Page 86

The stories are true: Numen are pure design.

They’re not flesh, but force. Except, something formed of more than energy has been trapped within the null wire.

Iriset opens her mouth to ask—she can’t resist asking—but the numen is before her suddenly, and grabs her wrists in cold, long-fingered hands.

It says a word, the same word it said the first night they met in the mirané hall. Now the word does not slither between too-large, too-sharp teeth, but is whole and firm, and obviously Old Sarenpet. She almost recognizes it.

“I don’t understand,” Iriset says, straining slightly against its grip, though not with her full strength. She doesn’t want to be free, she only wants to want to be free.

“Sunderer,” it says in mirané.

“I freed you, yes. I—I sundered your bindings.”

The numen smiles and strokes a finger against the inner skin of both her wrists.

In that moment, Iriset experiences a thing there are not quite words for any longer.

And the word they used to have (rivation) would have been meaningless to Iriset or anyone.

A feeling, a sensation, of coming apart while remaining intact.

It is an exact process the numen instigates within her.

An ancient process. Seeming apostatical, but in truth so far from that as to be its opposite. Sacred.

The numen peels the threads of force within Iriset open to even smaller elements and, in that action, creates new energy.

(When it happens to you, it feels like love.

Warmth, urgency, longing, belonging. Love.

It feels like congress with the Moon-Eater.)

Sweat beads on Iriset’s skin, released from the inner heat of creation. She’s herself, she knows herself, but a tangible flavor hovers in her awareness, gathering in her pulse, and she almost grasps what the numen has done. “What?” she asks.

“You are a sunderer,” it says. “You can make force.”

“Make force? No, forces exist , they can be bound, knotted, woven, given direction, or paused, but not created or destroyed—only Aharté creates force.”

The numen snorts. “Aharté.”

Well, Iriset does agree with that sentiment.

“We have to go, numen, before we are discovered. You’re free.” Now Iriset tugs. She wants to keep arguing, but here and now is not the place nor time. “Let’s go.”

It tilts its head. “Yes, but first I must complete my mission.”

“You can’t kill the Moon-Eater’s Mistress!” Iriset says. “The one you came for is long gone.”

“I do not wish to kill anyone.”

The numen has no accent whatsoever, she realizes. It speaks exactly like she does. “Why did you try before? That is why you were imprisoned for a hundred years.”

“Miscommunication.” It shrugs as casually as a child hiding stolen candy.

She stares, disbelieving. Maybe it’s trying to be funny.

“Come on.” Iriset tugs again, and it releases one of her hands, keeping a tight grip on the other. Fine. Iriset moves out of the room with the numen on her heels. “I can get us out of the palace, through the plumbing design, then we can talk, then we can—we can do whatever we want.”

“My mission.” It moves up the stairs effortlessly, as if it weighs nothing, has not been bound and weakened for a hundred years.

At the first security net, the numen pushes around her, and before Iriset can use her stylus to bend the net, it plucks at the threads with its bare hand until they shiver out of the way.

Iriset pauses. It can use its hands as she used her silk glove, to directly affect the forces. Oh holy moon, she has a thousand questions. But one first: “What is your mission?”

“To free the Moon-Eater from his prison.”

The ramifications of that simple phrase rock Iriset back on her feet.

The numen steps into her space, bending over her so all she sees or senses is it.

It says, “I need a sunderer, or else I need four equally strong architects, each dominant in one of the four forces. You are a sunderer, you can do it with me and no others. It will take hardly any time at all, and then we will flee, anywhere you like. I can take you, I can make you safe and teach you anything there is to know.”

Parting her lips to taste the forces that float off it with every blink and every shift of its mouth, Iriset murmurs, “We’ll never make it. I was lucky to get here to you without being recognized or caught.”

The numen’s sudden grin dissolves between one breath and the next, and Iriset stands in the narrow spiral stairs with hulking Garnet méra Be?.

She squeaks and leans back, but Garnet catches her elbows, laughing softly at her. That’s no laugh Garnet has ever made, full of wry amusement and a little wicked.

“Oh holy moon,” she says again, like she’s saying I have seen the face of god.

And it is certainly not Garnet smiling lopsided, with a lot of teeth. But the illusion is physically perfect. (Iriset knows why: It’s not, in fact, an illusion. The numen has become Garnet. Even to his voice.)

