I got run an Infernal Salon workshop at WisCon just now! Since I was on my computer to do so, I just wrote this write into my blog, so what you see is what you get after 20 minutes of free-writing off these prompts. LOL! First drafts!
The woman in the sun mask smiled at the musicians. The drummer had her eyes closed, but the guitarist caught the smile and reflected it back like a mirror. Only a few of the masqueraders were dancing. It was early in the night, and most were still replete from the feast, sitting sodden in their chairs. A few of the younger people, teenagers minding their toddler siblings, had ventured onto the dance floor and were bopping along, wearing the faces of frogs or flower petals or, in one instance, the mask of a much older man. As the person in the mask was maybe no more than five or six, it caused much uproar among the onlookers, to see a nonagenarian leaping and spinning and hooting, a hooligan among hobgoblins.
The woman in the sun mask was interested in the music. Had she not been attending the masquerade for a very specific purpose, had she been there solely to enjoy herself, she might have joined the children on the dance floor. She could have orbited around them benignly, casting her light upon their antics. But there were rules to this sort of encounter. No one could no who she was. She had to complete her task before the stroke of midnight. She then had to disappear. After that, the ball–as it were–would be in the other’s court.
Above the glass ceiling, clouds smudged the closed eyelid of the sky like phosphenes. No stars tonight. Perhaps, like her, they had all fallen, here, tonight, to attend this masquerade. Or perhaps they were all in hiding, like the one she sought.
Perhaps the one she sought was not here at all. Perhaps they had broken their pact, or had forgotten, or sought to punish her for what had happened after the last masquerade, not a hundred years ago, in a different country. She had worn a different mask that night, stitched leather, red, with a bull’s great horns. She had been the pursuer, and they the pursued. She had driven them into a mountain cave, and rolled a great boulder over the entrance. Their hundred-year challenge? To work their way back out, and design an even greater challenge to trap her here on the planet for her turn, whilst the other was granted leave to return to their celestial orbit.
They weren’t gods, exactly. But humanity benefited from their presence among them, no matter how remote. One time, she had been dropped at the bottom of a well. But humans figured out how to extract wishes from that well, and she did find the damp and dark soothing. She came out of that trap wealthy with coins, which she distributed where she saw fit before returning to her sphere.
She wondered if her partner had discovered something in those mountains that had made their stay worthwhile. How could they not? She had chosen that range most carefully, most specifically…
But where were they?
Ah. There.
Across the ballroom floor, dancing with a group of three toddlers, each of whom were wearing masks made out of twists of metal, orreries and astrolabes and armillary spheres. They themselves, barely clothed in a diaphanous sheet–thankfully this present age was not at all prudish–wore a mask of one of the baby-faced wind gods–the god “Enemigo” she thought, the hot dry wind from the south.
The moment she saw them, they turned their mask and peered in her direction.
Masks cannot smile, she thought.
She knew they could not smile. And yet, this one did.
They nodded their head, just once, regal. She turned her shoulder, brushed past a teenager wearing a dung beetle for a face, and kicked off her shoes.
The clock struck midnight.
The chase was on.
C.S.E. Cooney 