Page 78

The mouth of chaos

I riset’s goal is the Crimson Canyon, but the northern tip is halfway across the crater from the palace.

The city moves and churns with life, though rather quick and more frantic than one would expect on a warm late-summer morning.

As if a great hailstorm looms on the horizon.

There are no pop-up vendors, nor the usual news graffiti advertising daily deals in such and such market square or what time a show begins in the Amphitheater of Stars.

The only graffiti she sees is an innocent arch of spray-designed pink flowers so faded they must be quads old, and the remnants of some sigil declaring the rare sunstar bushes were finally blooming in the Wave-and-Moss Garden.

Iriset spies evidence that a few walls have been treated with anti-graffiti force-nets, and it must be because of fear that they’ll be charged penalties if rebel art appears on their buildings.

Along a curving street lined with fire-stalls and cafés, Iriset finds doors flung open and pedestrians calling to friends seated upon stools and cushions with their pipes and coffee.

There aren’t many smiles, but neither do the people seem overly anxious—except when an army-standard ribbon skiff slides past, gathering furtive frowns in its wake.

Then the alarum rings out from the ribbon system, and Iriset freezes in the street at the reverberation of Lyric’s captured voice: Turn against the cult of Silk and apostasy, or your homes will be leveled on the fourth day.

His voice purrs up her spine with rising force as the message repeats three more times.

It seems to resonate with the hum that is obliterating their marriage knot.

Iriset presses her fist over her sternum.

The pill is a choking ache deep inside. She wishes it would dissolve already.

When Iriset crosses into the Saltbath precinct with its needle minarets and honeycomb streets, the design patterns shift around her like the loosening of a too-tight robe.

She pauses again, touching her palm to cool red-blue-black tiles, and listens.

She parts her lips to taste the eddies of Saltbath forces.

This was her home in Moonshadow City, where she’d been born and lived every day of her life until this summer.

She knows the flavor of the specific way that the city’s design knots and weaves, and the sparks of ecstatic tingle exactly as they should—except no.

Iriset chooses a shaded alley between a silicate warehouse and the workshop where the crystals are carved and polished into usable tools or decorations.

With her stylus she creates a tiny break in the wall and reaches in, tugging gently at the flow threads.

Her lips are too raw from removing the craftmask to be helpful in sensing nuance of energies, but oh, how good it feels to welcome the coursing power of Moonshadow City back into her body.

She leans her forehead against the tiles, absorbing every rhythm and pulse of the working design.

Though she’s only been gone a season, some of the nuance has changed.

The pull toward the canyon is stronger, probably from security nets and way stations forcing flow to pause, and…

Iriset realizes suddenly, eyes flying open, her father’s tower is gone .

Of course it is, it was ruined and invaded, but the network of designs she wrapped it in used to be an invisible shadow shifting the patterns of forces in specific ways nobody had ever detected—and the shadow has entirely vanished.

The Little Cat’s tower has been dismantled, probably physically by the army and thread-by-thread by the investigator-designers. They explored her work, analyzed it, learned from her.

Iriset shoves away from the wall and heads quickly toward the southern ribbon hub, tucked in among branching garages, across the block from a row of mechanics (including her grandmother’s shop, closed up and dark).

At the hub, Iriset crawls under a skiff and unpeels the flow skate from the ribbon, splicing deep enough to lay a tiny little anchor with her own knotted hair and a whisper and the tip of her stylus.

It’s around this time that Amaranth is standing over her mother’s body. Every ounce of her inner design and willpower focus on maintaining a certain poise for the Seal guards and designers crowding the study.

According to Diaa’s Seal guard, Diaa had been feeling poorly and remained in her rooms all morning. It was Huya, Singix’s combat-designer and secretary, who discovered the woman exactly as she is now: sprawled dead on the floor of Lyric’s study with no apparent injury.

Amaranth was quietly and urgently fetched (isn’t it interesting that the palace sought the Moon-Eater’s Mistress before the Vertex Seal in this as in so many things!), and once the Seal guards and two investigator-designers checked the study for poison and traps (they’d found remnants of an oddly charged crystal and not been surprised by the secret door), she was allowed in with Sidoné.

Huya reported that he’d swept the entire suite, and Her Glory Singix Es Sun was not present.

There were some odd things in the bedroom, however.

Immediately, the body-twin left again to alert Garnet, who would bring Lyric. Amaranth dragged herself upstairs to the bedroom and discovered the evidence she most disliked to find. The kitten was not coming back.

Now Menna of the Seal crouches at Diaa’s head, with one of the investigator-designers and two palace designers.

They hold a stasis net around Diaa, trying to locate a cause of death.

“Her heart, maybe,” Menna says softly. Just what she’d said about Ambassador Erxan.

