The Blinding Knife

Chapter 32

Adrasteia was a slave, not a victim. She had crossed the Lily’s Stem, the bridge between the Chromeria and Big Jasper, before the sun had come up. Today was Sponsor Day. That meant no lectures, though the Blackguard would still practice. The Blackguard was too important to take days off. Every student was supposed to meet with her sponsor today, and slaves were no different from anyone else in this.

The difference was that Adrasteia’s sponsor never met with her. Instead, she gave Teia secret little jobs to do on Sponsor Day. Lady Lucretia Verangheti was not an easy mistress.

The vendors in the market were setting up their tents and stalls, laying out carpets, prodding their burros to try to get loads of produce or fish into position. There was a constant stream of people, but with the dawn it would become a flood as house slaves and wives attended to the daily shopping to feed their households. Adrasteia slipped through the mass of people as if she had somewhere to be. She kicked loose one of the laces of her boots and stopped by a wall, knelt on one knee, and pulled her skirt up enough to tie the lace.

She pulled the package out from its space between two bricks, slipped it into her boot, and went on her way. She took a few twisting alleys to make sure she hadn’t been followed-not that she’d ever been followed, but it was part of her orders-and finally found a place between two taller buildings. She pulled the package from her boot, then unrolled the letter.

Lady Verangheti rarely wrote words. She didn’t want to leave her own handwriting to tie her to the crimes she made Adrasteia commit, and she didn’t like trusting slaves or scribes with any more than she had to.

It didn’t matter. Adrasteia knew what was expected.

There was an uncannily accurate drawing of a man-Lady Verangheti could have been quite an artist if she hadn’t thought it beneath her. The next page of impossibly thin rice paper had a drawing of a snuff box, inlaid with a family crest: Herons Rising over a Crescent Moon.

From doing this before, Teia knew she was supposed to steal the snuff box, before tomorrow morning.

Adrasteia was a slave, not a fool: she knew that half the time, the victims were men or women working for Lucretia Verangheti. She’d been caught before, back home.

But she never knew which marks were real and which were decoys. It made sense, she supposed. Training worked best if failure was possible, but not catastrophic. If your trainee failed once and then was useless, you’d lose all the time you’d put into training her. If you weren’t willing for your trainee to ever fail, then you wouldn’t stretch her skills, you wouldn’t teach her where the line was.

But Teia didn’t know which was which. It didn’t matter that much, honestly. She couldn’t treat any of them like they were decoys. The difference being that if she were caught thieving from one of Lucretia’s men, she’d be thrashed, and if she were caught stealing from anyone else, she’d be thrown out of the Blackguard and the Chromeria and put in jail.

And of course, her father was counting on her. Things went well for the father of a slave doing excellent work. The other half of the statement didn’t even have to be breathed. A slave knew. Her father was a free man; she hadn’t lied to Kip about that part. But that didn’t mean that Lady Verangheti didn’t have power over what happened to him and his debts.

So Teia studied the portrait, memorizing the man’s features. Landed noble, most likely, from the clothes. Balding, short-cropped hair, wide nose, fat necklaces, wide cloak, sword belt, wide sleeves, leather gloves.

Dressed like that, Teia wouldn’t be surprised if he traveled with a bodyguard. She glanced down the alley both ways. Saw no one. She folded up the rice paper. The corners had red and yellow luxin under a thin layer of wax. She rubbed them together, scraping away the wax, and the paper ignited and burned up in a flash. Teia blew away the dust and headed back toward the market.

Like every other intersection in the city, each entrance to the market was straddled by arches that supported one of the city’s Thousand Stars. Though they were primarily intended to extend the power of drafters, in between the drafters’ uses each district could employ the great elevated mirrors for whatever they chose.

