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

“Then get a rope and tie us together. I en’t losing you until we find Ren… ata. The alta, I mean.”

Sedge did his best to cover the slip, starting as though he’d seen something in the mist. Then, as if he’d summoned it, there was something, drifting through the murk like—

Don’t think about that. “En’t none of it real,” he muttered, clinging to that conviction.

Until that prize bastard Vargo said, “Remember Hraček and Yurdan?”

It was real enough to kill. Fuck. “Let’s find some rope.”

The worst part was that he saw both worlds at once, waking and dreaming. There were people around them—real people, not the foggy ghosts of Ažerais’s Dream—but in the fog of Veiled Waters it was hard to tell the two apart, and thanks to the ash, both kinds were solid when Sedge blundered into them. He had to rely on instinct to navigate, the layout of Nadežra mapped onto his bones.

And he had to think in symbols. That thing rising to the left, that must be the Charterhouse: a web of ropes, grey and brown and green and blue and a shimmering rainbow strand—red and white, too, though as soon as he tried to look at those bits they were gone. But it was rope. Sedge grabbed Vargo’s arm and pulled him toward it.

They barely made it into the plaza before the way became doubly clogged with living people and faceless ghosts. A line of hawks held the steps, some human, some immovable steel statues, others feathered raptors that towered above the crowd.

Then things more monstrous than humans or hawks came roiling down the stairs—a creeping shadow of spider-thin limbs, the remains of bodies hung and burned and drowned, of gouged eyes, split tongues, severed limbs.

Sedge stumbled back, colliding with Vargo. “The fuck is that?”

“It’s the price.” Vargo—the man who always kept his head, who sometimes let himself show anger but nothing that looked like vulnerability—couldn’t stop his voice from trembling. “The price we pay to survive in Nadežra. Fuck the ropes. We have to get out of here.”

Sedge let Vargo pull him away. The rope web he’d been heading toward was gone anyway, replaced by a red-soaked tower built from the skeletons of dreamweaver birds.

He lost his bearings, but Vargo seemed to be keeping his head against the ash better than Sedge. A sudden blaze of light and heat turned the fog into a steam bath; they were in Suncross. Huge shadows passing overhead were hawks—actual birds, grown a hundred times their size, like the mythical rocs in the stories of Ptolyev the Wanderer. One of the shadows grew larger and larger, blotting out the sun. “Down!” Sedge barked, tackling Vargo to the ground—

—into the path of a wagon, and whether it was real or dream didn’t matter, because they’d be crushed either way. Sedge shoved Vargo aside and just barely rolled clear.

A hush fell over the street in the wake of the wagon. Too quiet. Sedge pushed up to his elbows and realized that was because nothing remained alive to make noise.

Only bodies.

Wagons of them, piles, lone ones slumped in the gutter as though they’d spent their last moments crawling toward safety. Their skin was pocked with pustules, nail beds ghastly blue. The stench of vomit choked him.

Then he spotted Vargo, sprawled on his ass and surrounded by plague-ridden corpses. His complexion had gone pale as the people around him, and almost as waxy. His breathing fluttered like a bird’s, high and fast, but otherwise the man was death-still.

Sedge staggered over to him, trying to look at the dream and waking worlds both, ricocheting off somebody who swore at him and shoved him to the ground. But at least he was next to Vargo now. “Come on, boss—gotta keep moving.”

Vargo didn’t even twitch. Just kept staring at the bodies. Whatever had held him together until now, it wasn’t working anymore.

Sedge cursed. Vargo was going to kill him for this later, but— “On your feet,” he grunted, sliding one arm around Vargo’s chest and hauling. One good thing about ash, I guess—my wrist en’t bothering me. The pain felt distant, like it was off in the dream without him.

Lifting the man wasn’t hard, but Vargo was as much deadweight as the corpses, his legs tangling loosely as Sedge lurched a few steps in the direction of the Point.

Dignity, or effectiveness? Vargo usually prized both, but if it came to one or the other—

Sedge shifted his grip, bending his knees and planting his shoulder. When he straightened, Vargo flopped bonelessly onto his back, ass in the air. But at least he wasn’t dragging Sedge off-balance anymore, and Sedge started marching grimly toward the amphitheatre.

They’d passed through two more intersections and fled a pack of Vigil riot dogs that might have been real and might not, when Vargo’s rapid breathing broke on a shuddering sigh. He went from limp to board-stiff in a heartbeat, and Sedge didn’t need his soft “put me down” to stop and set Vargo on his feet.

Off came his coat. It hit the front window of a shop, buttons rattling against the glass. The waistcoat followed, and Sedge worried that Vargo was going to strip naked in the street to escape his disease-ridden clothing, but he stopped at shirtsleeves and breeches.

His chest rose and fell with several deep, deliberate breaths. Then Vargo shook himself, threw his shoulders back, and retrieved his satchel from the ground. When he faced Sedge, it was as though nothing of note had happened.

“Let’s go,” he said, and struck off up the slope of the Point.

Sedge knew better than to say anything. Not now, not later.

The slope itself wasn’t as bad, maybe because it was too steep and too rocky for anybody to live on it, imprinting it with their fears. But Sedge heard people shouting up ahead, in Liganti and Vraszenian both—something about bombs—and he only realized that it must be happening in the waking world when things failed to start exploding. “Shit,” he