Miresse had not changed. The town was older and slower than Psikamit, scarcely a tenth the size, and it still possessed the same cold dustiness that Karys remembered—a taste in the air, a dry feeling on the back of the tongue, fine sand in the wind.
Eleven years ago, she had boarded a freight train bound for Psikamit, vowing never to return to this place. Yet, here she was. Right back where she had started.
They arrived at the Silkess station in the chill early morning. Attendants ushered passengers back out the spider’s mouth and through the building; Karys followed the thin stream of people past the waiting area. New Favour’s office stood empty and dark beside the ticket desk. No Haven in Miresse; there wasn’t sufficient demand for deathspeakers in eastern Mercia, and so saints only came to the town when they were specifically commissioned. They had less influence here, less control. That knowledge should have been a comfort, but Karys didn’t feel any safer.
No one is going to recognise you, idiot, she thought, hunching her shoulders. It’s been too long.
Winola seemed in a comparatively good mood; she had purchased a map of the town from a vendor at the station. She studied it as she walked, unaware of Karys’ discomfort.
“Did you know that there is a ruined Sanctum in the area?” she asked. “The heralds in this region were fairly obscure; I’ve never heard of ‘Swask’ before, but apparently he ruled a stretch of the Korasis River between the Lezas Basin in Varesli and the Mercian coast. According to this, his common aspect had twelve phalluses, which honestly seems a little excessive to me—but it’s interesting that the less powerful Bhatuma often tended toward greater personal ornamentation. Compensating, I suppose.”
Karys grunted.
“Twelve,” Winola repeated, smiling to herself. “It’s almost charming.”
A row of dusty awrigs waited in the yard outside the station. The low, dun-coloured hills stood still and blank in the early light, and patchy thorn trees grew crooked from the dry soil on either side. Miresse lay ahead; the town’s buildings gathered in an ugly sprawl around the river. Winola folded up her map, and they climbed into one of the vehicles. Karys spoke the name of Miresse’s better inn, and the awrig hummed forward over the dirt track.
Once they were moving, Winola raised one hand to the space just in front of her left eyebrow, and adjusted something small and invisible. Her guise unravelled with a disturbing sound, like a seamstress ripping a bolt of cloth. Her appearance spiralled, the real and unreal splitting into two distinct layers, and then she was herself again. She lowered her fingers from the rim of her glasses.
“Much better,” she said. “Wearing it for too long makes me itchy.”
“Ask if she made that guise herself,” said Ferain.
Karys folded her arms. “You’ll stand out in Miresse too, you know. Probably more than in Psikamit.”
“That’s fine.” Winola waved her map. “I’ll tell people that I’m sightseeing. A historical tour of the Mercian countryside.”
“Karys, ask her if she—”
Nuliere alive. “My reeker problem wants to know if you made the guise yourself.”
Winola blinked. “Oh. I, uh, yes. I did. Is he here now?”
“Unfortunately, yes. He never leaves.”
“Oh,” the scholar said again, clearly disconcerted. She shifted in her seat. “So, the whole time…?”
“Ever since he woke up.”
“That seems intrusive.”
“I’m still here,” said Ferain.
“He wants you to know that he’s still present.”
Winola regained her composure somewhat. “Of course, yes. My apologies. I don’t know why I never considered … but yes. How interesting. We should test your capabilities, work out the parameters of this situation. I’ll give that some thought. The last few days can’t have been easy for you either.” She dug into her bag, fishing out a tattered notebook from the side. “Perhaps we should start with some basic questions.”
By the time the awrig reached the centre of town, the scholar had filled several pages with cramped notes about Ferain’s experience of disembodiment, which Karys had to recount sentence by sentence. He also demonstrated his ability to move her shadow—causing the scholar to yelp in alarm—and laid out what he knew about the Split Lapse and proximal overlay.
