The medallion. Ren had kept her thoughts so firmly on the need to retrieve Tricat, she hadn’t let herself think about how that would link her to it again. Would she be forced to bear Tricat until the Rook was ready to destroy it? How long would that be? What would it do to her in the meanwhile—and to the Traementis?
Ren’s whisper came out dry and uncertain. “I am. I—I must be.”
Any good pattern-reader knew to move along before a client could spiral too deeply into their own thoughts. “The Fox for the reward you earn,” the szorsa said with an enigmatic chuckle. The card revealed for the Dvornik was The Face of Roses, beautiful overlapping petals and vivid green eyes. “If the poison is drawn out, the wound can heal.”
Her pleasant expression dropped, and her hands trembled. “You know what the poison is.”
The Mask of Worms. She’d seen that card in the Rook’s pattern, and its Face counterpart in Vargo’s. The corrupting power of Kaius Rex’s broken chain of office had woven itself throughout Nadežra—but there was a chance to cut it from her city’s flesh.
So far, the wheel layout had gone in alternating moods, the good cards preceding the bad. Next would be the Kiraly, and Ren wasn’t surprised when the szorsa said, “The Raccoon for the risk you take.”
Ren associated The Mask of Chaos with Mettore Indestor, the Caerulet who ought to have stood for law and justice, but instead sparked a riot on the Lower Bank. Ghiscolo now held his seat—and he’d used it to create the Ordo Apis, to target the Anduske, frame Vargo, and torture Grey. But that card, when in the “good” position in a nine-card spread, could also mean the necessity of stepping outside the system. Could that work here, or did it have to be interpreted according to its negative aspect?
The szorsa watched her with a knowing smile. “Try not to see too much for yourself. Only remember this: Not all may suffer the consequences they should. Sometimes the price for justice would be too high.”
Only the central card remained. Ižranyi, Ažerais’s youngest child, born without a twin. Paradoxically, it was Orin and Orasz: the twin moons sometimes said to be Ažerais’s lovers, from whom she bore all her children. The card of duality.
“The Dreamweaver for the hub on which all else turns,” the szorsa murmured. “You sit before me with a Seterin face and a Vraszenian voice. But you are in Ažerais’s Dream: Which of you can help your lost friend?”
For all that Tanaquis and Vargo called this the realm of mind, to Ren it was a profoundly Vraszenian place. It would not be Alta Renata who rescued Vargo, but Arenza Lenskaya.
She half expected to change on the spot. Her clothing remained Seterin, though, and her face felt no different. The szorsa didn’t seem to be waiting for any shift; she swept up her cards and returned them to her deck, whispering the prayer of thanks.
Ren put two more coins in the bowl, one for the Face, one for the Mask. “Thank you—I know your name not.”
The woman’s hands tightened around her deck. Not looking up, she said, “I am called Zevriz.”
It hit like a slap. Zevriz: the non-name given to those who were completely outcast, cut off forever from Vraszenian society. They weren’t even supposed to receive food or drink from anyone. Remembering her offerings, Ren glanced at the bowl… and found it empty.
What did you do, to be cursed like this? But she couldn’t voice that question. Instead she touched her heart and said, “I thank you. And…” What could she say to someone condemned to namelessness? “May you find peace.”
The szorsa made no reply. Ren looked around, thinking of where she had dropped the medallion. Was that where she would find Vargo? A leap of faith: Maybe this was it. Upward, through the stone—
And the dream allowed her to leap.
The Great Amphitheatre, Ažerais’s Dream
Chills wracked Vargo, an endless shiver he couldn’t control. Shit fucking pisspot hell. Last time he’d taken ash, it plunged him into a plague street, leaving him swimming in dead and dying bodies leaking disease from every orifice. Like the house he’d been rescued from as a child, when yet another pestilence swept the Lower Bank. Vargo would have happily dived into the West Channel to get clean.
This time, the ash didn’t fuck around. Vargo was sick. And that wasn’t even the worst of his problems.
