on cracking, a spiderweb of black lines spreading out across all of the shining surface, until the entire Mask abruptly fell apart into dust and flinders.

Prella gasped. “Oh!”

Mara gazed glumly at the ruined Mask. She didn’t even swear . . . this time. She’d used up her entire vocabulary of obscenities (of which a childhood spent playing in the streets of Tamita had given her a surprising number) the first . . . what? twelve times? . . . something similar had happened. Although at least this one had looked like a Mask. The first half-dozen had looked more like something intended to frighten small children.

She lifted her gaze from the crumbled clay and stared out through the narrow slit of the window cut through the rock wall above the bench. Her work chamber was on the topmost level of the Secret City, a long climb from the Broad Way that ran from the main entrance down to the underground lake that was the City’s source of water. From up here, she looked straight across the big horseshoe of the cove into whose walls the City was carved, all the way to the cliff on the far side. Snow glistened on the trees that capped it, white as the failed Mask had been before it crumbled.

Six weeks had passed since she had returned to the Secret City from the disastrous attempt to rescue her friend Katia from the terrible mining camp to which the unMasked were exiled. Six weeks since she had discovered her ability to harness enormous amounts of magic, and to pull that magic, not from the stores of it painstakingly collected from the black lodestone to which it was drawn when living things died, but directly from other human beings. Six weeks since she had ripped magic from scores of people—men, women, boys, girls, Masked and unMasked alike—and contained the force of an explosion that should have leveled the mining camp and killed everyone aboveground within it.

Six weeks since she had discovered that she had the rare form of the Gift that had produced the greatest monsters in the history of Aygrima . . . the same Gift, but to a far greater degree, as the Autarch himself, the tyrant to whose overthrow the unMasked Army dwelling in this Secret City was devoted.

She rubbed her tired eyes. “And a fat lot of good all that power is doing me right now,” she muttered.

“You’ll figure it out,” Prella said, and Mara started. She’d momentarily forgotten the other girl was there.

“I hope you’re right,” she said. She tried to give Prella a smile. It wasn’t very successful.

She looked down at the crumbled Mask once more. Growing up, she had watched her father, Charlton Holdfast, Master Maskmaker of Aygrima, make many, many Masks. She knew how to shape the clay, how to fire it, how to do everything except for one little thing . . . how to infuse the Mask with magic.

Catilla, the elderly woman who had founded and still commanded the unMasked Army, had seen no difficulty with that little fact when she had kidnapped—rescued, Mara reminded herself—Mara and four others who had just turned fifteen from the wagons taking them to the mining camp in the wake of their failed Maskings. Catilla didn’t want real Masks, Masks that would reveal any traitorous leanings on the part of their wearers to the Autarch’s ever-present Watchers, Masks that would shatter completely if the magic within them judged that the wearer posed a threat to the Autarch’s rule.

She wanted even less the new Masks, those made within the last year or two, which not only revealed incipient sedition but allowed the Autarch to draw magic out of the Masks’ wearers for his own use, a process which also weakened the wearer’s will to the point where he or she literally could not conceive of any rebellion against the Autarch. As a side effect, the new Masks altered the personalities of those wearing them, making them almost unrecognizable to their friends and loved ones. But what was that to the Autarch, desperate for more and more magic to stave off the ravages of old age and keep himself firmly in control?

All Catilla wanted were believable semblances of real Masks, Masks that her followers could wear as disguises, enabling them to safely enter the towns and villages of Aygrima, and even Tamita itself, to . . .

To what? Mara asked herself, not for the first time, and, also not for the first time, had no answer. Catilla had not confided in her what she intended her followers to do once they could enter those towns and villages.

But then, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Mara thought, still looking down at the failed Mask. I can’t make the counterfeits she wants.

The Mask in front of her should have been nothing but inert clay. She had put no magic into it—she had none, without reaching into the bodies of those around her. And since she had almost killed those whom she had treated as her personal storehouses of magic before, including her friend Keltan, she wasn’t about to do it again.

No matter how tempting it was . . . which it was, despite the agony she had felt when she’d stripped magic from living people, despite the warnings of Ethelda, the Palace Healer who now dwelt in the Secret City and had been tutoring Mara in the knowledge of magic (though not in its use, since the Secret City had no store of it with which to practice), despite the soul-sapping, nightmarish images of those she had killed with magic that had driven her to the edge of ending her own life before she had Healed Prella.

That act of Healing had somehow eased the nightmares, as if it had salved some internal injury she had done herself through her use of others’ magic. Ethelda had warned her, though, that those horrors were not gone from her mind: her power meant that every person she killed with magic, or even those who simply died in her presence, imprinted themselves on her, their final agonies mingling with her own imagination to produce hallucinatory horrors that could threaten her sanity if fully unleashed.

She knew all that. She knew it. And yet . . .

...and yet, despite it all, she longed to touch that raw power again, to see what else she could do with it.

She could feel the magic inside Prella’s skinny little body. It would be so easy to reach out and tug it to herself, use it to try to make the next Mask succeed where all the previous attempts had failed. Prella might not even notice what she had done, if she was—

No! She clenched her fists. No. Keltan had been...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: DAW
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0756409632
• ISBN 13: 9780756409630
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar