Page 16

A slip of silk

I riset makes a charged stylus with the carefully shattered crab pick and clay stolen from her art class.

With it she pulls apart the plumbing in the baths of the women’s petal to obtain a thread of braided flow and falling to settle around the jade cuff as a stasis ring.

Such threads can often be found in flushing mechanisms. She mistakenly opens a pipe she expected to be dry, and ends up exploring the intricate weave style of the mechanism entirely soaked. It’s worth it.

The next afternoon, when the sun shines directly through her lattice window, Iriset uses the bright light to examine the jade bracelet.

The braid of flow and falling she curls into a circle and sets the cuff into it: The design shivers into delicate stasis.

It shouldn’t alert anyone that she’s meddling like a null wire might.

Once the seal is open, Iriset gently pushes at the elegant layers of threaded architecture to find the knots and braids that work the power.

She feels a twinge like nausea in her wrist, but she continues to figure the best way to temporarily shield or quiet the cuff so the royal architect won’t be able to trace her paths through the palace.

Iriset triggers a thread of rising force and the entire seal chars almost instantly.

To hide her meddling, she puts all the design back together and snaps the cuff in half, making sure to crush the seal.

She grits her teeth and splays her hand, then uses the stylus to drive ecstatic force through the skin of her wrist and tug at the flow of her inner design to break capillaries so that a bruise flushes in exactly the shape of the cuff.

It should appear she’s hurt herself when she accidentally broke the seal.

Satisfaction curls in her chest as the bruise forms: Such delicate work takes tremendous control.

Menna is not happy with the damage, but within hours has a new seal built for Iriset.

But Iriset knows how to trick it now. She needs only four shards of tourmaline to build a balanced shield cap to mitigate the energy of the seal when she wishes not to be traced by the palace architecture.

There’s no way she can source design-grade tourmaline in an art class, and even Nielle’s mask making wouldn’t be good enough cover to ask for a high-quality force conductor. And once she’s free to move around, she’ll need specialized design supplies to make a craftmask to disguise her father.

That is what brings Iriset, nearly a quad after Amaranth rescued her from prison, to knock at the door of Raia mér Omorose’s office in the branch of the palace reserved for royal architects. (She has forty-five days to save her father.)

“Come in!” Raia calls, voice muffled.

Iriset settles her shoulders and enters, face tilted down in the appearance of politeness. Because she’s not at Amaranth’s side, she wears a plain attendant’s cloth mask, as Garnet commanded that first afternoon. Behind the orange cloth, her eyes scan everything.

Raia’s office is octagonally shaped in smooth stucco, as many architectural offices are, to better serve balanced design.

A worktable is affixed to the southernmost wall, narrow as a shelf, and the rest of the walls are covered by cabinets.

No window opens the room to light, though Iriset spies the star-eye cut into the ceiling with its opposite directly below in Raia’s floor.

The designer kneels in the center of the room before a squat square table covered in vellum that curls at each corner but is held down by glass drop weights.

A blue cloth mask binds ans brown hair from ans face, though much of it tumbles down ans back along with the tasseled end of the cloth.

Raia designs in a long-sleeved robe, full trousers, and slippers.

If she were free to be Silk, she’d tell an that ans design would immediately improve by a quarter margin if an learned to sense force resonance with ans lips and spine and the soles of ans feet.

Raia focuses on the diagram before an, using the thickest point of a quad-stylus to pin the corner of three force-lines down. Iriset moves nearer, steps silent in her palace slippers. She cranes to see, and in surprise says, “It’s a triangle.”

The designer glances up. “Oh, it’s you.”

She touches her fingers to her eyelids as an sits back on ans heels. “Raia mér Omorose,” she says politely.

“Iriset mé Isidor.”

Raia set down ans stylus and stands. “I am glad to see you, Iriset. I thought to invite you here, for a conversation, but did not know if you’d be willing. In a few quads, when you’ve settled… I would have.”

“I thank you for the consideration.”

They study each other for a moment.

“You look better,” an finally says. Ans bottom lip is flushed, and Iriset wonders if an chews it as an works.

Clasping her hands before her, which sends ans eyes to the jade cuff, she says, “It was suggested that I ask you how my father was captured. It must have been betrayal, I thought, but that is not what Sidoné mé Dalir claims.”