This market had rented out its stars to whatever merchant paid the most. So some focused beams of sunlight on particular shops. Others had colored filters fixed over them and focused on luxin jugglers who wandered the market, doing tricks and promoting one shop or another. Adrasteia made her way to the base of one of the stars, unlocked the tiny door with a key, closed and locked the door behind her, and crawled up the painfully narrow shaft. She had an arrangement with the tower monkeys, the slaves who kept this arch. As long as she didn’t get in their way or do any damage, they let her use one of the ventilation windows partway up as a lookout.

She opened her bag as she waited. Ordinarily, she hated her flat, lifeless hair, but this was why she kept it cut short. With a few clips, she was able to fasten a wig to her head with no problem: this time, long, wavy Atashian. Bound it with a red handkerchief. She fished about twenty bracelets out of the bag. Gaudy, flashy-anything to take attention off her face. She put rouge on her cheeks and lips, and folded her other handkerchiefs. She tucked her shawl into the bag, loosened some ties on her dress, and pulled it down-when she left the arch, she would put on tall shoes that would disguise her height, and the hemline needed to hang low enough to disguise the shoes. She pulled on a bodice and cinched it loosely around her ribs and stuffed the folded handkerchiefs into the bodice to give the appearance that her breasts were larger than mosquito bites.

Almost everything she hated about her body made her good at this work, she knew. It was doubtless part of why she had been chosen. Not too short, not too tall, skinny-that was easier to disguise with clothes than fat was-facial features pleasant, but not so pretty as to stand out from a line of other girls. As much as Kip had peeved her for saying it aloud, she could-and had-even disguised herself as a boy.

When she was finished today, though, she thought she probably looked like a woman. Lower-class Atashian wife, mid-twenties, tallish, bad taste, one tooth blackened with a mixture of ash and tallow. Which tasted awful.

The disguise wasn’t flawless, but Adrasteia wasn’t trying for perfection. The best thing about this disguise was that if she were pursued, she could take it all off in a couple of seconds.

Finished changing, she waited. Finding one nobleman among the human stockyards of Big Jasper would have been impossible on her own, much less stealing a particular item within that same day. But Adrasteia wasn’t required to find her target. He would come to her, and he would come marked.

She waited for an hour, dilating her eyes every minute. Her vision, as she’d told Kip, was alternately average, incredible, and terrible, with no logic behind which was which that she could divine. Superviolet didn’t register at all, her perception of violet, purple, and blue was merely average, green possibly average, yellow average, and then red indistinguishable from green. But then, below the spectrum that was visible to mundanes and many drafters, her sight sharpened. She couldn’t draft sub-red, but she could see it better than most sub-red drafters. Teia barely had to consciously dilate her eyes to see it; as long as she was relaxed it was as easy to her as going from focusing on something near to something far.

But when she did dilate her eyes, she saw something altogether different. Below sub-red, below sub-red as far as sub-red was below the visible spectrum, farther, was her color-if color it was. The books called it paryl. Paryl was pure and beautiful and mostly useless. It was so fine it couldn’t hold anything. So fine the few books she’d ever found that tried to make some translation of paryl called it spidersilk.

Except, of course, spiders could hang from their webs. Teia knew better than to try that with her color.

She was starting to get nervous about the mirror slaves’ shift changing. They didn’t mind her being in their tower, but they couldn’t get out while she was inside. And the moment when she left the tower in her disguise was the most vulnerable time of her day. She’d dilated her eyes all the way to paryl when something flickered at the corner of her vision.

A wisp of paryl smoke swirled and disappeared over the crowd, a hundred paces away.

No one noticed it, of course. No one could notice it. Teia hadn’t even met anyone who could see paryl, much less draft it.

It had to be her target. That was how her targets came marked: wisps of paryl in their hair or on top of their hat, burning like flameless fires. It made a perfect beacon, invisible to anyone but Teia. But she’d never seen her counterpart; the man or woman who marked Teia’s targets for her had always kept well out of sight.

Teia watched, looked everywhere. There! A beacon, passing below the foot of her tower. She couldn’t quite get the angle to see her target, but this was going to be easier than usual.

