The Watcher's Mask

Newly published by the award-winning author, Laurie J. Marks! Jamil is a multi-souled Separated One who serves the Emperor of the island nation of Callia. When she awakens to finds herself inexplicably lost in the wilderness, she suspects her second soul has gone to war against her. Through horrific events Jamil cannot remember, her life is entangled with the lives of the Asakeiri people--and the wise woman Ata'al—who have befriended her. Trapped by winter in a land alien to her, Jamil must somehow return to the Emperor to warn him of an assassination attempt. But the true danger that threatens Callia is more subtle and more dire: the Asakeiri people believe their land rests on the back of a sleeping dragon. And the dragon is beginning to awaken.

I swam up out of the black depth, propelling myself into the light of day. I felt a tightness, a panicked thundering, the slickness of sweat. I hung suspended over an abyss. A thundering cataract crashed and frothed within the rocky ravine. Like a spider stretching its thread between two twigs, I crouched in a basket attached to a rope that stretched between two pinnacles on either side of the gaping chasm. What had happened? How had I come to be here? But no one shared that precarious basket where Alasil had abandoned me in the midst of her personal adventure.

A faint sound brought my attention to the rope, and I noticed that, strand by strand, it was breaking. I grasped the rope and pulled on it to move myself toward the nearest edge of that rocky canyon, but a dozen strands gave way at once under the added strain. For now, the basket hung over water—which might be deep and might be shallow, and was certainly full of rocks—but water, nonetheless. The farther I moved towards solid ground, the closer I moved toward the boulders at the river's edge. I had a beggar's choice between the chance that I would survive the fall if I landed in the water, and the chance that I would reach the canyon's edge before the rope gave way.

Thin as a child's wail in a cold night, a voice called from the far escarpment. There I could make out the scar of a treacherous pathway, and a rickety platform where I must have first entrusted my life to this mildewed basket hanging from its rotten rope. Huddled by the platform, a pallid shape crouched as if dizzied by the precariousness and height of the perch. Again he cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, but the abyss swallowed up his words. I fit my own hands around my mouth and cried, pointlessly, as there was nothing he could do about it, "The rope is breaking!" The pale boy leaned forward, holding a hand behind his ear. "The rope is breaking!" I cried. Obviously misunderstanding me, he grasped the rope where it was tethered and gave it a pull. They are all fools in Akava, I thought hopelessly, as the remaining strands of the rope shattered like glass on stone.