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

But Alsius said, ::I doubt it. You would need a numinat to draw upon them, and there was no such thing here. Nor are they capable of affecting material things like flesh.::

Vargo kicked a loose cobble. “So what’s invisible and intangible, yet has the power to slice a man to ribbons?”

::It has to be related to the ash. No one else was attacked tonight.::

Rounding a corner, Vargo followed the side of the lace mill. “Focus on the ash, then. It’s new. Not an import, either, or we’d have rumors from the Dawn or Dusk Roads. Which suggests it’s being made here.” And where had they seen a questionable operation only a few months ago? “The break-in. That… substance… we found on the floor.”

::It looked nothing like ash.::

True—ash was a powder. “It could be an interim stage. They used that numinat for something dream related.”

::But this isn’t numinatria,:: Alsius insisted. ::It’s more akin to imbuing—if you could imbue aža to be nightmarish.::

They both fell silent. A pickpocket drifted close, saw Vargo’s face, and drifted away like that was his plan all along.

Imbuing, which couldn’t be integrated with numinatria in a stable fashion. An inscriptor who imbued a numinat fed it their own energy, burning them from the inside out. That was how the river numinata worked for nearly two centuries, and why the broken one was a fucking nightmare to replace. That was what Alsius had been terrified Vargo would do tonight. And when a crafter inscribed a numinat on their work, it might make the product incredibly potent, but only for a few moments. Not long enough to be useful for a street drug. And certainly not the sort of thing that could—

Vargo stopped dead in the street. Tyrant’s syphilitic nutsack—he’d been right the first time. “Ash isn’t imbued aža. It’s transmuted. Like prismatium.”

::… Impossible.:: The weakness of Alsius’s response was nearly agreement.

Vargo began walking again, conviction instead of fury giving him speed. He was right. He didn’t know how they were doing it, but he was right. Even though Alsius argued, ::The process required to transmute prismatium isn’t something one can simply set up and dismantle in a night. And even if it were, why would they do it at the lace mill instead of taking the aža somewhere they controlled?::

“I don’t know.” There was too much they still didn’t know. Hraček had died from ash before the lace mill break-in, and there was too much of it on the street for this to have been a one-time thing. It pointed to organization. Anyone that organized would have arranged for their own supply of aža, and a more permanent location to transmute it. Unless…

“Essunta has been buying a lot of aža from us since he hired us last year. And he’s been dancing on Indestor sticks for a while now.” They’d come full circle back to the lace mill door. Vargo rested his hand on the latch, letting the cold seep through his gloves. “Didn’t Indestor lose a prison hulk in Floodwatch back in Suilun?” Roughly a week before the lace mill break-in.

::Yes. The Stadnem Anduske were rumored to be using it to print seditious literature. At least, that was the excuse Era Novrus gave when she shut it down.::

Novrus and Indestor were always at each other’s throats these days. He’d assumed the prison ship was just another flimsy pretext—but what if there had been something there? Something that had to be relocated in a hurry afterward. Mettore Indestor had a good inscriptor to hand: Breccone Indestris, the grandnephew of Iridet’s seat holder, Utrinzi Simendis, and married into Mettore’s house through some cousin or another. He was capable of what Vargo had seen in the lace mill.

Vargo resisted the urge to kick the door. Wasn’t this what he’d wanted? Dirt on Mettore Indestor, something he could use to cut the man off at the knees. But finding it on his own turf… Vargo couldn’t help but wonder if Mettore had realized what Vargo was up to, and was preparing to strike back.

Fucking Indestor. Bringing their trash into his house.

Vargo threw open the door. Sedge and Varuni were too well-trained to flinch at the bang of it hitting the wall.

“We have a new priority,” he said. “I want to know everything about this ash. Who’s buying, who’s selling, who’s making. I want to know if Novrus’s people found any remnants of numinatria during the anti-Anduske raid in Floodwatch. And get me a list of Indestor’s holdings, official or otherwise. Any place they might be storing aža.”

Coster’s Walk, Lower Bank: Apilun 9

Sending Leato to talk to Vargo’s contacts about shipping was good business sense for Renata Viraudax, but it also served a purpose for Ren: It put him on the Lower Bank at a known time and place.

She was tired of trying to pry indirectly into the man’s affairs. As Leato emerged from the office into the clamor of Coster’s Walk, Arenza Lenskaya stepped into his path.

A major gamble—but her disguise was more than just clothing and makeup. It was the pitch and accent of her voice; it was posture, body language, the deference to a handsome altan. It was the fact that no man in his right mind would look at a Vraszenian szorsa and think, Is that Renata Viraudax?

“Your fortune, altan?” Arenza fanned her pattern deck. “Let the threads guide you, showing the way to what you seek!”

Leato’s step slowed, but his gaze slid sideways, the behavior of a man preparing to ignore the person accosting him on the street. Arenza edged back into his field of view and shuffled the cards, then drew one with a flourish, all but shoving it in his face. “In the cards there is much aid, altan.”

It stopped him cold. The random-seeming shuffle was anything but; she’d jogged a card inward as she tossed them, letting her ensure The Face of Glass would be