The Liar's Knot

by M. A. Carrick

  Until it all slammed back with a painful jolt as he stumbled into the wine-dark twilight of Noctat.

  Vargo took a moment to fill his lungs, wiping the cold sweat from his brow. A few weeks ago he wouldn’t have recognized these sensations, but now he knew them too well. He’d felt this the night he’d killed himself and Serrado, that moment before the jolt when his life faded—the moment when he grabbed on, leaned into the burn, the physical pain a reminder that he still lived.

  Other sensations bombarded him as he pushed on through Noctat: Sibiliat wrapped warm and wet around him, Fadrin’s hand, Iascat’s mouth, nails down his back and broken glass slashing his throat. The ache when Ren licked sticky wine off her fingers like the river rat she was under her mask; the impact of Serrado’s fist driving into Vargo’s gut and the bar of his arm cutting off breath. There was no pleasure or pain in this vision of Noctat: just sensation, reminding him that the separation of mind and body was an illusion.

  An illusion that shattered like a prism into rainbow light as Vargo escaped Noctat’s allure and spun into Sebat.

  It was the bliss after orgasm, the floating haze of papaver smoke, the shimmer of aža. Vargo was aware of his entire self, but from a distance he could see the cracks running gold through him.

  Cracks—and threads finer than silk.

  Alsius?

  The threads vibrated with Vargo’s thought, like chords struck, rippling out beyond sight. No answer came, but the returning ripples were enough to reassure him that he wasn’t alone.

  Never alone. The cord that connected him to Alsius was spun of guilt, affection, purpose, familiarity, instruction, need. Vargo never would have chosen it, but he couldn’t regret it. Sebat: perfection in imperfection.

  He spider-climbed that line into Sessat. All around him were strung complex nets of endless connected nodes: tangles, knots, looms, an entire cosmos built between warp and weft, and Vargo with only two threads to cling to. One thick and sturdy under his feet, the road of the spira aurea; the other a gossamer-thin wire of steel in his hands.

  Ren. He could sever it here, undo whatever he’d done when he brought her soul out of the realm of mind. Whatever she’d reciprocated and strengthened during Veiled Waters. He could free her from the web that had tangled him and Alsius for sixteen years. But even thinking it, Vargo could imagine the fury of her response. That wasn’t a choice he should make alone.

  She was going to be pissed enough at him as it was. Smiling, he laid his hand on her thread and used it as his guide as he passed from Sessat to Quinat.

  His hold tightened as the blue-tinged mindscape dimmed to a malevolent red, sliding blood-thick and warm against his skin, pulsing in time with his heart. The ash was sinking its claws in deeper, and need and revulsion lodged in his throat, choking him like that alien urge to unseat Sostira Novrus. Only the prismatium path beneath his feet and the steel wire in his hand kept him steady and on course, passing through the blood tide of Quinat into the green fields of Quarat.

  It should have been beautiful, a relief after the ominous pressure of Quinat. But with ash coursing through him, the farther Vargo walked, the more he smelled the rot under the honey-thick air, felt the mulch of dead vegetation under the verdant growth. Excessive wealth was built on the poverty of others. Bounty came from seeds planted in corpse-rich soil. Vargo knew. He’d been the soil, the seed, the fruit, the farmer. He might eat at the table now, but it was laid with his own death feast.

  Nausea roiled his gut. His own feast, and that of countless, nameless others.

  Not all nameless, he realized as he passed from lush Quarat into the sunbaked desert of Tricat. There he saw shades he recognized, their faces twisted with fury. Leato Traementis with Donaia, Giuna, and even Renata arrayed behind him. Kolya Serrado standing next to his brother. So many fists and knot bosses who’d been trampled in the course of Vargo’s rise.

  And Alsius Acrenix, looming on the path ahead, wearing a face Vargo hadn’t seen since he was a boy. Alsius had seemed old then, to Vargo’s childish eyes. But he’d only been a few years older than Vargo was now, barely thirty when he died.

  When I died? You mean when you killed me. Now you owe me. It echoed through his mindscape, a thread crossing at a tangent that led from past to present to future.

  “I owe a lot of people.” Vargo’s voice rippled out along that thread. I’ve killed a lot of people. It planted a chill under his skin that he couldn’t shake no matter how hard he shivered. Justice fell under Tricat’s purview. So did vengeance.

  Beyond the faces, at the edge of those ripples, other eyes watched. Eyes set in shadows made of teeth and claws and backward-bent limbs. The scars down Vargo’s back burned as he hunched his shoulders to avoid being seen, until Tuat’s moonlight washed over him and hid him from sight.

  The vengeful shades were gone, leaving Vargo on the spira aurea—alone. Given the patterns of the other numina, he’d expected to see… someone. Tuat’s self-in-other. But while Vargo stood in Corillis’s silver-blue light, the copper mirror of Paumillis reflected nothing.

  He supposed it made sense. He stood on the borders between everything: neither Liganti nor Vraszenian, neither hero nor monster, a cuff who was Lower Bank scum. He fit nowhere. He had connections, but did any of them really mean anything? To those around him he was an obstacle or a tool, nothing more. Even Alsius had only taken him on because he was useful, a means of first investigating and then avenging his own death. Vargo was what he needed to be—what other people needed him to be—to do what needed doing.

  And what he needed to do now was not get caught up with his head planted in his ass. Vargo stepped through a mirror’s pane, becoming his own reflection and passing to the Illi of the self—

  —and nearly toppling into the wellspring, glowing like one of Ažerais’s roses in the middle of the amphitheatre.

  The mist that surrounded it was a radiant veil, coyly hiding the waters themselves. But the sickly, poisoned cast it carried during Mettore’s attempt to destroy it had washed away, leaving the light pure and shimmering. That light shone through all the visions of different amphitheatres laid atop each other, plays and festivals and the bloody entertainments of Kaius Rex, each as thin as a pastry layer—but not moving. They were fixed in place like paintings.

  In all of them, a small circle of bronze glittered only a few paces away from the glowing wellspring.

  Relief flooded through Vargo: that he’d found it so easily, that it hadn’t fallen into the wellspring. Skirting the lip, he bent to pick it up.

  In the days before he met Alsius, when he’d been a runner for any sort of job that paid, some of the rats he’d run with had a game of gluing coins to the stoop of a rich merchant’s shop. Sometimes as a distraction for a quick dip and pass, sometimes just for the amusement of seeing a cheese-eater dirty their gloves trying to pry a mill free, and then huffing and pretending they didn’t care when they failed.

  Vargo felt the frustration and embarrassment of those cuffs now. Face burning, he stripped off his gloves, dried his sweaty hands on his coat skirts, and tried to dig his nails underneath the pendant. Then he drew out his boot knife. Then the metal form he used to trace basic numinata.

  By the time he’d failed to pry it up with every compass, edge, caliper, and instrument in his inscription kit and every curse word he knew, Vargo was hot, sweaty, and shaking with irritation. The thing was still stuck fast like it had been welded there.

  “Fucking Tricat,” he growled. Immobility: the same Mask-damned facet of that numen that had been poisoning the Charterhouse for months.

  Unlike when he’d come here to retrieve the missing part of Ren’s spirit, though, he knew how to deal with this. Out came the tools again, Vargo tracing a new spira aurea on the ground, with the medallion at its heart. But he drew it sunwise, so that the triangle he inscribed within the numinat inverted Tricat’s basic meaning. Not immobility, but movement.

  He kept his head down as he worked, grateful that the medallion
also seemed to be keeping everything around him fixed in place, so he didn’t have to worry about his nightmares attacking him. It was a simple figure. He set a new record for speed of inscription, and this time when he touched the bronze disc, it came up easily.

  Vargo stuffed it into his pocket and stood, joints aching, wondering if he would need to reinscribe the damned temple numinat—this time the right way round—to get out of here.

  With the medallion moved, the fixed layers around him came unmoored. The ground rolled beneath him, and by the time he caught his balance, he was in the amphitheatre as it had been that night during Veiled Waters. But now, two numinata were inscribed on its floor: the one he’d dismantled, and the one he’d walked to get here.