“Tied to your shadow,” said Winola, head down and scribbling furiously. “Might flexibly align to the size of the dimension generated by the Lapse; we’ll need to test that. Seems like a projection, rather than a purely physical manifestation, so not genuine respiration but the expectation of it—an active mind warping reality to fill in the accustomed absences, while the body remains inert and bound. Oh, I didn’t think of that.”
“Is ‘that’ bad news?” asked Karys.
Winola shook her head, still writing. “Matters of perception can be radically reorganised.”
Karys privately prided herself on her hard-won grasp of workings theory—but even she had no idea what that statement meant in context.
“Okay,” she said.
The awrig grumbled to a stop on the commons outside the Orago Inn. The sight of the familiar double-storey building jarred Karys more than she had expected; it felt as though she had been doused in cold, dark water, tides pulling at her legs, dragging her into the past. She clenched her jaw. Winola stuck her notebook back into her bag, and opened the awrig door.
“There’s an errand I need to run,” said Karys.
Winola paused, and cocked her head to one side. “Alone?”
“It shouldn’t take too long.” Karys picked up her box of desserts and held them out to the scholar. “Can you keep this safe for me? I’ll be back in an hour.”
The awrig carried her over the dried-up canals of the town and down to the western side of Miresse. She got off the vehicle past the old tanneries, and went on foot from there. Seven o’clock in the morning, and the streets were quiet; only a handful of people wandered the grey-paved roads. A hollow-cheeked boy rattled his begging bowl from the corner. A cool day to mark the change of season—the sky had clouded over, and the breeze rippled clothing strung from lines stretched between apartment buildings.
Eleven years. Eleven years, and it all looked the same. Karys didn’t know what else she had expected. While Winola had been chattering away about workings in the awrig, it had been easier to ignore the town, but now it all felt much closer. Unsettling. Every road, every worn-out building and tight alleyway, she knew them all; she could have traversed Miresse in her sleep. Even people’s voices, the passing strains of their clipped rural accents, seemed strange, seemed to flatten and compress the world around her.
“Why don’t you like it here?” asked Ferain.
Karys flinched, his voice yanking her back to the present. Her shadow matched her movements with mirror precision, falling in perfect step at her feet. She felt the uncanny weight of Ferain’s focussed attention. While not unfriendly, it seemed uncomfortably acute.
“Ever since we left the Silkess, you’ve been nervous and angry,” he said. “Why?”
“None of your concern,” she muttered.
“I thought you might be in a bad mood because of something I did, but that’s not it.”
Karys turned up her collar against the wind.
“Do I need to be worried?”
“You need,” she said under her breath, “to talk less.”
Her shadow made an exasperated sound.
On first inspection, Temius Rasko’s house was unremarkable. The drab little building stood apart from its neighbours; its garden cleared of everything but nettle and weeds. Most of the windows had been boarded over; if Karys had not known better, she might have assumed the place abandoned. Hundreds of lumpen wasp nests covered the underside of the roof’s eaves, and a few insects flew lazy circuits around the property. When she approached the front gate, more crawled out of their holes, their jet-black bodies glinting in the sun.
There’s no reason anyone would remember me, thought Karys. She pushed back her shoulders, and stood straighter. Miresse might have remained the same, but she had not. Besides, she had never even talked to Rasko. She rang the bell hanging from the gate post, and the wasps buzzed louder.
“Do you want to tell me what we’re doing here?” asked Ferain.
The door of the house opened halfway, and a thickset, shaven man stared out at her across the porch.
“I want to talk to Rasko,” called Karys. “He should be expecting me.”
The man looked her up and down, and then snapped his fingers. In perfect unison, the insects ceased their patrol and returned to their nests. He jerked his head toward the door.
“Oh good,” said Ferain. “We’re going inside the wasp house. Excellent.”
