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

A little distance away, a woman shrieked. This one, Tess recognized: It was Benvanna Novri, the current wife of Era Novrus. She had her hands pressed to her mouth and her gaze fixed on the backs of a cluster of delta gentry.

“They’re attacking her!” she wailed, shrinking back. “Oh, Sostira—all her wives—Lumen have mercy, I’m attacking her! Please, someone help her!”

But there was no Sostira Novrus to be helped. Benvanna lurched forward, hands waving, and moaned in dismay when she realized she couldn’t touch whatever she was seeing.

Tess knew enough about aža to recognize Benvanna’s dilated pupils and distant look, like she was gazing right through this world into the next one. And she wasn’t the only one: All around the plaza, shouts and cries rose from the aža-spun. One said he saw some old Vraszenian man weeping amid the bodies of murdered children; another babbled that the Tyrant still reigned, that the blood-soaked city was celebrating the 242nd year of his rule.

Unlike Ren and Sedge, Tess had never been one of Ondrakja’s favorite Fingers, but she shared their river rat instincts for moving through a crowd. Ren had done it with charm and a smile, Sedge with fists and elbows. Tess just found the spaces between bodies and slipped through them like a needle. Only this time, she wasn’t looking for an easy mark or a dangling purse; she was looking for the sister of her heart.

“Alta Renata! Has anyone seen my alta? Alta Renata!” Ren! Ren! The name rode the fear crawling up her throat, a fraying net of caution holding it back. But Ren had a cat’s knack for landing on her feet, and see if she wouldn’t give Tess a scolding for giving away the game when she’d been perfectly safe the whole time.

Tess pushed her way across the plaza to the Charterhouse steps, where Ren ought to have been. But there, a wall of bodies too solid for her to pierce blocked the way: sober nobles and delta gentry demanding to know what was going on.

A stern-faced woman with a Vigil commander’s gold pin did her best to respond, shouting replies as if she’d been doing it for a while and expected to be doing it for bells more. “There has been no murder! People have vanished! We do not know how or why, but we are looking into it! Please keep order so that we can concentrate on our search!”

Someone bellowed back up to her, “But the people out here can see the ones who have gone missing, and they’re in danger! Why aren’t you doing anything to help them?”

Tess faded back, breathing through the fear. Missing, not dead. The people on aža could see them—sometimes, some of them—and it might be a badly spun thread, but it was all Tess had to cling to.

She started moving with new purpose, seeking out people staring at things not there, asking them if they’d seen her alta. There was no rhyme or reason to it she could find; everyone she talked to described something different. Riots or plagues. The city in flames or the city flooded. A cowering man insisted he’d seen one of Era Destaelio’s assistants being chased by rats the size of hunting hounds. Another swore he’d seen Scaperto Quientis drowning in the West Channel alongside a pretty Vraszenian woman.

Tess pressed a hand to her belly to quiet the flutter of hope. “What did she look like? What was she wearing?” Had Ren swapped to her Arenza disguise? How could she have? Tess had dressed her. Nothing in the Dežera costume would look Vraszenian.

But the woman the man described sounded like Arenza. No—she sounded like Ren. “Mother and Crone, let her not be discovered,” Tess prayed as she struck off for the opposite riverbank. “I mean, excepting by me.”

Only she saw nothing of Ren at the river. Tess pounded her thigh in frustration. “Of course not, you fool. You aren’t seeing anything but what’s really here.”

If she wanted to find Ren… she needed to find aža.

Tess was about ready to cosh the nearest corner dealer over the head, when she heard a name that pierced her worry. Propriety be damned, she grabbed a delta gentlewoman by the arm and yanked her around. “Say that again?”

This one wasn’t so caught up in the chaos that she didn’t notice Tess’s lowly status. She pulled free and answered haughtily, “I said I saw the Rook climbing the Point, toward the amphitheatre. And the Vigil will hear of it.”

As if they would give a drop of tainted river water for the Rook right now. But the woman was as sober as Sebat—which meant what she’d seen was real.

If the Rook thought there was something worth doing up on the Point, when the Cinquerat had gone missing and the entire Old Island was erupting into madness, then Tess had a mind to see what he was about… and to ask him for help.

She set off for the Point at a run.

A run that all too soon slowed to a desperate plod as the path steepened upward from the low-lying mass of the Old Island. Tess pulled off her mask and gulped for air. Her calves and thighs burned as she pushed on to the amphitheatre; she would have prayed if she’d had wind to spare. When a black shape flitted past at the periphery of sight, she almost ignored it, thinking it a product of her breathlessness.

Except how often did fainting spots resemble famous outlaws, or carry women over their shoulders? “Ren!”

Tess realized her mistake a moment after the shout burst from her. As the Rook pivoted in her direction, Ren’s voice, with just an echo of Ondrakja behind it, prodded her to action: If you think you’re about to be caught in a lie, better to push through than to retreat.

“Run!” She jerked her mask back over her face and lurched toward the Rook, waving her arms. Try not to sound Ganllechyn. “The