  Here, where shadows flowed down the tiers of the amphitheatre like a tide of monstrous insects. Backward-bent limbs, tatters that were neither flesh nor fur, claws that scraped and ticked across the stone as they crept closer.

  The scars on his back burned like they’d been reopened, the pain only made worse by a wave of nausea when the mold-damp stink hit him.

  I’m a fucking idiot.

  He’d taken ash—and the zlyzen had come for him.

  20

  Coffer and Key

  Isla Traementis, the Pearls: Canilun 14

  Ren was having another nightmare.

  It still happened, though not as often as before. A kitten couldn’t truly keep everything away, any more than a thread labyrinth could, or a red thread around her bed. But her sleep had been better, if not every night.

  Tonight was one of the bad nights.

  The zlyzen—always the zlyzen. Only this time they weren’t after her: It was Vargo they tormented, circling around him like a living Uniat, their claws clicking, their joints bending the wrong way. Ren tried to reach out—

  —and came bolt awake as Clever Natalya landed on her head.

  She convulsed and sent the cat flying with a yowl of indignation. Ren sat up, swearing, wondering what in Ninat’s hell had possessed Natalya to attack her like that. In the moonlight coming through her window, she could just make out the darker shadow of the kitten leaping back atop the bed and rising onto her hind paws to bat at something on the curtains.

  Something climbing the bedcurtains, scuttling upward for dear life.

  Ren had no Mask-damned clue what Peabody was doing in her bedroom at this hour. With her heart still pounding and her thoughts muddled by the nightmare, she lurched to her feet just in time to stop Natalya from scaling the curtains after him. Peabody took refuge on her shoulder and Ren stumbled to the floor, trying to remember where she’d hidden that cloth numinat.

  By the time she had it out and assembled, the heat of surprise had chilled to fear. No, Vargo wasn’t here. Which, she presumed, was why Peabody had jumped onto her head: perhaps in a futile attempt to wake her, or in a reckless bid to lure Clever Natalya into doing it for him.

  She slung the kitten into the sitting room and closed the door. As it clicked shut—

  ::—realm of mind, but something’s gone wrong. He can’t talk to me across the boundary. I can only tell that he’s terrified, and it isn’t just the ash—though that’s bad enough—things seemed like they were going as well as they could, but then suddenly—::

  “Alsius!” With an effort, Ren dragged her voice down to a murmur, and thanked the Faces that she still lived on the guest side of the manor, without anyone in the neighboring rooms. “Start at the beginning.”

  The tiny lump of the peacock spider quivered in the numinat. ::Vargo didn’t want you to have to take ash again, so he’s retrieving the pendant for you. Only he’s not back—something bad has happened.::

  Ren sat down hard on the floor. Retrieving the pendant. Masks have mercy—was that Vargo being altruistic? Or was it the medallion’s corrupting power, luring him in? She didn’t know, and it almost didn’t matter; bad enough that Vargo might have it now.

  But even that wouldn’t matter if he was caught in the dream. A nightmare he’d gone into for her sake.

  ::Please, you must help him—::

  “Of course I will.” Ren shoved herself back to her feet, looking around her room. What did she need? Clothing. The Black Rose’s mask. Her pattern deck. The portable cosmetics kit she’d started carrying after that drunken afternoon. She scribbled a quick note to Tanaquis; she could wake Tess on her way out, get her to take it to Whitesail. Hopefully Tanaquis had Iridet’s ash samples by now, or could get them.

  At the last moment, she thought to shake Alsius off the cloth numinat, unpin it, and fold it into her pocket. He leapt onto her arm and scurried up to her shoulder, silenced now—but this way he’d be able to instruct her when she got to the Praeteri temple.

  Outside, the cool night air shocked her the rest of the way awake. Praying she wasn’t too late, Ren set off for the Old Island at a run.

  Temple of the Illius Praeteri, Old Island: Canilun 14

  The temple was eerily silent. Ren hadn’t liked the place when she came here for her initiation—not when she was blindfolded, not when they told her it had been used by Kaius Rex, and especially not when Diomen put her in the rage numinat.

  But she liked it even less now, with a figure chalked onto its floor that she remembered all too well from the confrontation in the Great Amphitheatre.

