The Mask of Mirrors, M. Carrick; [best books to read in your 20s .txt] 📗

arm-linked line to meet the oncoming thunder. Behind them, others were grabbing bottles, wagon whips, wheel spokes—any weapons that came to hand. Fucking idiots were going to get themselves killed.

::Vargo, this isn’t right. You’re under its influence, too. We both are. You have to get out of here before it’s too late.::

I know. But…

He glanced at the numinat again, radiating heated fury from every line. A driving need to fight it, to defeat it, had caught him in its grip. Knowing that it was working on him didn’t dilute its effect at all.

::Vargo!::

I can change this.

He wanted to change it. To prove that he could—that even an impossible numinat wasn’t beyond his skill. Shutting out the screaming in his head, Vargo dampened his cloth again and pulled out his chalk. Every lecture Alsius had given him about the dangers of freehanding numinata flew out of his head. Every memory of Alsius saying he could do better spurred Vargo on.

“I have my compass, my edge, my chalk, myself. I need nothing more to know the cosmos.”

Pin and string for his compass, the long side of his drafting journal for an edge, he got to work. Never mind making his alterations mimic the original inscriptor’s style; if Breccone Indestris had done this, it was on Mettore’s orders, and evidence would mean less than piss in the Dežera. Instead Vargo chalked bold lines through the existing numinat, altering it. Passionate sunwise Noctat transformed into a constellation of earthwise Tricat—harmony, community, family. Weren’t they all Nadežrans? Wasn’t this Veiled Waters, when fog and masks hid their differences and everyone came together to drink from the same wellspring? To counterbalance that on the opposite arm of the golden spiral, he encased the pentagram of Quinat in a hexagon of Sessat: power and domination channeled into fairness, friendship, and cooperation. What the Vigil claimed to represent, and fell obscenely short of.

Behind Vargo, the two sides crashed together, and the tension of the plaza broke into blood. But the mayhem was the barest whisper at the edges of his awareness. Stronger by far was the song of perfection that pulsed through every line he inscribed. It flooded into him; he bled into it. Peace, harmony, order, stability: ideals just out of reach, crumbling like chalk when he reached for them. Ideals he would always fall laughably short of, because of what he was: gutter scum. What he’d been, and would still be, if not for Alsius.

As the numinat changed under his hand, his fury redirected itself. Away from the asshole who’d scribed this thing, and toward his own inadequacy. He wanted to be better. That desire drove him. Moving closer and closer, seeking to connect to something bigger than he was and lose himself in it forever.

A sharp prick at the back of his neck broke him out of the trance. His vision danced, and when it cleared, he was staring at an altered numinat he barely recalled inscribing, his muscles and bones aching as though he’d taken a beating. And Alsius was screaming in his head.

::—you blasted idiot! Do you want to end up with your body fallen to dust and your spirit bound into the focus? What gave you the mud-brained notion to imbue a numinat?!::

“Is that what I did?”

::If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be alive for me to yell at you.::

Vargo tried to study the figure on the wall dispassionately, but it nearly dragged him back in; he had to avert his eyes. The lines pulsed with all the idealistic urges that had suffused him, radiating out into the plaza—where, against all logic and history, hawks and Vraszenians were clasping hands, talking softly, even treating injuries across the gulf that had divided them moments before.

Vargo’s knees gave out, and he sank to the ground, heedless of the muck.

“Are you sure?”

Alsius’s hesitation was too long to be comforting. ::It was a near thing. Now get out of here before someone notices you.::

With Alsius driving him, Vargo managed to stumble to his feet and escape down the Uča Obliok with nobody the wiser. The farther he fled from that pulsing center of peace, the clearer his thoughts became, and the quicker his heart beat. The second time his knees gave out, it was from fear instead of weakness. He caught himself before he took another bath in diseased dirt. “What did I just do?”

::That’s what I’ve been asking!::

But they both knew. And his close brush with self-annihilation didn’t need to be discussed. It was too real.

::No more numinatria today,:: Alsius said softly.

“Not for us, no.” Pulling himself upright again, Vargo continued on as though he weren’t trembling from exhaustion. “But let’s find Varuni and tell her to start diverting crowds to Dmariše Square.”

Sooner or later his improvised changes would break down; he hadn’t drawn them accurately enough to last. But until then, he might as well make use of his suicide attempt.

Seven Knots, Lower Bank: Cyprilun 34

The place Idusza led Grey to was near the center of Seven Knots, where the buildings compressed into a single tangled warren. Once they passed the sentry there, they entered a maze of narrow halls half blocked by worn crates and barrels and sackcloth, stairways going up and down again, and once even a window into a neighboring building that no longer gave access to the outside world.

I never would have found this on my own, Grey thought, wondering if he’d be able to find his way out again. He suspected Idusza was deliberately leading him by a long path.

He caught sight of a few faces, pressed like ghosts against cracks in the boards, warily observing their passing. The entire place reeked of bodies, cooked rice, and garlic—familiar scents. He and Kolya had lived in a tangle like this when they first came to Nadežra.

They’d been weaving their way for what felt like hours when he spied the first broadsheet pasted to a wall. Then another, and another—layers of the sedition the