Page 128 of The Mercy Makers
“Iriset,” Lyric whispers, and something in his expression shifts, from anger to—to wonder, perhaps. Or it might be fear. They’re so close, wonder and terror.
Behind him a line of silver light fattens on the horizon, displaying the sharp edge of the crater. The dawn puts an aura of holiness around him, glinting against his black curls, and Iriset thinks she’ll remember him exactly so for the rest of her life.
She says, “Maybe Aharté is wrong. Maybe she doesn’t even exist.”
Then the Vertex Seal takes her hands, gently tugging her around to face him. Their crossed legs touch at the knees and he begins the balancing meditation they’d mastered together. Ecstatic, flow, falling, rising, curling through them via the circle of their hands, arms, and hearts. The light strengthens and so she can see his freckles, the pinch of weariness at the corners of his upturned eyes, and the glint of bright red among all the mirané-brown flecks in his irises. Like an array of rose petals in the Garden for Four Winds where first they met.
Lyric lets go her right hand and touches her cheek, then her mouth, his gaze tracing the path of his fingers. Iriset can’t helpcomparing her own face to the perfect, symmetrical beauty of Singix Es Sun. Her jaw tightens and she looks down, but Lyric puts two fingers under her chin and lifts it again. “I am married to an unapologetic apostate.”
“And I to an ardent priest,” she says, trying to find any shred of humor.
“Mercy,” he whispers, and it sounds like a curse.
Sunderer
Iriset goes back to the palace. Just not with Lyric.
It’s the shock, maybe. Or one more knot in a string of bad decision-making. But there’s something she simply must do.
Here is what happens.
Lyric leaves her as the sun rises, and she remains alone with her face turned toward the east. Smoke fills the morning air, gusting at her where she perches like a ruffled griffon. The wail of emergency alarms lifts to mingle with the songs of late-summer larks and shrill skull sirens.
Iriset is hungry, but has no food. She’s exhausted and sad. So she climbs down the tower and scours the mechanics room, finding a small hemp bag, a broken stylus that will suit for now, a nearly gone spool of design thread, and a handful of random crystals and salt rocks. She uses the thread to redesign a scrap of linen into paper currency like is used in the outer regions.
Before leaving, she uses a small stick of charcoal to rub ashonto her fingers and paint it across her cheekbones in crosshatches to confuse the eye regarding her facial structure. Just in case anyone looks too closely and wonders why she resembles the Silk graffiti. Then she makes her way through the only-somewhat-trashed Saltbath toward Morning Market. It’s easy, because the city army has been abruptly recalled, and in addition to residents, emergency teams and units sent from the design schools and a wave of Silent priests are arriving to tend to fires and broken bones and spiritual ailments. (And to cover up or unravel bright new spider graffiti both designed and plainly painted across the streets and towers. The people won’t stop murmuring hopefully about Silk until all the spiders are gone.)
The moment she’s in the Morning Market, she buys a spiced pork pie and devours it too quickly. It takes several hours to make her way across the city to the Violet Break, one of the crevasses in the crater’s edge that catacombs had been built into. (It glows at sunset because of some veins of amethyst.) The Little Cat had a stash there that Iriset can access. Jewels, traveling supplies, false papers, a few weapons she hardly knows how to use, and some crude craftmasks. Clothing.
Though it’s midday by the time Iriset arrives, there always are visitors to the catacombs. She knows where she’s going, as most mourners do, and the weariness and sorrow are easy to read on her ash-masked face. Shade cools the catacombs, and water drips deep within, resounding prettily in the narrow caverns. The few people with her murmur and hold hands, place palms to the force-diamonds etched into the walls to mark memorials. There are rough-cut caverns covered in rows of tiny cubbies for echo coins, and it’s at the end of such a cavern where Iriset opens a secret door very like the one beneath the shelf in the Crimson Canyon. A force-shield surrounds her, blurringlight and shadows so that she’ll be invisible if nobody stares directly.
The cache is in her hand when she stops.
With it she can walk out the crater gates and go anywhere. Any of the towns or territories of the empire, or beyond to Ceres where at least she can speak the language. Or to the Cloud Kings where probably her mother went twelve years ago.
Leave Moonshadow City behind forever.
But.
There’s a memory of someone who helped her, for no reason, and she wants to know why. (The miran don’t say that curiosity kills cats and their kittens, but they definitely should.)
So Iriset goes back to the palace.
Presumably by now it’s easy to believe she can sneak in with only a broken stylus, wearing the burnt orange of most palace attendants, and using the plumbing design to her advantage.
Not to mention the security nets are in total disarray as palace architects feverishly attempt to untangle the remnants of the massive spider design. It’s gone, at least, her vivid graffiti. No more big, beautiful mother spider hunched over the Silent Chapel, no more tiny little spark spiders crawling up and down the glimmering web. Iriset wishes she could have seen it.
But places where palace architects attempted to dismantle it before it finished its course show craters in the walls, scorch marks on the hall of miran itself. A mess of broken tiles here, a smear of mud dried across a sidewalk there prove the chaos Iriset made, the panic and fear and awe her graffiti array caused. It can’t soon be forgotten.
She carries her stash in a simple bag slung over one shoulder, such as any non-mirané attendant might have. The cloth mask she wears over newly knotted hair pulls across her face, casting the complex in a comforting pale orange.
It surprises her to see red, pink, and black moons of force-light hanging in the corridors and courtyards, and dotting the edges of the layered, spiral petals of the palace. Those colors together mean someone important died, and everyone will mourn. Tragic death is the only time three colors alone are used, an odd number that can never be balanced. Sudden, violent loss is unbalanced, the miran believe. Iriset is impressed how quickly they got the moons up. Her opinion of the palace architects minus Raia is not high.
She assumes the mourning moons are for Diaa, though she does not pause to listen to kitchen gossip or the murmurings of gathered miran. Everyone is subdued. Diaa of Moonshadow had been more well-liked by every level of the palace than Iriset thought. Little did they know, she thinks, glad her stolen cloth mask hides her expression. She keeps her head and eyes down, and can’t imagine the Vertex Seal has announced anything about Singix yet. He should have returned to consult with Amaranth how best to do so. He might be furious with his sister, but he’s not stupid.
Fortunately, there’s no meeting of the princes’ council and she slips into the mirané hall and strides across its vast chamber without note, heading for the hidden arch opposite the one that leads to the office of the Vertex Seal.
(She glances toward it, not truly considering going to him, but wishing she could let herself consider it.)