“Look—” He choked on the word, pressing fingers against the swelling nodes on either side of his neck as though that would relieve the pain. He imagined them popping, sending pus oozing down his throat. Another shiver coursed through him.
“Look,” he tried again. “This is pointless. I’m not moving, and you’re not getting in, so you might as well give up and go terrorize someone else.”
The zlyzen circling the sloppy protective circle around him hissed, black tongues curling over serrated teeth and flicking against the invisible barrier of the numinat. Vargo shrank into an even tighter ball and wished for a red thread. Or even red chalk. The zlyzen were held back for now, but the hasty circle and overlapped triangles forming Sessat were too crude to last long, and he’d had to use Zavn for a focus because his bag had swallowed all of the more relevant chops.
“I’m not even sure you’re real.” He was sure. As real as the illness eating away at the edges of his composure. Ash made it real.
Just give them the fucking pendant. Its weight was heavy in his pocket. He curled his fist around it, sure beyond rationality that was what the zlyzen wanted. Unsure what they would do once they got it.
But he wasn’t giving up yet. It would be pointless to go through all this nonsense and die without succeeding. His circle was shoddy, but it would hold a little while longer. Long enough for him to come up with a plan for how to get past the zlyzen to the foot of the path—if the sickness didn’t kill him first.
The glowing fog around the wellspring swirled. Fucking Mettore Indestor, trying to destroy that thing. If he hadn’t done that, Vargo never would have gotten shredded by the zlyzen, and Ren wouldn’t have dropped the—
He mumbled a curse as the fog vomited out a new figure. “Great, another fucking nightmare.”
But his vision of Ren wasn’t some horror-twisted parody. She was herself—well, her fake Seterin self—and she recoiled at the sight of the zlyzen, who turned to face her in a shuddering wave.
Shit. She was real.
Vargo was on his feet before he knew it. Standing made his head spin and his stomach roil, but he managed to rasp, “Get out. I’ll throw you the pendant and then try to draw them off.” He was in no shape for a chase, but he might buy her a little time.
“And get torn to pieces?” Ren edged away from the prowling zlyzen, but her gaze was on him, and incredulous. “No. One friend already I have lost to these monsters. I will not lose another.”
Friend. The word made his head swim and his body sway, closer to the edge of his protecting circle. The nearest creatures crouched, their bodies low and backward-bent limbs bunching like cats preparing to pounce.
She already blamed herself for Leato’s death. Vargo was still hoping not to add to that weight, but—“I think getting the pendant out of here is a little more important, don’t you?”
“No.”
His question had been rhetorical. Her answer wasn’t. Ren had told him many truths these past few weeks, some unpleasant, some outrageous… but none as honest as that.
She stared at him across the ravenous sea of zlyzen, and there was no uncertainty in her. She’d risked entering the dream to save him—not the medallion, but him.
He’d come all this way to right the balance between them, to make up for what he’d done. For sending her into the Night of Hells. Her coming to rescue him would only tip the scales back the other way.
In his mind, maybe. But not in hers. He saw that with the same preternatural clarity that told him the zlyzen wanted—
Vargo’s mouth went dry. In a dead whisper, he said, “Ren—run.”
She didn’t move. “What?”
“The zlyzen…” They still held him trapped, but
apart from the nearest few, their attention wasn’t on him.
It was on her.
The whisper rose to a strangled yell. “It’s you they want! They’ve been waiting—like they knew you’d come back!”
The zlyzen spread out, circling around Ren. Stalking, but not attacking, and she faced them with a courage he couldn’t begin to understand. Her evasions brought her drifting toward Vargo, near enough for him to hear the murmur on her lips: “Leap of faith.”
“What?”
Ren pivoted to face him. “Vargo. Do you trust me?”
Trust is the thread that binds us… and the rope that hangs us.
“Yes,” Vargo said.
She was close now. Ren held out her hand. He leapt from the safety of his numinat to take it—
And the dream changed around him.
