Page 27

The beautiful twilight

I n these days, the moon never moves. It hangs like a massive pearl high over the throne of the Vertex Seal.

Iriset does not know why. Nor do any of the citizens of the empire. For centuries that silver-pink moon has been anchored to Moonshadow City.

The year is marked by how far beneath the moon the sun shines at midday.

When the days are shortest, the sun swings three times that of a raised fist below the moon.

As summer approaches, the sun’s arc lifts closer and closer to the moon, finally slipping behind it at noon, until the day of a total eclipse.

For eight days after the initial total eclipse, the sun moves higher and higher, cresting at midsummer in the Vertex Eclipse, when a brilliant white-hot crown of sun caps the moon, the rest obscured behind.

Then the sun falls for eight days back into the second total eclipse, before continuing its long path south again to midwinter and its lowest arc.

These sixteen days between two summer eclipses are known as the Days of Mercy: two octagonals, one rising and one falling, dedicated to balance, faith, and celebration.

Isidor the Little Cat will be executed on the Day of Final Mercy.

The initial eclipse is in ten days, the Vertex Seal’s wedding in seventeen, and the execution in twenty. That is exactly how long Iriset has to work out a new rescue plan.

“What do you want, Shahd?” Iriset asks the girl as she adjusts the sash around Iriset’s robe.

“Honorie?” Shahd pauses, her hands drifting away from Iriset’s waist.

“What can I do for you, because you are working for me?”

“I work for Her Glory.”

Iriset falls silent for a moment. Trust is impossible, but faith must be found. “You have taken messages for me before, and I need you to do so again.”

“To the Little Cat’s drop.”

“Yes.”

“There was no reply.”

“But you told me five days ago the drop was empty. Someone took the message.”

Shahd inclines her head. “I don’t want anything. Now.”

An open bargain, then. A favor now for a favor later.

Smart, as Iriset doesn’t have much of a choice.

She can’t leave the palace herself. Shahd is quiet behind her, tense lines of flow stretching between them.

The young woman hasn’t betrayed Iriset. Yet.

She seems to like her, well enough. Shahd is descended from an old Sarian tribe, or possibly even a cult.

There will be secrets there that Iriset can use if she ever is forced to.

Iriset says, “I will help you to the best of my ability, when you do want something. Or my friends will, if I am unable. Use the name Amakis to get what you need from the undermarket.”

The only reply is Shahd’s hands again at the sash, fixing the tasseled ends in place.

That evening, Iriset gives Shahd a thin chip of vellum with two eyes sketched: one a cat’s eye, the other her own.

So far she’d only sent probing messages, nothing to implicate anyone.

Little hints to the undermarket drops that she’s reaching out.

For anyone, any word. But now she needs Bittor.

He’s the only cat-eye in the undermarket.

If he lives, if anyone loyal to Isidor sees this message, they’ll get it to him. And he’ll get a reply to her.

Shahd takes it without comment.

Iriset hears that palace security will be entirely recast for the imminent arrival of Singix of the Beautiful Twilight, that the ambassador agreed to let the Vertex Seal arrange everything, and that the needle obelisks appearing in every corridor, hall, and garden are design-anchors for the wedding spectacle.

It explains why she’s seen Raia so infrequently, as the architect has been pulled into the security redesign.

Without permission to join an Iriset can only go for walks around the palace complex at different times of day again, between her activities as Amaranth’s handmaiden.

When possible, Iriset suggests picnics in various gardens with the others, or taking a circuitous route to her drawing class or lessons with Erxan.

She pauses to touch a security knot here, taste the wisp of a tangle where the shield lines of the Crystal Desert hiccup as they enter an arched breezeway there. Building a map in her mind.

She waits for news from Bittor. She draws repeating patterns, the succulents of the palace complex like an elaborate garden, hundreds of roses clustered together. She hides the map in the lines.

She waits.

When she can’t settle down to sleep, but nor can she work on the map for how tired she is, Iriset changes to drawing eyes and lips and hands, skeletal systems. She listens to the pulse of the palace, which should relax her, but instead riles her up.

She pulls out her own hair to knot into little spiders, sparking them to life with ecstatic force so they dance and skitter across the tiles.