She glances up at Amaranth. “Your Glory, I cannot say more without more invasive investigation. But there is no lingering design, that I can say certainly.”

The investigator-designer adds, “I recognize no regular signs of design-effect. And there is no injury that I can find that would cause death. I am sorry, Your Glory.”

Clenching her jaw, Amaranth nods. She can’t allow herself to embrace the body as her mother’s, to accept her mother is dead.

Not yet, not without a plan. She’ll rage in her grief, once it arrives, and she can’t afford to flail now.

But she can, and does, believe that Iriset mé Isidor is capable of murder methods that leave no trace for an architect trained under the Glorious Vow to find.

She’s done it before, after all. And Amaranth ignored the trespass.

The Moon-Eater’s Mistress shudders with the effort of swallowing back fury.

Diaa must have said something, discovered something, to make Iriset act. It must have been terrible, or Iriset would not have risked so much. The daughter of the Little Cat of Moonshadow is a survivor. And she loved Lyric too much to do this without necessity. Maybe even loved Amaranth herself.

Amaranth whispers the worst curse she knows.

If there’s one thing the Moon-Eater’s Mistress excels at, it’s controlling herself. So many believe otherwise, that she’s ruled by excess desire, but they believe exactly as she wishes.

She needs to know what happened here, and why. Nothing else— nothing —matters more. Not yet.

Lyric enters softly between two Seal guards who startle back when they realize it’s the Vertex Seal. Garnet is not with him. Amaranth looks up in time to see the moment Lyric realizes what has happened.

His entire body goes still. He doesn’t even breathe as he stares at their mother.

Then he draws a deep breath, holds it, and releases it.

Again, and again. After the fourth calming count, the entire room is fixed on him, and he says, “What happened?” in a dangerously quiet voice. “Where is my wife?”

“She’s missing,” answers Huya méra Luméri. “She said she wanted to visit her friend, the wife of—”

“Find her,” Lyric says, then he kneels at Diaa’s shoulder.

He places a hand over her eyes, another over his own heart, and murmurs a prayer.

When he releases their mother, he purposefully smears the painted flowers against her cheeks.

He touches the paint to his own face, smearing it there, too, against his freckles.

Tears glint in his lashes when he stands and turns to Amaranth. “Are you all right?”

“Hardly,” she answers humorlessly.

Lyric takes her hand, and then puts their foreheads together.

Amaranth wants to let herself crumble, to press against him and weep.

It’s been so long since she could be only a little sister.

She wants Sidoné and Garnet to appear in the archway, then close her and her brother both up in a tight embrace.

The four of them, balanced and together.

Unbreakable. They can survive this together; that’s how they survived Esmail’s death.

But of course, their quartet has been harshly divided for quads by the lie Amaranth and Sidoné know. By Iriset herself.

It’s time to tell Lyric. Send the Seal guards and architects away.

Tell both him and Garnet. If Iriset has done this, she will not be found.

She’ll vanish into Moonshadow City, and someday Lyric will feel their marriage bond snap.

They’ll have no other sign of her living or dying.

Holy fuck, but Lyric is going to need his family.

But he might not let Amaranth help him after this.

He might hate her for a while. No, he’ll definitely hate her for a while.

That, more than anything, sets her pulse racing.

She must maintain her composure! She knows him.

She knows how to bring them together in this.

Leaning away from her brother, though it tightens her chest with actual physical pain, she says, “Singix isn’t coming back.”

Lyric’s eyes fall shut and he flattens a hand over his heart. He looks like a corpse himself, mouth tight, eyes bruised and hollow. “She has to.”

“Not if—” Amaranth can’t help it; she stares down at their mother’s body. Oh, it hurts, and she can’t fight the reality for much longer. It’s like monsters slinking nearer and nearer in her peripheral vision. They’ll get her soon. She can’t stop it.

“Not if…” Lyric frowns at her, then at Diaa’s body. “You think Diaa did something to her? You think our mother…”

Amaranth doesn’t know what to say first. Shock chokes her. What if—

What—

Could that be why? Diaa hadn’t discovered Iriset’s secret, but Diaa had tried to assassinate Singix .

All the pieces kaleidoscope together, slotting where they belong.

Amaranth’s breath shudders out of her.

(She hasn’t known from the beginning, after all.)

“Mother…” Amaranth says, and then hisses her frustration and pain. It makes her teeth cold. “She hated this marriage, but I thought I’d—I’d won her over. I thought… she wouldn’t do this… She…”

“I can find Singix,” Lyric says, and without giving Amaranth a chance for more confession, he shoves out of the study.

As Lyric méra Esmail His Glory is halfway across the Silent precinct on the trail of his runaway wife, the entire palace complex lights up in brilliant design.

Silk is here.

Silk lives.