The interior of the building was less dilapidated, although an unpleasant musty smell hung in the air, and the rooms were dark and stuffy. Like Marishka, Rasko did not flaunt his power with ostentatious displays of wealth. There was no need; everyone in Miresse knew who the fixer was. When Karys walked into his parlour, he was seated with his shoes propped up on his desk, smoking osk. Somewhere in his late forties, his hair was thinning at the temples and his oiled reddish beard was starting to grey. He smiled like a shark—razor-thin lips peeling back from bright white teeth—and snuffed out his reed.
“Now, who might you be?” he asked.
“Temius Rasko?”
Rasko waved away his doorman, swung his feet down to the floor, and stood up. “You’ve found me. What can I do for you, cas…?”
She held out her hand to shake. “Dasin. Marishka sent me.”
“Ah, yes. Cas Dasin.” Rasko took her hand and brought it to his mouth. Karys tensed. He kissed her knuckles, lips lingering on her skin, breath too warm. “A pleasure. I don’t believe I’ve seen you around these parts before.”
There was something slick about his voice: spilled oil on ice. Karys refused to pull her hand back; she waited for him to let go, and kept her expression blank.
“Did you receive the Second Mayor’s message?” she asked.
“I might have.”
“I have no papers, and I need to cross the border. I believe you could help me.”
“Not one for idle conversation, are you? But I appreciate that.” He gestured to the frayed divan opposite his desk, and returned to his own chair. Karys cautiously lowered herself down. The window behind Rasko stood ajar; through it, she could hear the coarse droning of the wasps outside. “Crossing the border, hmm? Dangerous business. Expensive. So, are you running to Varesli, or away from home?”
She shrugged evasively. “A little of both.”
“Oh, a woman of mystery. You would need a guide to get through the canyon.”
“Do you know one?”
“I might. But whether you could afford him is a different matter. What can you offer me, cas Dasin?”
“Did the Second Mayor not—”
“The old woman had a word, and I listened. But a man like me has to consider expenses.”
Marishka had warned her that Rasko’s help would come at a cost. Karys kept her voice light. “What are you looking for?”
Rasko smirked. “Four thousand cret?”
“More than I can afford.”
“I suspected as much.” His predatory sneer widened, and he rested his hands on the desk, interlacing each finger between the next. “Well, for the old woman’s sake, I suppose I could find a way to reduce the price, if you were willing to render certain … services.”
Karys gave the fixer a flat look. Out the corner of her eye, she saw her shadow darken on the divan beside her. Rasko laughed.
“A joke, cas,” he said. “Where is your sense of humour? There’s no need to look so worried—you aren’t young or pretty enough to be saleable.”
“Bastard,” muttered Ferain.
Karys smiled blandly, and held her gaze steady.
“Hilarious, casin,” she said. “Which services?”
A flicker of irritation crossed Rasko’s face. He had wanted to rattle her. The expression disappeared again.
“I’d have to think on it,” he said. “Tell me again, where in Varesli would you be headed?”
“Eludia.”
“Ah, the old capital. Very scenic.” He ran a hand over his beard, studying her more closely. “Yes, there might be something there. You’re no beauty, but you’ve got a certain vulnerability about your eyes. It’s hard to find people with that look in my line of business. Might be useful.”
“Then you’ll get me the guide?”
“I’ll think about it.” He rose once again, and snapped his fingers. A large yellow and black wasp flew into the room through the window. It landed on the desk, and rubbed its head with its forelegs. “But for now—a gift.”
Karys watched the wasp. From antennae to the folded tips of its wings, it was the length of her little finger.
“Come, you’re not afraid of a little sting, are you?” Rasko rotated his wrist, and the wasp obediently flew from the desk to perch on the back of his hand. “She’ll mark you, that’s all. It keeps the others from seeing you as a threat.”
Face smooth, Karys tugged the Veneer aside. The wasp glistened with Ephirite-derived workings, wrapped tight like wires through its body. The walls of the parlour twitched with the hidden movement of hundreds more of the creatures, muted lights shining through the plaster.
“I’d prefer to just keep my distance from her friends,” she said.
