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

Ren fell silent as they skulked along the berm, stinking mud sucking at their boots with every step. Another week and the flood would cover it, the river licking at the edges of the Island and seeping into the streets and houses of Lacewater.

Though maybe not this year. Fulvet’s office had work gangs going all along the canals there, piling up bags of sand to keep the water out. Almost like Eret Quientis gave a shit what happened west of the Sunrise Bridge.

Bags of sand didn’t do much good down here at the river’s edge, but at low tide it was safe enough to risk—even with the shadow of the Aerie looming over them. “We couldn’t go in through the Dawngate hole? Smells better, and we en’t right on the Vigil’s doorstep.”

“I came out into Quientis’s dream near here,” Ren said, distracted. “Sedge… after the nightmare, when you came to the house, you said all night you’d looked for Vargo. Where was he?”

Sedge frowned. “Why all the questions about Vargo?” he asked. Not Vargo’s business. Not his reputation. Questions about the man himself.

They weren’t the only ones on the shore. Barefoot kids were rooting through the mud for anything of value dropped from above or swept downstream. Ren waited until they’d passed the kids and were nearly at the dripping mouth of one of the tunnels before she turned to face Sedge.

“I would say ‘mock me not,’ but you will anyway. I…” She grimaced, then spat the words out in a hurry. “I need to figure out if he could be the Rook.”

Back when they were Fingers, they’d played a game, Tell the Lie, in which one kid would tell a story, and the others tried to guess which part wasn’t true. Ren had been the best. Even so, Sedge had sometimes been able to tell—not because he knew when she was lying, but because he knew when she was telling the unvarnished truth.

“You’re fucking serious.”

Then the laughter dragged him down. He laughed until he was bent over. He laughed until it felt like his ribs were stabbing his lungs. He tried to climb out, caught sight of her increasingly annoyed frown, and fell back in.

“I’m no street fool, pulling this from my ear,” she said when she got tired of waiting. “I know it’s unlikely. But—”

Sedge managed to mute his guffaws to wheezing as she laid out her reasons. They weren’t bad; if she’d been talking about anybody other than Vargo, he would have thought she was onto something. But—Vargo.

When he pointed that out, Ren said, “You yourself told me he recently has changed. Perhaps this is why. And it might explain why he was so determined to be the one who helped me… because he knows my secret and wanted to protect it.”

This was Ren’s real talent. She made implausible things sound completely reasonable, to the point where you started looking for other details to support it. Vargo had been cagey about what happened in Ažerais’s Dream. And he’d come in there prepared, with that oh-so-innocent question about astrology and a fake birth date ready to hand.

Sedge squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. The Rook was a hero, standing against the cuffs. The Rook had been Sedge’s hero, when he was a kid. How could he make her understand? “Vargo controls half this island and most of the Lower Bank. He don’t need to be the Rook.”

And yet… Ren’s arguments wormed their way into Sedge’s mind. Like the Night of Hells. Vargo had slipped Varuni’s guard when he went off with Fadrin Acrenix. Sure, there’d been something with the Novrus cuff afterward, but that didn’t cover more than a few bells at most. Where had Vargo been for the rest of the night?

“Mask take it, Ren.” Sedge kicked a broken pot half buried in the silt. “Why’d you have to go muddling my thoughts?”

She made an exasperated noise. “I hoped you could unmuddle mine. I realize it seems unlikely, but we know the Rook has been around for centuries. It cannot all this time have been one person; even the Tyrant aged. But maybe what passes on is more than a hood and a name—maybe it’s some kind of spirit or ghost.”

He’d seen Vraszenians call up their dead ancestors with a dance, and Fienola had said part of Ren’s soul was lost in Ažerais’s Dream. Anything was possible. And—

A chill chased across Sedge’s skin, one that had nothing to do with the river wind. “Vargo talks to himself sometimes. Not just muttering—half a conversation, like.”

Ren went very still. “Does he.”

Sedge could see the questions coming, piling up in Ren’s mind like a flood behind a dam. But to his surprise, she dismissed them with a slice of her hand. “I want to ask you what he says… but you are sworn to Vargo. I’ll stop.”

That put a rock in the pit of Sedge’s stomach. “I… yeah. About that.”

Ren grimaced. “Already you have told me more than you should. I’m sorry—”

“No, it en’t that. It—” Sedge wrestled with himself. This wasn’t a violation of the knot bond… not exactly. And that was the whole problem.

She was his sister. She’d betrayed Ondrakja for him.

“Vargo en’t sworn to us.”

Ren lurched on the uncertain footing of the shore. “What?”

“He en’t sworn. Not to anybody. All the knots he controls are, but not him.” Sedge tugged back his sleeve enough to show the blue silk charm on its braided cord around his wrist, the emblem of his membership in the Fog Spiders. He wasn’t required to wear it openly, but Sedge’s kind of work didn’t call for subtlety. “Way most people assume it works—even in his knots—we tie in with his lieutenants, and they tie in with him. Except that en’t true.”

Because while the vows for knots varied from gang to gang, they tended to have a few things in common. Like doing favors for your knot-mates, no questions asked and no debts owed—and