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

this. Had someone killed Hraček to take advantage of the confusion that would follow?

::You don’t slice a man’s skin to strips because he’s inconvenient.:: Alsius’s reminder froze Vargo’s fury. Anger wouldn’t get him answers or retribution.

“Get it stable,” he snapped. “How long ago did they hit us?”

“Last night, but they didn’t clear out ’til almost dawn,” said Nikory, straightening. He shoved the creaking door open. “And the odd thing en’t what they took—it’s what they left behind.”

Vargo followed the lure of Nikory’s cryptic statement. Inside the old mill, the rot was worse. Clean circles edged with black mold decorated the floor where barrels had been left standing too long. Pigeons took advantage of gaps in the shingles to nest in the eaves; the walls wept tears of white shit. At Varuni’s booted nudge, a tangle of fur broke apart into a half-rotted rat king, the corpses knotted together in death. Cold sweat broke across Vargo’s forehead. Even his cowl wasn’t enough to mask the stench.

::What’s that in the center of the room?::

Blotting his brow, Vargo made for the markings that were neither mold nor shit. Gloves served a better purpose than just Liganti fashion; they also protected his hand as he brushed his fingers across a half-erased line of chalk that had once been a numinat. The power had broken with the lines; the taste of char lingered in the air. It had been active, and recently.

In Froghole, there was always someone who’d seen something and was willing to sell what they’d seen. “Check the eyes on the streets. Anyone saw so much as a rat out of place, I want to know it.”

::Do you really expect anyone to say anything?:: Alsius asked.

Not without incentive, Vargo thought in reply. “Make it clear I’m the one asking. And stack those barrels. I need to get higher.”

While his people sprang to obey, Vargo circled the room. Near the edge of the chalked perimeter, a splatter of dark liquid gleamed like an oily canal. Distilled aža had that surface, like trapped rainbows, but the splatter here was murky purple and stank of curdled milk.

::A sample might be—::

Not for nothing am I touching that, he shot back. You think it’s so necessary, you take the fucking sample.

But Alsius had a point. “Nikory. Scrape up a sample of this.”

“On it. Did you want me to climb up?” He gestured at the stacked barrels.

“Mastered inscription while I wasn’t looking, did you?” Vargo drawled, shedding his coat. He snatched a roll of blank pages and a pencil from its pocket before handing the garment to Varuni and climbing the mountain of barrels. He could rely on his people for many things, but for some tasks there was only himself.

From his new vantage, Vargo weighted the paper flat and began sketching the remains of a numinat complicated enough to make his eyes cross.

Soon he had several pages of what amounted to chicken scratches. Varuni had brought in lamps, placing them around the perimeter of the numinat—a diameter that knocked up against opposite walls of the warehouse. With that size and the rough grain of the floorboards, no wonder the intruders hadn’t managed to erase the whole thing.

Several sharp pops echoed in Vargo’s head when he rolled it to relieve the ache in his shoulders.

::I do wish you wouldn’t do that. Appalling sound.::

Setting out his sketches, Vargo traced lines with his finger, starting at the off-center point where the focus must have been, and spiraling out to the edges of the room. Along the spiral were the incomplete remnants of circles containing their own geometric figures, smaller numinata that refined the master numinat’s purpose.

“It’s an earthwise spiral,” Vargo said, quietly enough that his people wouldn’t overhear. Every numen had either an earthwise or a sunwise association, and the direction of the spiral determined whether the numinat was meant for good or ill.

::That doesn’t help us unless we know which numen it was dedicated to.::

The problem with having a pedant in his head was that Alsius tended to repeat basic lessons Vargo had mastered years ago. “Really. I didn’t know that.”

“Sir?” Varuni took an abbreviated step toward Vargo’s barrel tower. “Need something?”

He hadn’t meant to call her attention, but… “Did anyone locate the remains of the focus?” The boards at the center of the spiral were scorched in a perfect ring no bigger than a plover’s egg, marking Illi, the place where the divine focus was set, the starting point of every numinat. For more permanent numinata, the focus would be carefully drawn or inlaid in metal, but for temporary work, most inscriptors used wax blanks that could be stamped with a carved chop of whatever aspect of the Lumen they were drawing on. The discoloration at the numinat’s center suggested such a seal had been used, the scorching another sign that the numinat had been hastily and sloppily dismantled. Whoever set it up had left someone less skilled to take it down. If they used a wax focus, the dismantler might have dumped the fragments.

“Nothing yet, sir.”

Damn. Vargo waved Varuni back to her reports. “We do this the hard way,” he said, soft enough that she wouldn’t mistake his muttering for additional orders.

Without a focus at Illi to indicate the general purpose of the master numinat, the next best clues were the child numinata inscribed along the spira aurea’s arc. The first of which, just to the left of Illi, was easy enough to discern despite the attempts to erase it—the overlapping circles of a vesica piscis.

::Tuat,:: Alsius mused. ::What were the phases of Corillis and Paumillis last night?::

Astrology and numinatria often went hand in hand, and the double moons were tied to Tuat, the self-in-other. But Vargo didn’t think this had to do with astronomical timing. “First quarter and waxing gibbous.”

::Neither matched nor in reflection. So much for that theory. It’s probably some fool marrying their beloved in secret,:: Alsius grumbled.

“More like cursing them,” Vargo mused, tracing the earthwise spiral again. Tuat was a sunwise numen. Charting it