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

years on the streets… but Ivrina had clung to a few treasures, through every disaster Ir Nedje threw their way.

Now Ren had only one.

She kept it in a small hollow she’d dug out beneath a loose flagstone in the basement’s wine cellar, with the crate of Sureggio Extaquium’s terrible wine on top of it. Ren couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to this, the last remnant of her mother.

The oilcloth was stiff in her hands as she brought the small package into the marginal warmth of the kitchen. Tess was out laying waste to Vargo’s fabric stores, leaving Ren alone with her memories.

She unwrapped her mother’s pattern deck with care. These weren’t the cheap, woodblock-printed things she’d been using on the street; cold-decking required two identical decks, and cards like Ivrina Lenskaya’s were unique. Hand-painted, imbued not to wear down from use, with the symbols of the three threads forming a triangle on their backs, spindle and shuttle and shears.

A knot formed in Ren’s throat as she brushed her thumb across the topmost card. I still miss you.

She had Tess and Sedge now, her sworn sister and brother, made so through Ren’s best childish guess at the Vraszenian ritual of blood kinship. But Vraszenians were supposed to be defined by their lineages, their kretse. Ren only had her mother… and so in that sense, after Ivrina died, she had no one.

Drawing a ragged breath, she began shuffling and cutting the cards.

Ivrina had taught her daughter the art, giving her instructions and warnings both. The three threads, with their aspect and unaligned cards; veiled readings and revealed ones. Not to try to read for herself. Not to ask frivolous questions. Not to rely too heavily on the pattern, because sometimes the deities took the price of it out of the reader.

But if Mettore was falsifying convictions and sending innocent people into slavery, then House Traementis might have potential allies. Eret Quientis, if Fulvet’s authority over the courts was being subverted; Era Novrus, given her feud. So even though it was harder to read for an absent subject, Ren laid out Eret Mettore Indestor’s pattern.

Nine cards, three by three, and Ren murmured the ritual phrase under her breath, her words puffing from her lips like ghosts in the chill air. His past, the good and the ill of it, and that which was neither.

Hare and Hound, Jump at the Sun, and Hundred Lanterns Rise. Ren ran the tip of her tongue across her lip, thinking. All from the spinning thread; that meant the inner self, the mind and the spirit, and all three from the same thread meant they were probably linked. Jump at the Sun and Hundred Lanterns Rise—those two were clear enough, as far as it went. Mettore had taken some great risk and fallen short, losing something precious as a result. But what?

Ažerais didn’t see fit to bless her with a flash of insight. But Ren was fairly sure that whatever event those two represented had led to the third card, Hare and Hound. Adaptability. Mettore had changed to meet his new situation, and from his perspective at least, it had turned out well. The card chilled Ren when she looked at it, though. The name was a reference to an old Vraszenian tale, Clever Natalya changing forms to outwit a pursuer. But the pursuer had changed, too—in hopes of killing Natalya.

Whatever Mettore had become, she doubted it was good.

Ren smiled in grim recognition at the next row. Sometimes the central card represented the client himself; here it was The Mask of Chaos, the same card she’d drawn for Leato when posing as Arenza. Eret Indestor, holding the Caerulet seat in the Cinquerat, should have been represented by the other half of that duality, The Face of Balance. But with him, law and order were the Mask, and corruption was the Face beneath.

The good and ill cards were more intriguing. Again from the spinning thread, contrasting with The Mask of Chaos from the woven, which represented the outer self, the social world. The Mask of Fools, in veiled position, told her that Indestor was missing something—some vital piece of information, without which he couldn’t proceed. And Lark Aloft, sitting opposite and revealed, spoke of messages and new information coming. He might not have it in his grasp, but it was out there, waiting for him.

His future was represented by Wings in Silk, Storm Against Stone, and Two Roads Cross. “Djek,” Ren murmured, staring at them. Two more cards from the spinning thread, and one from the cut.

Whatever Mettore was doing… it wasn’t some simple gambit for power or wealth. Not with seven of nine cards all from the same thread. It might have meant some internal struggle on his part, but Ren doubted it.

Which left matters of the spirit. In other words, magic.

But what did Caerulet have to do with magic? That came under the purview of Iridet, the Cinquerat’s religious seat. Well, Ren amended, numinatria does. Imbuing mostly fell to Prasinet because the guilds controlled the crafters, and Prasinet controlled the guilds. And none of the Cinquerat gave a wet leech about pattern.

With Two Roads Cross at the center, it wasn’t hard to see how the other two pivoted around it. That one meant decisive action, an opportunity to change the game.

Mettore wasn’t content with his usual schemes. He was building toward something—and an opportunity for it was coming soon.

Unfortunately, pattern decks didn’t come with a clock. “Soon” could mean anything from tomorrow to a year from now. Ren suspected the news represented by Lark Aloft, the information Mettore was currently missing, would send events rushing onward… so his plans depended on when he received it.

She shook her head in frustration. If I knew for sure what it was, I could stop him from getting it.

With most patterns, the left and right cards in the top row represented alternative outcomes, what would happen in the case of success or failure. That was the sense Ren had gotten