Rasko ambled over to the divan, self-satisfied and smiling. Karys kept her nerve as he sat down beside her, draping his left arm over the backrest, supporting the wasp on his right hand. She knew he wanted to fluster her. When he leaned in closer, reaching out to nudge the wasp onto the collar of her shirt, she could not quite stop herself from pulling away. Rasko tsked.
“You don’t have to do this, Karys,” said Ferain. “Walk out of here now; we’ll find another way into Varesli.”
Rasko smelled like osk smoke and unwashed skin. When he moved his hand again to place the wasp on her shoulder, Karys held herself still.
“A gesture of trust, cas,” he said, warm and conspiratorial. “It’s harmless, I promise. There we go.”
The wasp climbed up the side of her neck, little legs scratchy on her skin. Karys swallowed. It took all of her self-control not to swat the fat-bellied creature off her throat as it crawled up to the triangle of skin between her left ear and her jaw. The feathery touch of the insect’s wings felt hideously intimate.
Fifteen thousand cret, she thought. Fifteen thousand cret, fifteen thousand cret—
Rasko snapped his fingers again.
The pain was immediate and fierce, like a molten splinter driven into her jaw. Karys swore and reached up to crush the wasp, but Rasko caught her arm and forced it back down. After another agonising second, the insect withdrew its stinger. In a whirr of wings, it took off and disappeared back out the window. Karys breathed hard, her head spinning from the pain.
“Very good,” said Rasko, releasing her arm. “I think I could grow to like you, cas. Say thank you for the gift.”
Karys gritted her teeth. The bright stab of agony was already gone, replaced by a blunt coursing ache. She tentatively pressed her fingertips to the side of her jaw, but the skin remained smooth—no heat, no swelling.
“Thanks,” she muttered.
It was a relief to leave the house. The morning remained cool, and the air tasted clean after the closeness of Rasko’s parlour. Karys walked with her hands buried in her pockets, trudging back up the hill to the shuttered tanneries. More people were about, warehouse workers in stained overalls, old men talking on the street corners. None of them spared her a second glance.
Ferain was silent for a long time, her shadow slinking along the ground behind her.
“Sadistic pervert,” he muttered at last.
Karys smiled, humourless.
“Could have been worse,” she said.
A long pause. The cold wind bit through her clothing, whistling down the street and drawing up small whirls of grey dust. Loose window shutters rattled in their frames.
“I think,” Ferain said, his voice unusually gruff, “that we might have lived very different lives.”
Karys almost laughed.
“Yes,” she said. “Probably.”
She walked back to the inn instead of finding an awrig. By the time she reached the Orago, the clouds had darkened overhead, spitting thin rain on the bare clay brick buildings and the gravel roads. The inn’s door stood open under the faded brown and yellow awnings. A few feet before the entrance, Karys slowed. Then she shook her head, and walked inside.
A few people sat at the bar, but the inn appeared largely empty. The entrance room smelled strongly of lavender soap and lye, and a large collection of framed artworks and posters covered the walls—yellowed gazettes, murky paintings of dour men, a handful of landscapes. During the occupation, the northern wing of the building had burned down, later to be rebuilt, and the ceiling beams still bore black marks from that fire. Karys talked to the owner behind the bar, and he directed her to a room on the second floor.
Winola was sitting at the dressing table when Karys walked in, stationery neatly arrayed across the surface in front of her. The room contained two beds, a pea-green armchair squashed into the corner, and a moth-eaten tapestry on the wall. The scholar brightened at the sight of Karys.
“You’re back,” she said. “I was just tidying up my notes. Have you finished your errand?”
Karys nodded. “Any trouble here?”
“No, not at all. Everyone has been very friendly.” Winola turned over a page in her notebook. “If you wouldn’t mind, I have a few more questions for Ferain, and then one or two experiments I’d like to try.”
Karys dropped onto the armchair in the corner. “Go ahead.”
