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

There’s nothing for you to explain,” Tess snapped, taking on a poor woman’s shadow of the icy tones and rigid posture Ren adopted so easily. “I’ll find my own way. You should go back to shooting arrows into crowds of frightened people.”

Ren probably would have come up with words a hundred times as cutting, but Tess had to be satisfied with her dull attempt. Nodding curtly, she hitched her rucksack over her shoulder and stormed off toward Little Alwydd.

Seven Knots, Lower Bank: Cyprilun 34

Thorn Mews was bad. The numinat there made the ground unstable, the buildings along the street creaking, swaying, dropping beams like drunkards looking for a fight. The passage by Pozniret Close was worse, a slow-burning numinat that set everything around it to smoldering. Only the dampness of the fogs had prevented fire before Vargo was able to dismantle it and pick off the stamped wax focus. It left an oily residue on his fingers, smelling of juniper. He shoved the broken pieces in his pocket and moved on to the next, and the one after that.

But the seventh, centered on the corner where Uča Obliok spat out into Dmariše Square, baffled Vargo. The snarling mob pulsed with more violence and anger than Vargo had seen anywhere else in Seven Knots, making it hard for him to even get close.

With Alsius’s help, he crept his way toward the edge of the outer circle. It had been widened to encompass the entire plaza—and the moment Vargo stepped across that line, his heart began to thud in his chest.

This must be what’s riling the crowd, he thought to Alsius. Vargo had never seen a numinat that tried to affect the heart directly. Other body parts, yes; contraceptive numinata worked that way, and he’d seen men stay hard for hours thanks to a Noctat numinat, long after natural desire had faded and all they wanted was to sleep. Affecting the heart was far more dangerous, though.

Where was the numinat itself? He was going to gut the muck-fucking asshole who inscribed these things.

::I think the heart is a side effect,:: Alsius said uneasily as Vargo edged inward. ::The way people are behaving… I think it’s affecting their mood directly.::

Vargo stopped dead. “You mean—”

::We’ve found one.::

Numinatria was the art of channeling energy: heat and cold, light and sound, the life force of the body. It couldn’t influence the mind… or so most people thought. Vargo and Alsius knew better—and now it seemed they might have found proof.

Proof, and no time to study it.

“We’ve got to get to the center of this thing,” Vargo said.

Alsius didn’t argue. ::There, across that alley. Is there something under the burlap?::

Vargo launched himself forward, only to find his way blocked by a man clearly under the numinat’s influence. Vargo ducked his wild punch and jabbed his own fist into the man’s throat. Then he went for the neck, digging his thumbs deep into either side. Choking was a slow process; cutting off the blood was a much more efficient way to take down a problem.

But not one Vargo took pleasure in. Usually.

::Vargo! He’s out. You can let go.::

Shaking off the red fury that had overtaken him, Vargo stumbled forward until he hit the alley wall. His heart was galloping. He was furious with himself for that lapse of control—and knowing the numinat was feeding that anger didn’t help him shake it off. But he had to see how the thing was made, and then take it apart before Dmariše Square was ankle-deep in blood.

A tarp of tattered burlap hung on the wall, but at some point it had been knocked askew, revealing a chalk line. Vargo ripped the whole thing down, uncovering the numinat’s focus.

It was blank. A plug of wine-dark glass without a single mark on it.

He stared in disbelief. The whole point of a focus was to have something inscribed in it: the name of a god, or whatever was powering the numinat. How the fuck had somebody made a numinat with a blank focus?

::Don’t just stand there staring at it, idiot boy,:: Alsius rebuked him. ::Get to work!::

Vargo gritted his teeth, leaning into his anger at himself for getting distracted. Neutralizing a numinat was easy: just swipe a damp cloth across the edge of the containment circle, remove the focus from the center, and have done. Neutralizing one without incinerating yourself or your workspace was a more delicate process. The more complex the numinat and the more skilled the inscriptor, the greater the chance that it had been scribed with multiple Uniats around the interior numinata. Which needed to be erased in a particular order to avoid simply unleashing all the energy within.

Vargo didn’t have the faintest clue what would happen if he pulled a blank focus out, because he had no idea how this numinat was working in the first place. All he could do was forge ahead. Wetting his kerchief in a nearby puddle, he got to work.

::Not there, you fool!::

Vargo flinched and barely avoided swiping his cloth into an angle of an octagram. Alsius’s chatter was nearly as distracting as the shatter of glass out in the plaza. “You want to take over?” he snarled, moving to the next channel break point.

A frustrated sigh ghosted through Vargo’s skull. ::I could do this much faster, if only—::

The driving clang of steel on steel reverberated through the wall. Vargo’s glance around the corner revealed what he most dreaded: A flight of hawks was pushing into the plaza, banging the flats of their swords against the bosses of their shields. The threat was usually effective at terrifying troublemakers into compliance. Everyone knew if that didn’t work, the hawks would turn their blades against flesh and bone next.

This is going to end badly, he thought grimly to Alsius. Even if he neutralized the numinat, he wasn’t certain that would undo its effects. The hawks didn’t need magic to incite them to violence, and already several young Vraszenians had formed an