The Labyrinth of Nadežra, Ažerais’s Dream
The walls of Kaius Rex’s amphitheatre crumbled to the ground, leaving fragments that reshaped themselves into pillars bearing sculpted, stylized heads. Not the painted clay shapes Ren was used to from her childhood, but beautiful works of art, some enameled, some gilt, others carved from rare and colorful woods. On one side of each pillar, jeweled eyes glimmered like stars; on the other side, the empty holes of a mask stared unblinking.
And across the ground spread a wide, inlaid path, the largest labyrinth Ren had ever seen.
She hadn’t been sure what change to expect. For months the zlyzen had been haunting her nightmares, and she’d done everything she could to keep them out. When Vargo said it was her the zlyzen wanted… it made sense.
But only in part. She still didn’t know why.
So she’d asked the dream to show her.
And it brought her here. Still atop the Point, but instead of the Tyrant’s monument, what surrounded them was the ancient temple he had destroyed, the labyrinth built to honor the Wellspring of Ažerais.
“What does it mean?” she whispered.
Vargo’s hand was still in hers, damp and trembling. He looked like absolute hell, his skin sallow, his eyes bloodshot, and his voice was a croak as he said, “Think it means I better wait to puke, or I might offend your goddess.”
The zlyzen were still there. Not pressing close, though, like they’d been in the amphitheatre; instead they paced beneath the colonnade, outside the open courtyard of the labyrinth’s path.
Some of the tension drained from her. But the distance still didn’t solve anything: She’d walked the labyrinth to enter the dream. To leave, she suspected she had to do as a worshipper would and cut straight across the sinuous lines, leaving any ill fortune behind her.
Walking straight into the ill fortune that waited outside, charred and wrong-jointed and baring its teeth.
“Can you tell what they want?” she murmured to him. It might be a bad idea to ask him to call on the medallion’s insights, but under the circumstances… “Beyond just ‘me,’ I mean.”
The shake of his head was as much a shiver as a denial. “Don’t even know how I know that. Pretty certain it’s the fever talking. But they haven’t tried to eat you.”
No, they hadn’t. Just like they hadn’t eaten Gammer Lindworm, until Ren turned them against her.
When Ondrakja was dying from Ren’s poison, she’d killed a zlyzen and drunk its blood. Ren hadn’t done anything like that… but she had, after a fashion, bound herself to them. To their knot. The blasphemous mimicry of friendship Gammer Lindworm had created, that Ren swore herself into so she could turn around and betray Ondrakja again.
She might have turned on her leader, but her link to the zlyzen remained, mottled purple like an old bruise. And she only had to look as far as Vargo to know that connections made in Ažerais’s Dream were as real as the cords of a knot bracelet.
Did it offend them, being tied to a traitor? Had they been haunting her dreams because they wanted her to sever the connection?
When she gave the thread an experimental tug, the dream lurched around them and the zlyzen yowled like they were in pain.
“My fever says they don’t want whatever that was.” Vargo rested his brow on her shoulder as though he couldn’t keep his head up any longer.
Ren drew her hand back from the line. I guess not. But what, then?
A Vraszenian curse ghosted from her lips. After she’d strengthened her connection to Vargo… she’d begun to hear his conversations with Alsius.
Her stomach turned over. No. She’d spent months doing everything she could to keep the zlyzen away. The last thing she wanted was to bind herself to them more firmly.
But… she had to find out what they wanted. They didn’t seem capable of speech or writing; on the other hand, Ren believed there was a feral intelligence there, something more than the mind of a simple beast. Gammer Lindworm had talked to them like she could understand them, and they her.
She was also insane.
Ren glanced over her shoulder and found not the wellspring, but a beautiful alabaster bowl, wider than her arms could span, filled with cool, clear water. She dipped the fingers of her free hand in it and touched them to her brow, praying briefly.
Then she laid those same fingers on the zlyzen thread and willed it to grow.
The Labyrinth of Nadežra, Ažerais’s Dream
Vargo shivered, fear pinning him like a bug on a card, as the thread leashing Ren to the zlyzen pulsed into visibility beneath her hand.
“Don’t,” he moaned, but too late. Ren stood motionless, her eyes unfocusing, the zlyzen going still.
