Page 66 of The Shape of Monsters
But Peace—who must be eighteen or so, close to Shahd’s age, and that means she better not get too familiar with Iriset or she’ll end up dead—clears her throat and looks directly at Iriset.
Even knowing it’s common here, the eye contact makes her feel too exposed. It’s probably easier for Peace, though, only having one eye to focus on.
“Is Lyric Aharté well?” Peace asks softly.
Grimacing exactly as she wishes to, Iriset says, “The last I—the last Iriset saw Lyric, Lyric was recovering.”
“Is it true Iriset’s injury is because Iriset tore out an eye for husband? To keep Lyric alive?” And oh, how eager Peace sounds. Like she’s experiencing a head rush at the very idea.
“It wasn’t that romantic,” Iriset mutters. She tries to keep walking, but Peace grabs her sleeve, curling her fingers in the fabric almost desperately.
“Oh for—” Iriset pries Peace’s fingers away. “Gossip moves fast in the Moon-Eater’s city,” she says, disgruntled. The last thing she wants is the city turning this into a beloved story. “Show me to the crater.”
Peace tucks a smile away in the corner of her mouth and complies.
The sun makes Iriset’s remaining eye water, and she wishes for a sheer cloth mask to tug across her forehead and block the harshest rays. They walk slightly slower until she adjusts, though once they reach the rock garden where the crater is, there’s not even shade and Iriset gives in to shielding her eye with her hand.
There is a disconcerting amount of activity around the crater.
The last time Iriset saw it, there was only a hole in the ground and a small gate shrine with a handful of glass baubles hanging in it. Now there’s probably a quad of people gathered under a cloth awning that arches up across a small slice of the crater, angled perfectly to shade the crowd from the sun.
Someone grabs her. “There you are,” the Moon-Eater says as she stumbles into his side. He’s looking perfectly mirané today, except for the streaks of pink and white in his wavy black hair. “Here is the expert.”
Iriset frowns. Compared to everyone in the Apostate Age, Iriset knows nothing. She turns her frown to the crowd, doing her best to ignore all the eye contact. Sure, she likes to see the design structure of other people’s features, but she doesn’t need them to seehers. Ugh. The only person other than the Moon-Eater Iriset recognizes is Amado, the small king of Chimera fortress, whom she met at the mask-making party for the Night of Chimeras. She doesn’t smile at the small king. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
Most people in the crowd look at either the Moon-Eater or a fem-forward person with strange white skin and hair only slightly less starkly white. Her skin has a sheen to it in the sunlight that Iriset can’t quite parse, but her hair is clearly not hair. To a connoisseur, the luster and way it falls makes it obvious, and Iriset says, “That’s silk,” because while yes, being blunt has bitten her in the ass before, it never makes people doubt her expertise.
“Yes,” the woman says as if that’s not the point.
Amado Chimera smiles like someone who knows everything. “Helica Silkhair is among the crater city’s most renowned geo-designers. That is—”
“Oh!” Iriset can’t help interrupting in her delight.Geo-design.The design of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, maybe even waterworks and trees. It’s history in the Age of Aharté. “Does Helica Silkhair terraform?” she asks, but it’s not an Old Sarenpet word, so Iriset waves her hands in front of her to erase the question. “Understand relationship between natural, ah, earthworks architecture and human architecture? Groundwater prediction and, um, erosion patterns?”
The Moon-Eater laughs. “This red god said Iriset is special.”
Someone snorts, and Helica Silkhair eyes Iriset like she’s an interesting insect, but an insect nonetheless.
Iriset fights the urge to hide behind Shade. Not because she isn’t special, obviously she knows that. But because she’s not used to being so much in the light. Relied upon. They have a problem and they think she knows the answer.
“Iriset Sunderer,” Amado Chimera says. “Through an unprecedented sharing of resources across fortresses and design colleges in the aftermath of this emergency, experts on geo-design such as Helica Silkhair, as well as city infrastructure and combat tracing”—Amado gestures at two groups of people in each category—“have worked together to trace the tremors that rocked the crater city six nights ago on the Night of Chimeras. Through mapping the known locations of effect, and using something called a prediction diagram—”
“Reversal,” interrupts one of the women in the infrastructure team.
“—the prediction reversal diagram points here, to this crater where Iriset and Lyric Aharté landed after falling like a star from the sky.”
“This caused earthquakes?” Iriset murmurs, remembering the feel of the anchor she’d found when she visited immediately after waking. It hadn’t seemed like more than an anchor spiked hard into the earth.
“City leaders would like to contain it, or remove it, but didn’t want to touch anything without consulting Iriset and Lyric Aharté,” Amado says. “Though the Moon-Eater has made clear that Lyric remains in recovery and Iriset is the expert.”
Iriset nods vaguely, already focused on the problem as she pushes past the crowd. There’s a thick-stepped ladder lying down the slope of the crater, built up now with some clay and even a rope rail tied to spikes at waist level. But Iriset doesn’t grip it, dashing down the ladder to the bottom.
The crater’s valley is more disturbed than before, with two thin cracks crossing each other in—yes, Iriset glances at the sun. It’s harder without the vertex moon as a reference, but she thinks she can tell from the position of the sun the exact cardinal directions, and the cracks point in all four. But not… exactly.
Iriset moves around the central anchor, studying it. She takes off her thin jacket, baring her arms, and toes off her sandals. With one of the laces, she pulls her hair off her neck. One crack is nearly vertical, north to south but both ends angle a little west. The horizontal crack generally points east and west but bends gently southeast and southwest like it’s the wings of a bird. As if the cracks aren’t crossing in the exact center of an array but…
Iriset crouches, putting her hand over the center. It’s tingling with ecstatic force, but she can also feel the other three, the spiral of flow, the sinking falling, and that effervescent lift of rising force. They work together in a cycle like breathing. From the anchor outward. Spreading evenly.
Unlike before, when it felt mostly driving down to anchor whatever this landing was deep into the world, now it is expanding. It’s not an anchor. It’s a knot.
