The Mask of Mirrors by M. Carrick; (lightest ebook reader txt) 📗

laughter. “Don’t you know what saltpeter is used for? Fireworks.” All amusement ebbed away. “And other things that explode. Djek.”

Black powder. The same material that had burned down the Fiangiolli warehouse and killed Kolya Serrado.

She’d never asked why the Stadnem Anduske wanted the saltpeter—but she should have. What have I done?

Vargo pivoted, scanning until he spotted a sedan chair unloading a passenger. “Normally I wouldn’t care much about Scaperto Quientis losing something, but—I’ll look into it right away. My apologies.” With that for a farewell, he set off at a jog, all but knocking a waiting gentleman out of the way to take the chair for himself.

Ren stood outside Breglian’s, eyes squeezed shut. The Anduske had put together a printing plate calling for people to gather at the Charterhouse—after they’d taken Quientis’s saltpeter. She didn’t think they were so blinded by their cause that they would murder their own… but use a bombing to incite something? That was all too possible.

I have to tell the Rook. But if she hadn’t done that just now, she had no other way of contacting him. And she hadn’t told Vargo that it was the Stadnem Anduske who had the saltpeter—because how could Renata Viraudax know that?

She could, however, tell Grey Serrado. He was the one member of the Vigil she could trust with this.

Back in her townhouse, she had just finished scribbling another anonymous message when the bell rang. Tess called her to the door, and a man from Breglian’s delivered a small, heavy box. “Your winnings, alta.”

Lost for words, she took it. Inside were twenty-one forri: her point total for the game.

She had assumed they were only playing for chips. Apparently Vargo had let her keep that assumption… then turned the tables when it was too late for her to argue.

“Thank you,” she said faintly, and shut the door.

Whitesail, Upper Bank: Cyprilun 32

It was a measure of her faith in Vargo’s network that Ren hoped to wake up the next morning to the news that he’d found the saltpeter. But no such message awaited her.

Instead a letter came inviting her to visit Tanaquis’s townhouse in Whitesail to discuss “spiritual matters.” Renata went, puzzled as to why the meeting wasn’t happening in Traementis Manor, and discovered it was because Donaia and Giuna hadn’t been invited.

“I wanted to talk to you about pattern,” Tanaquis said without preamble. “I’ve spent the past three days questioning szorsas, but they’ve been… unhelpful.”

When Iridet’s right-hand woman was interrogating them, Renata wasn’t surprised. The Cinquerat’s religious seat wasn’t known for his tolerance of local “superstition.” She said, “I’ll tell you what I can, but compared to Vraszenians, I’m quite ignorant.”

They hadn’t gone to Tanaquis’s parlour, but to the top floor of the house, what would ordinarily have been the servants’ garret. Someone had knocked out all the interior walls and installed large skylights, creating a bright, open workroom. A star chart enameled in lapis blue and silver covered the largest wall. The polished floorboards at one end held a circle for numinata, and the other end was packed with books. On a platform beneath one of the skylights sat a copper-banded rosewood telescope, with chains connecting the platform to a winch so it could be raised and lowered.

Tanaquis gestured her to a well-cushioned chair. “Your ignorance is less than mine, and at least you won’t be foretelling my doom or hard-selling me inferior spotted toadcaps. I apologize for the mess. I rarely have company.”

Renata took the offered seat and glanced around again. Other than a bit of chalk dust on Tanaquis’s sleeve and a few books stacked on the desk, she saw nothing resembling a mess.

“According to Vraszenians, pattern is linked not only to their cards but to the wellspring, the Great Dream, and the aspect of the Lumen they call Ažerais,” Tanaquis said, proffering a glass of wine. “The cards seem to act like the focus of a numinat, but the manner in which they do so is…” She wrinkled her nose. “Unstructured. Illogical. Does that fit with what you know?”

First time in my life I’ve heard Ažerais called an aspect of the Lumen. “It doesn’t seem illogical to me. When I look at the cards… they make sense.”

“Yes, but how?” Tanaquis leaned forward, dark eyes bright with curiosity. “Aža allows people to glimpse the realm of mind, and ash lets them physically interact with and sometimes even enter it. As I understand it, pattern offers similar glimpses. Some patterners even use aža to gain greater insight. Clearly there’s something to the notion; your reading gave you insight into the Traementis curse. It took me days to come up with a way to reliably verify that. But for you it just… came. Without effort. I suspect because you were conceived during Veiled Waters, which brings us back around to the wellspring. And the Vraszenian goddess—well, not a goddess. She lacks a dyadic counterpart. She’s merely an ancestor spirit of some sort.”

Any Vraszenian would argue that the deities didn’t exist in oppositional pairs. They were single entities, with a Face to petition and a Mask to propitiate. Ažerais was special not because she was an ancestor, but because her Face and her Mask were the same.

Clearly the hardest part of this was going to be listening to Tanaquis get Vraszenian religion wrong.

Despite her best efforts, Ren must have given some hint of her irritation, because Tanaquis held up a conciliatory hand. “There is power there. But Ažerais falls outside the divine dichotomies, which makes her an odd sort of remainder. Difficult to resolve mathematically, and she has no sigil to let us draw on her power for a numinat, so there hasn’t been much study of her. Which is why I wished to speak with you. The pattern you laid out—what cards came up?”

Tanaquis was undeniably brilliant, but it was hard to follow the way her mind jumped from topic to topic. Renata felt a little dizzy as she said, “The Mask of