Tor méra Ladalir tried to have the numen bled, starved, hanged, and even suggested the Vertex Seal’s historically preferred method of execution: unraveling. His brother, the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, argued that unraveling would free the numen, not kill it, and since the Mistress was the one in the most danger from the creature who (they believed) had come here to kill the Mistress, the Vertex Seal and his mirané council gave extra weight to the man’s opinion.
(There is only one way to kill a numen.)
Since they certainly couldn’t set it free and had no clue how to destroy it, they spent quite a bit of effort paid in money and hours to secure it in a prison that should last a thousand years.
It was Lyric and Amaranth’s grandfather who decided to flaunt the numen sometimes, situating it behind the throne, chained to the red foundation rock broken from the fallen red moon itself. Initially it caused a stir, both curiosity and outcry, but the Seal guards didn’t allow anyone too near, and the numen itself reacted to nothing at all—not offers of ecstatic wine in delicate flutes or beer thrown in its face. Eventually it lost its luster,and the miran ignored it, teased one another about it, pointed and told stories to comfort themselves, and drifted away.
When Lyric was fifteen, he came across it already chained to his father’s throne, hours before the start of the party that would fill the Hall of Princes. Startled, on his way between the Silent Chapel and the high arch leading to the office of the Vertex Seal, he stopped.
They were alone in the echoing chamber.
He’d seen it before, of course. Lank hair, falling in pieces over pale gray-pink shoulders bared by the long vest it wore. Naked feet with toes splayed inhumanly against the tiles. It crouched so that its legs seemed too long, knees too knobby. And it stared at him with black diamond-shard eyes. Lyric breathed deeply, in a slow four-count as he’d been taught in the temple.
There was nothing he could do, and if he unlocked the null collar and chains, what if it slipped away to murder his uncle? By the time Lyric inherited and could make such a decision to let it go, it would be his sister in danger.
But Lyric always felt it when it was in the mirané hall. Not the hum of forces felt by certain others, no—for Lyric it was the weight of his own expectations and the weight of choice and privilege. Imprisoning it did not fit into his understanding of Silence, of Aharté’s Holy Design. It had been captured attempting murder, but hadn’t actually hurt anyone. It was a mystery, yes, and dangerous, certainly. It should have received swift and just punishment. Death or a term of sentence, whatever his forebears decided. Not this slow, sick, unending apathy. It was wrong. Torturous. Unbalanced. He wanted his reign to be marked by justice, by the balance and peace of Aharté’s Silence. The promise of it.
Then again, the next time Lyric méra Esmail the VertexSeal was alone with the numen chained to the throne—which, thanks to the death of his father, was suddenly his—he had already commanded every sixteenth person in the Rising Two refugee camp executed, whether child, adult, elderly, infirm, guilty, or innocent. A handful of refugees coming in from the northwest in the wake of a bad plague—on top of civil war in the great Lakesea—had broken into the army warehouses of animal feed and stolen the grains for rough bread. They’d been protected by the people in the Rising Two camp, of course, because they fed those people. Instead of hunting the specific perpetrators, the army rounded up the whole camp and committed the Vertex Seal’s deterrent.
You are welcome here, the Vertex Seal said,so long as you obey the Holy Design. Harbor criminals or apostates, and this is what you face.
The number of refugees in the camp was seven hundred and sixty-eight. A perfect number divisible by Aharté’s best number. Proof, was it not, that the decimation was part of her Holy Design? Forty-eight died. Also a holy number. Maybe some of the thieves were among them. Maybe not.
After having done such a thing, Lyric looked at the numen as it wasted away behind his throne. He saw the injustice. He saw the slow cruelty of it. But in the face of everything else he had to consider now, the balance of violence and compassion, the numen was nothing.
The beautiful twilight
In these days, the moon never moves. It hangs like a massive pearl high over the throne of the Vertex Seal.
Iriset does not know why. Nor do any of the citizens of the empire. For centuries that silver-pink moon has been anchored to Moonshadow City.
The year is marked by how far beneath the moon the sun shines at midday. When the days are shortest, the sun swings three times that of a raised fist below the moon. As summer approaches, the sun’s arc lifts closer and closer to the moon, finally slipping behind it at noon, until the day of a total eclipse. For eight days after the initial total eclipse, the sun moves higher and higher, cresting at midsummer in the Vertex Eclipse, when a brilliant white-hot crown of sun caps the moon, the rest obscured behind. Then the sun falls for eight days back into the second total eclipse, before continuing its long path south again to midwinter and its lowest arc.
These sixteen days between two summer eclipses are knownas the Days of Mercy: two octagonals, one rising and one falling, dedicated to balance, faith, and celebration.
Isidor the Little Cat will be executed on the Day of Final Mercy.
The initial eclipse is in ten days, the Vertex Seal’s wedding in seventeen, and the execution in twenty. That is exactly how long Iriset has to work out a new rescue plan.
“What do you want, Shahd?” Iriset asks the girl as she adjusts the sash around Iriset’s robe.
“Honorie?” Shahd pauses, her hands drifting away from Iriset’s waist.
“What can I do for you, because you are working for me?”
“I work for Her Glory.”
Iriset falls silent for a moment. Trust is impossible, but faith must be found. “You have taken messages for me before, and I need you to do so again.”
“To the Little Cat’s drop.”
“Yes.”
“There was no reply.”
“But you told me five days ago the drop was empty. Someone took the message.”
Shahd inclines her head. “I don’t want anything. Now.”
