Book Read Free

The Ruling Mask

Page 22

by Neil McGarry


  In the dim light that leaked through the barred windows, the room seemed much the same as she remembered it: wall hangings, a massive desk flanked by several chairs, and, in the shadow behind the desk, a small bookcase. She crossed the room as quietly as she could, offering thanks to Mayu that the Uncle had furnished the room with several rugs that muffled her footsteps. As she stepped around the desk, her elbow caught a small vase that she saw only as it toppled towards the floor, along with the rose it held. Her hand shot out almost of its own accord and seized the vase before it could shatter upon the floor.

  She clutched the thing to her chest, shuddering in reaction and no longer feeling quite so crafty or clever. If she were found here...well, she tried to imagine what the Uncle would do to someone who tried to rob him and her imagination balked. No one on the Grey was stupid enough to even try something like this. Best not to think on it, she told herself as she replaced the vase and rose, more or less where they had been. Then she moved around to the bookshelf and crouched to examine its contents.

  There were only a few books there, a dozen or so in all, but even in the dim light she could see that two on the far end were clearly the kind which the scholars used. She carefully slid them out; they were indeed as large as she remembered, and heavy too, each one five or six inches thick. Fortunately, she’d brought a pack that would accommodate both—or would, once she’d emptied it of its current contents.

  “What happens when he notices the journals are gone?” Lysander had asked when she’d shared her plans with him. “From what you told me, it’s not like he’s got a room full of books.”

  “Cecilia told me herself that, by law, a scholar’s diaries belong to the Scriptorium, so the Uncle’s not even supposed to have them,” she’d replied, sounding more confident than she felt. “At some point he’ll notice the theft, sure, but he’ll have no idea who to blame. None of the redcaps would dare to steal from him, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be interested in a scholar’s diaries. He could try to accuse the Grey—we’re not supposed to steal from the Red—but that would be admitting he’d had the books in the first place, which I’ll bet he doesn’t want to do. He’ll be caught the same way Nigel was: robbed and unable to speak of it.”

  “So as suspicious as the Uncle will be, he’ll likely do nothing.” Lysander nodded approvingly. “Very clever. Still, that raises the question of just what was so important about your father’s diaries that the Uncle had to have them.”

  That mystery still didn’t have an answer. Clearly something in these books had great worth to the Uncle—great enough to persuade him to let the Deeps gangs run free and bring the War of the Quills to its crashing end. What that something was she couldn’t say, but perhaps the diaries themselves could.

  She carefully lifted the two blank scholar’s diaries Cecilia had provided and placed them neatly into the empty space the real diaries had left. She slid those easily into her pack, which she carefully closed. She didn’t know how much time the ruse would buy; she’d distressed the covers to make the books look old, but anything more than a cursory glance would reveal the deception. Still, she’d be long gone before—

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a door opening below, then voices, then boots upon the stairs. Duchess lurched to her feet, nearly dropping the pack in her fright. If they found her here, Great Mayu...

  She hurried across to the secret door as quietly as she could, feeling that at any minute the office door would swing open and the Uncle would be there with a lantern in one hand and a knife in the other. She’d left the small door open, thank the gods, and she slipped through and pressed it closed just as the office door swung open. One hand clutched the rungs of the ladder with panicky strength, while the other still held the pack. She was afraid to climb down, afraid even to breathe lest she be detected. The secret panel was so thin that any tiny sound might give her away.

  “She’s on the move,” came the Uncle’s voice, and a spear of ice jabbed her in the belly. They knew she was here. Duchess closed her eyes and offered a prayer to Mayu for a quick death.

  “You think?” She would have recognized Antony’s gravelly voice anywhere, but his tone was calm. A quiet conversation between professional murderers, and not ones angrily seeking the thief who had just slipped out.

  “Oh yes. The game’s changed. Something’s spooked her.” Still no sound of pounding feet from the alley below, nor of Antony and the Uncle frantically searching the office. Perhaps the gods were on her side after all. Then who was this she?

