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

Cercel coughed to hide a smile. “You’re out of uniform, Serrado.”

Grey yanked his shirt on, fumbling to close it. “Yes, Commander. Apologies. People usually knock.”

“Do I hear a reprimand?” Cercel drawled, hipping up onto his desk so she could squeeze the door closed.

“No, Commander.” He shoved his feet into his boots.

“I thought not.” She leaned against the closed door, frown deepening as he set himself to rights. “You look like hell, Serrado. Are you sleeping?”

The anger he’d been swallowing flared. “Not recently, no,” he snapped, yanking on a strap that refused to buckle.

Silence fell. She didn’t dress him down for mouthing off to a senior officer; she just let the pause remind him whose side she was on.

Grey straightened and gripped the back of his chair, wishing he could slump into it. But Cercel was standing, which meant he stood. “My apologies. Another child turned up, unable to sleep. I spent the night at her side.” He didn’t mention that if Fiča didn’t sleep, she was likely to die. Cercel knew about the boy in Suncross.

“Then this may help,” she said quietly. “Balriat arrested an old woman today—not the one you’re looking for. Brought her in for giving short weight. But he was laughing with Agnarsin about how ugly she is, and said, ‘She’s even uglier than that Gammer Lindworm hag Poltevis arrested back in Fellun.’”

The only thing that stopped Grey from barging out to speak to Poltevis right then was that Cercel was blocking the door. Wait. Poltevis. He slumped. “Didn’t she take a knife in the Dockwall riots this summer?”

Cercel nodded. “But the arrest record should still be downstairs.”

“Thank you, Commander,” Grey said, meaning it. “Is there anything else?”

She didn’t budge. “You need to sleep, Serrado. If you run yourself into the ground, you won’t do those kids any good. And don’t tell me you’re fine; anyone with eyes can see you aren’t.” Her voice hardened, but not with anger. With sympathy. “I know you’re still hunting the Rook.”

“He’s on the top of the Vigil’s list of—”

“Don’t give me that. First it was the Stadnem Anduske; now it’s the Rook. You want someone to answer for your brother’s death—and I understand that. But if the last two centuries are anything to go by, the Rook will still be here a month from now. Those kids might not be.” She glanced pointedly at the bedroll in the corner. “You need to use that occasionally. Would it help if I got you a bigger office? One at least as long as you are tall?”

The joke was a weak one, but it helped mute the sick fury that welled up every time he thought about Kolya’s death. “Commander, if you can get me something larger than a channel raft, I promise to sleep at least four hours a night.”

“I’ll hold you to that, Serrado.”

They parted ways at the stairwell, Cercel heading to the loft where the commanders and more senior captains had their offices, Grey descending into the half basement of the Aerie, where they kept the prisoners and the records locked up. Only captains and above were allowed access there—a preventative against blackmail.

The records archive was a long, low-ceilinged room sandwiched by a numinat above to provide light without threat of fire, and a numinat below to keep the room cool and dry. For all his many sins, Mettore Indestor followed in the footsteps of his predecessors when it came to good record-keeping. Great ledgers set out on tables by the door provided a brief catalog of arrests sorted by crime, and the shelves behind held the files themselves.

“It’d be nice to know what Poltevis brought the old woman in for,” Grey muttered.

Cercel had said Fellun. He found the right shelves and began flipping through the records, scanning for the name “Gammer Lindworm” and silently cursing his fellow hawks for their terrible handwriting.

He didn’t have to search for long. Not because he found it—but because he didn’t.

A page had been torn out of one of the arrest ledgers. If the person responsible had used a knife to cut it cleanly, Grey might have paged right past without noticing, but a trailing shred remained at the bottom, with a scrawl saying held in the Dockw. Which on its own was no evidence at all… except that he’d already run across other pages recording arrests by Poltevis, and the handwriting was the same angled scrawl.

“Djek.” His curse echoed off the low ceiling. Grey worried the remaining scrap between thumb and forefinger, bare because in his rush to follow up on Cercel’s information he’d forgotten his gloves. The back of his finger brushed the uneven surface of the following page.

Hardly daring to hope, he splayed his hand across it, feeling the faint ridges and bumps of writing that couldn’t be seen even when raised to the light. There was no mistaking it; the pressure of a pencil on the thin paper had left a faint imprint.

He fetched a stick of charcoal from the shelf of supplies. Rubbing it carefully over the ridges revealed ghostly traces of the writing—incomplete and tangled with the next page’s notes, but enough to confirm his suspicions. Although the line for the perpetrator’s real name was blank, under aliases it said amme and indw. She’d been brought in for assaulting a young Nadežran woman… but try though he might, Grey couldn’t make out the victim’s name.

Maybe the victim was the reason someone had torn the page out. Someone of at least captain rank, to have access to this room.

With a brief apology to any future hawk searching for information on one Arvok Drazky, arrested for climbing the Rotunda naked, Grey pulled out a thumb knife and cleanly cut the page from the ledger. Then he stuffed it into his pocket and left, with new energy in his step.

Isla Prišta, Westbridge: Apilun 33

When Ren’s mother died, Ren lost almost everything. Not that they had much by that point, not after two