  The only sign of Vargo was a tiny vial and cork discarded on the floor, bearing the faint, sickly traces of ash. She would recognize that poisoned iridescence anywhere. Ren forced herself to pick it up, but back when Breccone Indestris had been selling the excess on the streets, it had only been distributed in single doses. Vargo hadn’t left any for her to use.

  Which meant waiting for Tanaquis. How long would it take Tess to reach Whitesail? How long to rouse Tanaquis, and for her to get herself to the Old Island? Ren paced restlessly around the numinat, thankful that at least this time it hadn’t been painted in dreamweaver blood, that it wasn’t glowing and trying to shred the world.

  Peabody leapt from her shoulder and did an agitated dance on the floor. Ren guiltily dug the cloth out and reassembled it.

  ::It’s getting worse. Don’t you understand—he’s on ash. It subjects you to all your worst imaginings. For a man like him—::

  Ren shared far too many of Vargo’s unpleasant experiences not to understand. “Is he being hurt, physically?”

  Alsius twitched. ::I—I don’t think so. But—::

  “That’s enough for now.” As long as the zlyzen hadn’t found him yet, weren’t tearing into him the way they’d torn into Leato. As long as Ren could get to Vargo before they did. She didn’t know where the zlyzen had gone after they turned on Gammer Lindworm; perhaps they always lurked in Ažerais’s Dream, monsters of Vraszenian legend that children feared and adults pretended not to. Ondrakja had leashed that threat, but Ren had cut those ties and the zlyzen had vanished. If Alsius didn’t sense Vargo being injured, she could cling to the hope that they hadn’t returned.

  Alsius leapt toward her, then scuttled back into the numinat, where he hunched miserably. ::I think he’s sick. Alta Renata—Ren—please. Your people call the realm of mind Ažerais’s Dream. You yourself have some kind of connection to it. Isn’t there anything you can do?::

  “I don’t have—” she began helplessly, but the protest died on her lips. Ash. She didn’t have ash… but she could try something else.

  ::Where are you going?::

  If Alsius said anything after that, then she must have passed out of the range where she could hear him. Ren darted into one of the side chambers and fumbled until she found the cover for the lightstone sconce and pulled it open. Yes, she’d chosen the correct room. This was where the celebratory feast had been laid, with its cabinets and supplies—

  Including a small bottle of aža. For the first time in her life, Ren had reason to be grateful to Sureggio Extaquium and his appetites.

  ::Yes!:: Alsius said as she returned. ::Wait—will that do it?::

  “Maybe,” Ren said, measuring a s
mall dose of aža into her palm. Ordinarily one put it into wine or some other drink, but she didn’t want to waste time. She tipped the shimmering powder straight into her mouth and choked it down.

  Aža only let one see into the dream, not touch it bodily. But there was the numinat, and she was conceived on the Great Dream. Perhaps those two together would be enough. “Where should I stand?”

  ::Do you see where the spiral meets the edge of the circle? Start there—wait! Take me with you!::

  Ren looked dubiously at the spider. She understood his desire to help, but even so… “Have you taken aža in that form? I wouldn’t know how much to give you.”

  All eight legs curled in frustration. ::That’s exactly what Vargo said!::

  “Then maybe he was right.”

  But her mind whispered, How would you feel if it were Tess in danger, or Sedge?

  That didn’t make dosing Peabody a good idea. Instead she said, “You’re his anchor, Alsius. In mind as well as body. He needs you here, unaffected. What would happen to him if you went off into your own dreams?”

  ::… You’re right, though may the Lumen burn you for it.::

  No further arguments. Ren went to the place he’d indicated, took a deep breath, and began walking the spiral.

  Nothing happened.

  “Is it still active?”

  ::Yes. Aža must not be enough. Curse it! Where’s that damned Fienola woman?::

  Before Ren could reply, the world around her began to change.

  Beneath her feet, the floor rippled like the surface of a pond. In that surface she saw a reflection—but of course when she looked up, she saw nothing but the arched stone of the temple. It was as if the floor were reflecting something much farther away, in both distance and time.