Page 79

Bittor

I t begins with a slight shudder of rising force in the Color Can Be Loud Garden, as the delay loop Iriset placed expires with an ecstatic spark, releasing the trigger.

Swift on the heels of the shudder is another and another, from the nearest anchors in the Seven Petals Is Not Enough Amphitheater and the menagerie, then a cascade of pop-shivers spreading across the entire palace complex from the Moon-Eater’s Temple to the Silent Chapel.

Most architects notice, though they shrug it off as a hitch someone caused with some sort of update or maybe it has to do with the hundreds of extra force-cuffs.

Raia mér Omorose stands in surprise: An knows the security webs very well, and this should not happen.

Menna of the Seal also is aware something is wrong, though she’s less able to pinpoint that it’s the security webs.

Of course, everyone with working eyes sees it when the aforementioned security net begins to glow.

Normally the net remains invisible without a specific design frame set over various sections to allow for updates and manipulations (frames Silk doesn’t need, scoff scoff , because once she marks a few linchpins, she can mentally construct the rest of the design out).

The net flares silver, in undulating pulses of flow and rising, and the ground beneath the mirané feet sparkles in long threads.

People leap onto chairs as if they’ve seen a skink or they perform silly tiptoe dances to get away, or a few crouch to touch—those are either architects or children or fools.

Yes, there’s already some screaming from the ones most likely to faint during the next stage.

While everybody reacts to the floor or lawn or gravel as though it’s suddenly turned to lava, little pink sparks of ecstatic travel the threads, moving too fast to catch, and they grow eight legs to wave around and suddenly the lovely silver net is a lovely silver web covered in creepy crawling spiders!

That isn’t the worst, though. Where the threads meet and crisscross, the spider-sparks shoot up bolts of rising force that crash together hundreds of paces in the air, swirling over the dome of the mirané hall. There they form a single massive, elegant mother spider.

All this happens in merely the time it takes Raia to throw anself out of ans workroom and onto a petal balcony two doors over.

An cranes ans neck to look up at the gargantuan (beautiful) spider. Raia has never seen anything like it—the power it must consume! The complex directions that had been completely hidden! How…!

Now the screams really let loose, and in a very subtle, genius trick the likes of which Silk should be known for, the natural rising force and terrorized ecstatic of the screams themselves feed the churning design.

The giant spider steps over the palace with its long, silver-pink articulated legs, each ending in toes with delicate claws that were dainty on the adorable little spinners Iriset kept in her workroom. On this spider, each toe could squish a couple of miran if they stand near each other.

But the spider’s made of forces, not mass, so it squishes nobody. The few unlucky enough or so slow that they come in direct contact experience a dramatic frenzy of their internal forces and collapse. They’ll (probably) be fine after a nap or a thorough inner balancing.

The spider moves gracefully, smoother than an arc of wine poured by a talented attendant.

It makes no sound but hums with forces, and skull sirens shriek, flocking toward it in a terrible mess.

Lattice snakes ruffle their feather-teeth toward it, the rainbow bees fly a tad too high for their own good, and the rep-cats duck into shadows.

The less said about the state of the griffons in the menagerie, the better.

Where the spider goes, it leaves behind gorgeous woven sigils that shimmer the same silver-pink as the spider (as Aharté’s moon in the sky).

Can you guess what they read?

Silk is here.

Silk lives. Silk is Syr.

The spider is so large, and so bright, it’s visible against the afternoon sky from the four precincts at the edges of the Crystal Desert: Morning Market, Descent Market, Silent, and Design.

Thousands of citizens of Moonshadow City see Iriset’s glorious design, but not Lyric, who races toward his wife.

Iriset doesn’t see it, either, though she was supposed to be flying high with the mama spider, arms outstretched, glorious in the robes of the Vertex Seal. Instead she’s at the bottom of the Crimson Canyon.

In her physical condition she’s lucky she made it this many miles as it is, and chooses one of the two paths down into the depths of the canyon with shallower stairs, though it takes longer to reach the bottom.