  “And you think the shift in Temple’s her doing.”

  “Oh, indeed.” Avuncular humor filled the Uncle’s voice. “Minette’s moving her pieces, and Galeon is only the latest.” Duchess had half-thought of trying to slip down the ladder while they talked, but the mention of Minette held her fast.

  “I guess it makes sense,” Antony replied. “Only way an Ahé could get a job like that.”

  She heard the sound of metal on metal, then the squeaking of hinges. The Uncle opening the safe? “She’s been moving her people into place for years, and he’s just the latest. I’m sure there are others no one’s even noticed.”

  Her thoughts were flying around like birds. She hadn’t considered it before, but an Ahé in charge of the Temple blackarms was unusual to say the least. And Minette had arranged it? What had changed? What had her moving pieces now?

  There came the unmistakable clink of handled coins. “Perhaps our Ahé friend needs to have an accident?” Antony asked. She tried not to shiver at the casual way Antony discussed murder.

  “Not yet,” the Uncle replied. “Something like that happening to a newly placed sheriff? That gets noticed. That causes trouble.” She could almost see the look the Uncle was giving Antony. They all knew how he felt about trouble. “Besides,” the Uncle went on, “that’d give the game away. For every piece we see, there are probably two we’ve never suspected.” The hinges sounded again and then a click. “Better to wait and bide our time. When the hour is right...”

  “Measure twice, cut once?”

  “Cut once.” She was certain she never wanted to see the smile she heard in the Uncle’s voice.

  “Good habits make good work,” Antony replied.

  “That’s my boy.” There was a shuffling sound and the creaking of floorboards. “Speaking of work, any word from our friends in Verge?” It sounded as if they were moving back towards the door.

  “Letter came in from the Duchies two days ago, right on schedule, and all it said was nothing yet.” There was a pause. “Do I ever get to know what’s going on out there?” There was a long silence, and Duchess could easily imagine the Uncle fixing Antony with those rat’s eyes of his. “You’re the boss,” Antony said at last.

  “That I am,” the Uncle agreed. The office door creaked open. “Still, I think perhaps a bit more incentive is needed. We’ll send a message—” The door closed, cutting off his words, and Duchess heard footsteps on the stairs and, finally, the slamming of the front door. She released a pent-up breath, and wiped sweat from her brow with one trembling hand. The chief of the Red and his first lieutenant had been within a yard of discovering her. Three feet between her and a terrible end.

  She clung to the ladder until her shaking had stilled and her brow had dried, and then began slowly to descend. Time to head home and find what her bravery and madness had bought her. And if it had been worth the risk.

  * * *

  She laid her head on her desk and tried to stop the tears, to no avail.

  The two journals were musty with age, with battered covers and bent corners, but they were intact, and that was all that mattered. She’d nervously flipped one open, and the sight of her father’s handwriting on those fine vellum pages had sent a dagger of pain right through her. Even after so many years she recognized his firm, flowing hand. The weight of every day that had passed with him gone fell suddenly on her shoulders like a blanket of iron, and she remembered how Savant Terence had said t
hat her father had died not in a fire but by poison he himself had taken. Had he been frightened, at the end? Angry? Had he thought what he purchased with his life worth the cost? And what would he think of her now, not a scholar but a full-fledged member of the legendary Grey? What would he think of her adventures over the last few months? Would he have been proud of her ingenuity, or horrified by her reckless daring?

  She’d closed the book and set it aside, lest her tears stain the precious pages. She cried for her father, she cried for herself, and for every lost day between when he had died and now. There was a hole in the world that would never, ever be filled, no matter how used to it she got. It had simply become...familiar.

  By the time she had no more tears left, her candle was all but burned down. She lit another, dried her hands and face, and began to read.

