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

She didn’t know why. But at the moment, it didn’t matter. As soon as she heard the steps of the other two fading into the distance, she climbed back up to street level and headed for her townhouse.

If she wanted to stop this, she was going to need help.

20

The Mask of Chaos

Horizon Plaza, Westbridge: Cyprilun 34

Shouts rose from the Horizon Plaza in a furious mix of Vraszenian and Liganti, the crowd surging like waves against the line of hawks that barred anyone from passing onto the Sunset Bridge.

“This is getting worse,” Grey muttered to Ranieri, low enough that the rest of his squad couldn’t hear.

The crowd had been building since dawn, their outrage stoked by stoop-thumpers reminding them of all the wrongs cited in the Stadnem Anduske broadsheets. Word had raced through Seven Knots like a spark through dried tinder: a dead dreamweaver, its body drained of blood, had been thrown against the lintel of the labyrinth during the late earth hours. The Liganti nobility were often accused of eating dreamweavers at their feasts, but desecrating a labyrinth with one’s corpse made Grey’s own blood beat hot enough that he was tempted to rip off his hexagram pin and lead the charge to the steps of the Charterhouse himself. If I thought it would do any good…

But it wouldn’t. The Vigil’s cordon was proof of that. The Cinquerat’s response to unrest was always the same: cut off the Lower Bank from the Old Island and the Upper Bank, so the mobs couldn’t strike at the heart of their power. There was still the river, of course, and Masks have mercy if the skiffers ever decided to throw their lot in with the Lower Bank… but Fulvet, who licensed the skiffs, was smart enough to keep them on his side.

The Cinquerat was trying to deprive the fire of fuel, but Grey had a sinking certainty it wouldn’t work. Not after the Night of Hells. Not with the Stadnem Anduske using this as a rallying point. And not when—according to the warning he’d received—the Anduske had the makings for black powder.

The same contraband that had killed Kolya, leaving Grey to dance the kanina for a burned husk of a body.

The thought of anyone else having to do the same propelled him into motion. Grey cut behind the cordon to where Cercel was standing. “Sir, let me go out there and try to talk them down. Standing here in silence isn’t helping.”

The hard line of Cercel’s mouth said she wasn’t any happier with the cordoning tactics than he was, but the look she gave him spoke volumes of doubt. “If I send a hawk out there, Serrado, it’s just as likely to be the spark that sets this off as the water that puts it out.”

He yanked off his captain’s pin. “Then I won’t go as a hawk. Let me at least try to stop them from escalating.”

That was a risk of a different sort. His uniform made him a target, but authority was also a form of protection. Stripped of that, he might just look like a traitor—a slip-knot whose heart was so Liganti, he didn’t care that someone had desecrated their holy ground.

The tendons in Cercel’s neck ridged as she fought with herself. Then she took the pin with one curt swipe. “If they turn on you, run. I can’t send people out to protect you without making this worse.”

Grey’s response was to shrug out of his coat and shove it at her, followed by his gloves.

In shirtsleeves and reinforced waistcoat, he vaulted the railing of the bridge and dropped to the shore below, splashing in the ankle-deep water. A nearby river stair brought him up to street level again, and he threaded his way through the restless crowd.

“—take our city, they pave over our wellspring and make us pay for the privilege of dancing on its grave, they poison our elders with a profane mockery of aža, and now they’re desecrating our temples with the bodies of dreamweavers. How are they any different from the Tyrant? How long will we pretend the Accords ever meant anything but a different sort of oppression? How long before it’s our faith taken? Our children poisoned? Our blood spilled?”

Rumbles of agreement surrounded Grey. How was he supposed to stop this when he agreed with the stoop-thumper more than he didn’t? But mob anger wasn’t the way.

“What they did was wrong,” he called out, letting his accent shift, searching for an argument that would turn this tide to something productive. “But that is a thing for the ziemetse to address. Whoever did this wants us to break from our ways. Giving in only strengthens them and weakens us.”

“They killed the Kiraly ziemič!” someone roared back in Vraszenian.

I know. I was there for his kanina, too. The protest caught in Grey’s throat, the way so many words did. These days he felt like he might burst from all the things he wasn’t letting free: anger, grief, fear.

Was he willing to grind his own outrage and pain into dust for the sake of the powers he served?

Before he could answer that, someone slipped through the crowd to his side. “Serrado. I need your help.”

His answering curse caught in his teeth at the sight of the pale skin and fine features of Renata Viraudax. But not the elegant Seterin alta as she usually presented herself: She was dressed plainly, in an underdress and loose surcoat that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Lower Bank craftswoman.

She rose onto her toes, speaking close into his ear. “I saw what happened with the bird. I know who’s responsible.”

For an instant, he thought the angry roar around them was in answer to her words—that despite her caution, the crowd had overheard. But then he saw a train of Liganti-style wagons rumbling into the plaza, forcing the gathered people aside. “What in the Mask-cursed world do they think they’re doing?” Grey snarled.