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

In the early days of Nadežra, Vraszenian lineages had built the foundations of the islets for their own people, different branches living in the various houses.

He stepped carefully on the bridge, walking a little faster every time it shifted from stone to wooden planks and back. That turned into an undignified leap when the sun rose just as he reached the Old Island and the bridge transformed into a beam of dawn’s light.

Light that snuffed out like it had never been the moment he touched down, leaving him in the Tyrant’s Nadežra. Vargo hurried along, head down, hoping none of the phantom soldiers around him would notice a lowly night-piece—or take him for the Tyrant’s use.

Except he was headed to the Charterhouse, which had been the Tyrant’s stronghold. Please change before I get there, Vargo thought, half in prayer.

He doubted any gods were listening, but the Charterhouse was its familiar bureaucratic bustle when he arrived. Vargo slipped through the crowds toward the audience chamber—and found it as echoingly empty as the antechamber had been full.

Given how things shifted, though, he wasn’t going to take that for granted. “Renata?” he called out.

The name seemed to vanish as soon as it left his lips. Still, Vargo tried again. “Renata? Are you here? Ren—”

A shimmer caught his eye. Her prismatium dreamweaver mask—the one he’d bought her at the Autumn Gloria—lying on a bench.

Vargo climbed up to it. Was it his imagination, or was the metal warm against his fingertips, as if she’d just taken it off?

It felt solid, in a way nothing else here did. But unless the realm of mind had turned the missing piece of her spirit into a mask, he was no closer to finding her.

“Are you in there?” he muttered to the mask, feeling foolish. No response. Sighing, Vargo lifted it to his face, wondering if that would summon her.

It didn’t. But it changed the dream around him.

He was still in the Charterhouse. Only now everything he saw had the faintest iridescence, like aža, like the feathers of a dreamweaver bird… everything except a trail across the floor. That was iridescent, too—but with a murky, rancid cast. Like ash.

Didn’t szorsas say it in their readings? The good and the ill of it, and that which is neither. Aža was the good. Ash was the ill. This place was that which was neither—or both.

Vargo tied the mask on and pursued that trail. It led him out of the Charterhouse, into the Old Island. Then, as if he’d stopped paying attention while he walked—a thing he never did—he was suddenly in Lacewater, standing before the smoking wreckage of a small row of houses on the Uča Mašno.

For one mouth-drying instant, he thought it meant she had burned there. But the thing sticking up out of the ashes wasn’t a bone; it was the corner of a pattern card. Vargo knelt and tugged it free.

The starved shape of The Mask of Hollows stared blindly up at him.

He frowned, looking at it. The Mask of Hollows represented poverty and loss—he knew that much—but it wasn’t among the cards Lenskaya had shown him. So why did he feel like he ought to know what it meant?

No answers here. But the sickly trail led onward, and he followed it.

This time he knew the dream was acting oddly. He had no memory of crossing the Sunset Bridge, but suddenly the streets around him were as Vraszenian as if Kaius Rex had never conquered them. He was in Seven Knots, and from the shadows he could hear the calls of the Vraszenian clan animals, the hoot of an owl and the yip of a fox and the threatening stamp of a horse’s hoof, warning him away.

No sound from the Varadi spider, of course. But the ash trail led him to a web, and caught in its strands, he found another card. A wolf slept beneath a flowering bush, or seemed to; one eye was a watchful slit, and its muzzle was stained with blood.

He couldn’t remember what Four Petals Fall signified. Yet that feeling nagged at him again, that there was meaning here, and he was too stupid to see it.

The trail jumped him to the inside of a moldering townhouse, the kind of building Vargo knew all too well. Facedown on the carpet in front of a high-backed chair he found Sword in Hand. Then to the cells of the Aerie, where The Mask of Chaos was caught between iron bars. Then back to the Charterhouse—

For a moment he thought he was chasing his own tail. But a single statue stood where the five of the Cinquerat ought to be: an old one, wooden and Vraszenian, depicting a szorsa. In her hand she held Storm Against Stone.

Vargo scowled up at the carved, enigmatic visage. He remembered what it was like, listening to people have conversations with meanings he couldn’t quite follow. He’d built up an information network to rival Argentet’s just so he wouldn’t have to put up with that feeling anymore. He didn’t much appreciate the realm of mind inflicting it on him again.

So he kept moving: to a study that wasn’t Mettore Indestor’s, but had his colors and emblems all over it, where The Face of Glass seemed to be trying to hide in a corner; then he turned around and it was the same room, only with Traementis markings, and The Face of Gold sitting in what he suspected was Donaia Traementis’s own chair.

Onward to Westbridge, and the townhouse he’d rented out. The fire blazing in the kitchen hearth showed him Three Hands Join, gummed to the floor by a smear of blood. Not hers, he hoped. He had eight cards now; nine was Ninat, and death, and endings. There were nine cards in a pattern reading—one of the few places where numinatria and pattern overlapped.

The ash trail led upstairs. Her home—could it be that easy? But the house had the air of a place abandoned a hundred years… or one that hadn’t