Page 2 of The Mercy Makers
“That isn’t his command,” Bittor says simply.
Nobody will go against her father except her. She says, “They have my father already?”
Bittor nods, and frowns beneath his thin beard. His voice is low as he says, “There is nothing you can do, and you can’t get down to the street. They are below us, on nearly every level, surrounding the whole Saltbath precinct, and brought with them investigator-designers who drove hard falling forces down through the streets in case we had tunnels. Theyknew, Iriset.” Darkness colors his cheeks and he bares his teeth helplessly.
“Someone betrayed us,” she says calmly. Too calmly.
Bittor ignores it. “Do not let them think you know what you know of design.”
“I know what I am bound to protect,” Iriset says. Herself. She’s not allowed to protect her father or Bittor, nor any of the cousins of the court. She must prioritize her own life, not claim her mask-name. She must allow fire to strip away all the evidence of her discoveries. Rising force inside Iriset lifts painfully, a yearning pressure.
Bittor kisses her again, and then pushes her toward the door. “Go, Iriset.”
Iriset snatches her clothes and red silk mask off the floor and obeys.
The air outside the study is cool with morning breezes from the windcatchers carved into every level of the tower, but that wind brings sounds of battle and desperation: steel clashingand cries of pain, the shaking of stone and ecstatic force. Iriset dashes to the wide spiral stairs up and up along the outer edge of the tower. Her bare toes hardly touch the limestone bricks, and her fingers skim along the smooth white stucco walls, until she spills up into the blue landing.
Untouched yet with violence, the landing is a small sitting area with two levels: one of perfect mosaic tiles in the shapes of blue gentians, the second layered with rugs and pillows in every shade of blue beside a huge lattice window spanning nearly half the entire curved wall. The glittering lattice snakes that usually wind through the cutouts, soaking in sunlight, are nowhere to be seen. Hiding, she hopes, sparing another brief thought for her poor dead spiders.
Iriset sits hard on the second level and pulls on her pantaloons, knotting them around her waist under her robe, and adjusts the laces at her ankles. She shoves her arms into the short jacket and ties it under her breasts, but loosely in case she needs to run or scream or fight. Finally, she pins the red silk mask to her hair, tucking it up so that a quick tug will let it fall over her eyes.
By now Iriset hears voices just below, methodical and ordered: soldiers searching the levels of the tower.
She stands. Through the soles of her feet she feels the tower’s architecture trip and startle. Fear disrupts her body’s design, an influx of ecstatic energy. She’s unused to being afraid under either name she’s used: Safe as Isidor’s daughter, coddled by murderers and thieves. Safe as Silk, too, thanks to her own skills and the Little Cat’s favor. Now Iriset needs to balance her inner design for calm. Fear serves nothing once its warning is made.
Hard boots clomp up the stairs to the landing.
She is Iriset mé Isidor, and even in his absence she will make her father proud.
Her father, so tough and sly he rules the Moonshadow City undermarket. He is slight and wiry, hardly larger than her, yet he commands respect through his reputation and deeds. He would not give Iriset sympathy, were he here, but snap at her to lift her chin and face the consequences of their choices with eyes clear. Wear her mask demurely, be what he needs her to be in that moment—a daughter sheltered and no threat to the empire. Keep her criminal identity secret. Survive what comes next so that she can make better, slyer choices in the future.
Just as the first soldier’s head appears in the well, Iriset jerks the red edge of her mask down. It brushes her nose and falls just to her lips.
The world turns hazy red as she peers through the thin silk.
The soldier’s own cloth mask wraps tight around their hair and face, leaving only a slit for their eyes, a blatant white that continues down in a uniform of lacquered armor over a short white robe and pants and thick boots: all clearly displaying the crimson splatter of their work. Their short sword is dark with smears of it. Behind them come more soldiers, identical in uniform and size, who stop around Iriset in a half ring. One says, in an impatient fem-forward voice, “Who are you, girl?” The speaker’s eyes are black, the slit of skin visible a darker brown than her companions’. None are the mirané brown of Moonshadow’s ruling ethnicity.
“Iriset mé Isidor,” she says boldly.
“The Little Cat has adaughter?” one of the other soldiers says.
Iriset doesn’t move.
The woman soldier darts a hand out and Iriset recoils, expecting a slap, but the woman only rips the mask off her face.
Anger flushes rising force up her spine, and Iriset struggles not to show it. If this woman will not give her the little respect of the mask, what else might be taken from her?
“Get her out of here,” the commanding soldier says, and her soldiers obey with grabbing, hard hands, dragging Iriset down the spiral stairs.
This is what Iriset does not know about the attack on the Little Cat’s tower: The city army of the Vertex Seal has been targeting her specifically for over a year. Or rather, targetingSilk.
Rumors of Silk’s existence have filtered through the gossip of the small kings of the Holy City for nearly seven years now. She is said to be a prodigy at design who invented a wondrous—and proprietary—material called craftsilk that every architect in Moonshadow would like to get their hands on. But Silk doesn’t share. She works exclusively for the Little Cat, and rumors accuse her of everything from creating design nets for cheating at cards to illegal human architecture that can disguise the features of Isidor’s thieves and spies so they can slip into the halls of power or infiltrate a rival’s bank. Some say Silk can cause a heart attack with a kiss of ecstatic force, others that she merely helps the Little Cat toy with his prey, using tricks of flow to keep a rival awake for questioning or wearing a mask of a Seal attendant’s face to whisper here and there, shifting the tides of scandal. Perhaps she is a rumor only, or an amalgam of several talented designers in the Little Cat’s employ. The latter opinion held the most favor for a while, until Silk herself began publishing brief, passionate papers that edged extremely near a pro-human-architecture stance. In the third paper she directly refuted the rumors she was several people.
But the city army has little evidence of anything other than that Silk is a woman. All theyknowis that since her appearance,the Little Cat has grown bolder in sending out his disciples. They scale towers like rock skinks and paint his graffiti for all to see, smuggle goods through blockades held by the city army, and hijack force-ribbons in order to stop traffic, jamming the schedules of the richest folk in Moonshadow for whatever no-doubt nefarious reason. And they never get caught. They leave only evidence they intend to leave.
Under the leadership of the Little Cat and his pet apostate, the undermarket has thrived.
While the Little Cat keeps his people to thieving, gambling, and smuggling, the occasional venture into fixing scandals or tugging small kings’ political strings—oh, and a few memorable murders—the recent growth has made many in the army concerned about how easy it would be for Isidor’s organization to turn to outright rebellion. And the Vertex Seal is always deeply concerned with rebellion.
