Benighted jackass. Dammit. As Teia closed the door, she rubbed her cheek. It hurt like hell, but she silently thanked her Archer sisters for the stratagem.
That you can kill a man easily doesn’t mean he knows it; even if he knows it, it doesn’t mean he’ll act in a rational way with that knowledge. Their fault, but your problem.
She grabbed her gear and went to her window. Her room had no balcony, but that was just as well. The window opened wide enough for her to wriggle through. She popped the first climbing crescent and affixed its sticky side to the wall and then poked her head out. This side of the palace sat over a cliff, with retaining walls leaving barely enough room for a row of low flowering bushes before the palace itself sprang from the ground. Teia’s window was only about ten feet above those bushes, but if she fell and didn’t grab on to them, a fall of several hundred feet onto rocky beach awaited.
Good thing I’m not afraid of heights.
Much.
There was no one else out here. No balconies hung out above the cliff face, though there were inset patios on the roof, Teia knew.
She moved carefully and took her time. She didn’t have enough climbing crescents to make it all the way to the top, so she planned on getting into a window on the next floor. Quick and easy.
The window was locked.
Nothing is ever quick and easy.
She made it to the next floor up before she ran out of climbing crescents. The window was cracked open, but there was a couple inside. They looked like they’d be busy for a while.
Teia wasn’t exactly fond of clinging to a wall while the autumn-evening breeze kicked up, chilling her fingers, but she didn’t see that she had many good options, so she waited.
She peeked again. The couple—younger staff, servants both—were still sitting on the woman’s bed, only kissing. The woman had her legs spread and was arching her chest toward the man, but he barely had his hand on her thigh. Awkward kisser, too.
Teia waited. She couldn’t make her move now. The couple was seated facing the window she’d be trying to get through. Anywhere the cloak slipped, Teia would be visible, and it would be impossible to get in without making some sound.
She would have to wait until they were too distracted. Then she could slip out of the room either when they fell asleep or when the young man slipped out.
Teia peeked again. The young man barely had one hand on the woman’s rib cage. She finally took his hand and pulled it to her breast.
He stopped and pulled his face away from her, though he left his hand where it was.
“Tiwul, I don’t know if we should…” he said.
Orholam have mercy, man! Get on the horse and ride, or get out of the corral!
Teia looked around and considered her other options. They weren’t good.
I don’t need to worry. I’ve got all night.
All night to figure out how to kill the Nuqaba, without anyone suspecting it’s an assassination. No problem.
So Teia alternately blew warm breath on one hand and then the other to keep her fingers from getting stiff while she clung to the wall at three points. Five minutes passed and Teia heard a little sound of protest.
She peeked again. Oh no.
This time the young woman had broken off the kissing. His burnous was off, and her dress was pushed down to her waist, and her skin was all gooseflesh.
Oh no no no, Teia thought. The young woman walked toward the window, shimmying so her dress dropped past her hips and onto the floor. She was flushed with glee and desire.
“It’s freezing in here!” she said. “Why don’t we—” and Teia lost the rest of the woman’s doubtless brilliant seduction with the creak of the window shutting.
Damn. It.
For one murderous moment, Teia thought of cracking the window just enough to draft through the empty space. At some opportune moment, she’d tweak a nerve in a leg or an arm and make the young man crush that stupid girl. Better yet—
Actually, she’d never thought of it before, but could she make a man’s horn fall? Just by tweaking the right nerves? That opened up all sorts of possibilities for mischief.
Could she make a man’s horn rise against his will with a similar manipulation?
Now that—!
Not the time, T.
Nonetheless, the idea made her almost giggle. It was almost irresistible, but she knew if she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop. It was totally inappropriate, totally immature, but she was so scared, so nervous, so afraid of failing and of not failing, that she almost dissolved. She bit down on her macerated cheek.
Too hard. She almost yelped aloud.
But she felt more levelheaded when she was done cursing silently. Maybe that was the darkness working on her. Not a total darkness out here by any means, thank Orholam. She thought she’d go mad in ten minutes in total darkness. Here the lights of the city below and the stars above relieved the empty cold of blackness.
Time for a new plan.
Teia climbed back down to her own window, getting her feet onto the first crescents she’d placed. Each climbing crescent had a string dangling from it. Pull that string in a big circle around your crescent, and the string cut it off the wall. Each time you removed it, you lost adhesive luxin, but the crescents could be reused.
Of course, it was one thing to place a crescent and then decide you needed that handhold to be farther to the right; it was quite another to do what Teia planned.
Still clinging to the wall, she removed her boots and stockings one at a time and stowed them in her bag. Each string had a ring at the end of it. Dipping low, she grabbed one with her big toe, cut the climbing crescent off the wall with the string, and carefully stood. Then she lifted the crescent with her foot, holding on to the wall with a single hand and foot, and grabbed the crescent in her hand.
Each crescent retrieval took time, and after a few, Teia’s toes were so cold and insensate that she had to watch carefully while grabbing at the rings, arching her head dangerously far from the wall. But in another ten minutes, she made it to the third floor.
Locked. Curtains drawn. Who locks a third-floor window overlooking a cliff?
She debated breaking the window, but she couldn’t be sure the room was empty. Nor could there be any doubts about the Nuqaba’s death. There were other windows on the same floor, but she had no guarantee that those would be open, either.
Worse, the climbing crescents were starting to lose too much adhesive. She rubbed the wall with a sleeve each time she set a hold, to remove the dirt, but it wasn’t enough. Either the humidity or the dust or the simple fact that Teia was short and had to place the crescents closer than a taller assassin meant that there was no way Teia would be using the crescents to climb back down to her room.
That was a problem for later.
She decided to go for the rooftop gardens.
It took her an hour, and more than once, she told herself she was a fool, but there was no way down now; she’d brought the crescents with her.
When she finally threw herself over the edge of the roof, she simply lay beneath an immense rhododendron bush and quivered. Her hamstrings would never forgive her. Her knuckles were scraped bloody. Her sleeves were pilled from polishing the rock wall. Her toes were bruised and alight with pain where the feeling was leaching back into them. Her arms were jellyfish, stinging her shoulders with their death throes.
When she felt she had the strength, she sat up and massaged her feet and then put her boots back on. Standing, she shook out the master cloak to get the dust off it—and a gust of wind and her own zealous whipping of it launched it from her cold-clumsy fingers.
For a moment, it drifted over the void, flipping away from her—and then she snatched it, nearly lurching off the edge to reach it.
She held herself very still, the thunderbolt of what might have been paralyzing her for a moment. She let it roll slowly past her as she merely breathed, breathed.