Page 85

Sunderer

I riset goes back to the palace. Just not with Lyric.

It’s the shock, maybe. Or one more knot in a string of bad decision-making. But there’s something she simply must do.

Here is what happens.

Lyric leaves her as the sun rises, and she remains alone with her face turned toward the east. Smoke fills the morning air, gusting at her where she perches like a ruffled griffon. The wail of emergency alarms lifts to mingle with the songs of late-summer larks and shrill skull sirens.

Iriset is hungry, but has no food. She’s exhausted and sad.

So she climbs down the tower and scours the mechanics room, finding a small hemp bag, a broken stylus that will suit for now, a nearly gone spool of design thread, and a handful of random crystals and salt rocks.

She uses the thread to redesign a scrap of linen into paper currency like is used in the outer regions.

Before leaving, she uses a small stick of charcoal to rub ash onto her fingers and paint it across her cheekbones in crosshatches to confuse the eye regarding her facial structure.

Just in case anyone looks too closely and wonders why she resembles the Silk graffiti.

Then she makes her way through the only-somewhat-trashed Saltbath toward Morning Market.

It’s easy, because the city army has been abruptly recalled, and in addition to residents, emergency teams and units sent from the design schools and a wave of Silent priests are arriving to tend to fires and broken bones and spiritual ailments.

(And to cover up or unravel bright new spider graffiti both designed and plainly painted across the streets and towers.

The people won’t stop murmuring hopefully about Silk until all the spiders are gone.)

The moment she’s in the Morning Market, she buys a spiced pork pie and devours it too quickly.

It takes several hours to make her way across the city to the Violet Break, one of the crevasses in the crater’s edge that catacombs had been built into.

(It glows at sunset because of some veins of amethyst.) The Little Cat had a stash there that Iriset can access.

Jewels, traveling supplies, false papers, a few weapons she hardly knows how to use, and some crude craftmasks. Clothing.

Though it’s midday by the time Iriset arrives, there always are visitors to the catacombs.

She knows where she’s going, as most mourners do, and the weariness and sorrow are easy to read on her ash-masked face.

Shade cools the catacombs, and water drips deep within, resounding prettily in the narrow caverns.

The few people with her murmur and hold hands, place palms to the force-diamonds etched into the walls to mark memorials.

There are rough-cut caverns covered in rows of tiny cubbies for echo coins, and it’s at the end of such a cavern where Iriset opens a secret door very like the one beneath the shelf in the Crimson Canyon.

A force-shield surrounds her, blurring light and shadows so that she’ll be invisible if nobody stares directly.

The cache is in her hand when she stops.

With it she can walk out the crater gates and go anywhere. Any of the towns or territories of the empire, or beyond to Ceres where at least she can speak the language. Or to the Cloud Kings where probably her mother went twelve years ago.

Leave Moonshadow City behind forever.

But.

There’s a memory of someone who helped her, for no reason, and she wants to know why. (The miran don’t say that curiosity kills cats and their kittens, but they definitely should.)

So Iriset goes back to the palace.

Presumably by now it’s easy to believe she can sneak in with only a broken stylus, wearing the burnt orange of most palace attendants, and using the plumbing design to her advantage.

Not to mention the security nets are in total disarray as palace architects feverishly attempt to untangle the remnants of the massive spider design.

It’s gone, at least, her vivid graffiti.

No more big, beautiful mother spider hunched over the Silent Chapel, no more tiny little spark spiders crawling up and down the glimmering web. Iriset wishes she could have seen it.

But places where palace architects attempted to dismantle it before it finished its course show craters in the walls, scorch marks on the hall of miran itself.

A mess of broken tiles here, a smear of mud dried across a sidewalk there prove the chaos Iriset made, the panic and fear and awe her graffiti array caused. It can’t soon be forgotten.

She carries her stash in a simple bag slung over one shoulder, such as any non-mirané attendant might have. The cloth mask she wears over newly knotted hair pulls across her face, casting the complex in a comforting pale orange.

It surprises her to see red, pink, and black moons of force-light hanging in the corridors and courtyards, and dotting the edges of the layered, spiral petals of the palace.

