Page 95 of The Mercy Makers
Amaranth laughs. “I can hardly leave you obviously vulnerable after what you’ve done to my brother.”
Reminding herself she can’t scowl with Singix’s face, Iriset only turns primly away. “I’ll allow Huya to make me some appointments, then, with whomever you want, Your Glory. And I want to go into the city. I’ll send a message to Nielle mé Dari, who was very friendly to me.” She lowers her voice to add, “Being seen out and about might create some opportunities. And I can continue to investigate myself who was eager for this alliance between the empire and the Ceres Remnants, and who resented it. Was Dove méra Curro in favor of it?”
Surprise colors Amaranth’s answer: “Yes, but that’s because he loves nothing more than a stirred pot.”
Sidoné laughs once, but it’s not very amused.
“You asked him to recommend secretaries?” Iriset says.
“I did.” Amaranth looks past Iriset, in the direction from which she’d come. “You ran into him.”
“And Hehet méra Davith. He doesn’t like me.”
Both Amaranth and Sidoné flick disagreeing looks at her. “Hehet doesn’t have opinions like that,” Amaranth says after a moment. “He doesn’t care one way or another about anything that isn’t a fact.”
“Well. If you say so. Who does Hehet’s faction think poisoned my candy?”
“Ama already told you,” Sidoné says, leaning closer. She brings her body heat and a whiff of citrus perfume. “Hehet won’t think anybody did it until there’s proof.”
“But Dove thinks it was a conspiracy between two princes who support the supremacy of the Four Fronts general—Lapis mé Matsimet, you remember? And that the conspirators worked with Beremé’s approval.” By her wrinkled nose, Amaranth clearly doesn’t suspect her sharp-faced lover.
“Why would she approve?”
Sidoné says, “Beremé’s faction openly disdains alliances of any kind, preferring the empire to grow as it always has. By violence. Which murder is.”
Amaranth rolls her eyes. “Murder is beneath Beremé.”
That does seem likely to Iriset, but so does the idea that Amaranth and Beremé are engaged in a long-term game of their own that might or might not include murder. If it was Beremé, Amaranth is protecting her. Fine.
“Lapis is a strong suspect,” Sidoné says. “If the empire stops conquering new people in favor of alliance, those alliances will come with ceding of territories, and if we cede somewhere, we must do so elsewhere and her power will lessen, especially compared to her brother’s. She’s due home again soon, and perhaps will take the opportunity to complete what her subordinates could not.”
Iriset grimaces delicately over the thought of playing bait for a long time, and anger tickles ecstatic force in her chest.
At least while she waits, she has plenty to do.
Graffiti
The Crimson Canyon is a lightning shape cut into the rock of Moonshadow City from the Saltbath precinct southeast into the Flower precinct, and home to hundreds of people.
Narrow stair-paths zig and zag from the crater floor down along the cliff walls, between shelf-houses, balconies, and caves, descending beneath the line of sunlight. The base of the canyon is one of the only places in the city from which Aharté’s moon is never visible. Ropes have been strung across the open canyon from balcony to balcony, hanging with tiny force-lights and long wind-whistles. There’s little breeze in the canyon, but when the wind penetrates, it does so with a tight roar that sends the lights bobbing and spinning, and the whistles a-scream. People swing off shelves using elaborate ropes and pulleys, or climb down hemp ladders, and others sit on balconies with their legs dangling. Those with shared histories and hardships draw together into neighborhoods, despite assimilation laws forcing them to marry outside their cultures. The empire can legislate marriage laws and reproductive taxes, but not stories. Not values. Not the unwritten markers of a stolen past.
Up in Moonshadow City, traditions and the most obvious of cultural markers must be hidden behind masks and under fashion so that they can’t be easily taken away. But in the canyon, it’s little trouble to identify ruddy-tan Sarians by the metal sewn into their scarves to keep ghosts away, square-faced Urs with too many horse figures woven into their hems, People of the Bow who paint on red freckles as an ancient sign of luck, and those descended from sturdy Pir tribes who bead their wealth into their clothes. There are peach-faced Osahar who remember how to pass along secrets through the knots in their hair. The only people missing from the canyon neighborhood are miran. And masks are few and far between.
This is where Bittor was born.
He was often hungry as a child, but never quite starving, and believed that kids without families were just meant to live on the edge like that. Street kids are rare in Moonshadow City because the complex infrastructures that divide and assimilate families also happen to take a lot of care of orphans. But Bittor’s cat-eyes triggered various superstitions in the canyon—superstitions that kept people from taking him in, but also from turning him in or letting him starve. Because he was naturally athletic and fearless, he scampered up and down the ropes and pulleys and force-ribbons in the canyon like a sticky-fingered lizard and managed to get enough work running messages to last until he drew the attention of a post carrier who served the northern block in the Flower precinct and hated the messy-to-outsiders address system in the canyon, not to mention the perilous journey down. Her name was Tesmose mé Fira and she was afraid of heights. Bittor, at seven years, saw her shaking at the top of the stair-path and tried to help her combat some sudden-onset extreme vertigo. Bittor had never experienced vertigo and sohis advice was lackluster. But his enthusiasm charmed her into ignoring his eyes and hiring him. Then she started to feed him and cleaned out a storage room in her housing petal for him to use. She registered him with the Silent priests and they gave her a stipend for her compassion. It was a solid, if not especially loving, relationship.
By the time he was fifteen, Bittor knew his way around the surface streets and alleys across the city and treated the Great Steeples and soaring petals of Moonshadow like the walls of the canyon, scaling them easily to use as excellent lookouts and even better access points. Thieving was more lucrative, and more fun, than postal delivery, and Bittor learned to appreciate good food and always having it.
He fell into a trap—literally—set by the Little Cat for enterprising thieves and was adopted again. As he studied new skills of subterfuge and sleight, Bittor blossomed. He was one of the few from the undermarket to meet the Little Cat’s daughter before she officially joined the court. The first thing Iriset mé Isidor said to Bittor was “Osahar. Like me.”
“How do you know?” Bittor hoped she was right. He’d never had a clue about his birth family before.
Iriset, only fourteen, poked a finger a little too sharply at his cheekbone, then jabbed at his brow, almost getting his eye. Bittor shied away. “My skin? A lot of people have skin this color. Sarians sometimes.”
“Your skull.” Iriset flashed him a bright grin. “We could be cousins. Also—” She tugged a thick curl of brown hair hanging over his ear. “Texture. See?”
Spinning around, Iriset offered him a look at her heavily knotted brown hair.
