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

behind them, she could hear his growl of frustration. “If anything happens to you, Leato will never forgive me.”

Her smile tasted of bitter regret. “And he’ll never forgive me if I don’t try.”

Westbridge, Lower Bank: Cyprilun 34

A bottle smashed into the wall by Sedge’s head, close enough for glass shards to strike his cheek and wine to run down it like thin blood. He reflexively flung his arm up to protect his eyes, and clipped a fleeing woman in the tit with his elbow.

Her man took exception to that and answered with fists. A boot to the fellow’s knee knocked him off-balance, enough for Sedge to shove him to the wine-stained wall with a forearm across his throat. His bound wrist ached with the pressure, but he kept it up until the man’s eyes started to roll white.

“Don’t start fights you en’t gonna win.” It was advice the whole Lower Bank could stand to listen to—not that anybody would. But the fight had gone out of the man. Sedge let the woman shove him aside so she could catch her man’s slumping bulk and help him hobble to safety.

Wiping wine from his cheek, Sedge went back to what he’d been doing, which was cursing. He’d lost Vargo.

Not surprising, between the fog and the chaos, but he couldn’t shake the notion that Vargo had slipped him on purpose. Ren’s suspicions had lodged under his skin, and no logic would shake them loose. Vargo was no hero… but if he had some spirit riding him, who was to say what he might be doing when none of his people were watching?

But he’d left Sedge with no idea of where Thorn Mews was, and dodging a series of rooftop assaults. Most of it was disgusting rather than dangerous—rotted food, pisspot donations, wadded clumps of bird nest and shit. But Vargo hated filth more than most cuffs; the mere fact that he was out here instead of staying safe and sound in Crookleg Alley was odd enough.

No point in chewing on it. Sedge wasn’t going to find Vargo, and he wasn’t going to find Thorn Mews, neither. Might as well do what he could to break things up—starting with shitlickers who liked to throw things at frightened, fleeing people.

Veiled Waters was a bloody time for this kind of business, people appearing out of the fog without warning and vanishing just as fast. But as Sedge made his way along, through streets as bent as elbows and bridges barely wide enough for two, no longer even sure which district he was in, he spotted a shadow in the mist that he recognized as trouble, just by the sheer size of it.

People on their own might be assholes or afraid. People in small groups might be assholes or clumping together for safety. People in groups that big were looking to fuck something up.

On his own, though, he couldn’t do a lot, even if his wrist wasn’t busted. Sedge veered left and found himself on a street corner he knew. He was in Westbridge now, and not too far from Ren’s townhouse.

Ren. Tess. He might have lost Vargo, but he could at least make sure his sisters were safe.

Before he could take more than three steps, though, he heard voices he recognized. Smuna and Ladnej, two Vraszenians from the Leek Street Cutters. “Hey,” Sedge called out as he approached, so Ladnej wouldn’t knife him. “You two on your own?”

“Got separated,” Ladnej said, keeping a wary eye around. “We was sent with Varuni.”

With Varuni? They could defend themselves, but they weren’t fists. Mostly they were good at—

At throwing things.

Sedge’s attention went to the sack over Ladnej’s shoulder. “You got house bombs in there?” When she nodded, he pivoted and started back in the direction he’d come from. “Follow me.”

The mob he’d seen had moved onward, but they weren’t hard to find. The sound of shattering windows led Sedge and the two women to Isla Ejče, where the rioters had broken down the door of a moneylender’s and dragged out the screaming Liganti proprietor.

Luckily, Sedge’s unbroken right arm was his throwing arm. The house bomb Smuna gave him arced neatly overhead and broke against the wall of a draper’s, right where the crowd was thickest. Vargo had the house bombs made to drive out vermin before he took a building over. Sedge wasn’t convinced they worked, but they sure as hell reeked bad enough to drive out humans. The crowd scattered, retching.

Ladnej laughed and planted a kiss on Smuna’s lips. Then all three of them retreated, coughing, as a shift in the breeze brought the stench toward them, the bastard child of rotten eggs and a tanner’s yard.

It also brought screams.

“Follow me,” Sedge growled.

He knew what he would find even before he got there. This wasn’t Sedge’s first riot; he could tell the difference between the sound of an angry mob breaking things, and the sound of the Vigil breaking people. Sure enough, a wedge of hawks had caught some of the rioters Sedge had dispersed and were putting them down, hard.

Them, and anyone else who happened to be on the street at the time.

A teenaged boy tried to flee toward Sedge, but the hawks had brought out the dogs. A mastiff weighing more than the boy knocked him to the ground and started tearing into him, while the boy did his best to curl into a protective ball. Sedge snarled and almost lunged out to intervene, but Ladnej grabbed him by the wrist—the bad one—and the spike of pain brought him up short.

“Rule one,” she snapped at him. “Don’t be stupid.” Behind her, Smuna wound up and chucked a house bomb into the plaza.

As the hawks and dogs reared back, Sedge’s gaze went past the two women to a stocky, furious shadow emerging from the fog. “Too late for that,” he mumbled.

“Sedge.” Varuni bit his name off like a threat. “Where’s Vargo?”

Charterhouse, Dawngate, Old Island: Cyprilun 34