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The Little Cat’s daughter

W hen Iriset was seven years old, her father brought her a three-legged bobcat kitten.

How she’d adored the black tufts at its ears and its round green eyes, the large pads of its feet and long, fluffy tail.

Its fur was colored like sand in the shadow of a drooping juniper, just like her father’s hair.

She’d watched it learn to leap without stumbling, to play awkwardly with only three legs, and she’d designed it a pair of wings made of linen, her own hair, and long twigs of rolled vellum.

In a slick work of genius, she married the wings to the kitten’s musculature so that it could control them, inventing a new sort of creature.

The wings did not give flight to the desert cat, but helped it glide, helped it balance.

They beat gently in the slightest breeze.

Her father was furious but did not yell, instead only took the bobcat kitten away and explained in plain terms that such design reeked of forbidden human architecture: No designer could attempt to create life of any sort, for life was the purview of the goddess alone.

“Do you understand why the time before Aharté is called the Apostate Age?” he asked.

“Because architects could do whatever they wanted,” she complained.

Instead of laughing at her sass as he often did, Isidor’s mouth hardened.

“I will have a collar of null wire fashioned for you if you do not appreciate the dangers of apostasy. Architects created wonders and they created monsters before the Glorious Vow. Not only the fragments that remain now—the skull sirens and micro-vultures—but chimeras, half-men, undead, unicorns, and flying whales capable of devouring entire families.” The Little Cat stopped talking, for he saw the thrill blossom in her gaze.

“Unicorns?” Iriset whispered.

He crouched and put his warm hands to her cheeks, staring into her eyes, and she stared right back.

Her father’s eyes were gray and flecked brown, just like a Cloud King, and even then Iriset was wondering if she could design a window that looked exactly like them.

She’d seen a dead man’s eyes once, when she snuck out of her bedroom in their old petal apartment.

Her father had been conducting business he expected to be nonviolent, or it wouldn’t have happened where his wife and child slept.

Iriset hadn’t witnessed the kill, but she’d stared at the blank eyes of the dead man, his head tilted toward her and blood all over the floor.

Though at seven she’d not yet designed her first craftmask, or even conceptualized it, she made the intuitive leap that it was not accuracy nor detail that would create the perfect illusion of life in a craftmask, but motion and reflection. Death was still. Life trembled with force.

“Iriset,” her father said gently, seeing her curiosity regarding the unicorn.

“I was wrong. You do not have to understand. You simply have to obey. Do not turn your attention to human architecture, or anything that glances against it. If you do, I will collar you. That is my vow. Now it is your turn.”

She put her small peach-brown hands against his white cheeks so that they mirrored each other’s poses. “Did you kill the kitten?” Iriset asked.

“Yes.”

Ecstatic force crackled down her spine, a tremor she automatically breathed into balance with the flow of her heartbeat.

It was fear, but not only fear: excitement, too.

This topic mattered so much, it could kill.

How could anything less dangerous signify?

Iriset said carefully, “I will do as you command; that is my vow.”

Thus went her first bond, carefully worded to be bendable. She only ever blatantly broke it once, and never regretted the choice.

When Iriset was eleven and her mother recently gone, her father pulled her onto his lap on the slender throne in the basement of his first gambling den.

Her lanky limbs sprawled everywhere, limp in her grief, and Isidor held her tightly, haggard in his own.

He buried his nose in her knotted hair, holding her back-to-chest, and together they breathed.

“I understand what you are now,” Isidor said to his little daughter. Awe and fear tangled in his voice, but Iriset couldn’t read such things then. She only turned her face toward his neck to cry.

But Isidor caught her jaw in hand. He looked at her sticky lashes, the splotched peach of her cheeks, and saw her mother in the turn of her lips. “But, Iriset,” he said, “the Little Cat’s daughter cannot—must not—think or perform or even smell like human architecture.”

She blinked at him, and unlike the tone of his voice, she could read the tension in the tiny muscles around his eyes, the fear and concern and love set like a scaffold against the architecture of his face.

“Do you hear me, Iriset?” the Little Cat demanded.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I can’t be your daughter.”

Isidor’s mouth pressed down in displeasure. “No.”

He waited. He knew she’d get there without further hints.

Iriset tucked her head under his jaw. He allowed it. She tried again. “Iriset has to be innocent. I need someone to blame.”

“That’s better. Do you know why?”

“Even the Little Cat is afraid of apostasy,” she said dully, accurate and scathing in the way of children.

When Iriset was seventeen, the Little Cat held a winter feast. Iriset did not attend.

It was the third night after the Night of Deep Hunger, when the tilt of the world makes the moon go dark, and the people of Moonshadow City celebrate the Moon-Eater, that old red god whose hunger for She Who Loves Silence was so great he ate his own moon like an apple.

Bitten to the core, it fell from the sky.

The Little Cat’s court had grown over the years, thanks to money from roving gambling dens, favors paid and favors owed, and not to mention the occasional murder-for-hire or excellent score.

He smuggled already, too, but before Silk he only could use the methods used by every other ambitious undermarket cat.

On this third night after the Night of Deep Hunger, the Little Cat offered a feast to his most loyal, to his associates and helpers and their husbands and cousins.