He tore his gaze off her to look around. The numinat he’d inscribed was gone; instead there were knee-high markers of carved wood, polished and oiled to withstand the elements, springing up from moss-covered ground like pegs on a guziek board. All were topped with carvings: spiders and foxes, ghost owls and rats, horses and raccoons and dreamweaver birds.
Could he drag her out while the zlyzen were distracted? Whatever strength the ash had lent him was fading, his connection to Alsius so attenuated that he feared a strong word would snap it. And with the sickness swirling through him, pulsing from his head down to his gut and back up again…
“They want to communicate.”
Ren’s whisper was nearly inaudible. Vargo snatched at it like a lifeline. “What?” he croaked.
The thread had faded, but her hand still hovered in midair. Fear trembled at the edge of her mouth. “They want me… to see.”
Fuck this. Vargo reached for his bag—if he had to, he could re-create the numinat that brought them here—only to realize he’d dropped it at some point after inscribing his protective circle. It was as lost as they were.
Shoving his hand into his pocket, he was relieved to find the cause of all this trouble still there. He tightened his fist around the pendant—
—and felt a tug, an urge to follow that was too strong to be natural.
He’d let go of Ren. He caught her wrist just as something seized hold and dragged them out of the dream.
21
The Mask of Nothing
Temple of the Illius Praeteri, Old Island: Canilun 15
::Be careful what you say—we aren’t alone!::
Vargo staggered, Ren slamming into him hard enough they almost fell over. The numinat around them wasn’t the one he and Tanaquis had inscribed. It was a simple Tricat, only large enough to hold the two of them, and underneath Vargo’s feet was a plain focus of red glass.
A Praeteri numinat. And when he forced his gaze upward, he saw the worried countenance of Tanaquis… and the avid, delighted face of Diomen.
“It worked!” Tanaquis said, clapping her hands in relief and even cuffing Diomen on the shoulder. “Thank you, Pontifex.”
::She brought him here to help—what Ren did ruined the numinat you used before—but I’m worried about what Tanaquis may have told him—::
Vargo swayed. He hadn’t left the fever in the dream; he’d gone there in the flesh, and his flesh had carried that nightmare back with him. His head was spinning.
Anytime he looked at Ren, his skull felt like a bell someone had just rung, and the disorientation of it made him lurch out of the numinat.
Alsius was easier to look at, as he scuttled up and hid in Vargo’s coat. He only wanted Vargo to be safe. Diomen wanted to bring some grand plan to culmination. And Tanaquis… she wanted to reconcile the seemingly disparate parts of the cosmos, with a purity that was frankly daunting.
I know these things. How do I know these things? Like with the zlyzen. Vargo had just… looked. And known.
“Oh my. Did you repeat your zeal offering?” Tanaquis caught Vargo before he kissed the temple floor. His weight made them both stumble. “Come along. Let’s get you home so you can call rest.”
“This was foolish.” Diomen’s unblinking gaze was fixed on Ren. “Sister Renata, what could possibly possess you to take such a risk? People have been lost in the realm of mind before. I understand that a part of you was lost there, not long ago. Whatever you left behind at the time, it cannot be worth this peril.”
She offered him an unsteady curtsy. When she spoke, it was in Renata’s accent. “Pontifex, my apologies. I should not have attempted it.”
Diomen bent to break the lines of the numinat, then stepped forward, looming over Ren. “You have not answered my question. Show me what was worth the risk to yourself. Show me, so that I may make it clear how little it matters, compared to you.” His words sounded like a man in love; his tone held nothing that resembled affection.
Vargo wanted to cut out the man’s tongue so he could never speak again. With Alsius nestled in his coat like a second heart, the thirst for long-delayed vengeance was nearly overwhelming. Ghiscolo might have been behind the attempt to murder Alsius, but Diomen had crafted that curse. Now here was the man himself. One strike with a knife and half their revenge would be complete. Vargo and Ren could figure out something to tell Tanaquis—after Diomen was dead.
::Vargo, don’t. You’re sick, and you’re not thinking straight.::
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