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The air outside the study is cool with morning breezes from the windcatchers carved into every level of the tower, but that wind brings sounds of battle and desperation: steel clashing and cries of pain, the shaking of stone and ecstatic force.

Iriset dashes to the wide spiral stairs up and up along the outer edge of the tower.

Her bare toes hardly touch the limestone bricks, and her fingers skim along the smooth white stucco walls, until she spills up into the blue landing.

Untouched yet with violence, the landing is a small sitting area with two levels: one of perfect mosaic tiles in the shapes of blue gentians, the second layered with rugs and pillows in every shade of blue beside a huge lattice window spanning nearly half the entire curved wall.

The glittering lattice snakes that usually wind through the cutouts, soaking in sunlight, are nowhere to be seen.

Hiding, she hopes, sparing another brief thought for her poor dead spiders.

Iriset sits hard on the second level and pulls on her pantaloons, knotting them around her waist under her robe, and adjusts the laces at her ankles.

She shoves her arms into the short jacket and ties it under her breasts, but loosely in case she needs to run or scream or fight.

Finally, she pins the red silk mask to her hair, tucking it up so that a quick tug will let it fall over her eyes.

By now Iriset hears voices just below, methodical and ordered: soldiers searching the levels of the tower.

She stands. Through the soles of her feet she feels the tower’s architecture trip and startle.

Fear disrupts her body’s design, an influx of ecstatic energy.

She’s unused to being afraid under either name she’s used: Safe as Isidor’s daughter, coddled by murderers and thieves.

Safe as Silk, too, thanks to her own skills and the Little Cat’s favor.

Now Iriset needs to balance her inner design for calm.

Fear serves nothing once its warning is made.

Hard boots clomp up the stairs to the landing.

She is Iriset mé Isidor, and even in his absence she will make her father proud.

Her father, so tough and sly he rules the Moonshadow City undermarket.

He is slight and wiry, hardly larger than her, yet he commands respect through his reputation and deeds.

He would not give Iriset sympathy, were he here, but snap at her to lift her chin and face the consequences of their choices with eyes clear.

Wear her mask demurely, be what he needs her to be in that moment—a daughter sheltered and no threat to the empire.

Keep her criminal identity secret. Survive what comes next so that she can make better, slyer choices in the future.

Just as the first soldier’s head appears in the well, Iriset jerks the red edge of her mask down. It brushes her nose and falls just to her lips.

The world turns hazy red as she peers through the thin silk.

The soldier’s own cloth mask wraps tight around their hair and face, leaving only a slit for their eyes, a blatant white that continues down in a uniform of lacquered armor over a short white robe and pants and thick boots: all clearly displaying the crimson splatter of their work.

Their short sword is dark with smears of it.

Behind them come more soldiers, identical in uniform and size, who stop around Iriset in a half ring.

One says, in an impatient fem-forward voice, “Who are you, girl?” The speaker’s eyes are black, the slit of skin visible a darker brown than her companions’.

None are the mirané brown of Moonshadow’s ruling ethnicity.

“Iriset mé Isidor,” she says boldly.

“The Little Cat has a daughter ?” one of the other soldiers says.

Iriset doesn’t move.

The woman soldier darts a hand out and Iriset recoils, expecting a slap, but the woman only rips the mask off her face.

Anger flushes rising force up her spine, and Iriset struggles not to show it. If this woman will not give her the little respect of the mask, what else might be taken from her?

“Get her out of here,” the commanding soldier says, and her soldiers obey with grabbing, hard hands, dragging Iriset down the spiral stairs.

This is what Iriset does not know about the attack on the Little Cat’s tower: The city army of the Vertex Seal has been targeting her specifically for over a year. Or rather, targeting Silk .

Rumors of Silk’s existence have filtered through the gossip of the small kings of the Holy City for nearly seven years now.

She is said to be a prodigy at design who invented a wondrous—and proprietary—material called craftsilk that every architect in Moonshadow would like to get their hands on.

But Silk doesn’t share. She works exclusively for the Little Cat, and rumors accuse her of everything from creating design nets for cheating at cards to illegal human architecture that can disguise the features of Isidor’s thieves and spies so they can slip into the halls of power or infiltrate a rival’s bank.

Some say Silk can cause a heart attack with a kiss of ecstatic force, others that she merely helps the Little Cat toy with his prey, using tricks of flow to keep a rival awake for questioning or wearing a mask of a Seal attendant’s face to whisper here and there, shifting the tides of scandal.

