The Mask of Mirrors by M. Carrick; (different e readers txt) 📕

her starving on purpose—always hungry for crumbs of approval, scrabbling after them through the muck.

The muck of the Depths. She wasn’t in the lodging house at all. Sedge’s hands were braced against the slimy edge of a crumbling niche, and Ondrakja stood ankle-deep in water, and the flood was rising—

Higher and higher, up to her ankles, her knees, her hips. Things brushed past her in the water, some blessedly unseen, others floating on the rushing current—a bloated corpse, a fisherman’s net tangled into a solid mass, rats swimming frantically for dry ground that wasn’t there. All of it painted a ghastly green in the dim light coming off the slime-coated walls.

But a moment ago she’d been in the lodging house. The streets. Home.

It’s a dream, Ren realized.

Not a dream—a nightmare. And now she was in the Depths, the old burial niches where they used to put the ashes of the dead, and she didn’t know how to get out.

Her only warning was the rush of water behind her. A surge swept her off her feet, slamming her into the walls, spinning heels over head—she didn’t know which way was up, and she couldn’t swim—

Then there weren’t even walls or rats to grasp at, just water everywhere.

Until she collided with something soft and grabbed it, crawling up, clawing desperately for the air above.

“Let go, you stupid—” The thing—the person—she’d latched on to kicked, trying to free himself from her grip, but she clung to him like the drowning rats had tried to cling to her. For her to rise, he had to sink. It was the way of the world.

“Help! Somebody help us! Hel—” His shout ended on a gurgle as Ren got a knee on his shoulder. They were in the West Channel, people passing along the river walk and the Sunset Bridge, as remote and uncaring as the moons above. She shoved harder, reaching for the stones, sinking her fingertips into a crack. When she risked a glance back, she saw Scaperto Quientis flailing for the surface once more, mouth open in a drowning plea.

Only for an instant. As she hauled herself above the edge, the steady flow of the city transformed into chaos.

Not erupted into chaos. Transformed. One moment, people were idly strolling past, ignoring the splashes from the channel; the next, she was surrounded by bodies that hadn’t been there a blink before, all jostling elbows and knees and screams. They forced her along, little different from the rushing waters of the Depths. A bottle shattered against the wall beside her, raining glass and sour-smelling millet beer.

She’d hoped the tide would lead her away from trouble, but instead it spilled into the plaza in front of the Aerie. Bodies littered the steps, some in Vraszenian panel coats and embroidered sashes and skirts, many more in Vigil uniforms. A bare dozen hawks held the steps. The rioting Vraszenian crowd battered against them, hurling objects and a few recognizable obscenities, though most of what they shouted was garbled and unintelligible—the howling of beasts, rather than the speech of human beings.

Mettore Indestor stood at the top of the Aerie steps, behind his line of hawks. His face was scarlet with rage, his voice booming out over the plaza, louder than it should have been. “—order, if I have to kill every one of you to get it!”

But his men were the ones dying. The mob surged upward, sweeping Ren along, and then she was inside the Aerie.

Not the front rooms, full of hawks and paperwork. The cells. An impossibly long hallway lined with iron-barred doors, and they slammed shut on the Vraszenians, cutting them off in ones and twos, while the rest tried to outrun the trap.

Ren wasn’t quick enough. A faceless hawk shoved her into a cell with a young woman who looked distantly familiar. She shoved past Ren and grabbed the bars. “Where is my grandfather?” she shouted in Vraszenian. The hawks walked past, callous and unhearing. “Please, his health is not good! Put me in with him!”

The shadow of the crossbar painted a mask across the woman’s eyes, large, dark, and wet with tears, and Ren recognized her: the Kiraly girl who’d taken the horses at the start of the Accords.

She sank to her knees, sobbing. “Please! Let him not die alone!” Twisting to look at Ren, she begged, “Please help me. Make them listen.”

“This is a dream,” Ren said, backing up. She retreated farther and farther, not hitting the wall of the cell. “All we need do is wake up.”

“But we cannot,” said another voice.

Ren turned and saw a woman sitting in the corner, crying blood tears from the empty sockets where her eyes had been. Ren recognized her: the szorsa from the Vraszenian delegation.

“We’ve been poisoned.” Ren’s voice shook. “All of us. The aža in the wine—something was wrong with it.”

“That was not aža. This dream is not a gift from Ažerais… but we are in her dream.”

Ren’s breath caught. Ažerais’s Dream: the otherworldly reflection of the waking world, the many-layered place glimpsed by those who took aža. But this was no mere glimpse; they were in it, trapped like flies in honey.

She’d never heard of anyone entering it bodily. And she had no idea how to get out.

The szorsa lifted her chin, nostrils flaring as if she was scenting the air. “You are not a dream, though you are by Ažerais touched. Help me to my feet.”

Hesitantly, Ren took the szorsa’s hand in hers. It was bird-light. “You must be my eyes,” the szorsa told her. “You carry the gift. Use it to see—to find our path through this storm.”

Ren bit her lip. What path? What gift?

She means reading pattern.

The Mask of Hollows. Four Petals Fall. Sword in Hand. The Mask of Chaos. And at the center of the pattern, Storm Against Stone.

Leading the szorsa, Ren walked into the darkness.

The statues of the Charterhouse loomed above them, impossibly tall.

For a moment Ren thought this