  There was more within them than she had dared to hope, more than she could possibly read in a single night or even a single week. Much of it was foot-noted and cross-referenced in ways only an expert would understand, and she found herself in awe of her father’s keen intelligence and scholarly prowess. He was also somewhat of an artist, something she had not remembered. For here and there the work was illuminated with sketches, of castles and ancient obelisks, and even a drawing of the Ruling Mask of House Davari, set beside an account of Iceni’s tale. Here were images of tools found in the ruins, of stone plates containing ancient laws, there a dagger—

  She flipped back a page, her nose nearly pressed against the parchment. A serpentine dagger, nearly identical to the one she’d stolen from Baron Ivan Eusbius, the one stolen again by Tyford and passed along by Finn to Keeper Morel in the Deeps. She focused watering eyes on the accompanying text and began to read. If her father’s research was to be believed, the dagger was an artifact from Old Domani, never found but associated in their writings with a philosophical and spiritual notion of justice. A nagging suspicion took hold and she began to flip ahead, knowing what she was looking for even before she found it: the drawing of a spoked wheel, another artifact, a symbol for order. A few more pages took her to the sketch of a crystal shard, akin to the one held in the hands of Anassa as depicted in the statue on the Godswalk, representing wisdom. All spoken of in legend. None ever found.

  Three symbols, three faiths, each derived from the ancient Domae—there was something to Cecilia’s thesis after all. Three symbols taken not from the ancient Rodaasi, but the Domae. The edunae were pretenders, all.

  Duchess sat back in her chair, rubbing tired eyes. The Domae who had lived in this place, centuries ago, had venerated order, justice and wisdom, and in turn, the Rodaasi had done the same, naming them Ventaris, Mayu, and Anassa. If her father’s research was accurate, the religions of her people were lifted neatly from their predecessors, inspired by the dagger, the wheel and the shard. There were changes, of course; Mayu encompassing death as well as justice, Ventaris taking on illumination as well as order, but the basic concepts—

  Justice, order, wisdom. Suddenly she was back in the rooms above the shop, drunkenly joking with Jana about magic and witches, and Jana was showing her the cards, carved in ibex horn: Justice, Order and Wisdom, and set amongst them, the Fool.

  Fool.

  She had asked the pit who she was, and it had answered.

  Two must have passed your hands.

  She was out of her chair and padding down the hall to her bedroom, moving as if in a dream. Her hands were prying at the floorboards as if of their own accord. There was the mirror, still wrapped and hidden as she’d left it after the Levering job. Why had she even taken the thing?

  But of course she’d known even then. She’d felt cold and scared the way she had when she’d held the dagger, down in the tunnels, when the fog had impossibly found her. There had been the same chill, the same thickness in the air.

  She pulled away the cloth wrapping with one hand while the other slipped a dagger from her belt. Then she was sliding the blade between the strange crystal surface and the wooden frame, twisting and prying. Wood creaked as she turned the blade this way and that and she was scarcely aware of the pounding of her heart.

  Then the frame cracked and splintered, and she was tossing the dagger aside, using both hands to pull the wood away from the mirror, revealing edges that were jagged and uneven, impossibly sharp at the corners. The back of the reflective surface was just as strange, criss-crossed with raised lines marking out facets in the surface.

  Her hands were a blur now, tossing wooden pieces carelessly to the ground until the mirror was free. Whoever had framed it hadn’t known what they had. But she did. Somehow, she knew.

  Her candle was guttering, and in that flickering light she sat on her bed and ran her fingers over the mirror’s surface, leaving behind thin streaks of blood. When had she cut herself? Was it when she realized that the mirror could be bent along the lines in its back, or when its surface had become like clay under her fingers? She pressed and folded as if crystal were bread dough, and in the mirror’s faceted surface her eyes were reflected a thousand times, filled with mad intensity. The thing shrunk as she spun it like the threads in Jana’s looms—over, under and inward—the same words, the same rhythm that had echoed in her head a thousand times as the girl had worked at her cloth. Treadle, throw, beat. Treadle, throw, beat. One, two, three. Fold and push and turn.