She slid down the ladder with her bag slung over her back. At the bottom, she pulled out the tall shoes, put them on, put her bag over one shoulder, and made sure that the straps hadn’t displaced her “breasts.” She breathed deeply. Confident but not aggressive, Teia. No, not even confident. Just busy. Enough sway to make it look like I have hips, but not so much that I look like a prostitute. Checking her wig one last time, she exhaled, opened the door, stepped out, and closed it unhurriedly behind her.

The foot of the arch here was right next to the side of a building, so she was able to step into a narrow side street quickly. She scanned the crowd once she got away from the arch, and relaxed her eyes briefly. It was as important for her to look for people who had noticed her stepping out of the arch as it was for her to find her target.

She found the beacon in seconds. But it wasn’t on her target. It was in a woman’s hair, and it was knotted, tight. Not loose and fiery.

Teia knew it was a bad decision, but she followed the woman immediately.

If what Teia had seen was this woman being marked, the other paryl drafter might be here.

But rather than pure excitement, Teia felt that she’d stepped into something dangerous. Whoever had marked this woman didn’t know that anyone else could see her. It was like stumbling across a secret message and opening it. Whoever had sent the message wouldn’t be pleased to have their correspondence read-even if the words meant nothing to Teia.

There were powerful undercurrents in this city, and a slave could get sucked down into the weakest of them. It was a rare morning on Big Jasper that the Cerulean Sea didn’t carry away at least one body.

Teia kept her eyes open, but didn’t draft. Any drafting would alert the other paryl to her presence. The woman was perhaps fifty paces ahead of her, and not in any particular hurry, browsing the stalls, moving deeper into the market. Her very lack of haste made it almost impossible to find the other drafter. If she were heading somewhere, the number of possible followers would be limited to the people who were heading in the same direction and at roughly the same speed. With the woman browsing and impossible to lose because she had a beacon on her head, the woman’s pursuer-her spy? — could focus on blending with the shifting crowd.

Trying not to be obvious, Teia circled to get a better look at the woman, who was now chatting with a textiles dealer, gesturing to a silk scarf checkered with bright greens and black. The woman was petite with a heart-shaped face, frizzy hair, well dressed in a pale blue dress, big earrings. Attractive, perhaps late thirties.

No hint why someone would be following her.

Nothing to do with me. I should get the hell out of here.

But Adrasteia couldn’t help herself. Her mother had always said that she was the kind of girl who needed to burn her hand on the stove twice before she was convinced it was hot.

A vendor selling clay jars glazed with garish snarling animals approached Teia. “Ah, the lady has excellent taste,” he said.

She smiled neutrally. “Just looking, thank you.”

“Any particular uses you’re looking-”

“I’ll let you know,” she said. She sort of surprised herself. She wouldn’t be so rude in real life, but wearing a disguise was strangely freeing.

“Very well,” the merchant said, giving her a false smile. He turned away and cursed her under his breath, none too quietly.

She had more important things to worry about, but it made her blush nonetheless. What an She almost missed it. A quick pulse emanating from near the fountain. She looked for the source, but couldn’t narrow it down between three men standing there, all of them looking toward the pretty woman.

Teia knew that pulse. She’d used it herself. It was, in fact, the only reason she had a chance at getting in the Blackguard. The special thing about paryl that no other color could do was that it went right through clothing. With paryl, you could see exactly where anything metal was on a person’s body. If they wore mail concealed beneath a tunic, or had a concealed dagger strapped to their thigh, it wasn’t concealed to Teia. That, and marking things with beacons no one else could see, seemed to be the only practical uses of the color that Teia had found. One book had discounted it from being a true color at all for that very reason, calling paryl “singularly ephemeral, and singularly useless.”

It was easy to get tunnel vision when hunting, and Teia’s fighting masters back in Odess had beaten her for it a number of times. So she tried to breathe deeply and be aware of her surroundings. That intense focus could give you away or cause you to make mistakes.

