Page 3 of The Mercy Makers
Two years ago, apprehending Silk and her benefactor, Isidor the Little Cat, was declared a priority by the mirané council, with the backing of the Vertex Seal, Lyric méra Esmail His Glory. But for internecine mirané council reasons, the army has been denied their request for access to investigator-designers from the Great Schools of Architecture. Then some enterprising commander suggested they stop arguing for access based upon the crimes the Little Cat had been accused of—for what are such atrocities as murder and thieving to the Vertex Seal, which expands its imperial grip in ever-increasing waves through much the same? Lyric, however, is known for his piety and devotion to She Who Loves Silence, and so might not apostasy be an easier argument to make? Surely Lyric could be convinced of the likelihood that Silk had broken the goddess’s proscription against engaging in human architecture, notmerely written of it. Apostasy, not atrocity, would spur him to action.
It worked. The zealous can be quite predictable.
No offense.
So the city army, the small kings who rule the various precincts of the city, and the Great Schools of Architecture bound themselves together in the chase. (The Great Schools argued for Silk to be taken alive, for their magisters are desperate with envy that an unknown, anonymous designer had learned to fashion the forces of architectural design into spells as fine as spider gossamer, when they themselves could not evenreplicatesuch workings. Ha!) This was an unheard-of alliance hunting Silk and the Little Cat, but an initially unsuccessful one, for the criminals slipped again and again through the army’s fingers.
Until a young designer with just the right combination of curiosity and ambition set ans mind to tracing Silk through less obvious means. Raia mér Omorose is just twenty-two and from a Pir-pale family of little means to buy ans way into a Great School or bribe any of the ranking designers to apprentice an directly. So Raia relied on ans wits and determination and no small skills at design to find other ways of promotion.
An charmed ans way into the possession of a scrap of a thin scarf Silk had created apparently to wrap around a thief’s face and work as a half-mask that would add a birthmark or beard to their jaw. It was, as suspected, dangerously close to human architecture. But it only hid the face of the person wearing it; no alteration took place. Carefully dissecting the threads of force—mostly flow for flexibility and ecstatic for the amazing adhesive qualities—Raia realized Silk was not imbuing her designs into actual spiderwebs alone any longer, if she ever had been so exclusive (she had), but strands of pure silk. Though an hardlycould afford silk anself, ans brother had been recently married, and for the seed necklaces, Raia’s mother had purchased a small skein of raw silk from the Ceres Remnants. The silk had come already twisted into stronger threads of seven or ten strands, and cut shorter than this single long, nearly invisible strand woven through the designed scarf.
This led Raia to a startling epiphany: Silk was unspooling her own strands of silk from the cocoons of the worms. She—or someone on her behalf—was importing cocoons so that she could control every aspect of her material.
Although ans admiration for this mysterious woman’s ingenuity was veering toward a dangerously romantic swell in ans heart, Raia revealed the discovery to the investigator-designer in charge, since Raia anself did not have the resources to trace imports from the Remnants into the empire.
Thus, on day two of the Blossoming Contemplation quad—today—the army of the Vertex Seal surrounded a six-story tower in the Saltbath precinct. As the sun rose into a dawning sky the same purple of winter cacti, soldiers blasted through a beautiful arch of design security and attacked.
The Little Cat’s daughter
When Iriset was seven years old, her father brought her a three-legged bobcat kitten. How she’d adored the black tufts at its ears and its round green eyes, the large pads of its feet and long, fluffy tail. Its fur was colored like sand in the shadow of a drooping juniper, just like her father’s hair. She’d watched it learn to leap without stumbling, to play awkwardly with only three legs, and she’d designed it a pair of wings made of linen, her own hair, and long twigs of rolled vellum. In a slick work of genius, she married the wings to the kitten’s musculature so that it could control them, inventing a new sort of creature. The wings did not give flight to the desert cat, but helped it glide, helped it balance. They beat gently in the slightest breeze.
Her father was furious but did not yell, instead only took the bobcat kitten away and explained in plain terms that such design reeked of forbidden human architecture: No designer could attempt to create life of any sort, for life was the purview of the goddess alone. “Do you understand why the time before Aharté is called the Apostate Age?” he asked.
“Because architects could do whatever they wanted,” she complained.
Instead of laughing at her sass as he often did, Isidor’s mouth hardened. “I will have a collar of null wire fashioned for you if you do not appreciate the dangers of apostasy. Architects created wondersandthey created monsters before the Glorious Vow. Not only the fragments that remain now—the skull sirens and micro-vultures—but chimeras, half-men, undead, unicorns, and flying whales capable of devouring entire families.” The Little Cat stopped talking, for he saw the thrill blossom in her gaze.
“Unicorns?” Iriset whispered.
He crouched and put his warm hands to her cheeks, staring into her eyes, and she stared right back. Her father’s eyes were gray and flecked brown, just like a Cloud King, and even then Iriset was wondering if she could design a window that looked exactly like them. She’d seen a dead man’s eyes once, when she snuck out of her bedroom in their old petal apartment. Her father had been conducting business he expected to be nonviolent, or it wouldn’t have happened where his wife and child slept. Iriset hadn’t witnessed the kill, but she’d stared at the blank eyes of the dead man, his head tilted toward her and blood all over the floor.
Though at seven she’d not yet designed her first craftmask, or even conceptualized it, she made the intuitive leap that it was not accuracy nor detail that would create the perfect illusion of life in a craftmask, but motion and reflection. Death was still. Life trembled with force.
“Iriset,” her father said gently, seeing her curiosity regarding the unicorn. “I was wrong. You do not have to understand. You simply have to obey. Do not turn your attention to humanarchitecture, or anything that glances against it. If you do, I will collar you. That is my vow. Now it is your turn.”
She put her small peach-brown hands against his white cheeks so that they mirrored each other’s poses. “Did you kill the kitten?” Iriset asked.
“Yes.”
Ecstatic force crackled down her spine, a tremor she automatically breathed into balance with the flow of her heartbeat. It was fear, but not only fear: excitement, too. This topic mattered so much, it could kill. How could anything less dangerous signify? Iriset said carefully, “I will do as you command; that is my vow.”
Thus went her first bond, carefully worded to be bendable. She only ever blatantly broke it once, and never regretted the choice.
When Iriset was eleven and her mother recently gone, her father pulled her onto his lap on the slender throne in the basement of his first gambling den. Her lanky limbs sprawled everywhere, limp in her grief, and Isidor held her tightly, haggard in his own. He buried his nose in her knotted hair, holding her back-to-chest, and together they breathed.
“I understand what you are now,” Isidor said to his little daughter. Awe and fear tangled in his voice, but Iriset couldn’t read such things then. She only turned her face toward his neck to cry.
But Isidor caught her jaw in hand. He looked at her sticky lashes, the splotched peach of her cheeks, and saw her mother in the turn of her lips. “But, Iriset,” he said, “the Little Cat’sdaughter cannot—must not—think or perform or even smell like human architecture.”
She blinked at him, and unlike the tone of his voice, she could read the tension in the tiny muscles around his eyes, the fear and concern and love set like a scaffold against the architecture of his face.
“Do you hear me, Iriset?” the Little Cat demanded.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I can’t be your daughter.”
Isidor’s mouth pressed down in displeasure. “No.”
He waited. He knew she’d get there without further hints.