This year it took place in a catacomb disguised to look deserted by all but the dead. Disguised with design, of course.

But just before midnight someone put one delicate crystal stylus to the design net and tore it down.

This person walked through the low stone hallways, following the shade-torches and graffiti, past crouching thieves and revelers in full-face masks. None stopped them, for everyone was invited if they could find the door.

The Little Cat held court at a table of polished geode, with less impressive tables scattered about the largest of this catacomb’s chambers.

Force-lights clung to the carved red-rock ceiling, illuminating people in apple masks and cactus masks, masks like the starry sky and masks of feathers and alliraptor skin and plain canvas masks painted with the favored foods of the old red god.

They ate, they drank, and they moved in subtle patterns around the Little Cat, who sat alone in his dark blue robes and a mask with yellow rays like the sun.

The stranger slid along the red stone, dragging streaks of black silk and purple muslin.

This person had taken pains to disguise any form, hiding in the comfort of androgyny, dark hair knotted at the nape and a terrifying mask covering their features from crown of the head and dripping over the chin.

Shaped of black-glazed ceramic, the mask gleamed with shards of smoky quartz glued into six faceted eyes arrayed around the actual eyeholes, which were covered by sheer black silk.

The spider walked into the Little Cat’s feast, and the room fell quiet.

“What do you want?” the Little Cat asked, flicking a hand to clear the space.

The spider knelt. When she spoke it was in a feminine-forward voice, enticing and plain. “I have come to bargain my design skills with the Little Cat.”

“I already have designers.”

“Not like me,” she said, and snapped her fingers. A surge of woven ecstatic and flow forces lifted the strips of silk and muslin, and her outer robe flared out around her in eight long lines, like a spider’s legs. Like a black sun.

The Little Cat leaned forward. “What do you want in return?”

“A workshop.” Her voice behind the spider mask hooked up in amusement. “The best tools and supplies a small king’s money can buy.”

“Your costume is cute, but not enough.”

The woman stood and raised her hands slowly to remove the eight-eyed mask.

Gasps stuck in throats, and the Little Cat’s court shied away.

Under the mask was the face of the Little Cat himself.

He removed his own sun mask, tossing it away.

Upon comparison, the spider looked a little more like his baby brother, or little sister. The jaw was not quite correct, the wrinkles too smooth, the nose a little too short. But it was close. Close enough.

Whispers of fear slithered through the catacomb. Whispers—and awe.

The Little Cat laughed, then reined in his knowing stare.

The spider grinned. “Imagine what I could do if I’d had a chance to be really close to you, study your structures, your expressions.”

“I’d rather not,” the Little Cat drawled. “Tell me your name, and I’ll give you a trial run.”

“Silk,” she said, and covered her eyes—her eyes that looked just like the Little Cat’s—to bow.

Even in the palace of the Vertex Seal, they heard the story of how the Little Cat found his apostate.

Meanwhile, the Little Cat’s daughter grew up to be gentle and pretty, with a quick wit when she chose to engage with her father’s people, and a wry smile when she did not.

She wore simple cloth masks like the workers in her local Saltbath precinct and occasionally appeared at the undermarket court to serve her father coffee or rice wine imported (smuggled) from the southeastern territories of the empire.

Iriset mé Isidor spent most of her time studying and running her father’s household, visiting her grandparents on her mother’s side, and sometimes wandering the Saltbath markets.

She was quiet and rarely seen, and her grandmother hoped she would take an interest in mechanics, but Iriset tended toward more scholarly pursuits.

She always brought her grandmother trinkets and her grandfather the night-blooming hothouse flowers her mother had adored.

She knew the names of every shopkeeper on their street, and several for many petals in every direction.

At least, that’s what people said about her.

They knew her mother had married a smuggler—a trader when people felt generous—and that Iriset remained at his side when Amakis died.

As Isidor’s reputation grew, Iriset was seen less frequently on the streets, and she only visited her grandparents every few weeks.

There was gossip she was being courted by a charming young Osahar boy but that he worked for the Little Cat and surely couldn’t provide a stable home.

Sometimes a baker or mechanic on her grandmother’s row tried to tempt Iriset away from her father’s life of crime, but she always smiled and said her father was good, and the life she had was good.

Besides, if her father was a criminal, wouldn’t he have been arrested already?

If people thought her naive, all the better. Though if they found her too innocent, that was bad, for the last thing she wanted was anyone trying to rescue her. The delicate tension kept a mind like Iriset’s engaged in the game.

At seventeen she began arranging flowers in her grand-uncle’s flower shop once a week, and let people know she was no criminal, but if they needed the Little Cat, perhaps she could pass a message.

Iriset has always loved flowers, and loves the art of arranging them into bouquets.

The balance of asymmetry and beauty might seem plain and innocent, but it feeds her unruly imagination.

If she wonders at the shape of leaves that turn toward the sun, or the exact number of petals on a mum and the curve of a thorn, if those thoughts lead her down long spirals of theory and potential, who is to know?

All to be seen is the elegant arrangement of ghost lily and weeping spine fig and burst of scarlet moonflower.

See?

Sure, there is an apostate working for Isidor the Little Cat. A friend, lover, sister, bond… Who knows? But not his daughter.

The daughter of the Little Cat is no threat to anyone.