Chương 66: The Mouthless Mask

Zayn did not stop long enough to rest. He only stopped long enough to steal a new skin. The dry ravine where he had taken refuge had two advantages: it cut the wind, and it hid the smoke of the woods behind him. The two dead trackers were far away now. The Ashes hound too. Not far enough to be forgotten, but far enough that their screams were nothing more than a useful memory. Zayn laid the gray cloak over a flat stone. Then the mask.

Originally, it had been an Ashes tracker's mask: dark leather, reinforced around the nose, thick fabric over the mouth, two side plates to protect the cheeks. Designed to filter tainted odors, hide the face, and make the one wearing it look more like an official tool than a man. Zayn looked at it. Too recognizable. Too Ashes. Too clean. He took the dead man's knife and began cutting. Not carefully. His fingers were shaking too much for that. He tore away the lower section first, the part that covered the mouth.

The leather resisted, then gave with the wet sound of fibers ripping. He cut off the straps that were too long, scraped away the inner insignia with the knife tip, then rubbed the whole thing in dust, ash, and a little dried blood. The result was ugly. An uneven half-mask covering the forehead, eyes, cheekbones, and upper nose. The right side hung lower than the left. One edge was split. One strap had been replaced with a piece of cord. Altogether, it no longer really looked like military equipment.

More like something a man had made from the remains of a corpse so he could keep walking without showing too much of his face. Exactly. Zayn put it over his eyes. The leather still stank of the tracker. Cold sweat. Oil. Dog. Final fear. He wore it anyway. The straps pulled at his filthy hair. The upper edge pressed against an old cut. His vision narrowed slightly, but not enough to become dangerous. The world took on a tighter shape, framed by blackened leather. His mouth, meanwhile, remained uncovered.

He breathed in. The air came more easily. And the mark on his tongue touched nothing. That mattered. Not symbolically. Practically. He did not want cloth against his mouth if the mark burned. He did not want to have to tear off an entire mask to vomit, spit, bite, or eat what he should never have considered an option. He stayed motionless after that thought. Then he laughed softly.

"Very impressive progress. Design criteria: breathe, run, bite." The laugh died quickly. He took the gray cloak, turned it inside out to hide the most recognizable seams, and draped it over his shoulders. It was too large. Good. It hid his bag, his emaciated outline, and part of his filthy bandages. From a distance, he could pass for a wounded tracker. Up close, he looked like a bad answer. That was enough. He then unfolded the map taken from the tracker. Lorvain was no longer very far. Not the town. The pass.

A secondary valley through the ridges, old enough to avoid the main roads, known enough to be watched when things turned bad. And things always turned bad around Zayn. He unfolded the Ashes order and reread the lines. Subject Z. V. to be intercepted before Lorvain. No engagement in civilian zones. Tongue to be removed if public exposure is likely. His mouth tightened. His tongue brushed his teeth. He stopped the motion immediately. No. Not yet. He was not going to let those people give him a habit.

He put the order away, got back to his feet, and headed toward Lorvain. The pass was not a gate. It was a gorge. Two gray cliffs narrowing toward each other for several hundred meters, leaving between them a stone road, narrow and old, lined with worn boundary markers and broken statues. Once, it had probably been used to move convoys between the Marches and the southwestern roads without taking the main routes.

Now it looked like the perfect place to be stopped, searched, classified, then executed with administrative apologies. Zayn watched from a high slope. A checkpoint had been set up at the northern mouth of the gorge. Six soldiers. Two civilians seated beside a cart. A minor priest of the Sun of Glass. And one Ashes man. Only one. Approximate value: 36 Not weak enough to ignore. Not alone enough to attack. The priest examined travelers with a pale crystal.

The Ashes man looked less at the people than at how they reacted to the crystal. Bad. Stolen novel; please report. Very bad. The road was not merely watched. It was filtered. Zayn remained crouched behind the rocks. The half-mask clung to his face. The leather under his eyes warmed under the gray sun. His uncovered mouth dried faster, but he preferred that to cloth. A family passed the checkpoint. The priest lifted the crystal. White light. Nothing. The soldiers waved them on. Then a merchant. Nothing.

