If she goes now, fast, she’ll have time to find Bittor and warn him. Make sure he’s safe. And her grandparents. Dalal and her son. The remnants of the Little Cat’s court who were her family long before she infiltrated this one. Iriset will be safe, too, slipped away into the city to be Silk out there. To keep pushing her work. To live.
Only slightly shaky, Iriset returns to the study. Diaa remains sprawled on the floor, those pink blossoms still beautiful against her skin. Iriset drops a scarf over Diaa’s face, then gathers the rest of what she needs, including a long strip of orange silk to be a cloth mask for herself and her father’s echo coin. Before she can change her mind, she leaves through the secret door.
Her only stop on her way out of the palace complex is the Color Can Be Loud Garden, where she kneels on the lawn beside the bed of force-hungry lilies. Iriset plants the final anchor, the trigger, with a crudely designed delay. She hooks its delay into the breathing foundation, that natural rhythm of the palace architecture. She doesn’t have time to make it precise, and only knows that at this pace, the delay will deteriorate sometime in the next five hours. At that point the anchors will connect and close their loops, and her massive design will activate. Silk’s spiders will climb all over everything.
Once it’s done, she retucks her cloth mask and bows her head like a regular attendant, and Iriset mé Isidor leaves the palace of the Vertex Seal.
RISING
Confession is always violent.
—Word of Aharté
The mouth of chaos
Iriset’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 overlyanxious—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, probablyfrom 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 theVertex 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.
