“Rebellion points to weaknesses in the system, but not that the system itself is weak?”
The look Lyric gives her then, thoughtful and veering toward suspicion, causes a chill falling to drain through her skin. She’s said too much, analyzed too much. He says firmly, “Rebellion points to the faithless. To people who want selfishly for themselves, not for the greater good of Silence. The current protest is not suggesting Isidor Salisidor was innocent, or that the army ormyself have done something wrong. What is it that this Bittor méra Tesmose is protesting with his apostatical graffiti, except Aharté’s Silence itself?”
Exactly, Iriset thinks.
Though Iriset also thinks it’s possible Bittor is using the graffiti to consolidate power, to regrow parts of the Little Cat’s undermarket that were cut away or atrophied. Whether he believes in his message or not, he still chose rebellion. He must have crafted the graffiti to honor her. How often had Bittor listened to Silk spell intricate arguments for why human architecture should not be a crime? She’s never had faith in Aharté, and didn’t hide her faithlessness from her friend and lover. He’s doing this for her. Centering her. She can’t wait to answer him.
In eighteen days she’ll be ready to shift the heart of this empire from the inside, even if only to destabilize it, to prove that it’s always been unstable. Apostasy only exists if you believe in god. Lyric believes in Silence, and Bittor may believe in rebellion, but Iriset believes in herself.
In her quiet, Lyric squeezes her hand. “And, Singix, what is the alternative? The empire is not perfect. How can it be, with flawed rulers and flawed citizens? But it is better than the chaotic hell that was the Apostate Age. Someday everyone will see the goodness in balance, in Aharté’s Silence. That is what I hope for, what I work for. I know it is a real thing, a goal that can be met, because I am bound to it, as is my sister. The Holy Design moves through us and with us.” He lifts her hand to his chest. “You must feel it, too, when our hearts beat together?”
“I do,” she whispers, a lie, because faith is not what she feels in moments like these. She feels the effects of the marriage knot, a miracle of human architecture despite what the Silent priests claim. She feels the inevitable break between them: the promiseof triumph and the cold, brutal look in his eyes when he sees what she’s done. When she shows him Aharté’s will is not as strong as her own.
Late that night, while the Vertex Seal sleeps, Iriset slips down into their study, rifles through her accumulation of leather and beads, glue and ceramic with which to make elaborate mirané masks, finds paper and charcoal, and she begins again to draw Lyric’s face.
Even the red moon fell from the sky
If the reminder of her husband’s fanaticism teaches her anything, it’s that she needs to prioritize the final piece of her plan higher: destabilizing the marriage knot. She can create her ruinous, ambitious array, she can reveal herself, her power, and set the numen free, but without dissolving or otherwise unraveling the marriage knot, there’s nowhere she can run that Lyric can’t follow.
And she assumes he would follow.
Iriset asks Diaa of Moonshadow a few questions under the pretense that she occasionally feels an odd twist. Diaa overreacts by interrogating Lyric himself in case there’s something wrong with their marriage knot, who in turn worriedly tries to take Iriset to the Silent priests who constructed their design eggs in the first place for a deep analysis. Needing to avoid that at nearly all costs, Iriset lies her guts out to Lyric, saying she was only trying to find more in common with his mother so that they can grow closer, and honestly, the twists she occasionallyfeels in their marriage knot only are pulling them more irrevocably together. Obviously, she has sex with him about it.
Having dodged that dart, Iriset attempts to investigate the knot in more detail herself, but it’s most prominent in her inner design when she and Lyric are near to each other and Lyric will notice if she pokes around. Iriset gives him a massage one evening, perched on his naked bottom, and runs her hands vigorously all over him. If she can distract him with friction, maybe he won’t detect the little investigatory threads of force she simultaneously slips in.
That doesn’t work, either, thanks to the very marriage knot itself. Who knows if Lyric has always secretly been this horny or if he’s just feeding off Iriset’s natural inclination, but the investigation part of the massage lasts only a few minutes before Lyric is moaning softly and nudging his ass up against Iriset’s. Then she’s the one thoroughly distracted by having to pretend she’s never fisted a man before while she tries to get Lyric to tell her it’s what he wants.