“Coming?” it says, one heavy brow lifting to tease.

“Wait. I want to see the prison, but I’m not promising to help you free the Moon-Eater.”

It smiles again, rather predatory. “You will, when you see.”

Though she’s uncertain about, well, everything in that moment, Iriset goes. (She will always go, can never resist such a temptation. How else did all this happen?)

With Garnet as her escort, nobody stops them, though they pass many, including a harried Raia mér Omorose.

Iriset pulls her cloth mask over her face and keeps her eyes down, bubbling with nervous laughter—amazed laughter.

Whatever else happens, she’s crossing the palace of the Vertex Seal with a shape-shifter, a legendary numen, and in the Moon-Eater’s Temple she’ll shortly understand something nobody else in the world understands.

As they cross the quartz yards, Iriset concentrates on not tripping on any of the tangled security threads.

But the numen looks up at the silver-pink moon, and it waves.

Iriset hisses at it to be more circumspect, and it continues stomping heavily, which is not exactly the way Garnet walks.

They make directly for the Moon-Eater’s Temple.

The Silent priest standing guard doesn’t shift at all beneath his full black veil when Garnet and an anonymous palace servant enter. Inside the alcove the candelabras are lit, and the latticed door leading into the sanctuary gapes open. The numen doesn’t even ping the security nets.

Beyond, several miran kneel before the granite altar, holding hands as they murmur a brief song of balance.

It’s cool inside. The dark blue honeycomb arches lift so high in the starry dome, glinting along their angles with soft force-light. Amaranth’s privacy screen has been folded away.

“Finish your prayer and leave us,” Garnet—the numen—says. Its voice cuts through the peaceful silence. (Garnet’s voice, perfect.)

One miran flinches, but the rest remain bowed and murmuring their song.

Iriset touches the numen’s back, urging patience, for even though Garnet is the Vertex Seal’s first attendant and body-twin, he doesn’t have usual business here.

It sighs quietly and seems to settle into the large body, even relaxing slightly against her hand.

She taps a force-rhythm gently with her forefinger, lingering in flow to encourage this patience, and the numen tilts its head to shoot her a wry look more familiar than Garnet usually would be with her.

She wonders if this is how Ambassador Erxan felt when he saw through the Singix mask—unsettled and unbelieving, even knowing the truth.

When the miran finish their song, they bow to the altar and one another, slipping out. One nods a greeting and says Garnet’s name. Another, an older woman, asks, “Does the Vertex Seal wish to honor his wife and mother with the Moon-Eater? I expected him to haunt the Silent Chapel.”

“His wife?” Iriset says thoughtlessly.

The mirané woman flicks her a dismissive glance. “He would not mourn her according to Ceres traditions, naturally.”

Iriset drops her head and quickly flattens her hand over both eyes, under her veil. She leans into the numen as the world tilts beneath her, out of balance.

Lyric returned to the palace and killed her. Did he say Silk did it? Is that how he will control what he can of the narrative?

“Naturally,” the numen says in Garnet’s voice. “There will be balance in mourning, as in all things.”

The miran agrees, or must; Iriset doesn’t exactly see what they do except that they file past and out of the sanctuary.

When they’re alone, Iriset finds herself breathing her eight-count rhythm as she approaches the altar. To lock down her grief. To move past it, to—to just focus on what is before her. The altar.

Even knowing the teeth never belonged to a god but some ancient dead monster, she remains reluctant to disturb them.

The numen, however, sweeps the teeth off the altar in one strong gesture: They crash down with a cracking clatter, chipping on the tiled floor.

Iriset presses her lips together, fighting the urge to chide it.

“Look,” the numen says.

“At what?”

“The lines of force creating this prison.”

“I can’t see force with my bare eyes.”

Its responding frown suits Garnet’s features better than the numen’s previous smiles. “Do you have your stylus?”

Removing it from the front of her robe jacket, she holds it up.

“Help me draw a basic design diamond—say, sixteen paces from point to point.”

“We have nothing to mark the forces with.”

The numen picks up a fossil molar. It holds it in one hand, and Iriset feels again the drawing forces for a brief moment before the molar simply crystallizes. Then it shatters into four nearly equal chunks. Each falls to the floor, and the numen smiles.

Iriset decides not to analyze how that transformation occurred right now and gathers them in the left skirt of her robe. Together, she and the numen begin their work.