The scholar’s questions were varied and specific. Some seemed arbitrary to Karys: whether Ferain had consumed any food in the hours preceding the binding, exposure to certain metals and substances in the days before that, whether he wrote with his left or right hand. Others seemed more obviously pertinent: whether he possessed any body modifications that could interfere with the functioning of the Split Lapse, whether he could describe objects outside of Karys’ field of vision, whether altering the shape of her shadow caused him discomfort. The last point seemed to particularly interest Winola, and she rephrased the question in several different ways—was it more difficult to mimic Karys’ movements or produce his own, was the sensation of movement heavy or light, did he experience temperature? Could he discern texture through contact? Was he tired, was he hungry? What felt good, what felt bad? What hurt?
“He says he’s fine,” said Karys, after what felt like the hundredth question on the same theme. “It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t feel like anything.”
Winola pursed her lips.
“What?” said Karys.
“Hm. Just a suspicion.” She wrote something down. “Right, circling back around to your answer on temperature, is the ‘cold’ you experience a persistent source of irritation?”
Ferain sighed. “I wish I could just talk to her.”
“He says he wishes he could talk to you.”
Winola glanced up, and her eyebrows drew together. Then she returned to her notes.
“Interesting,” she said.
After that, she moved on to a series of small experiments, making Ferain distort his shape in various ways, asking him to spread or shrink. He proved unnaturally flexible; there didn’t seem to be any limits on his ability to manipulate his form provided a small band of shadow still tied him to Karys’ body. He could even cast himself upright, appearing as a murky darkness in the middle of the room, a translucent black silhouette cut into the world. Winola tentatively reached through him. Meeting no resistance, her fingers emerged unmarked out the other side of his body.
“Doesn’t hurt,” said Ferain, pre-empting the inevitable question.
Arms folded, Karys studied her upright shadow, feeling disturbed but intrigued. A small, childish part of her wanted to try sticking her hand through him too. She looked out the window instead. At any rate, they would have to take a break soon—Worked Dispatch opened at noon. Ferain had dictated his letter to the Foreign Ministry aboard the Silkess last night, recounting events calmly, as though they had happened to somebody else. He had not mentioned Karys or the Split Lapse, or his own wound.
Winola started on another test, crossing the room and opening the door to the long empty hallway outside. She told Ferain to stretch to the far wall of the passage.
It was probably still a terrible idea, the letter. Karys rested her chin on her hand, gazing down at the street outside. Hard to know what Ferain was really thinking. For all that he talked, for all his surface of candour and ease, she couldn’t shake the sense that he was being … careful. He had a kind of self-possession or control that she was unable to penetrate, a quiet, cunning agility that became perceptible only in the moments when he seemed closest to relaxing his guard. It didn’t strike her as malicious; she doubted that he meant her harm, or wanted to start a war between Mercia and Varesli, but—
A hard ache blossomed in her chest, and Karys made a strangled sound. Her ribs seemed to compress around her lungs; she could not breathe.
“Ferain,” she gasped.
In an instant, he snapped back to her side. The pain diminished.
“That hurt you?” he asked.
She bent forward in the chair, nodding. Her pulse beat fast. “You?”
“Nothing.”
“Of course not.”
“Sorry,” said Winola. She hastily shut the door. “Sorry, I had no idea—”
Karys waved off the scholar’s concern.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Just caught me by surprise.”
Winola looked unconvinced and uneasy. “Are you sure? You’ve gone pale.”
Karys straightened, pushing her hair back from her face. “Yes, I’m fine. Could we take a break, though? I need to go to Worked Dispatch.”
Winola stayed behind to collate her new notes, and Karys headed downstairs alone. More people had gathered at the bar since she had arrived—old men and women with weary expressions, most likely clerks from the magistrate’s office down the road. Karys wound through their midst to reach the door. As she passed one of the tables, a curly-haired man in his early fifties frowned at the sight of her, then leaned over and said something to his associates.