As she descends, the light fades into long shadows thanks to the angle of the afternoon sun, but there are force-lights tied across the narrowest parts of the canyon walls and gas lamps burning at the end of curving poles.

The best thing about the canyon is everyone ignores her and vice versa.

It’s easy to fade into the flickering shadows with their warm gas-flame color, like dropping into another world.

On the lowest level of permanent residence, a wide terrace carved into the cliff, Iriset slips past the temporary stalls and tents, through a raucous crowd clearly unconcerned with the city army.

They should be. The combat-designers could drop percussion bells down here, or trance ribbons, and everyone would be out.

But that’s not her current problem so she keeps going until she reaches the northernmost tip of the canyon, then climbs one of the ladders down to the sand-and-mud-caked floor.

She wipes her palms on her robe skirt and walks along the barren bottom.

There are no homes or stalls or even lean-tos here, but several cave mouths hidden beneath the layers of overhangs.

One is the entrance to an elaborate warren of undermarket hideaways.

Nobody lives in them—though they often fill with squatters during the winter—because when the Lapis River overflow pours through the canyon during the spring and sometimes autumn, the hideaways flood first.

Iriset ducks under a low shelf into a cave.

She remains bent in half, sliding her hand along the rough rock in an awkward shuffle until she suddenly is free to stand in a pocket cavern.

It’s black as night, and there’s nothing with which to make light, so she continues using her hand to feel for the second jagged hole in the eastern wall.

She squeezes through and around a sharp turn, then comes into a room that buzzes with latent force.

Iriset claps and an echo of ecstatic answers, showing her the diamond etched beside the entrance.

She places her hand over it, taps a code with her fingers into the hidden design panel, and the forces answer: A thread of bluish light flickers to life just above her eye level.

It streaks around the artificially smooth walls of the cave, illuminating a diamond-pattern netting across the ceiling.

Iriset glances at the stones spread in what is supposed to seem haphazard fashion, and carefully picks up two granite chunks shot through with lines of quartz.

She leans them together against the wall where a similar vein of quartz crawls up the red rock.

When they are aligned just right, the quartz veins pulse with ecstatic force, which begin a cascade effect, lighting the diamond net in a pattern to reveal hidden sigils.

It’s a map that Iriset helped her father and one of his cryptographers create before she ever took the name Silk, and Bittor has not forgotten—the location of the Little Cat’s surviving court is marked with the sigil for Silk.

Three hours before sunset, Iriset arrives at a wine shop at the southeast edge of Saltbath.

Thin glass bottles are bricked along the porch roof like glinting teeth, and in its shade small tables stand on short feet, surrounded by flat cushions and customers sharing rose wine and juniper mead.

Iriset walks past them and into the dim stucco foyer.

Two women lean upon the counter, both in sleeveless robes with long lines of black tattoos streaking their forearms and dotted with leaves and berries in vivid purple and blue.

(Tattoos are controversial for being a permanent alteration of the body, but not technically considered apostasy.) Iriset spares a brief regret for the lovely ghost writing on Singix’s hands that used to decorate her forehead and back into her hair, with all the names of her ancestors.

These two are likely a branch of Bes people, the only people Iriset is aware of who tattoo for pleasure or art, though their high brown foreheads suggest more of a Sarian lineage.

By that same high brown forehead on both of them, plus the shape of their upper lips and their feminine-forward physicality and style, Iriset guesses they are mother and daughter.

She places her hands on the counter and says, “I am here to see Bittor.”

Though the younger woman scowls in a pretense of ignorance, the older peers at Iriset. “Are you?”

Iriset pushes back her hood. “I do not know you, honorie, but he will wish to see me.”

“Your name?”

“Mama, it’s Silk,” the younger whispers. “The graffiti—or, at least she looks like…”

“Yes,” Iriset says. She leans in to rudely look into their eyes. “But I’ve been out of touch too long to know his new codes. Since the Little Cat was taken. Tell him to come here or let me through. It is urgent.”

“Prove you’re not army.”

Withdrawing her stylus, Iriset says, “Let me repair that cut on your arm.”