“What kind?”
“As big as you can make it. Safely.”
Images and ideas flash through her thoughts instantly—most of them related to the very intricate details she’s recently gleaned about the palace security webs already in place. “Oh yes,” she murmurs with quite a bit of relish.
“Good.” Bittor grins.
“What’s the best way for me to send you a map?”
Bittor removes his hand from hers and plucks a chunk of sea glass from the pocket of his linen jacket. The hem of it brushes the dust around him. He puts the greenish glass into her hand. It’s sun-warmed and glows.
Iriset hides it between both her hands. Sea glass is perfect. She can reorder the internal structure to hide a design map. They’d hypothesized about such spy-craft two winters ago, tossing the idea back and forth, and Iriset designed a web to impress into the foundational design of the glass. Any amorphous stone like this would, theoretically, work, but she thought natural glass best, and Bittor had remembered. She looks up at him. His pupils have widened as the sun dips behind a cloud. She knows he’s thinking she shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be the one in the field. Silk is meant for the laboratory.
“I don’t want to be doing this, either,” she says. “But I must.”
“I know. I miss you at my back.”
“I miss you,” Iriset says, then tilts her smile wickedly. “Under me.”
It startles him into a bark of laughter. Bittor glares but for a moment, happily. Then he starts to roll up the resin. “I have to go. Make your map and send that through Shahd mé Sahar.”
“Don’t hurt her family unless you must.” Iriset tucks the sea glass into the bodice of her sleeveless vest. She draws her mask across her eyes, sending the world back into a glaze of orange.
Bittor nods. “I want your escape as part of the plan for your father. I’m getting both of you out that day.”
“Yes. I’ll be ready.”
“Here.” He stands with his rolled pack of resin and offers his hand to assist her. Iriset takes it, and he squeezes, putting something into her palm. He withdraws, and Iriset opens her mouth to speak, to call him back, but doesn’t.
She watches him return to the others, ignoring her. She doesn’t look at what he gave her.
Longing paints streaks down her skin, cold and hot and cold. Iriset counts to eight with her breath. In-one-two, hold-three-four, out-five-six, hold-seven-eight. In-one-two, hold-three-four, out-five-six, hold-seven-eight. She’s so torn today, isn’t she? Longing to run back into her shadow home; longing to remain with Singix in the sun.
Before the resin merchants pack up, Iriset leaves, walking slow to counter the urge to run.
Late that night, after fucking herself as best she can, followed by hours of careful notations on the security and force-threads she’s encountered, Iriset sets down her stylus and vellum, thesea glass and scrap of silk that is the craftmask of her own face. Bittor had put three tiny crystal shards into her palm, coated in resin that can be easily removed with the proper vibration. They’re from her prototype glove, and part of the fabric that made it useful for manipulating force. With them, she can make another silk glove with which to dig her way through gates and security, or tear down craft and force art.
She can’t stop thinking of another use, though.
It’s past the nadir hour when she slips out of her room, disengaging the field of the jade cuff with her tourmaline cap. She hurries silently through the curving corridors of the palace, toward the mirané hall.
Under the stark black-and-white domes, the throne of the Vertex Seal gleams solemnly and alone, lit only by low force-lights, and beneath it is the chunk of red moon rock like dried old blood.
She slips through the vast room, too quiet for any echoes, then behind the throne, and finds the ring of iron through which the numen’s chain would be bound.
If she leaves the shards here, tucked against the iron base, the numen will find them. Or perhaps somebody else will, servant, attendant, designer. But will they extrapolate the purpose?
It isn’t enough to leave crumbs for the numen. Iriset has to do something more. She can’t explain it, and is grateful nobody is asking her to. But its imprisonment makes her so uncomfortable. For herself, for her father. For it, though she understands nothing about it or why it had come.
Keeping the shards in her hand, she goes to the wall and touches it. She closes her eyes and parts her lips to sense and taste the argument of forces filling the mirané hall. There’s so much empty space that the Hall of Princes roars with tension.
Iriset follows the most basic threads woven into the walls. Ties and anchors for security and decoration, for amplifying and dousing sound, knots for occasionally charging a cool breeze, and nets of rising force for something she can’t identify. Toward the back of the hall, she finds an archway almost invisible for the clever way it was built—without design, but only basic building techniques. It opens into a shadowed corridor she suspects will take her to the Vertex Seal’s private office.
Across the hall from that archway is another. Iriset dashes to it on silk slippers and follows the shallow steps down and down to a dead end.
There’s a hidden door. This one disguised by design to appear like nothing more than wall, but covered with alarum-net. She leans close and breathes on the filaments of force without quite touching. They tremble, and Iriset freezes. If she fiddles with it in the slightest, the alarm will sound. She can’t afford that, yet.
It must be where the numen is kept.
