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

felt the hard lump of the Acrenix medallion against her back. Tricat, the numen of family. Was that why Gammer Lindworm kept calling Ren her daughter?

You are not my mother. But instead Ren said, “A good mother also teaches her daughter. You’re smarter than he. If we work together, we can outwit him.”

Gammer Lindworm’s claws tangled in her hair. “Smarter than you both, you mean. I’ll make him use you instead of that filthy bundle of bones over there. That’s your punishment. I’ll poison you—it seems only fair, don’t you think?—and then we’ll use you to poison the wellspring. Once it’s destroyed, he’ll be satisfied.”

Ren barely heard the rest of her words. The roaring in her ears nearly drowned them out. “The wellspring,” she whispered, lips numb. “You seek to destroy the wellspring.”

“He says the gnats will leave Nadežra if there’s no pool to swarm around.” She clicked her tongue like an old auntie. “That man is obsessed.”

Ren’s heart thundered against her ribs. She couldn’t even fight as Gammer Lindworm pried open her mouth and poured ash into it. The world spun around her—not quite the chaotic unraveling of the Night of Hells, but she could feel the threads sliding past each other, the weave coming loose. Like she could just… step through.

Gammer Lindworm sensed it, an instant after Ren moved. “Wait! Stop!” The claws on her shoulder tightened, but melted through Ren’s flesh like knives through fog. “Get back here, you horrid little brat!”

Ren stumbled clear, through and outside the circle of the old hag’s arms. The zlyzen were there, sinuous and broken and wrong, but there was more than one Nadežra; she’d seen it when Gammer Lindworm hauled her to Indestor Manor.

And if she was born of Ažerais, then she could move through Ažerais’s Dream.

Ren turned her back and fled.

23

Storm Against Stone

Ažerais’s Dream: Cyprilun 35

She ran.

Through the darkened corridors of an amphitheatre, while audiences above shouted in crazed approval of the Tyrant’s bloody entertainments. Across the Point of stone bare to the sky. Past the shadows of Vraszenian pilgrims climbing the slope to walk the labyrinth around the wellspring and Liganti soldiers behind defensive fortifications, down into the Old Island, shifting between open ground and suffocating trap and a soulless, well-ordered grid of streets it had never been in the waking world.

Through Nadežra. Through all the dreams of all the Nadežras. And the zlyzen chased her, snarling and snapping, but she outran them. Because she was a river rat, and if there was one thing she knew, it was her city.

On and on, faster than her feet could carry her, streets and canals and bridges flashing by, through districts she recognized to ones she didn’t, to the northern edges where the stone foundations of the islets gave way to houses built on stilts in the delta mud, the rich farmland that fed the city, and beyond that, glittering under the light of two ever-changing moons, the sea.

Ren stopped, gasping. Nothing was following her anymore.

But the fear still beat at her, ash’s song in her bones. Gammer Lindworm could appear out of nowhere. So could the zlyzen. How far would she have to go to escape them? How far did Ažerais’s Dream stretch? Did it stop at the borders of Vraszan, or were there countless dream versions of Ganllech, Seteris, all the cities and nations along the Dawn and Dusk Roads?

Would the dream still be there after the wellspring was destroyed?

If the dream ceased to exist… what would happen to Ren?

And not just to her, but to the ancestors. The szekani, the part of the soul that kept watch over that person’s kin and descendants, and came forth when called by the kanina.

Ivrina Lenskaya wasn’t there. Ren hadn’t been able to afford proper rites for her; Ivrina’s cremation had been done in the Liganti fashion, with prayers for her spirit to ascend to the Lumen before reincarnating once more. But countless other mothers and fathers were, and grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters and cousins. The threads that bound the Vraszenian people together.

She could see their ghosts around her now, vague shadows working the soil, poling barges, fishing the bounty of the river.

As if pulled by invisible strings, she turned back to see Nadežra.

The City of Dreams. Holy site of Ažerais’s wellspring. Held for two hundred years in Liganti hands… but all the more precious because of it.

They were going to poison Arkady with ash, then sacrifice her to destroy the dreams of all Vraszenians, past and present and future.

She couldn’t turn her back on that. Couldn’t give up on it all.

Ren set her gaze on the stone of the Point, rising impossibly high above the river, and began running again.

Running home.

Old Island: Cyprilun 35

The ash working through Sedge’s blood felt like a desecrating mockery of the aža he’d taken for his knot oaths. Nadežra crumbled around him, boards rotting with mold, buildings sinking into mud and silt. It sucked at his boots, threatening to pull them off with every step, until Sedge trudged along stooped over, fists clamped around the straps to keep them at his knees. Like the delta itself was trying to swallow him.

It was one of his oldest nightmares. He’d been just a baby when some clam-digger found him in the sedge by the riverbank, but that bastard Simlin used to tell stories about kids swallowed by river mud. Drowning in dirt.

I en’t gonna drown. He was too big for that now. Too big for any of this shit.

Sedge tried to focus on Vargo instead, only to find the man fading in and out of sight as the mist swirled thick around him. “Oi! Don’t you fucking take off without me again!” Sedge shouted. And maybe it worked, because Vargo firmed up again, like a guttering candle sheltered from the wind.

“It’s not my doing,” Vargo said. “It’s the realm of mind. We’re still in waking Nadežra, but the dream