Then a man with a bandaged arm. The crystal pulsed. The Ashes man raised a hand. The man protested at once. Too quickly. Two soldiers seized him. The priest spoke, probably some formula of verification. The bandage was ripped away. An infected bite appeared. Not demonic. Just filthy. The Ashes man had him forced to his knees anyway. Zayn watched. The man was examined, questioned, slapped when he answered badly, then dragged toward a side tent. Not killed. Not yet. But the road was closed to him.

Zayn had no chance of passing there. Even with the cloak. Even with the mask. Especially with the mask. He backed slowly off the ridge. Lorvain was closed. Not completely. But closed to him. He could have tried to go around through the cliffs. Maybe. If he had two good legs, enough water, and no demonic smell. So no. He opened the map. Another name appeared lower down, written beside a nearly erased line. Old Cliff Road. Not recommended. Of course.

The path branched off before Lorvain, wound above the gorge, then crossed an area hatched in black. On the Ashes legend, the place had a name: The Dead Lands of Caurane. Zayn looked at the checkpoint. Then the road. Then the blackened area on the map. He sighed.

"All right. One option controlled by soldiers, a priest, and an administrative dog. Or the option called the Dead Lands." He folded the map.

"The local marketing is really aggressive." He chose the Dead Lands. The problem with forbidden roads is that they rarely start out looking forbidden. At first, the Cliff Road was just a goat path. Flat stones, dry grass, a few old traces of tiny wheels. Nothing impressive. Nothing to justify a warning. Then the birds disappeared. Then the insects. Finally, the smell changed. Not the stench of Rhel-Fosse. Not the smell of the demon kingdom. Something emptier.

The scent of cold ash, old soil, and plants dead for too long to rot anymore. Zayn stopped at the edge of a plateau. Before him, the land opened into a vast depression. The Dead Lands of Caurane. Not a desert. Not a plain. An old battlefield. He understood that without anyone needing to tell him the history. Dozens of low hills were covered in bones bleached by time. The remains of old war machines jutted from the earth like metal ribs. Black craters deformed the land.

Petrified tree trunks leaned in the wind, leafless, barkless, frozen in the posture a long-ago heat had caught them in. And in the distance, almost at the center of the depression, a broken tower still stood. Not human, perhaps. Or too ancient for the distinction to matter. Zayn stood still for a long time. This was not a detour. It was a trial. Not given by a system. Not announced. Not rewarded with a neat little window.

Just the sort of place you crossed when all the reasonable roads had been closed by reasonable men. He descended. The first hour was silent. The second too. In the third, he found recent bodies. Two men. Not soldiers. Smugglers, perhaps. Or travelers who had believed that "not recommended" meant "shorter if you're in a hurry." The first had died against a stone, throat open. The second had crawled farther before dying. No values. No warmth. Zayn searched them. An empty waterskin. A silver coin.

A chunk of hard bread in one pocket. A small notebook. He took the bread. Then the notebook. The first pages contained accounts. Names. Debts. The last pages were more useful. The road is passable if you do not go down toward the craters. Avoid the tower. Noises at night. The dead move sometimes when the wind falls. Do not light a fire in the depression. Zayn closed the notebook. Good. Instructions written by someone who had died before finishing the journey. Questionable reliability. Still better than optimism.

He ate a piece of bread. Dry. Normal. Normality now tasted like luxury. Then he resumed walking. The half-mask protected him badly from the dust, but it hid his eyes from the wind. His mouth remained exposed, dry and split. He quickly understood that the image he presented, if he met anyone, would be a bad one. A man in a gray cloak, upper face masked, mouth visible, too pale, too thin, walking with a brace made from bone, wood, and tendon. Not a hero. Not yet a demon. A thing between the two, badly assembled.

He kept going. At dusk, the wind died. The notebook had been right. The dead moved. Not all of them. A few. First an arm slid from a mound of bones. Then a skull without a jaw slowly turned toward him. Weak values. 4 6 3 Not full undead. Fragments animated by old battlefield resentment, or by the contamination of war. Enough to bite an ankle. Not enough to pursue for long. At first Zayn circled around them. Then one of them caught on his brace. An incomplete skeleton, one arm, one rib cage, no legs.

Its bony fingers closed around the cord. Zayn looked down. The skull tilted up. Its tongueless mouth clicked in empty air. Zayn sighed.