She hums against the lattice window in the four rhythms of the four forces, summoning sleepy rainbow bees and a tiny family of skull sirens who eat up her forces like worms. She fucks herself from the inside out, focused on the pull of flow and arousing rising forces in her blood and skin, deep ecstatic in both mouths, tracing those falling connections from teeth to nipple to navel to clitoris, to see if she can bring herself without touching.

Or sometimes she does it the old-fashioned way with pinching and penetrating fingers.

And when exhaustion passes her out, Iriset dreams very badly.

Amaranth asks what bothers her, what draws bruises under her eyes, and Iriset doesn’t try to hide. “Can you imagine what this is like for me? Waiting? Waiting as my father waits to die?” she asks. “Imagine, and then help me. I want mercy for him. I want to beg mercy.”

Her Glory simply says no. And, “This is the end of your old life, hiha, and it is supposed to hurt.”

On her way back to her room from an afternoon lesson in personal combat from the grim Sidoné, Iriset is sweaty and feeling some kind of melancholy way, but with hardly any time to bathe before her lesson with Ambassador Erxan.

Her mind swarms with the need to get closer to the security designs, and when Iriset sees Garnet méra Be? standing alone near the Silent Chapel, she instantly veers toward him.

The palace’s Silent Chapel is across the complex from the Moon-Eater’s Temple.

Built of sparkling silver-pink marble, it’s composed of a spiral of columns that lead to the central altar.

A lofted dome of clear quartz and pink amethyst rises above it, four times higher than the columns.

Iriset has never been inside it, but assumes it’s like the Silent Chapel she visited in Saltbath, meant for walking meditation and dotted with small alcoves and rock gardens for contemplation.

Garnet glances at her, then settles back into his waiting stance. Hands on hips, chin down. His force-blade is sheathed against his back today, the hilt aimed down to be drawn from his right hip.

“Why don’t you pray with him?” she asks when she arrives, assuming Lyric méra Esmail is pacing the route of the labyrinth.

“Not feeling quiet enough today,” Garnet says. “Can I help you with something? You look in a rush.”

Iriset taps her fingers to her eyelids, then looks directly at him. “I’ve been working with palace architect Raia mér Omorose, but since an was assigned to the princess’s security, I’ve had no chance to practice design. I want to assist an.”

He turns incredulous eyes at her. “On security for the Vertex Seal’s wedding.”

Iriset lowers her gaze, though it chafes more than usual. “Why not?”

Garnet says nothing.

Eyes still down, Iriset shrugs one shoulder. “I know security well.”

“And I should give you better access to it,” he drawls with deep sarcasm.

“Yes.”

Garnet stares at her, and Iriset changes tactics. “Let me see your force-blade.”

The body-twin barks a laugh—he sounds genuinely amused.

“Do you think I can hurt you with it?” Iriset scoffs, though obviously she could—just not by using it as a sword. She’d strip the force from the metal and fling it at him. Paralyze him maybe, or shock his entire system and stop his heart. But she won’t .

Garnet presses his rather lush lips together and grasps the hilt. He twists to unlock it, then pulls it free in a smooth motion.

Iriset steps back, focused on the shine of it, on the cleave of forces as the edge slides through the air.

It’s force-magnetized steel, with lines of design etched into the blade.

Iriset has read that a true master can channel any force through it, but that most are inclined to their dominant force and their blade attuned to their personal inner design. “May I?”

The body-twin flips the force-blade, so that the cutting edge lines up along his forearm, and holds it out, hilt-first.

Unable to keep the grin from her face, Iriset takes it.

Her fingers stroke along his rough knuckles and she barely even notices.

When she holds the smooth hilt—inlaid with opal for silky resonance—he lets go, and the weight of it bends her wrist. But Iriset is lost in the feeling of the forces.

Garnet’s dominant force is flow, the opposing force to Iriset’s ecstatic.

He is all heartbeat and breath, the transformation of ice into water into vapor, where nothing is made or destroyed, but everything becomes everything else.

The force-blade warms in her palm, and she draws flow up through her veins, into her chest. She’d intended to slice through a bit of the security at their feet with the blade and then stitch it back together, but with the weapon in hand, the sensations are all she can think about.

Iriset closes her eyes and begins to move.