Ed Greenwood - The Wizard's Mask

The only man still alive in the room smiled behind his dark mask.

The warning was encrypted, but Molthuni codes had never risen above simple. Always the same pattern, always strict adherence to unimaginative authority, leaving many holes for a clever rat to slip through.

And although more than a few things had slipped away from him recently, he was still a clever rat.

He read the Molthuni intelligence report again. Bluntly flattering. No wonder Tarlmond had laid a trap for him.

The man Tarram Armistrade always wears masks, and so is most widely known as "The Masked." Nethran gives his name as "Armistrode," but this is now considered a misreading of a handwritten ledger entry. Has gone by several other names, including Bellowbar, Jalosker, and Markant.

Makes his living as a thief; successful, is wanted for many crimes in Cheliax. Many small thefts within our borders probable, but none proven. Suspected of involvement in the Five Dragons thefts.

Is swift to violence and must be considered dangerous.

Tall. Agile. Speaks courteously and in cultured sentences; can and has impersonated nobility, law-officers, priests, and officials. Observant, and remembers what he sees.

Some recent accounts report that his face has been damaged or altered in some manner.

Recently seen in Canorate and Braganza. Apprehend on sight for interrogation, but slay without hesitation if difficulties arise.

Ah, yes, those oft-arising difficulties. Annoying things.

It had been a nasty little trap. A needle tipped in soporific poison, thrusting up under the seat-cushion. If his long-ago preparations for getting past the defenses of the Five Dragons hadn't left him immune to that particular poison forever, he might be slumped helpless in that chair right now, lost in dreams, waiting to be awakened by the ungentle handling of cold-faced men in blood-red Molthuni tabards, eager to take out their frustrations on the dangerous fugitive known as The Masked.

If Tarlmond had been a better actor, if the man had been better able to leash his own anger and keep it off his face but he hadn't.

The Halidon merchant's fury at discovering just how badly he'd been hoodwinked had fairly bellowed across his cozy office at his arriving guest. The Masked would have had to be blind and deaf not to notice the blazing glare, the tight-lipped smile, the greetings curt even for Molthune.

Luckily, he wasn't either of those things. Yet.

His good mood turned bitter.

As if he needed to be punished. If he could have undone that theft-years ago, now-he might still have a face. He might be able to live a comfortable life without the constant threat of pursuit-and by those far more dangerous than any Molthuni investigator.

Who would have thought such danger lurked in masks? Masks!

Bejeweled, darkly elegant, one even sporting feathers. He should have known a wizard's mask would harbor magic.

He should have done so many things differently.

And if so, what then? He might have died years ago, drowned in boredom behind a desk in some ledger-cluttered shop cellar room, in one of the more crowded and noisome cities, keeping track of "chamber pots, black" or "false noses, flesh-hued."

False noses like those he no longer bothered to use, because there was nothing left to keep them from sliding down to plummet from the chin he no longer had.

It had been the easiest of mistakes. He'd needed to see in the dark in order to make his escape, and so had put on the one mask of his newfound loot whose magic was supposed to help with that.

He'd taken it off again soon enough, but "soon enough" had been too late.

The curse had begun. Slowly wiping away his face.

Someday, a dying sage had warned him, it would leave only eyes staring out of a blank, smooth sheet of flesh. Noseless, mouthless, and chinless. He'd go mute, reduced to breathing through his skin, with an endless, droning whistling. He'd be something people would recoil from, or else draw sword and hack at in terror and revulsion. A walking worm that would quickly starve to death.

He wasn't that far gone yet. He could still fare well enough far and wide across Golarion, in increasing desperation to find magic to halt and reverse his curse. Nothing he'd yet found even slowed what was happening to him.

"Yet I remain Tarram Armistrade," he told the dead man on the floor gently. "For now."

His once-handsome face was a ruin, nose gone and mouth a mere slit in a chinless slide of flesh. He covered it with masks that had no magic, because leaving the mask on hastened its foul work.

Yet he dared not leave the cursed mask hidden, for any harm done to it happened to his face, too. Usually he wore it like some sort of hidden codpiece, under his clothes, where it was least noticeable. Where he was wearing it right now.

"Though more truly," he added to the sprawled and forever silent Tarlmond, "I am now The Masked."

It was a matter of necessity. If he went around unmasked, he'd no doubt be mistaken for a monster and slain by the first warrior he passed. The laws of Molthune allowed citizens who perceived danger to slay "horrible monsters." Molthuni law was so clear-cut and brutally simple. Pity for everyone that most people weren't.

The Masked looked around the room and smiled, though he took little pleasure in it. Cozy rooms like this one, chambers of wealth that stank of power and ill-gotten gains, were where he flourished these days. While his victims fell.

Enough self-pity. He took up the poker and stirred the small fire in the grate to spitting, popping vigor. He dropped the intelligence report onto its flaring flames, pinned it there with the point of the poker, and watched it curl and blacken into ash.

When nothing recognizable was left, the tall masked man turned to survey the shelves behind the desk again, peering at the lowest-down tomes.

Ah. There.

Escolarr Tarlmond was as predictable as he was greedy. That particular fat volume. Sigh.

When purchasing a false book as a treasure-coffer, even a dolt should be aware that to buy one out of a shop window in Canorate, from a shop that made scores of identical volumes, meant that many would recognize your hiding place for what it was at a glance.

There'd be a removable floorboard somewhere in this room, too, and a rather better coffer beneath it. With another poisoned needle, no doubt. Best toyed with at leisure, elsewhere, so take the second and leave the first. Between the book coffer, Tarlmond's purse, and the gems that undoubtedly rode in a hollow boot heel, no one would notice the missing floorboard stash.

But first, there was still business to attend to.

Molthuni sword-tutors taught too many showy flourishes. Tarlmond had taken so much time singing his blade free of its scabbard, and needed so much room to do so, that it had been simplicity itself to step inside the man's reach, thrust the elbow of his sword arm away with one hand, and throttle the merchant with the other. A quiet and bloodless death, but it left The Masked needing to account for-or conceal-the congested purple of the dead man's face.

He caught up the decanter that held Tarlmond's best wine, splashed it generously over the corpse's face, front, and hands, then arranged the remains with that purple face in the fire, a goblet in one dead hand and a stool overturned where it would look as if the drunken merchant had tripped over it and ended up in the fire.

Finding the right floorboard, and its spring-dart trap-my, but Tarlmond had been a nasty, suspicious man, and Halidon was better off without him-took but a moment. The coffer thus gained was smaller and lighter than most, which was even better. Into the padded underarm sack it went.