Those colors together mean someone important died, and everyone will mourn.

Tragic death is the only time three colors alone are used, an odd number that can never be balanced.

Sudden, violent loss is unbalanced, the miran believe.

Iriset is impressed how quickly they got the moons up.

Her opinion of the palace architects minus Raia is not high.

She assumes the mourning moons are for Diaa, though she does not pause to listen to kitchen gossip or the murmurings of gathered miran.

Everyone is subdued. Diaa of Moonshadow had been more well-liked by every level of the palace than Iriset thought.

Little did they know, she thinks, glad her stolen cloth mask hides her expression.

She keeps her head and eyes down, and can’t imagine the Vertex Seal has announced anything about Singix yet.

He should have returned to consult with Amaranth how best to do so.

He might be furious with his sister, but he’s not stupid.

Fortunately, there’s no meeting of the princes’ council and she slips into the mirané hall and strides across its vast chamber without note, heading for the hidden arch opposite the one that leads to the office of the Vertex Seal.

(She glances toward it, not truly considering going to him, but wishing she could let herself consider it.)

The other hidden arch leads through a narrow, dim corridor, and then to a staircase cut in a tight spiral down into the bedrock.

Several design nets span the way, which she bends around herself easily, and at the bottom is a null door.

Iriset skims her palm along the outer frame until she finds the design panel, then uses her broken stylus quickly to dismantle the lock.

It should set off an alarum in the office of the Architect of the Seal, but she engages a delay to slow the notification, to earn herself a few minutes.

The door slides open, the light behind her piercing into darkness, revealing the numen.

Iriset jams her stylus into the arched doorframe, ruining the null. She’s able to pull out a few threads and knot them into a dim light. Then she steps inside.

A smell like after a severe lightning storm pervades, dank and dangerously electric. But everything is clean, pristinely so, and Iriset wonders if numena shed skin or hair or relieve themselves at all.

It crouches in the center, on its haunches, long pinkish-white arms hanging to either side with the knuckles turned under. Lank hair drags around its face and neck, falling like an old stained-and-tattered silk veil. When it sees her, the numen grins, showing jagged black teeth like a shark.

Iriset kneels beside it. She nudges its chin up with her closed fist, and like before, the drained pink skin shimmers silvery where there’s contact. It does not resist, its vivid black diamond-shard eyes locked onto hers. It seems curious, not hostile.

Quickly she unknots the lock with her stylus. The numen gasps hard as the collar falls away, and shoves at it with one foot, then raises its hands to Iriset: Both are chained with null wires. It really would have been easier to use the hematite.

“Thank you for keeping my secret,” Iriset says, eyes down, as she works on the shackles. So near to the creature, she smells the lightning scent coming from it. The wires take another long moment to untwist and break, and Iriset swings her bag off her shoulder to tuck them inside it, just in case.

Then, as the numen rubs its raw wrists, she backs away to the door.

It stands slowly, head bowed, as if drawn up by the shoulders. Those shoulders heave as it takes a long breath, seeming to grow taller, and as Iriset stares, she feels forces sliding toward it like it draws them in as it draws in air. Her skin tingles and her inner design pops.

Color flushes its skin; silver, peach, and black lines appear where arteries and veins bulge in its flesh.

Its hair thickens, lifting into long waves of silver-white, and the numen smiles as it tears threadbare trousers off itself, and the ragged vest, until it’s naked, with a human-looking penis.

Muscles cord along the starving, bony lines of its hips and ribs, thighs and chest. It lifts its face finally and its eyes are as sharp a black as ever, but the whites have cleared of tawny yellow-pink illness.

When it smiles, Iriset watches with an uncomfortable fascination as its black teeth become a perfect white-ivory and blunted into human teeth except for two on either side that retain too much of a point.

By the time its teeth finish re-forming, it’s wearing slim black trousers and boots, as well as a black robe with red stitching. Iriset understands instinctively that the numen crafted the costume out of pure force, just as it changed its body at will.

She can hardly breathe.