Page 22

The little cat

T he afternoon before Iriset is to visit her father, Raia tells her that Silk is dead.

“Silk,” an begins, and Iriset startles hard enough to stumble.

Raia reaches for her elbow and she jerks away. How did an know? What gave her away? She draws her shoulders back and tilts her chin up, pulling a cool smile across her face.

But the architect’s gaze is angled down. “I’m sorry,” an murmurs. “She’s been poisoned. General Bey believes the Little Cat instructed it be done so that she gives no more secrets of his away—not that she was.” Raia grimaces.

“Oh. That…” Iriset struggles for the appropriate grief response amid waves of extreme relief. “Is… to be expected,” she finishes in a whisper.

Raia’s mouth pulls into a disapproving line. “It ought not be. It’s terrible. She served him, he shouldn’t—it’s a betrayal.”

Iriset grasps her hands together against her chest. Her identity has not been uncovered, and it makes her furiously glad.

It hadn’t been her, she isn’t dead. She’s alive and can still save her father.

The sheer relief makes her cold enough to shudder.

A woman is dead because of her, a friend, and she’s glad .

The cold flashes hot as unruly ecstatic charges take over.

Nausea like strings of rising force climbs sticky up her throat. She’s selfish in her relief, and depraved for being glad. Iriset swallows again and again, then manages, “She expected it. She knew it would come. It was part of her bargain with my father.”

“That’s monstrous,” Raia says.

It is.

But Iriset shakes her head. “Everyone—everyone bargains with him.”

“Iriset,” the architect begins, reaching to brush ans knuckles against her shoulder.

“May I go?” she whispers. She has to get control of herself.

An gives her leave and she flees back to her chambers.

Once there, she pulls the door closed and stumbles to the lattice window to press her forehead against it.

She stares through star-shaped cutouts and whispers a balancing count prayer, an invocation of the four forces.

Her breath catches a wisp of her hair, ruffling it against her chin.

A tear spills from one eye, then the other, asymmetrical.

She doesn’t even know still if it was Paser or Dalal who took her place. Paser had a lover, and Dalal had a son. That child could get the news Iriset dreads: His mother is dead. To keep Iriset safe. Because Iriset is more important.

The reality of it scoops out a hunk of the pride she’s always embraced, splattering it onto the floor like viscera.

She aches to curl down against the cool mosaic of the floor.

To melt. She’s no mastermind. She’s not supposed to be the one plotting, just making tools to enact her father’s will.

Inventing, experimenting. Scheming isn’t her job!

Or her purpose. Design is her only purpose.

All she’s ever wanted. Her only ambition.

Iriset grinds her teeth to maintain control before she falls to pieces.

If she doesn’t maintain her poise, her father will die next.

She purses her lips and blows a long, quiet sigh. When she’s pushed out every ounce of air, she pauses, deprived, not drawing any new breath.

In this moment Iriset feels it, with one teary cheek pressed to the window lattice: the slow rhythm of the palace’s design.

Like someone else’s careful breathing. In her fog of panic she imagines a sleeping lion beneath the foundations, a hibernating tortoise from the Apostate Age, its shell the stones of the world itself.

Iriset matches her breathing to the rhythm of the palace’s design.

Her thoughts meander along curious, distracting paths: Could the rhythm maintain foundational integrity?

Did designing in a repeating pulse hold the complicated threads of alarms, plumbing, wind, shieldwork, art, ovens, and a hundred other systems knotted together without degradation? Push back against entropy?

Impossible. All design deteriorates, she knows. Either maintenance or demolition is necessary eventually. Someday even Aharté’s moon will fall.

Isidor the Little Cat is incarcerated in the apostate tower, the highest, most isolated of the prison towers.

To reach him, Iriset is forced to pass through one of the three branches of the main prison building—three to keep it off-balance and always rippling with a tension between the foundational forces.

The missing force is ecstatic. While some doors hum with ready rising force and threads of alarm, others are nulled and no architecture can pass through.

It’s a design built to disrupt rather than reject.

As Iriset follows behind a Seal guard, she marks every variation and its effect upon her jade cuff.

She’s theorized that the design of the cuff itself, its link to her inner design, will allow it to hold its spark of force even when she slips through the null doors.

Luckily, the jade cuff functions as she posited.

