The sun was just setting when the two of them came within view of the busker village. Daenek could see a few dim lights come on in the windows of the buildings clustered near a sluggish river. He and Rennie hitched their packs higher upon their shoulders and hurried their footsteps along the river’s sandy bank.
“Are you glad to see it again?” said Daenek.
“This dump?” A corner of Rennie’s mouth curled. “Naw, I never cared very much for it.” She lowered her head and trudged on in stony silence.
When they reached the outskirts of the village, Rennie stopped in front of one of the squat wooden buildings. The windows were unlit. “Wait up,” she told Daenek, then stepped to the door and pounded on it. She waited a few seconds, then struck it again with her fist, but no answer came.
“Come on,” she said, rejoining Daenek, “well go ask at the inn.”
Daenek followed her to the village’s central building, an inn two stories high with its windows spilling yellow lamplight into the darkness. Inside, Rennie pushed through the knots of buskers, men and women, with Daenek trailing in her wake. She turned once and saw him studying the drinking, gossipping crowd—he had learned their language from her while on board the caravan. “Yeah,” she said over her shoulder with a thin smile, “just like real people.”
She stopped at the side of a table near one of the side walls. A fat man wearing an apron splotched with grease and beer, looked up at her from his conversation.
“Gerd,” said Rennie, “how’s it going? What’s the news around here?”
“Right bad,” wheezed the fat innkeeper. “The bad priests creeping about everywhere. Seems like a new one near every week.”
“So what are you doing about ’em? Don’t tell me anybody’s grown brave enough to hunt one down.”
“Huh.” The man’s jowls mottled in indignation. “Right cowardly maybe, but not stupid at least. We just don’t go wandering about in the hills when there’s one about, and after a while it goes away like its others. As though they had just been passing through all along.”
Rennie smiled and leaned down closer to the innkeeper.
“Hey,” she said, “where can I find Uncle Goforth?”
The fat man grunted. “Cost you.”
“Bull.” But she rolled a small coin across the table to his waiting hand.
“He moved out of his shack.” The fat man dropped the coin into an apron pocket. “I gave him a room upstairs. End of the hall.”
Without saying anything more, Rennie turned away from the table and headed for a sagging stairway in the back of the inn.
Daenek followed her through the crowd.
Upstairs, a low-ceilinged hallway was lit only by a candle guttering in a bracket on the wall. The bare planks of the floor creaked under their steps. Most of the doors they passed were silent but from behind a few came voices or the sound of laughter. Rennie pushed open the last door without knocking.
“Uncle Goforth?” she called.
Daenek stepped behind her into the small room, lit only by the candlelight from the hallway. The room’s windows were shuttered tight.
“Hello,” said a figure sitting in a straight-backed chair against the wall. “It’s Rennie, isn’t it? Who’s that with you?”
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Daenek could make out the old man, sitting with his vein-gnarled hands upon his knees. He was looking straight ahead but not at either of his visitors.
“So they finally went out on you,” murmured Rennie, crouching down in front of the old man and looking into the dulled pupils of his eyes.
“Well,” said the old man—his voice was flute-like with age, “they were never much good anyway.”
“I’ve got a buddy here,” said Rennie, “who needs your help.”
She placed a coin in his hand.
The old man rubbed his thumb over the large gold-piece.
“You’re doing pretty well, Rennie.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll be doing even better if you help me out. Can you do it?”
“Let me see him.”
Rennie pulled Daenek onto his knees beside her. The old man’s hands reached out and felt Daenek’s face, probing the flesh with sharp, bony fingers.
“It’ll take a few days,” he said finally, putting his hands back on his knees.
“That’s all right,” said Rennie. “We got time.”
“Look at me,” the old man ordered Daenek.
He peered into the age-seamed face, and then drew back in surprise as the features changed into that of a different man.
Even in the dim light, the change was unmistakeable—the skin tautened, the arch of the nose changed its angle, the eyes seemed to shift position. It was not an old man making a face, but the visage of an entirely different person floating to the surface of the skin. Only pupils of the eyes, obscured with cataracts, remained the same. A few almost imperceptible shifts of flesh and another face appeared, like that of a smooth-complexioned woman.
“The trouble with masks,” came the old man’s reedy voice, “is that you put them on from the outside. What’s best is a mask you draw up from inside. You’ll see.”
They spent a week at the inn of the busker village, sleeping at night in one of the rooms upstairs. Daenek spent the days with the old man everyone called Uncle Goforth. Rennie stopped by the room at the end of the hallway at random intervals, then wandered off to get their meals or on other, more mysterious errands.
“It’s the muscles,” explained Uncle Goforth on the first day. “And the sinews in the face. Even the bones flex a little. Everybody controls their own, but they just learn to make one face and then stop. Like learning to say one word, and then repeating it over and over for the rest of their lives. As though it were the only word they could ever say at all. But you can learn to speak with your face, make it say anything you want. That takes years. I’ll just teach you another couple of words, is all.”
Daenek’s face soon arched with the pinching and kneading from the old man’s surprisingly strong fingers. Every inch of skin felt as if it had been stretched to its limits.
There was a small wooden box as well, with jars of ointments that caused a furious itching or burning when rubbed on different parts of Daenek’s face. He could only make the uncomfortable sensations stop when he flexed the right muscles in the right way—muscles he hadn’t even known were there.
The old man was finally satisfied with the results he saw with his hands. While Rennie was downstairs paying the innkeeper for their week’s lodging, Uncle Goforth stood beside Daenek as he gazed into a mirror on the wall of the little room. Daenek had stolen the stub of candle from the bracket in the hallway so that he could see what the old man needed no light to see.
“Change this line first.” The old man ran his finger along Daenek’s jaw. “But slowly, so that no one will notice. Then the cheekbones—flatten them. That will bring the nose down as well, just a fraction. Change the eyes last. Pull the lids to the side and hold. Like that, yes. Slowly, though. Maybe nine months until you’re finished. That way you’ll become disguised without anyone being aware of it having happened. Check the mirror every time you awaken, until the muscles learn of themselves.”
Daenek looked at the face in the mirror, the face that he would melt away and then grow back gradually aboard the caravan. It was that of someone else, rounded rather than lean, the relationship of eyes to nose to mouth different. He suddenly remembered how, as a child, he had stared at his reflected image in the pool in the rocks above the house. Looking for what the Lady Marche had said others could see in his face. Is it hidden now? he thought, studying the stranger’s mask. A wave of dismay that surprised him in its intensity curled inside him. Is it lost?