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

the lines without stepping on them and set Ren in one half of the largest set of overlapping circles. Vargo removed his coat and sat in the other half.

“How’re you going to make certain she don’t run off halfway through?” Sedge asked. “Maybe I should stay in it with her.”

“That won’t be necessary, nor advisable,” Fienola said absently, checking her lines against a smaller version of the numinat in her notebook. “A Tuat working needs two people, not three, and I’ve strengthened the containment circle. Nothing will get in or out.”

Sedge liked that even less, but Vargo sat unconcerned. And Sedge was out of ideas.

“All right, then. Guess you’re the boss,” he muttered. With a final brush of fingers across their shared scar, he left Ren in her circle and settled at the edge of the numinat with arms crossed and jaw tense.

“Then we begin,” Fienola said, and closed the circle.

The Realm of Mind

For the first time in years, Vargo was alone.

No Alsius. No body, even. And maybe there was some truth to what Serrado said about different pieces of the soul, because he felt like he’d shed everything Alsius had given him, and what was left was a thin strand spinning out into infinite nothingness.

But he hadn’t spent years observing spiders without learning a few tricks. He let that strand balloon him along until it caught and tangled with something denser than nothingness. Something thick as thought. The realm of mind. The dream of Ažerais.

He slipped inside and found himself bathed in cool silver light, standing on the steps of the Tuatium, at the overlapping edge of a vesica piscis so large it seemed to encompass the entire world.

The light came from the other half of the figure, sealed behind glass thin as a soap bubble. Vargo pressed a hand to it, but it was cool, slick, and unyielding. That was Alsius’s world, not Vargo’s… and without Alsius, he had no way to cross over.

“This just got harder.” The glass echoed Vargo’s words back to him. However closely bound the two of them were, Alsius would always know things Vargo didn’t. He could feel them like missing teeth, pieces of himself he hadn’t even realized weren’t his until they were gone. In the few hours they’d spent planning this madness, neither of them had considered what it would mean for Vargo to be on his own, without Alsius’s years of knowledge and wisdom.

Vargo wasn’t even certain what he was without the old man’s guidance.

“Guess we’re going to find out,” he muttered, and turned his back on the Tuatium and Alsius’s world.

Vargo’s world wasn’t made of light. The streets of Nadežra spread before him in a murky web, full of shifting shadows and eyes flashing like knives in the dark. Everything here was waiting for a moment of weakness—for the right time to strike. The weight of those gazes was a physical thing, part hunger and part hate. He shivered and pulled his robe closer in a futile attempt to ward them off.

A robe that was nothing like the amber velvet coat he’d worn to Fienola’s meeting. It wasn’t even the beaded decadence he’d worn on the Night of Bells. Instead of sheer, the fabric was dull and threadbare. A garment easily lifted or opened, depending on which part of his body had been bought. Cheap tin bells clacked dully, advertising the wares for sale, and his fingernails were dirty and broken, as if he’d scraped them against countless stone walls.

Vargo shuddered. Without Alsius, this might have been his fate: not the master of the Lower Bank, bending Nadežra to his will, but a night-piece selling the only thing he had in order to survive. The thought made his skin crawl, and he stripped the robe off with angry movements, tearing the flimsy fabric and throwing it aside.

It vanished as soon as it left his hand—and reappeared on his body.

“Fuck you,” Vargo snarled, addressing the darkness around him. “Dress me in what you like; it isn’t who I am.”

But a treacherous part of his mind whispered, Isn’t it? He’d thought it himself, when he sat across from Mettore and sold Renata Viraudax out for a charter. Because it would get him closer to his real goals. Just because he wasn’t paid in coin and didn’t hand over his body in trade didn’t change the truth.

In the real world, he could present whatever facade he liked. But here, all his facades were stripped away, locked behind the glass bubble that contained everything Alsius had made him.

The cold of that thought made him shiver. “I en’t got time for this shit,” he muttered. His urgency wasn’t only because the realm of mind was determined to dress him like a cheap night-piece. He’d recognized that name Fienola used, Mirscellis: a Seterin inscriptor who’d lived in Nadežra before the Tyrant’s conquest. Vargo couldn’t remember most of the details—Alsius probably had them—but he knew the man’s experiments with the realm of mind had ended with his spirit being lost there. Forever.

He had no intention of staying long enough to risk that. But how the hell was he supposed to locate Renata?

Fienola had said Renata’s nightmare took her to Seteris, but his surroundings looked like Nadežra, more or less. Everyone had been dosed in the Charterhouse; if she’d lost some piece of herself, maybe it was still there.

As Vargo struck out across the Upper Bank, heading for the Sunrise Bridge, the city shifted around him. One moment the islets of the Pearls were carved out of literal pearls; then they turned into green, muddy fields, as if all of this were still ancient farmland. As he crossed into Eastbridge the houses curved around him, edging the Isla C aprila like an embrace, with the center of the islet an open plaza. Surrounding him were the ghostly, half-there figures of Vraszenians, waving farewell to a caravan rolling out onto the nearest bridge. A kureč, Vargo thought, noting the similarity of faces.