Which means the craftmask she spent the night perfecting will, too.

At the base of the apostate tower, a soldier and an army combat-designer work in tandem to unlock a small wooden door.

Iriset steps first into the dim glow of force-lanterns, then up into the narrow, spiraling staircase.

The Seal guard follows, turning his shoulders so the heavy padded armor fits.

The narrowness and tight curve, the steepness and depth of the steps, are meant to further impede escape or rescue.

The only quick way out of the apostate tower is to leap from the mortally high window.

A thin crescent landing tops the staircase, and at the center of its inner curve is a waist-high door. “You must crawl,” says the soldier who came up behind the Seal guard, and shoves herself between them to crouch and unlock the short door.

“You have an hour,” adds the Seal guard.

Iriset nods and gets to her hands and knees.

Nervous sweat drips down Iriset’s temple as she emerges into the cell.

Plain, dull tiles cover the floor, and the wall is curved stucco.

A pallet and thin pillow are rolled up beneath a small, tightly latticed window; there’s a slightly thicker sitting pillow, a relief bucket, a pitcher and bowl for water, and a stack of three books.

Her father stands at the window, his back to her, and Iriset knows he does it to prove his lack of fear, lack of concern over whoever enters.

She quietly gets to her feet, scrubbing dust from the knees of her trousers, and uses the end of her mask to discreetly wipe sweat from her temple.

She bites her lip, staring at Isidor. A threadbare brown robe hangs from his narrow shoulders; his feet are bare and dirty beneath the ankle ties of his trousers.

His hair has been razed close to his skull, and in the bare light that pierces the quad-scythe pattern of the lattice, it shines silver.

Isidor the Little Cat doesn’t turn. His patience, when hunting, is legendary.

“Dad,” Iriset says, and in a spark of ecstatic movement, he spins.

“Iriset,” he breathes. His gray eyes dart over her, taking everything in.

Iriset does the same, noting the lines at his eyes, the paleness of his lips, the ragged brown-and-silver beard the same length as his shorn hair.

The suntan that used to darken his ruddy Cloud King skin to a tone more like that of his daughter’s has faded.

There are hollows under his narrow cheekbones, and the knot he’s never let her fix in his proud nose stands out angrily.

As she stares, his hands twitch into fists.

“I’m all right,” Iriset says. Her heart pounds, for she doesn’t know if he’ll approve of her game.

With the grace of the cat for which he was named, he strides to her, cupping her face. In Old Sarenpet, which has no personal pronouns, he says, “Bags under daughter’s eyes. Lost weight.”

“Stink,” she shoots back in the same, but a whisper.

Then she falls against him, arms around his neck.

She squeezes, pressing hard, ear to ear.

The fuzz of his hair tickles her cheek. It doesn’t matter that he smells of sweat and grime—it might’ve been worse.

The cell is clean, watered. He doesn’t reek of urine or blood or infection.

Iriset clings to him. Her heart blasts and she feels like everything inside her flares white as lightning.

He’s alive—alive!—and they have a chance.

She has a chance. She tucks her face against his neck and he puts his chin over her head.

They breathe together, automatically falling into the eight-count meditation.

Like Amaranth, Isidor’s dominant inner force is falling, the kind of pull that turns the attention of others toward him and inspires loyalty.

Though much of his youth had been spent attempting to avoid that attention, as his undermarket empire grew, Isidor learned to manipulate his charisma to gain friends, allies, followers.

His daughter has always relied upon it, loved best to reach for that falling force with the spikes of her dominant ecstatic, allow his energy to calm hers. To center her in him.

But in the cell, when she opens to him, his falling force drags at her like a whirlpool. He needs so much, and never has before. Iriset clutches tighter. She breathes carefully.

“What is kitten doing here?” her father murmurs into her mask.

A shudder plunges through her body and she pushes back to look at his face again, but leaves her hands on his shoulders, unprepared to let go.

“Getting father out. Have a craftmask wrapped in this cloth mask, and extra clothing, and overlarge slippers. A perfect Iriset mé Isidor mask. Dad must drop shoulders and keep hands mostly hidden in the sleeves. There’s a flow-net woven into scarf to help. ”

Isidor’s brow lowers. “And daughter?”

“Must wait here. Only one entered, only one can leave.”