1 #3
Myria found her hands gripping her skirts, and forced them loose again. Still, those wolf-gray eyes flashed in her memory—those eyes that seemed to threaten all the world, then smile at her.
“What do you suppose he wants? You knew him in the old days.”
“Worked with him, yes. Knew him?” She shook her head. “All I know is, that man’s plans come with a price.”
“Then we could run.”
Hadria gave a low laugh. “Don’t be a splitwit. We’d have to go all the way to Iseus to get away from him. You’d have to leave everything.”
“And why not?” Lysander said softly. “I’d go. However soon. However far. Besides . . .” A smile warmed his sincerity. “I’ve heard favorable reports of Iseus. White sands, sapphire bays—”
That’s enough of that.
Myria jerked the last two dials, and the curse dissolved. Hadria and Lysander parted with unobtrusive speed.
“All clear,” she said, ushering them in.
The stacks of treasures made up three rough alleys in the vault. Myria was barely halfway down the first when she saw it.
The box from their master’s drawing sat on a lower shelf amid a scatter of gems. It was duller than she’d expected—just etched brass and tarnished cogs, about a foot across.
Its value evidently lay within. Still, no use in speculating why Vixius wanted it.
That man did what he did, and never explained.
She whistled the others over and stood back. Lysander ran a wash of arcana through the artifact.
“Unprotected. Seems stable,” he said, dropping to a crouch. Delicate as a butterfly, he set his fingertips to the surface. Nothing. Hadria raised an eyebrow.
“Well, that was suspiciously easy,” she said. “Lysander, check it for curses, then start picking out the best goods. Myria . . . fetch him.”
Lightning flashed through her from fingertip to toe. It was time. She turned and started for the roof.
Thoughts batted in Myria’s head like trapped moths as the ascension column bore her upward. Hadria, leaving the crew? Her mind recoiled from the thought. She’d known no other guide—not since she’d woken on a cold steel slab twelve years ago, her powers gone and all her life before wiped clean away.
Later, she told herself, shuttering her memory. She couldn’t afford to be distracted when she met her master.
She stepped out to find Cassia lounging by the chimneys, swapping a long Isran cigarette with Leo.
The silverwalker caroled away a comic opera as he watched the skies.
Not quite the dutiful sentry, but he had the kind of velvet voice a lady couldn’t help but listen to.
Just as well, since he’d stolen more with words than most of the grayside had managed with all their knives together.
Myria clicked her fingers, and her friends scrambled to their feet.
“We’ve found it,” she said.
Leo paled and drew his quill. Cassia only extinguished the cigarette, then made a few quick, fluid gestures in midair. Translucent shapes and colors flowed from her fingertips, as though she were spinning silk with her touch alone. They flooded together into the shimmering phantasm of a woman.
Cassia stepped forward, sliding her arms into the arms of the illusion, slipping her body into its form. Moments later, a glamorous redhead stood there, clad in a plum silk evening gown that hugged every curve. She raised an eyebrow with her counterfeit face.
“Passable?”
“Very nice,” said Leo, eyeing up the buxom figure. Mercuria was a rare power, even on the grayside, and Cass spun it with an expert hand.
“You can smirk all you like. Boss ain’t seen my face, and with any luck, he’s never going to,” she muttered. Then, her wry expression fading, Cassia clasped them each by the elbows. “Good luck, mates.”
With a deep breath, Leo opened the gateway. Apprehension chased anticipation through Myria’s body. She drew herself up and stepped into another world.
The silver lining.
They sometimes spoke of the fabric of the world. If fabric it was, then Carintheum had been wearing it for over a thousand years. The weave had snagged and stretched across the centuries, and in time, the lining had begun to show.
A prudent soul, upon discovering tatters in the cloth of the universe, might’ve resolved not to touch them.
The graysiders of Carintheum were not prudent souls.
Some decades past, a handful of arcani had learned to detect the gaps, then to slip through them, then to press them together across the miles, folding the fabric in upon itself until they could step straight through it from one side of the city to the other.
Silverwalkers, they’d come to call themselves—a rare breed, born with a talent that’d since made them some of the most valuable thieves on the grayside.
They’d soon carved a crumbling little empire of their own within the lining, where the laws of nature often took a day off and the laws of man had never done a day’s work in their life. A haven for all the thieving crews of Carintheum to plot, fight and hide from the law.
Myria stepped from the gateway to the twilit strangeness of the silver lining. A muffling silence closed about her ears. The world turned slow and heavy.
