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

“No. I don’t want you going off on your own again. Let me just…” Tess looked around blankly, not yet awake enough to hold a thought for more than a few moments. “Shoes?”

Ren wouldn’t have taken Tess back to the lodging house if the rest of the city were on fire and that was the only safe building. “No, you stay here. I would not leave the house empty, not until we can board up the parlour windows.”

“I could ask…” She saw the moment Tess remembered the previous day’s events, in the slump of her shoulders and tremble of her lips. “Never you mind. Go. I’ll see to it.”

Sedge wouldn’t begrudge Ren the moment she took to hug Tess again. Only when Tess pulled back and started gesturing for her to get on with it did she dress herself as Arenza, putting on her makeup in haste and slinging the Rook’s shawl of knives around her shoulders. Lacewater was no place for Renata Viraudax, not at this hour.

It wasn’t any place for Ren, either. Not with the memories that haunted its narrow lanes. But Sedge had called, and she had to go.

Lacewater, Old Island: Cyprilun 35

Ren had avoided three places in Lacewater since coming back to Nadežra. The first was the Uča Mašno, the street where she’d lived with her mother until the fire destroyed their house and four others. The second was Svajra Square, and the little alley off its southern end, where she’d found her mother’s body.

The third was Ondrakja’s lodging house.

Every muscle in Ren’s body tightened as she approached. The streets hadn’t changed; everything was as weathered and as run-down as before, the lanes as cramped, the bridges as rickety.

The building sat on a bend in the Uča Fidou, well-positioned to watch both approaches. Ren crept close in the darkness and fog, studying the exterior. There were no lights in the windows, but that was no surprise; people here didn’t waste candles or lamps at this hour. Who had moved in after Ondrakja vanished and the Fingers scattered? She hadn’t asked.

But that was probably why Sedge had told her to come in the escape window.

It wasn’t a window at all. It was an old coal chute, running from street level down into the cellar, from back when Lacewater was well enough maintained that the river didn’t flood its cellars every spring. Knot members weren’t supposed to keep secrets from each other, but they’d kept this one from Ondrakja, so they could use it to sneak out without her knowing. The inner and outer doors looked like they’d been nailed shut, but they weren’t really, thanks to some unknown predecessor.

Ren eyed the hatch dubiously. Had Sedge really managed to fit down that? Probably not, but for her it would be a quieter way of entering than going through the front door.

At least the countless Fingers who’d slid through the chute had polished away the coal dust. She folded up the Rook’s shawl and shoved it inside her shirt for protection, then pried open the hatch and eased herself in, feetfirst.

She landed ankle-deep in water. The cellar around her was pitch dark; she put the shawl back on and tied it securely, then drew one of the knives and palmed it for comfort. She might be out of practice with throwing them, but something was better than nothing. And she could always use the knife to stab.

“Sedge?” she whispered, even though he would have said something if he were down here. The cellar answered with nothing more than the quiet sloshing of the ripples she’d set off. Moving by memory, with her free hand sweeping the air in front of her for obstacles, she made her way to the stair. Its bottom two steps were missing, rotted away by the damp, but when she heaved herself onto the next one its creaking structure held.

The cellar door opened into a pantry and kitchen that hadn’t seen a meal cooked since long before Ren was born. Here there was a bit more light to see by, the exterior door hanging half-open and the grey of false dawn brightening the mist outside, but only enough to mold the shadows into shapes—shapes that seemed to loom and creep.

Her fingers tightened painfully on the knife’s hilt. How many times had she fallen asleep in this building, clutching a knife for comfort? Comfort and protection both, especially before Sedge came. The Fingers preyed on each other as much as on the cuffs they robbed. Ondrakja encouraged it—up to a point—so they wouldn’t band together against her.

Now all that fear returned, like she was a child once again.

An itch crawled up her nose, from the dust-thick air and the earthy smell of long-dried rat droppings. Ren silenced it into her shoulder, three sharp sneezes that made her head throb. Taking a cautious breath afterward, she scented something familiar: a tang as sharp as fear, not quite blanketed by the dust and the droppings.

Zlyzen blood.

Now that she knew to look, she saw its sickly glimmer splashed over the walls, felt its insidious whisper in her bones.

Panic flung her back toward the cellar door, but something was coming up out of the darkness, mold-black and broken-limbed. Ren spun and saw more zlyzen emerging from the shadows, from the empty shell of the pantry and the mist of the street outside. She hurled her knife at one of them and tried to bolt, but they blocked her path, and the only escape was deeper into the lodging house.

Where more of them were waiting. It was like the Fingers themselves had been transformed, all the kids she’d known turned into spindly, charred monsters. But they didn’t claw her apart, the way they’d done to Leato. They were only herding her, pushing her back and back—toward the stairs to the second floor.

Ren retreated, throwing a second knife, a third, a fourth. All of them missed. Then she was far enough up the stairs to see