  The blood was gone now, vanished into the edges of the crystalline shard that lay in her hands.

  She fell back on the bed, panting. The shard was just as she had seen on the Godswalk in the hands of Anassa, just as depicted in her father’s diaries. It was a handsbreadth long, wider at the top than the bottom, where it narrowed to a sharp point. She lay on her back holding it before her eyes, looking into its shining facets as it in turn looked down upon her. Cold and smooth and perfect, the shard ate the heat from her fingers, which felt almost like crystal themselves, numb and mirrored. She had a thousand hands and each held a perfect and beautiful shard.

  And then it was falling. They were all falling, tumbling from her numb fingers and her eyes widened in shock as its eyes widened in anticipation as it was falling towards her eye.

  She jerked her head away just in time, and the shard cut a shallow line along her cheek, piercing her bedclothes and standing lathe-straight from her mattress. Whatever spell had gripped her was broken and she curled up in a ball, shivering and wondering if she’d gone mad. She held up her now-warm hands and saw no blood, no wounds.

  Two must have passed your hands.

  She rolled out of bed and paced the room, thinking furiously. The dagger, the Key of Mayu must be the first—was this the second? But how had the facets known? They’d once said they could not see her, but they’d seen something. We saw nothing and knew a pattern by the absence. We followed it by what we did not see.

  The absence of evidence. They’d guessed, just as they’d guessed her name, though they could not see it. Like Minette, they’d pushed what they could see towards what they could not, in the hopes of flushing out their prey. They’d pushed Hector towards a conflict with Baron Eusbius, and when Duchess herself had needed help, they’d given her a hand in escaping with the stolen dagger. A push past the first and towards the second.

  We were waiting that night. At the party... Father. Justin. You. We were. I was. There. Here. Then. Now. All one.

  They knew that Justin was not there, but that she was. That he had gifted you with what he once received. Had they known that gift, whatever it was, would lead her to the second, to the Shard of Wisdom?

  You must bring us the second. Before it is too late. Or all will surely suffer before the end.

  A flicker of movement from the bed caught her eye. She walked over, leaning in close, and there she saw the guttering light of her candle through the shard’s misty silver surface. She moved her head and saw movement once more. Carefully, not daring touch the thing, she turned this way and that, trying to catch sight of—

  There it was again. It was a shadow, moving through the m
irror. An elongated shape that—there, another, and a third. Several shadows moving in different direction against the candle’s light. She sensed that if she just turned and looked at the shard from the right point, the right angle, that—

  The shadows fell and clarified and merged into a curve, an ellipsis, a circle.

  There it was, as clear as day. At the center of the shard was a spinning shape that she knew far, far too well. Some illusion of the crystal made it look real, almost alive. The snake, devouring its own tail: the symbol of He Who Devours.

  We have seen the tattered figure dancing. We have seen our brother lost. Bring us the second, or all will surely suffer...

  She found her hands again moving of their own accord, but this time they were tightening into fists.

  She’d once held the Key of Mayu, which bore the same symbol. She’d seen what blood upon its blade could do, the night the dead had risen beneath the hill. She had given up the Key when the Uncle had demanded it, and now she wondered if that had been a mistake.

  She’d given up the first too easily; she would not do the same with the second. Their warning and threats did not matter. She’d not give the facets what they asked for. Not easily.

  She went to fetch a cloth with which to wrap the Shard, and to light another candle. Dawn was still a long way off, but Cecilia would arrive with it, and there was still much to do.

  * * *

  Cecilia held the book as if it were a holy relic, her eyes almost overflowing with tears. “Where did you—”

  Duchess, seated behind her desk, held up a hand. “Best not to ask.”

  The girl nodded, carefully turning page after page. Duchess had spent the rest of the night pouring over the books, but found no more secrets among their pages. Much of the work was dense prose, covering various theories and earlier works and in the end the pages had seemed to blur until she simply couldn’t read any more. She’d finally gone to sleep some time after third bell.

 

‹ Prev