Free Lords of the Seventh Swarm by David Farland Page B

immediately stiffened. Felph seemed more than a bit mad himself. He had worn the masks, of that Gallen felt certain. Perhaps the mask had made him insane. Certainly a normal man would not have howled for his guests to leave his party, would not have bayed like a wounded hound almost as soon as they entered his home. Felph was insane, and possibly dangerous. Gallen didn’t trust his judgment, didn’t want to don the mask. Yet a certain morbid fascination gripped him. Gallen wanted to know for certain that Felph spoke the truth.
    Gallen went to the case, pulled out the mask that Felph had indicated—a mask of deep purples with threads of red among the silver writing. He took a deep breath, then held the strange birdlike mask up to his face with both hands. Almost immediately he stiffened, as if bracing himself for a blow. Wearing the mask somehow seemed suffocating—though Gallen could breathe easily enough. It was an odd sensation. He felt as if—his head had elongated, as if it were pulled into a far place.
    Almost immediately he saw something—a vision one might call it, and the oddity of it repelled him. At first, his mind could not make sense of what he saw. A world as flat and featureless as a sea of molten lead, skies in banded shades of yellow and crimson, and green birds of light wheeling through the skies. One of the birds was flying toward him, growing larger and larger in his field of vision, and its thoughts seemed to pummel Gallen. Half-formed questions formed in Gallen’s mind—questions that he felt, curiously, must be answered once posed.
    He choked back a sob, then drew the mask away, shoving it toward Felph. He found that he had dropped protectively to one knee.
    He blinked rapidly and shook his head, as if trying to wake from a disturbing dream, then said weakly. “All right. I believe you.”
    “What, what did you see?” Orick nearly shouted.
    “It is not so much what you see,” Felph said. “It was what you think and feel. The ancestors speak to your whole soul—your hopes and desires and dreams.”
    Orick asked, “What did they say?”
    Gallen shook his head. “They asked me …” he struggled for words, “if I could seek for the Waters of Strength. To seek with my whole being. They told me to find … peace?” He frowned, as if uncertain of the message.
    Maggie looked to Gallen, then to Felph, incredulous.
    Felph said, “Would you like to try it, Maggie, Orick? Do you want to hear the voices of the ancestors?”
    Maggie shook her head vigorously. Orick and Tallea declined the offer.
    “Such a shame,” Felph said. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind. Here: this mask is for you, Gallen, since you had the courage to wear it. It’s quite valuable. It dates to the thirty-third ascendancy, a historical period that ended about three thousand years ago. The finest masks were made then.” He presented the mask to Gallen with a bow. Gallen took it, gingerly, put it under his arm.
    “I—I don’t get it,” Orick said. “You said that the Qualeewoohs had conquered time and space. If that’s true, why don’t you bring us one?”
    Felph smiled broadly. “Well, Orick, that is hard to explain, and I don’t know the answer for sure myself. The Qualeewoohs say that the ancestors are `flying between the stars.’ I think that phrase means, quite frankly, that they do not exist in the physical universe. They have been transformed into something else, something that travels to another dimension, where time and space as we know them no longer exist.”
    Maggie seemed astonished at this. She pushed up at her mantle, as if to shove it from her head. She did that at times when it was downloading too much information to her. “That would require a more sophisticated level of technology than even we have!” she said. “We’ve never crossed dimensional boundaries.”
    Felph shrugged. “Qualeewooh technology differs from ours, yet I doubt it is ‘more sophisticated.’ “
    Maggie said,