Perhaps she is a rumor only, or an amalgam of several talented designers in the Little Cat’s employ.

The latter opinion held the most favor for a while, until Silk herself began publishing brief, passionate papers that edged extremely near a pro-human-architecture stance.

In the third paper she directly refuted the rumors she was several people.

But the city army has little evidence of anything other than that Silk is a woman.

All they know is that since her appearance, the Little Cat has grown bolder in sending out his disciples.

They scale towers like rock skinks and paint his graffiti for all to see, smuggle goods through blockades held by the city army, and hijack force-ribbons in order to stop traffic, jamming the schedules of the richest folk in Moonshadow for whatever no-doubt nefarious reason.

And they never get caught. They leave only evidence they intend to leave.

Under the leadership of the Little Cat and his pet apostate, the undermarket has thrived.

While the Little Cat keeps his people to thieving, gambling, and smuggling, the occasional venture into fixing scandals or tugging small kings’ political strings—oh, and a few memorable murders—the recent growth has made many in the army concerned about how easy it would be for Isidor’s organization to turn to outright rebellion.

And the Vertex Seal is always deeply concerned with rebellion.

Two years ago, apprehending Silk and her benefactor, Isidor the Little Cat, was declared a priority by the mirané council, with the backing of the Vertex Seal, Lyric méra Esmail His Glory.

But for internecine mirané council reasons, the army has been denied their request for access to investigator-designers from the Great Schools of Architecture.

Then some enterprising commander suggested they stop arguing for access based upon the crimes the Little Cat had been accused of—for what are such atrocities as murder and thieving to the Vertex Seal, which expands its imperial grip in ever-increasing waves through much the same?

Lyric, however, is known for his piety and devotion to She Who Loves Silence, and so might not apostasy be an easier argument to make?

Surely Lyric could be convinced of the likelihood that Silk had broken the goddess’s proscription against engaging in human architecture, not merely written of it.

Apostasy, not atrocity, would spur him to action.

It worked. The zealous can be quite predictable.

No offense.

So the city army, the small kings who rule the various precincts of the city, and the Great Schools of Architecture bound themselves together in the chase.

(The Great Schools argued for Silk to be taken alive, for their magisters are desperate with envy that an unknown, anonymous designer had learned to fashion the forces of architectural design into spells as fine as spider gossamer, when they themselves could not even replicate such workings.

Ha!) This was an unheard-of alliance hunting Silk and the Little Cat, but an initially unsuccessful one, for the criminals slipped again and again through the army’s fingers.

Until a young designer with just the right combination of curiosity and ambition set ans mind to tracing Silk through less obvious means.

Raia mér Omorose is just twenty-two and from a Pir-pale family of little means to buy ans way into a Great School or bribe any of the ranking designers to apprentice an directly.

So Raia relied on ans wits and determination and no small skills at design to find other ways of promotion.

An charmed ans way into the possession of a scrap of a thin scarf Silk had created apparently to wrap around a thief’s face and work as a half-mask that would add a birthmark or beard to their jaw.

It was, as suspected, dangerously close to human architecture.

But it only hid the face of the person wearing it; no alteration took place.

Carefully dissecting the threads of force—mostly flow for flexibility and ecstatic for the amazing adhesive qualities—Raia realized Silk was not imbuing her designs into actual spiderwebs alone any longer, if she ever had been so exclusive (she had), but strands of pure silk.

Though an hardly could afford silk anself, ans brother had been recently married, and for the seed necklaces, Raia’s mother had purchased a small skein of raw silk from the Ceres Remnants.

The silk had come already twisted into stronger threads of seven or ten strands, and cut shorter than this single long, nearly invisible strand woven through the designed scarf.

This led Raia to a startling epiphany: Silk was unspooling her own strands of silk from the cocoons of the worms. She—or someone on her behalf—was importing cocoons so that she could control every aspect of her material.

Although ans admiration for this mysterious woman’s ingenuity was veering toward a dangerously romantic swell in ans heart, Raia revealed the discovery to the investigator-designer in charge, since Raia anself did not have the resources to trace imports from the Remnants into the empire.

Thus, on day two of the Blossoming Contemplation quad—today—the army of the Vertex Seal surrounded a six-story tower in the Saltbath precinct. As the sun rose into a dawning sky the same purple of winter cacti, soldiers blasted through a beautiful arch of design security and attacked.