I don’t need any more trouble, thought Karys, and walked faster.
The Miresse branch of Worked Dispatch stood two blocks away from the Orago. Unlike most of the buildings in the town, it was not constructed from red brick, but rather a series of uneven mirror plates—it resembled an enormous lump of melted iron pocked with abscesses and cavities. The front door was uncomfortably low; although Karys was not especially tall, she still had to duck to pass through it.
Low-grade green etherbulbs illuminated the interior, casting garish light across the central island of cubicles. The walls and ceiling puckered around small irregular channels recessed into their metallic surface, tiny windows surrounded by tracts of glittering crushed ice. As with other branches Karys had visited, the space inside Worked Dispatch had a curiously underwater quality—its colours and lights seemed to diffuse and ripple, and sounds moved strangely between the walls. The private mail service had been founded over a hundred years ago, when a Vareslian herald had gifted one of her Favoured families a working that could be used to pass correspondence instantly over great distances. It only functioned while the sun was at its meridian, and the original family closely guarded the secrets of its operation, enabling them to charge exorbitant fees for anyone wishing to use the service. During the Vareslian occupation, Dispatches had opened in most of Mercia’s larger towns, and continued to run after the Slaughter and subsequent signing of the Sovereignty Agreement.
There were a few other people in the room, sending or collecting their mail, but no one spared Karys any attention. Not that New Favour should know I’m in Miresse, anyway. She scanned the strangers’ faces, peering through the Veneer for any sign of Ephirite-derived workings. Nothing.
“I’m watching your back,” said Ferain.
Karys scoffed quietly, and walked over to one of the open cubicles. Although she had received mail via Dispatch before, she had never sent any. A faded board over the cubicle’s entrance listed the price of transmission—ten cret per envelope. Easily enough money for a fortnight of meals. She stepped inside.
The orchid stood on the plinth against the back wall, growing from a thin bed of dark soil inside the reliquary. Its petals held a healthy, waxy shine; dark purple at their edges, snow white within. Karys counted out her cret and fed the money into the collection box beside the entrance. Then she took Ferain’s letter out of her pocket, and wavered for a moment, fingering the bent corner of the envelope.
“I know you’re worried…” began Ferain.
Karys dropped the letter into the tray underneath the reliquary, and pushed the drawer closed. “Do you want me to do this or not?”
“Trying to be reassuring, that’s all.”
She placed her left thumb on the tongue-like protuberance of the orchid’s central petal. The plant warmed slightly, and then the outer sepals folded inward and kissed the skin above her nail. A faint click sounded from within the closed drawer. The letter had been accepted by the working.
“Done,” she muttered.
Ferain gave a low sigh, hardly audible, and then made a small, self-deprecating sound of amusement.
“Sorry,” he said. “That was … it was weighing on me. Thank you.”
His gratitude felt oppressively sincere. Karys withdrew her thumb from the orchid, and rubbed her hand against the fabric of her trousers, skin prickling.
“I said I’d do it,” she muttered.
With a little pop, the drawer below the reliquary slid open again. Inside the tray lay a new envelope.
Karys frowned. She picked up the letter. The outside was blank and smooth, no indicator of who the sender might be. Cheap, thin paper. In the past, when New Favour had tried to recruit her to the Psikamit Haven, their correspondence had always came stamped with an official seal—but this envelope only bore a circle of standard blue Dispatch wax. Marishka? The Second Mayor shouldn’t have any reason to contact her now, not unless something had gone wrong. Karys turned the envelope over again. There was no danger; Dispatch’s channels would accept nothing but unworked ink, paper, and wax.
She broke the seal.
The letter inside was not from Marishka. It was dated five days ago, and contained no signature, greeting, or address.
Oboro is dead. His send-off is next Saturday.
“Karys?” said Ferain.
She stood in the sickly gleam of the green etherbulbs, frozen in place. It felt as though the floor had dropped out from beneath her.
Her brother was dead.