PROLOGUE
The Man with the Ashless Face
They call me the man with the ashless face. It is not an accurate name. The ash seeps in through the eye holes of the mask and around my mouth when I breathe. It’s worst when they make me smoke, but afterward, I don’t care so much for a while.
My mask is iron; at least, I think it is. I know little of metal-making. All I know of forging is what they did to me on the day they brought me here. The hammer fell hard and hot at the back of my head, clamping the steel mask tight around me. I screamed then. I don’t scream anymore. It echoes horribly.
Marta brings me food and stew twice a day. I believe it is in the morning and night, though there is no daylight here. Sometimes I wonder if I have the meals backward if I have become a creature of the night, as blind to the rhythm of the sun and moons as I am to my own face. I hear Marta in the hall. Her gait is hobbled but brisk. I can always tell when it is her because it is only ever her.
I realize I am lying on the stone floor. The cell is a perfect box, built from blocks worn wavy and smooth by decades of the very same prisoner. The ground supports my body and my mask in a way that is as pleasant as anything here, but this is my favorite spot. Something about the floor here feels warmer than elsewhere.
Three raps at the door, then key scrapes against lock. Those three raps mean “sit in your bed, away from the door.” I learned that from the male soldier on my first day here, for Marta does not speak. She does not hear, either. I tried to speak with her when I first arrived—her reticence infuriated me. Because of the mask, she did not know that I was trying to speak with her until I became so angry as to stand up from my mattress and gesture wildly at her with my arms. Frightened and panicked, Marta tried to scream. It was then I saw she had no tongue and realized she could also not hear. I wept that night. There is much to mourn in my prison, but that night, I cried for all the words: kind and harsh and desperate, that died without even an ear to hear them, let alone another’s tongue to give them life.
I sit up. I no longer struggle to lift the weight of my prison. My neck and shoulders have become strong carrying the weight of my mask, though my body has never accepted it as a part of myself. I walk over to my bed, a pair of lumpy mattresses stacked one on the other, flush to the wall, and I sit. And I wait.
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Marta can see me through the barred window of my door, and once I am seated, she uses her key to enter. The key is both the only means of entering the room and her only adornment. As she passes through the entrance, it swings gently until it comes to rest in the rough cowled fabric of her robes. She could have been a holy man in a different time. She nods to me in greeting, then turns quickly to her work. She removes the bucket of my waste and replaces it with a new one. It used to shame me, to watch her carry away my refuse, but I have no room for that emotion anymore. With her least pleasant task complete, she takes my food tray away and replaces that as well. It is water and stew. If I’m lucky, the stew contains bits of meat. If I am not… well, I am not often lucky.
She turns to leave the room and trips over the hem of her robes. Her head hits the stone hard enough to bounce, and I can tell that it has stunned her: she is not a young woman. I can see my escape in my mind’s eye: I pull the key’s chain taut against her neck, with my foot on her upper back. She may flail a bit, but her position is so compromising that I would easily win any struggle. She would pass out or die, and I would slip the key off from around her neck and run through the prison, following the sweet breath of fresh air as it fills my stale lungs. I’d be free. It would all be over. I think of people in my old life, Randley Burrows or Lang Prana; they wouldn’t miss an opportunity like this. But I am not them. And they never had a prison as hard and tight as mine.
I rub my hand over the side of my mask and rush over towards Marta. I help her to her feet; she is scared but relieved not to see rage through my eyeholes. She grunts a grateful sound and bows several times to me as she backs out of the cell. I may be wrong, but I think I may see regret in her face as she closes the door and twists the key in the lock. The sound of the deadbolt sinking into its home is cold and final. The sound echoes around my head, drowning out the sound of Marta’s uneven hobble. She is gone, and I am again alone. I find the excitement of the situation has given me some energy. I take advantage of that and walk over to my mattresses. I pull them from the wall and sit between my bed and the stone that creeps down to meet the floor. I reach between my mattresses and pull out a sharpened bone. It was a rib that made its way into my stew. It was the biggest piece of luck I’d had in years. I use my off-hand to feel the stone until I come upon a small divot in the mortar, still too small to see unaided. I will dig at the stone, on and off, until Marta returns.
The weight of my mask becomes heavy after an hour or so of digging but I continue anyway. I don’t know what I would do if I ever saw that elusive glimmer of light from the other side, but it is the only thing that gets me through each day. Not the hope of success but the thought of my jailers staring into a hole in the wall, scratching their heads and wondering how it went so wrong. I can see them shouting for backup, for men to mount horses, to begin the manhunt, panicked over the consequences of their failure. They can already start to feel the rasp of the noose around their necks. How had I disappeared? They will wonder. Where had I gone? I still have no answers to these questions, but that is not the important thing. The important thing is how they will suffer.