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

Just in time, too. She’d barely rattled off her story about her sweetheart and would his parents ever accept her when Idusza emerged onto the stoop barely a wagon’s length away, with a zrel bottle in one hand and a pipe in the other. She lit the pipe, and sweet-scented smoke drifted up to curl around the eaves. Taking a swig of what was probably her lunch, Idusza leaned against the wall, head back and eyes closed.

“Your sweetheart, what is he named?” Arenza asked, shuffling the cards—Sedge’s signal.

Tess had always been better at improvised truths than practiced lies. It seemed she’d taken Ren’s advice not to overprepare to heart. “P-Pavlin?”

So—there’s more there than I realized. Arenza didn’t try to hide her smile. “A good name. Pavnilun is the dreamweaver’s month, after all.”

The swing of Sedge’s balding velvet coat and the strike of his cane on the cobbles did as much to scatter people out of his path as his scowl. Even Idusza raised her head as he clomped up and stopped at the edge of Arenza’s blanket, where she’d only just turned over The Face of Roses.

“I was wondering where you’d got off to. Found a nice new patch for yourself, did you? But it en’t getting you out of what’s owed me.”

It took Arenza a moment to pinpoint why his condescending drawl and his affected swagger seemed familiar. And when she did, she almost broke character.

Vargo. He was imitating Vargo.

She’d deliberately chosen a bad spot, tucked into the space where the front of a tinsmith’s jutted out past the neighboring apothecary. It let Sedge trap both her and Tess in the corner, and half the passersby didn’t have a clear line of sight—but Idusza, lounging on the stoop with her pipe and bottle, had a perfect view.

“I—I am sorry,” she stammered, in the thickest Vraszenian accent she could manage. As if she’d come to Nadežra from the furthest depths of Vraszan. “I knew not—but you own not that shop—”

He kicked her bowl, clattering it against Idusza’s stoop in a spray of centiras.

“Own this corner, don’t I? And I don’t need no mouthy card-juggler stinking up the place staked out for my night-pieces.” He leered, and she wondered uneasily how much of this came from years on the street, and how much was lifted from watching Vargo. “Unless you’re looking for better things to do with that mouth, sweetheart.”

Tess scrambled to her feet, but Sedge grabbed her arm as she tried to dodge past and threw her against Arenza.

“No you don’t, sow. No running for the hawks. We can finish up here easy if the gnat gives me what I want, and then you can—”

“Why don’t you fuck off and stop stinking up this corner, you Liganti leech,” Idusza snarled. She knocked the embers from her pipe and ground them into the cobbles with her foot. “Before I find better uses for your mouth. Like breaking my bottle on it.” The remains of her zrel sloshed as she raised the heavy glass.

Sedge pivoted to face her. The way the three of them used to run this scam, some hawk or virtuous passerby would intervene, and he’d keep the mark busy long enough for either Tess or Ren to pick their pocket—or if that didn’t work, he’d let himself be run off, and then they’d swipe things while clinging to their savior in gratitude.

But money wasn’t Ren’s target this time.

“She’s a stranger. Hurt her not,” Arenza cried, stepping forward. Without looking, Sedge smashed one elbow backward. He’d insisted on practicing before they came out here, because both of them had grown; she was glad of it now, as he came within a sneeze of genuinely hitting her in the teeth. She hurled herself into the wall and bit down on the packet she’d slipped into her cheek, spitting out blood.

“You stay out of this,” he snarled at Idusza, reaching for the bottle and wrenching it out of her hand—but leaving himself open for the fist that cracked him in the jaw.

It sent him reeling back a step. Cuffing the blood from his split lip, Sedge snarled, “You’re gonna pay for that, just as soon as this one pays what she owes me.”

Arenza rose to her feet. “I owe you nothing except the curses of fate,” she spat, bending to snatch up her deck. “You have a szorsa struck. Let us draw three cards and see what your doom will be.”

A twitch of her finger sent the bottom card into her waiting hand. “The Mask of Night,” she said. “May Ir Nedje curse your eyes with the blindness of your heart.”

Sedge lifted his cane to strike her. “I’ll show you where you can shove your cards, you damned—” The insult died as he swung and missed by two handspans, stumbling off-balance and smashing shoulder-first into the wall. He hunched against it, blinking and staring at nothing.

“You… what did you do? What did you fucking do to my eyes?!”

He charged again, waving his arms wildly as though uncertain of his target’s position. Arenza easily stepped out of the way. As did Idusza, whose furious scowl was fading into surprise.

Arenza dealt another card. “The Mask of Worms. May Šen Kryzet curse your mouth with the foulness you spew.”

Sedge lurched “blindly” into a man who shoved him away, dropping him to one knee. That gave him cover to palm something into his own mouth. Then he staggered upright again, coughing and gagging—and a mass of bloody, writhing worms spattered to the cobblestones.

They had an audience now, not just Idusza. Arenza brandished the third card high. “The Mask of Ashes. May Ezal Sviren curse your hand, which you use only for bringing pain and destruction.”

Sedge’s arm burst into flame.

Gasps and screams rose from the crowd, and they all backed away from the flailing man and his blazing arm. He fell to his knees, beating at the flames with the opposite glove until they went out, leaving