Raia’s shoulders jerk as an takes a fast breath, then an blows it out loudly and turns away from her. An walks across the tiled floor to one of the cabinets. With a ring on ans left forefinger, an keys open an architectural lock and reaches inside to remove something.

It’s a scrap of silk.

Her silk. So sheer and delicate ans fingers are visible through it. It frays at the diagonal where it must have been carefully cut free of the mask she’d made.

“You recognize it.”

Iriset realizes her lips have parted and she tastes ecstatic force snapping at the tip of her tongue. She closes her mouth and lowers her eyes. “I do.”

“I’ve never seen anything so fine. When it functioned, it must have clung to the face like skin.”

Glancing at an, she sees the admiration in ans face, and recalls the eager arguments an made to her in the prison, wanting her to explain what Silk taught her, wanting to work together. “Why show that to me, when I ask about betrayal.”

“It was not betrayal,” Raia says, sympathy gentling ans excitement. “I thought Silk was making her own material, from raw cocoons, and so we traced the imported worms. That’s how the army-investigators found your father’s tower.”

Iriset’s knees weaken. It was her fault.

Instead of fighting it, she lets her body bow, sinking slowly to the floor as despair sours her stomach.

Raia kneels beside her, not touching. “I am sorry, Iriset. I imagine what I would feel were my mother or father facing execution. You do him credit, to seem so strong. You do all the Saltbath credit, and your extended family.”

“Don’t be kind to me,” she murmurs, wondering vaguely if her grandparents are all right.

If they’re attempting to submit petitions on her behalf.

They might, though they should know better.

If it went well it would still take quads to work through the overtly complex bureaucracy of the Holy City to free the Little Cat’s daughter.

If it went poorly, they might be arrested, too. Better if they leave it alone.

Maybe Amaranth will find out for her, or Sidoné, if Shahd can’t.

Or won’t. Iriset looks back at the scrap of sheer silk.

It just flops there, still in ans hand and pressed against ans knee.

Iriset reaches out and skims her finger against its softness.

Would Raia offer it to her, a memento? Unlikely.

“It’s so perfect,” an says, releasing the silk. “She is such an innovator. I have examined her glove, too, and what little was recovered.”

“Is that how you earned your new office?” Iriset asks sharply.

“Discovering the means to locate Silk was how. The rest is my duty.”

Iriset slides the silk into her lap, spreading it against the dark green linen of her trousers. The silk takes up a green shade. When she flattens her hand over it, her palm tingles with remembered resonance. She whispers, “Has she given anything to you?”

“I am not participating in her interrogation any longer.”

A tremor of discomfort accompanies ans words, and shame makes Iriset vicious: “No stomach for torture?”

“She used a trick to ruin her voice,” Raia says. “Something she swallowed.”

Iriset stares. The candy. She’d thought it was for some scheme of the Little Cat’s. Blackmail or something—no. She hadn’t thought at all.

“Will she break her own fingers before she writes anything down?” Raia asks so softly, there’s no voice left in an, either.

Iriset shakes her head. But maybe. She, at least, invented no such tool.

Dalal or Paser would have to hurt themselves the old-fashioned way.

Iriset hates this, hates her torture applied to someone else.

Hates the cold, sickening relief to be spared it.

There’s no way for her to ask if the Vertex Seal ordered the torture of Dalal or Paser without giving away that neither is Silk.

As long as the Vertex Seal believes he has the apostate, she’s safe enough with Amaranth.

“And my father?” she asks instead, though it’s hardly better. “Is he being hurt?”

“I do not know, Iriset. But if you consider how many he has hurt in his turn, perhaps you will have some understanding of the army’s perspective.”

“Do not lecture me about my father from the heart of the Holy City. The empire itself relies on harm, on the suffering of others, Raia mér Omorose. It is the nature of empire to consume.”

The designer’s eyes widen into circles at her outburst.

Iriset clenches her jaw, pressing her mouth and eyes shut, irate at her loss of control.

Isidor the Little Cat had said that to her, more than once.

It is the nature of empire to consume. To him it was a fact, an excuse to consume in turn.

The Moon-Eater, unraveled, is only hunger, and the Moon-Eater’s Mistress feeds him.

The Little Cat feeds the undermarket. Normal, natural, the Holy Design of things.