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

giving them the chance to handle the problem first would go a long way toward placating them.

Once Caerulet found out, Grey would be dead. But he’d long since resigned himself to the likelihood of dying for the sake of this city.

The clock towers chimed, calling him back to the present. “Think on it. I must go,” Grey said heavily. “My friend’s funeral…”

He wasn’t able to finish that sentence. Idusza’s expression softened from its usual fierce lines. “Go. And—may your friend’s spirit find peace in heaven, kin in the dream, and a new life down the road.”

Ninatium, Owl’s Fields, Upper Bank: Cyprilun 19

After the multicolored glory of the Sebatium the previous day, the Ninatium in Owl’s Fields on the edge of the city was as stark as the space between the stars. Walls draped with black velveteen dampened all sound to a reverent hush. They were supposed to bring a sense of peace, closing out the bustle and distraction of the world, but to Ren they felt more like a shroud.

It wasn’t a place for ordinary worship. People who wished to remember loved ones who had passed on, or to focus their minds in contemplation of the boundary between death and life, went to one of the smaller Ninatia elsewhere in the city. This one served only a single purpose, which was to reduce the bodies of the deceased to ash.

Even thinking that word made Ren flinch. Leato had been poisoned with ash; now he would become it.

She and Tess joined the slow parade of mourners down the path of numinata laid into the floor. Bitterness flooded her mouth. The Traementis had so few friends, and even fewer kin; in the normal way of things, she doubted many would have attended Leato’s funeral. But he’d died on the Night of Hells—one of eight to perish, and the only one the city’s nobles cared about. The rest were Vraszenian, or minor Cinquerat functionaries. So if the cuffs wanted to be seen showing their outrage at what had happened, this was their best chance to do it.

If it weren’t for the oppressive silence of the temple, broken only by shuffling feet, she might have raged at their hypocrisy. The leash on her tongue was unraveling with exhaustion; sooner or later she was going to say something she shouldn’t. Or take the knife from under her skirt and use it.

The mourners filed into the chamber and arranged themselves on the curved benches. Most were nobility—even Mettore Indestor was there—but she saw Vargo among them, and Tanaquis, and Grey Serrado, bleak-faced in dress vigils, with a black armband. Renata took her own seat and looked down into the half-sunken chamber at the center of the floor.

At its bottom, contained in a circle broken by a single missing tile, was a numinat: a nine-sided figure cast in liquid silver, as wide as the Sunset Bridge. Figures within spirals within spirals swirled around the nonagram with dizzying geometric precision: the channels along which the power of the cosmos would flow once the focus was set in place and the circuit closed.

Donaia and Giuna stood alongside a black-robed priest, three small figures in an area that should have held a dozen close kin. Dressed in black, they waited, not looking up at the crowd filling the room, until a gong sounded to mark the beginning of the ceremony.

Eight bearers carried out the bier, led by Bondiro Coscanum and Oksana Ryvček. Behind them came a woman singing a funeral chant, praying to Anaxnus: the Liganti name for the Mask of the deity Ren knew as Čel Kariš Tmekra, the bringer of life and death. Leato’s body had been washed clean and wrapped in black cloth, hiding the wounds that killed him. Only his head was visible, antique gold hair shining painfully bright against the starkness of the scene.

Donaia’s sobs echoed through the quiet.

They set the bier at the terminus of the numinat’s main spiral, and together Leato’s mother and sister approached to bid him a final farewell before laying a veil over his face. Ren squeezed her eyes shut to close out the sight, knowing people would be watching her, too, and not caring. With the ritual area set down below like that, she felt as if she were in the amphitheatre again, looking down the endless pit of the empty wellspring where she’d left Leato to die.

If Leato had been Vraszenian, she could at least take comfort that he’d died so close to Ažerais’s heart. The three parts of his soul would find their roads easily from there: the dlakani ascending to heaven, the szekani lingering in Ažerais’s Dream as an honored ancestor, and the čekani moving on to be reborn. But Leato had not been Vraszenian, and who could say if his soul would find its way free of the dream to pass through the spheres of the numina, as the Liganti believed. Perhaps his imperfections would not be burned away by the pure fire of the Lumen until he came to rebirth.

Shuddering away the thought, Ren opened her eyes in time to see the priest accept a sigil-marked disc from an attendant: the focus for the numinat, calling on the deity of destruction to bring cleansing fire. He raised it above his head and recited a series of prayers, then stepped forward and placed it at the center of the numinat.

Retreating outside the circle that would protect the onlookers from the forces within, he knelt and set the missing tile into the floor, closing the line.

Flames leapt up within the ring of tiles, blazing high. The heat of them beat at Ren’s face. She remembered again the heat of her burning childhood home, and then she couldn’t hold herself together any longer; she broke down crying. The weight around her shoulders was Tess’s arm, trying to comfort without publicly overstepping a servant’s bounds, and Ren held on to that sensation like it was a rope.

Only when Tess nudged her did