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

yet welcomed a tenant. Everything was covered in dustcloths and mist, as though rarely seen and even more rarely used. Only the front parlour had any life to it, and that was all gilt and hard edges, a place for show. Beauty whose only purpose was to be useful.

Was this how she saw herself? A facade, and emptiness beneath?

He found no ninth card there. Instead the twisted, desecrating touch of ash led him back to the Old Island, and the Point. To the heart of the City of Dreams: the Great Amphitheatre, and the Wellspring of Ažerais.

Except there was no wellspring. Just a ring of stones around an empty pit, and caught between two of the stones, Drowning Breath.

The final card. The trail ended there. And Vargo was alone.

He took off the prismatium mask, but that didn’t summon her. If he had chalk and compass in this fucking place, he’d turn to them, but he only had the cards in his hands.

Pattern was the magic of Vraszenians. Pattern was the magic of Ažerais. Pattern was the key here.

Pattern was something he knew fuck all about.

Sighing, Vargo slung the mask over his wrist, then turned his back on the empty wellspring and knelt, laying the cards out, three by three, in the order he’d found them. Too late, he realized he’d done it the wrong way: szorsas laid the right-hand card in each row first, then the left, then the center, following their words. The good and the ill of it, and that which is neither. He’d gone straight across the rows.

But apparently that was correct, or else the dream decided he’d thrown his dart close enough to count. Because as Vargo set down the final card, a mist rose around him, and a gentle glow suffused it, coming from behind him.

Vargo was fully Nadežran. He scoffed at suggestions that his peculiar fascination with spiders spoke to some distant Varadi connection. And yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to turn around and look at Ažerais’s wellspring, outside the night of the Great Dream. He wasn’t meant to be here, and he didn’t want to offend whatever power might be present.

He cleared his throat and stood, mist swirling at his movement. “Are you here?” No answer. “If you are, let’s not play a game of seek-me-out?”

“Seek me out.”

A repetition of his own words, but not in his voice. Her whisper threaded through the air, barely more substantial than the fog. An instruction? Or just an echo?

Sighing, Vargo closed his eyes. “Uniat.”

He was thinking of the children’s game, but before he could continue his count, her whisper answered him. “Tuat.”

As if they were about to fight a duel. “Tricat,” he said before the dream realm could make that happen.

“Quarat,” she answered, and his shoulders sagged in relief.

“Quinat.”

“Sessat.”

“Sebat.” Was he drawing her to him? Or just wasting precious time?

“Noctat.”

“Ninat.” He opened his eyes and took a careful step, then another. The mist slid around him like silk.

“Illi,” they said in unison, and the mist coalesced into the shape of a woman.

A shape even more indistinct than the phantoms of the dream. She faced him, but showed no sign of seeing or recognizing him—a small mercy, he supposed, given how he was dressed. When he tried to reach for her, his hand passed through her like fog.

“Wonderful. How do I drag you out of here?” Vargo muttered. He and Tanaquis had assumed it would be enough to find her, which seemed foolish now.

The mist softened the ghostly form’s beauty, making her look younger, more vulnerable. Or was that just how she felt, lost here? At least it didn’t resemble her current state in the real world, bloodshot eyes and bloodless lips. That image haunted him: She’d looked like The Mask of Hollows.

The Mask of Hollows. When he looked down, the nine cards had vanished. But they’d gotten him this far.

What else did he know about pattern? Not much. Mostly that it was a bunch of metaphors about textiles: shuttles and spindles, weaving—

And threads.

Vargo exhaled and shifted his focus. Instead of a bowl of mist, he imagined the amphitheatre as a Varadi might see it: a circle spanned by a great silver web, with him at the center.

The mist coalesced into a cobweb, its filaments as fine as lace. Vargo looked for the thread that connected him to Renata’s ghostly form, untangling it from all the others.

It was broken. All the threads around her were broken.

No wonder she couldn’t come back.

Vargo gritted his teeth. Fine. People called him a spider, didn’t they? Spiders made their own damn threads.

He held out his left hand, concentrating. He had no idea what the threads were made from, and had a definite suspicion he might regret this later… but he needed Renata, and the alternative was to sit here until his soul came permanently untethered and Tanaquis sent the fucking hawk in to retrieve them both. A silver thread unspooled from his palm, floating in the air, reaching out toward her.

She saw it. Her left hand rose, mirroring his gesture, and the thread touched her palm—

Tuatium, the Pearls: Cyprilun 25

::You’re back! How was it? Fascinating, I imagine. Rather quiet here. Though I do like this Fienola girl—very precise in her chalking.::

Waking felt like surfacing from very deep water. Vargo could feel his body: stiff from sitting too long, one leg numb from being bent under the other, head aching, mouth dry. But this was more than his usual distance from his flesh. He eased himself back into it, like putting on unfamiliar clothes, and opened his eyes just in time to see Tanaquis remove the focus from the deactivated numinat.

The moment she did, Tess, Giuna, and Donaia all shot toward Renata like bullets from slings, while Sedge and Serrado both hung back trying to pretend they weren’t craning their necks to look. But Vargo, still seated, could see between the women’s skirts to where Renata lay in the other crescent of the vesica piscis