No ornamental scatter of sparks marked their arrival this time; Leo dropped his gaze and moved aside at once. Small wonder. They stood at the summit of the watchtower, the home of the fifth lord of the grayside. Vixius.
She looked around the chamber. It was nothing but a round stone tower, as dim and indistinct as everything in the lining.
Five ancient Carinth numerals were carved above the window, the first three scored out by their successors.
IV stood untouched. Their master was, perhaps, sufficiently well versed in classical Xanthian tragedy to know the dangers of hubris.
Besides, if the stories of what Vixius had done during the crimson summer were true .
. . well, the fourth lord wasn’t coming back.
“We’re here, sir,” she called into the silence.
Something in her spirit moved like a tide pulled by the moon. She turned, ignoring the tremor in her nerves.
“So I see. Good evening, Myria,” said a voice from the dark, cool and cut-glass Carinth.
Vixius stepped into view, as quiet as smoke. He was a slender figure, sharp and elegant, dressed all in pristine black and white. He’d come alone, as usual; the average grayside bodyguard was more a danger to him than the prefecture ever had been.
The fifth lord’s gray eyes cut across them like an alchemist working on a corpse, incising, sifting and discarding. He tossed a thin dagger in his hand, letting it spin twice before he caught it by the blade. Up, down, up, down, just like every other time she’d ever seen him.
Then, the dagger paused, and Vixius smiled. It broke like a sunburst through the silver-black sharpness of his countenance, and nature bid her smile in return.
“Silverwalker,” he said, “prepare the way. We’ll follow.”
Leo stepped through the gateway without a word, and silence fell.
Not ready. The words crept into Myria’s head from nowhere. She hid a frown and shook them away.
Vixius strode to the window and beckoned for her to follow. She took a place beside him, and the ever-twilit world rolled out before her.
It was like looking out into oblivion. Fog swathed everything in choking layers.
No, fog came from everything, curling up from the ground, leaking from the walls and stirring in the shrouded sky.
Narrow buildings ran like rows of rotten teeth out to the vanishing point.
Oily green and brassy lights moved in the streets, the only signs of life amid the vast decay.
“You’ve found what I’m after?” asked Vixius. Myria tore her gaze from the unnatural sight and gave a quick smile.
“I’m fond of my limbs, sir. I’d not have called you, otherwise.”
“Now, now. You’ve been listening to rumors.”
She arched an eyebrow. Those rumors hadn’t started themselves. That man had buried a great many enemies. He’d even had the courtesy to kill some of them first. There was a reason he’d lived long enough to earn a dash of silver in his hair.
“It’s the one, sir,” she said. “Shall we?”
“A moment. I’d like a word concerning your future.”
Ah.
The puppeteer of her soul seized the strings and pulled. Vixius turned to her, still tossing his blade in silver wheels.
“There’s change afoot in the grayside, Myria,” he said, “and in Carintheum.”
“Change.” Her nerves cranked tight. “In the vein of the crimson summer, sir?”
Pantheon, please, not again. Every decade or so, the crews decided that anarchy was better than answering to a master, and turned the grayside red.
Too late, they remembered why they’d had a master in the first place.
Divided, they fell. Vixius himself had risen on the brink of that last bloody wave.
Thank mercy, he shook his head. “Favorable developments,” he said, “but suffice it to say, I’ll be glad of capable allies when the time comes.”
He can’t mean . . . She snatched the reins to her mind before it could take off at a gallop.
“I’ve no doubt your men will serve you well, sir,” she said. Vixius caught his spinning dagger with a ting of steel.
“Allies, Myria,” he repeated. “Those men play by the devil’s rules. They’re instruments, at best. Not the sort who’ll hold fast when it’s just the two of you against the world.”
He does mean . . .
“You must’ve speculated, ever since I asked you to lead the venture,” Vixius went on. “It was a test. A test you’ve passed. And now”—he rammed the blade into its sheath and turned to face her—“I’ve need of a left-hand woman. You.”
Gods below. Her head went light as aether.
“It’d be an honor, sir,” she said before her wits could take the first sally at the matter. “But . . . why?”
“I don’t ask why,” he said. “Not when I know who.”
He held her full in his gaze, now. Anticipation ratcheted along her nerves.
“Thank you, sir,” she managed to say. “I . . . only wonder . . . I’m deficient in certain fields.” She mimicked the flourish of an arcani casting magic.