"So even leftovers want to slow the trip. Fine." He crushed it against a rock. No message. Not even +0. Ultimate insult. He continued. But the movements multiplied. Bones scraping. Hands emerging from dust. Fragments of bodies drawn by warmth or sound. Alone, they were almost nothing. In numbers, they made the ground hostile. Zayn understood he would not be able to sleep in the depression. Not on ground level. He looked for height. The broken tower was the most visible option.

The notebook had said to avoid the tower. Which meant the tower contained either danger, or shelter the dying man had not been able to use. Zayn hated the logic of that sentence. Then he headed for the tower. The tower was larger up close. Three levels still standing, the rest torn away by some ancient force. The stone was not human: too dark, too smooth, crossed by fine lines that looked like scars. The doorway had long since lost its door. No nearby values. That was already suspicious.

Zayn entered with the short blade in hand. The interior was thick with dust, rubble, empty nests, and old claw marks. A spiral ramp climbed toward the second level. The third was partly collapsed, but still reachable. He climbed. Slowly. With every step, the bones outside shifted in the depression. On the second level, he found at last why the notebook had said to avoid the tower. Symbols were carved on the walls. Not human symbols.

But one had been covered by a recent inscription, written in charcoal: THIS IS NOT A SHELTER IT DREAMS HERE Zayn stared at the sentence. Then looked outside. The bones were moving in the plain. The ground was worse. The tower might dream. Fine. He would rather spend a night with a psychologically unstable building than with crawling corpses. He climbed to the third level. There he found a relatively intact corner, protected from the wind by two broken walls.

He set down his bag, checked the approaches, placed stones on the ramp as an alarm, then finally sat. Hunger returned. He ate some bread stolen from the dead. Drank a mouthful. Then his gaze dropped to the wrapped remains. No. Not tonight. He had eaten bread. He could hold. The mask was constricting his face. He wanted to take it off. Then stopped. He did not know why. After a moment, he took it off anyway. Cold air touched the upper half of his face.

He passed a hand over his eyes, over the red marks left by the leather. Then he looked at the mask on his knees. The upper half of the face hidden. The mouth exposed. A practical image. A monstrous image. An image that said without words: the gaze may disappear, but hunger stays visible. Zayn put it back on. Not because he needed it inside. Because he wanted to get used to seeing the world through something. Night fell. And the tower began to dream. Not immediately. First the dust seemed to rise without wind.

Then the lines on the walls took on a faint glow. Zayn straightened, blade in hand. The bones outside stopped moving. Silence. Then an image appeared at the center of the room. Not a tisseur's voice. Not a sharp illusion. A place-memory. Figures moved through the tower, transparent, tall, not human. Fighters? Priests? Ancient demons? He did not know. They carried curved weapons and smooth masks. Far away, beyond the broken windows, the plain was not dead. It was burning. A war. An old cycle.

The tower was not dreaming of him. It was dreaming of its own destruction. Zayn stayed perfectly still. The figures did not look at him. Then one of them stopped. Slowly turned its head. Not toward his body. Toward his mouth. Toward the mark on his tongue, which it could not possibly see. The figure raised one hand. A word crossed the room. Not in the human tongue. But the system, or the mark, or something in the flesh Zayn had swallowed, gave him its meaning. Succession. Zayn stopped breathing.

The figure dissolved. The lines on the walls went dark. Outside, the bones began moving again. Zayn stood in silence for a long time. Then he slowly laid the blade back against his chest. He had chosen the Dead Lands road to avoid humans. He might just have crossed a place that recognized something else in him. Not his name. Not his face. Not his story. A direction older than that. The uncovered mouth beneath the mask suddenly felt too cold. Zayn clenched his teeth.

"No," he murmured. Not a convincing refusal. A warning to himself. He was not going east. Not yet. He was not going to follow every ruin that whispered a word too large for him. He was going west. Because west was far. Because far meant time. And because he needed time before all the pieces of what he was becoming learned to speak the same language. At the foot of the tower, the dead scraped the stone until dawn. Zayn barely slept. But he survived the night.

And in the morning, when he put the half-mask back over his face and resumed the Cliff Road, he carried with him a word no human had yet spoken aloud to him. Succession.