The designs of the mask flickered, as if they’d caught the light for a moment. A breath later, the man’s eyes went dead. Not closed, not dazed. I am a son of Enefa; I know death when I see it.
Yet the busker got to his feet and looked around, pausing as his white-masked face oriented on the top of the Salon steps. I expected him to begin walking in that direction. Instead he charged toward the steps, running faster than any mortal should have been able, plowing down or flinging aside — far aside — anyone unfortunate enough to get in his way.
I also did not expect the cobblestones that edged the Salon steps to suddenly flare white, revealing themselves to be bricks of daystone that someone had painted gray to match the surrounding granite. Through this translucent layer of paint, I could see the darker, starker lines of an etched sigil, the characters on each stone together commanding immobility in the harshest gods’ pidgin and addressed to any living thing that tried to cross it. A shield, of sorts, and it should have workerelsigil,d. The Arameri on the steps had no fear of knives or arrows; their blood sigils could deflect such things easily. All they needed to fear were the mask-wielding assassins, whose strange magic could somehow circumvent their sigils. Keep them out of reach and the Arameri would be safe — so the scrivener corps had reasoned.
The busker staggered, then stopped as he reached the ring of stones. The mask swung from side to side, not in negation, and not with any movement that could be interpreted as human. I had seen gravel lizards do the same, swaying back and forth over a carcass.
Too late I remembered the simplistic literalness of scrivening magic. Any living thing, the stones commanded. But even if the busker’s heart still beat and his limbs still moved, that alone did not qualify as life. The mask had dimmed his soul to nothingness.
The busker stopped swaying, the rounded eyeholes fixed on a target. I followed its gaze and saw Shahar frozen at the top of the steps, her eyes wide and her expression still.
“Oh, demons,” I groaned, and ran for the steps as fast as I could.
The busker stepped closer to the sigil-stones.
“There!” cried Glee, pointing.
She could not have been talking to me. As the crowd’s cheers turned to screams and stamping became stampeding, Kitr appeared at the foot of the steps, just in front of the Arameri guard. A line of twelve glowing red knives appeared in the air before her, hovering and ready. I had seen her fling those knives through armies, leaving fallen mortals like scythed wheat. She could have done that here, risking the crowd to get her target, but like most of the godlings of the city, she would not. They had all taken an oath to respect mortal life. So she waited for the fleeing mortals to scatter more, giving her a clear shot.
I saw the danger before she did, for she had ignored the Arameri’s guards behind her. Faced with a strange godling and a mad mortal, they reacted to both. Half of them fired crossbows at the masked man; the other half fired at Kitr. This could not do her any lasting harm, but it did throw her off balance as her body jerked with the impact of the bolts. She recovered in an instant, shouting at them in fury — and as she did so, the masked man pushed past the barrier, as if the air had turned fleetingly to butter. Slowed, but not stopped.
I thought Kitr would miss her chance, distracted by the mortals. Instead she hissed, her form flickering for just an instant. In her place curled an enormous red-brown snake, its cobralike hood flared. Then she was a woman again, and the knives streaked at the man with the speed of spat poison, all twelve of them thudding into his body with such force that he should have been flung halfway to the city limits.
Instead he merely stopped for a moment, rocking back on his heels. That was the first evidence that the mask had its own protective magic. I saw a glimmer around the edges of his mask, against his skin, underneath. What was it doing? Strengthening his flesh, certainly, or Kitr’s knives would’ve torn it apart. Displacing the force of the blows. Before I could fathom it, the busker started forward again, running slower because of the knives in his thighs. But running.
And in that instant, a second masked man, this one bigger and heavier, raced out of the crowd and plowed into the guards from the side.
Two of them. Two of them.
Glee cursed. We were too far from the madness, going too slow as we fought our way through the panicked crowd. She grabbed my shoulder. “Get them to Sky!” she said, and flung me through the ether. Startled, I materialized atop the Salon steps, in front of an equally stunned cluster of Arameri and soon-to-be-Arameri eyes.
“Sieh,” said Shahar. She stared at me, oblivious to the chaos twenty steps away, and I knew in that instant that she still loved me.