They end up in the bathroom, both it and each other wrecked, and while panting in the afterglow on the cool tiles with her ankles dangling in the warm water, Lyric melted and passed out with his hand curled over her belly, Iriset wonders if maybe she’s been wrong this whole time and she should stay with Lyric forever. Do what Amaranth wants; use the position the way her father suggested; take what Lyric offers, the love and power; be happy.
But it’s only a passing postcoital thought. She could never be happy in even the most holy cage.
She sits up with a spark of ecstatic, sways because she’s rather melted herself, but Lyric is passed out! Scooting closer, she rolls him half over and plasters herself against him. She digs herfingers into his hair, scratches her other hand down his spine, and he only murmurs. Iriset pecks her lips against his cheek, making sharp kissing noises to send ecstatic pops into his inner design.
It’s slightly awkward, and as mentioned, Iriset is droopy herself. But she manages to get a good look at the knot, at how tendrils of forces reach from his toward hers, and hers does the same toward him. If she had her old silk glove, maybe she could pinch along the whole thread, even where it goes thin and insubstantial in the air between them.
The knot design is so old, so intimate, and somehow pure.It’s magic, Iriset thinks in a rare, sleepy concession to romance.
And it’s definitely human architecture.
Without her glove and a few styli and a diagram to record the intricate lines, this is the best Iriset can do.
For more information, she’s going to have to research the old-fashioned way.
The Holy Library is housed in a fat spiral tower in the north of the palace complex, with various levels accessible by the long staircases that gradually step up the outer wall. Books, scrolls, stacks of illustrations, and even diagrams and old tablets are arranged on hundreds of pillar shelves. Statues, old pre-Silence religious icons, and foreign art scatter among the collections. But all the books she wishes to view are high in the crowning level, forbidden to everyone but the most advanced Silent priests and architectural masters. Even Singix of the Beautiful Twilight can’t access them without express consent of the Vertex Seal.
Fortunately for Iriset, she has unfettered access to him. Though Lyric is surprised at the request, he agrees easily. She only says, “You mentioned the Apostate Age to me, and while I know of it, I would like to better understand the dangers, the—the nuance of what you fear.”
Lyric nods. “I do fear apostasy and its great temptations. And so when you delve into it, when you find the miraculous, the beautiful, remember the price we all paid for that beauty, for those miracles.”
He trusts her so completely. It’s a heady feeling, icing on a cake of darker, pettier delight.
Iriset’s attendants and Seal guards aren’t allowed to accompany her up the narrowest portion of the spiral staircase, beneath the holy arch, and into the crown. An intricate security web spreads across the entrance, and Iriset expected something of its nature. She removes the thin crystal stylus hidden in her hair and carefully unknots just enough of the web to allow her craftmask and other designs to slip through. A pulse of ecstatic alarm rushes out, but Iriset catches the pulse just in time, looping it into stasis. She breathes carefully to release the shock of near failure even as she reknits the web and allows it to mark her personal design and therefore record her entrance.
Awe makes her lightheaded this first time she wanders the tables and shelves covered in ancient texts carefully preserved with thin fields of architecture to keep time from spilling its detritus upon the delicate treasures. There are bones—entire skeletons fully articulated!—of rep-cats and river dragons, a minotaur, bones she can’t begin to identify, and six different kinds of wings Iriset barely restrains herself from caressing in yearning reverence. There are horns of a strange material that seem gold dusted, but the gold clearly grew through the bone like capillaries. Overhead, filling out the ceramic dome, is a cloud whale skeleton: its eye sockets large enough for Iriset to nest in, its backbone so delicate she sees light through it.
Then there are the books. Iriset would need years to study them all. She only hasdays. But she touches every spine, as if toabsorb knowledge from each, while looking for anything that might contain the kind of human architecture that led to the development of marriage knots. Anything in a language she canread, that is. So, mirané, Sarenpet and its older form, and any Osahar-mirané or Osahar-Sarenpet dialect. Most of the books she identifies are written in some variety of Sarenpet, thank the Moon-Eater.
For several days Iriset spends the dwindling hot hours of her afternoons in the crowning level, researching apostatical design, specifically unraveling and binding, the sort that those old architects had used to give new appendages to humans, reworking and rebinding muscle, tendon, bone, as well as the sort they had used to re-form trees into hybrid mammals or transition lungs into gills. There’s almost no complete information, only stories and condemning tracts, but Iriset reads between the lines. The real problem is she can’t experiment. One slipup and it’s all over.
