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

The railing snapped beneath her hand when she put her weight on it, turning her leap into a fall. But she crashed to the ground floor behind the pack of zlyzen and managed to keep her feet, staggering desperately toward the kitchen.

Claws snagged her hair, her skirt, dragging her back. She kicked, pulled out another knife, and slashed with it, felt blood like slime oozing terror over her fingers. The claw tore a hank of hair loose as it let go. One of the other zlyzen hissed.

They’re trying not to hurt me, Ren realized. And that terrified her more than if they’d been out to kill her.

Her swipes with the knife got wilder. They grabbed her arms in their wrong-jointed claws, twisting them behind her with a strength that could easily have snapped her bones, and the knife fell to the floor. Then they pushed her back toward the stairs, a jostling, flowing crowd, while her breath sobbed in her chest and panic blurred her vision to fog.

She knew where they were taking her.

A croaking tune slithered down the hall, echoed by a smoother voice rising in Ren’s memory:

“Find them in your pockets,

Find them in your coat;

If you aren’t careful,

You’ll find them on your throat…”

More frantic struggles only brought more pain, lancing through her shoulder, and all she could see was Sedge on the kitchen floor while Tess levered his joint back in place.

Stop. You need your arms. And your wits. Hard enough to think it, harder still to comply, but Ren forced herself to go limp. The pain eased.

The zlyzen carried her down the hallway and through a curtain of moth-chewed silk, throwing her onto a carpet dank with mold. The same carpet from five years ago; it squelched under her cheek. Through her tangle of hair, she could see the shattered crone that had once been Ondrakja, lounging in a parody of her former grace—as if this parlour were her stronghold again, and the zlyzen her new Fingers.

The big toe of Ondrakja’s bare foot loomed before Ren’s eyes, the nail fibrous and yellowed with fungus. It hooked her chin and lifted, forcing Ren to look up. Ondrakja took a slow sip from a pristine crystal goblet, something purple-dark and thick as river sludge.

“My little Renyi. You’ve come home.”

“This isn’t home,” Ren spat. “It never was. You lured me in with the promise of helping me find my mother’s koszenie, but it was a lie. Everything you told me and taught me—all lies.” Lies she’d clung to. Because the alternative was to have nothing at all.

Ondrakja frowned, rubbery skin twisting over bone so easily the two barely seemed connected. But Ren remembered her frowns well enough to recognize this one. Not anger. Hurt.

“Not a lie. I was going to give it back to you; I was just waiting for the right moment. Once you showed me you’d learned your lesson.” Ondrakja’s skeletal arms wrapped around herself in a hug. “You would have loved me then.”

Ren’s mouth turned dry as dust. I was going to give it back to you.

Her mama’s koszenie. The embroidered shawl every true Vraszenian had, their lineages coded in thread. It had been stolen off Ivrina’s body, along with everything else.

“You had it. All along.”

Ondrakja cackled with triumph. “Whose Fingers do you think plucked her corpse clean? And you, wandering the streets like a lost duckling, wailing for your mama’s shawl… I couldn’t give it to you then, of course. You might have left us. I was saving it for when I really needed it, to bind you to me forever. Until you poisoned me.”

Zlyzen claws dug into Ren’s shoulders when she tried to lunge for Ondrakja. “You had it, and you used me—”

“All for your own good! My poppet, my little mirror. You couldn’t survive on the streets; you would have died with that shawl. But I said I’d take care of you, and I did. I said I’d teach you to use your beauty to get anything you wanted, and look at you now.”

She leaned closer, the Acrenix medallion swinging from her withered neck, tangled with other cords, and her face warped into a mockery of a smile. “Alta Renata Viraudax. What mother could be more proud than I?”

Horror gagged Ren. She knows. The note from Sedge had been a trick; Ondrakja had sent the messenger. I should have made sure I knew what his writing looked like. Should have taken more precautions. Shouldn’t have trusted that Ondrakja never knew about the escape window.

Too many “shoulds,” going all the way back to the day Ivrina Lenskaya died.

The worst part was, Ondrakja was right. What she’d done as Renata—Ondrakja had taught her that. Her skill at lying, her light fingers, her ability to read people and figure out how to make them dance… She’d learned all of that here.

“Call yourself my mother again and I’ll cut your tongue out,” Ren snarled. “You aren’t even Ondrakja anymore. You’re a rotted husk full of zlyzen blood. You are Gammer Lindworm.”

The glass shattered against the wall, and with it, all pretense of humanity. Gammer Lindworm lunged for Ren, nails digging into her jaw as she forced her head up higher. Breath foul as a river-bloated corpse washed over Ren’s face.

“Whose fault is that?” Gammer Lindworm hissed. “You swore the knot oath, and you betrayed it. I died for days. Screaming, retching, clawing at my own skin. Until I saw one of them—the beasts—tangled in flood wrack and half-drowned. Tore it apart and drank its blood. I’m a monster now? They kept me alive. They are loyal to me—unlike you. And I’m going to feed you to them in pieces.”

Sunlight edged through the broken, filthy window behind her. It barely lit the room at all, but an eerie sound filled the air around Ren: an inhuman moan, fear and longing braided together.

It was coming from the zlyzen.

They faded like smoke, into black mist, then nothing at all. Gammer Lindworm let go of Ren’s jaw, cursing, yelling