And just in time, too.

Glancing up and down the main street of the market, through the swirl of humanity-traders from every satrapy, slaves, luxiats, beggars, and nobles-Teia saw the last thing she wanted to see. Her own target-her target for Lucretia Verangheti-was walking straight toward her. Worse, the direction he was going would take him straight in front of the other paryl drafter. Her target had the familiar paryl beacon woven into his hair. If he walked down the street with that intact, the other paryl drafter couldn’t miss him. And that might set him hunting Teia.

Teia was moving before she was sure what she was going to do. If she had one flaw, it wasn’t passivity.

She shot out a pulse of superfine light herself, making it as brief as possible. A couple of the best things about paryl were that it could be drafted faster than any other color and it was everywhere, even on the cloudiest day, so there was rarely any problem finding a source. It was present weakly even at night, so long as you were outside. Her focused stream cut through her target’s clothes, making them look like shadows shaking in the wind.

From long experience, Teia was able to pick out the fuzzy shapes of all the metal items he carried. Sword, knife, belt buckle, silver worked into belt, narrow chain links to secure his purse to his belt (paranoid about being robbed, then), coins within the purse, tips of the laces on his shirt, necklace, cloak chain and gold thread worked into the cloak’s mantle, an earring, and-finally! — a snuff box in his cloak’s chest pocket.

It was an easy spot to pickpocket from. She crossed the street. At the last moment, to make it convincing that her running into the target was accidental, she glanced back.

Mistake. She saw one of the men by the fountain-slight, plain, a fringe of red hair around a bald spot, tradesman’s clothes-bring his hands together in front of him. A needle of paryl luxin leapt from his hands and stuck into the side of the neck of the woman he was watching, twenty paces away. It was an amazing shot through the press of massed bodies and passing carts. It hung in the air, anchored on one side to his hands and on the other to her neck. He was bent forward in concentration.

A passing pedestrian walked through the spidersilk thread and snapped it, but the man was unperturbed. He released the paryl and walked away without a second glance.

Teia caught a glimpse of the woman, frowning and rubbing her neck for a moment, then going back to looking at a melon in the cart before her.

Then someone collided with Teia. She would have gone sprawling, but a strong hand snatched her arm.

“Watch yourself there, sweetcheeks,” her target said. He cupped her butt and gave it a squeeze as he helped her regain her balance.

“Oh-I-” Teia didn’t have to feign her confusion. It took a little more effort to regain her balance with her tall shoes, and a little more effort than that to regain her mental balance.

“I’ll be at the Red Six Inn later, if you’re looking for some entertainment, gorgeous,” the man said. His hand was still on her butt.

She swatted his hand away. “No, thank you, my lord. Excuse me.”

He laughed and didn’t try again. “Think about it,” he said. “I’ll show you a better night than your husband ever could.”

She ducked her head shyly and walked away, feeling violated. She swore she could still feel his hand on her. She wanted to punch him in his grinning face for groping her.

Instead, she contented herself with dropping the snuff box into her bag. He’d caught her off guard, but Teia had recovered quickly.

She turned as he walked on and, drafting, snatched the beacon off his head. If she was smart, she should get the hell out of here, but she couldn’t help trying to peer deeper into the market to catch sight of the woman.

It wasn’t hard to spot her. She still had her beacon glowing on her head, though it was already dissipating, and her skin was pale enough that it evinced the slight tea green tint of a longtime drafter. She crossed the main street of the market, carrying the melon. One of her arms fell and she dropped the melon. She smiled, as if surprised and confused, but only half of her face moved. She staggered and suddenly fell.

A couple of people grinned and chuckled. But the woman didn’t get up. She started having a seizure. Apoplexy. A stroke.

The smiles disappeared, and people began running toward her.

“Someone, help! Chirurgeons!” a bystander shouted.

Dread shot through Teia. Orholam have mercy, what had she just seen?