Chapter 2
Teia lowered the silk noose toward her damnation. Rope spooled out from careful fingers toward the anxious woman quietly working at the desk below. The target was perhaps thirty, wearing a slave’s dress, her copper-colored hair pulled up in a simple ponytail. As Teia watched, the woman folded a piece of the luxin-imbued flash paper that all her spies used. She paused and took a sip of an expensive whisky.
Don’t look up! Please don’t look up.
The woman was Prism Gavin Guile’s room slave. She was the White’s hidden spymistress. She was Teia’s former superior and her mentor. Marissia put down her whisky, and as she sealed the note, she said, “Orholam, forgive me.”
Teia was using the shimmercloak that Murder Sharp had given her, but because she was clinging to the ironwork on the ceiling, it hung away from her body, and it didn’t hide the dangling noose at all.
But Marissia didn’t look up. She put the note aside and pulled out another sheet of thin paper.
As her mentor leaned forward again, Teia dexterously flipped the noose over Marissia’s head and then dropped from the ceiling, holding the rope. Draped over a beam above, the noose jerked tight around Marissia’s throat and hauled her to her feet. The sharp movement flung her chair backward just as Teia, holding the other end, swung down and forward. The falling chair cracked across Teia’s shins a moment before she crashed into Marissia.
Somehow Teia kept from releasing the rope, and she didn’t cry out. Marissia was choking, grabbing at her neck, scrambling to get her feet under her.
Amazing how pain shuts down your thinking. If Teia hadn’t just gotten her shins destroyed, there were a dozen things she would have done. Instead she clung stupidly to the rope, gasping, tears springing from her eyes, face-to-face with her old superior.
As Marissia regained her feet, Teia saw the problem: she wasn’t as heavy as Marissia. Marissia noticed it, too. Though gagging, she grabbed the rope above her head and pulled down with all her strength.
Something shimmered in the corner of Teia’s eye, and Murder Sharp became visible as he took quick steps across the carpet. He buried a fist in Marissia’s stomach.
Marissia’s strangled cough blew spit across Teia’s face. The slave woman went slack. In quick motions, Sharp took the noose from Teia, threw a sack over Marissia’s head, and bound Marissia’s hands behind her back in such a way that any move she made to escape would tighten the noose around her neck.
Master Sharp was gifted with knots.
He forced Marissia to her knees and checked once more that she could breathe—all the fight had gone out of her.
“Not good,” Master Sharp said, turning back to Teia. He was a lean man with sharp features, orange-red hair, and a short beard the color of fire. His most remarkable features, though, were his teeth and his too-big, too-frequent smile, which he flashed now joylessly, from mere habit. Usually the teeth he revealed with that smile were too white and too perfect. On most hunts, he wore dentures made of predators’ teeth. But today, perhaps because his mission wasn’t to kill anyone, he wore dentures of beaver teeth—a full, disconcerting mouth of big, wide, flat incisors. They barely fit in his mouth.
“Not very good at all. But you kept her from destroying any of the papers,” he continued, “so I’ll accept it.”
“You were here the whole time?” Teia asked. She set the chair back upright to give herself a moment of not looking at the monster who was now her master. She massaged her aching shins. Orholam have mercy, those beaver teeth made her skin crawl.
“This is too important for me to let you bungle it. She was some kind of secretary for the Prism. Who knows what she has access to?”
Secretary? So the Order didn’t know what Marissia really was. Why, then, was it kidnapping her?
And why kidnapping? Teia had thought that the Order only killed people.
Not that it wouldn’t murder Marissia later.
Handing Teia the noose, Murder Sharp strode to the window to look down at the islands. Even from where she was, Teia could see a thick curl of black smoke rising to greet the morning sun.
Earlier this morning, their trainer Tremblefist had blown the black powder stores beneath the cannon tower so Kip and the rest of the Mighty could escape by sea. He’d probably given his life doing it. The squad had gotten away while Teia had chosen to stay here. And now she was doing this.
She was a fool.
“We’re lucky,” Sharp said. “The few Blackguards who weren’t already on the parade route have abandoned their posts to get down to that tower. Still, no time to waste. You watch her. Break her neck if she screams.”
He shook his head at that last part. He’d said that for Marissia’s benefit. He made a fist and mimed hitting her stomach. Knock the wind out of her if she screams, he meant.
Why he hadn’t just gagged her, Teia didn’t know, but she didn’t ask. She’d learned not to push the mercurial assassin. Sometimes he had deeper plans. Sometimes he didn’t think of the obvious. But he never liked being questioned, and there was no upside to Teia appearing too smart.
Sharp scooped all the papers off the table and into a sack. He opened drawers and grabbed every paper with writing on it, and thumbed through all the blank pages to make sure nothing was hidden from him.
Then he was off, searching the rest of the room.
Marissia gave two sharp little tugs on the rope in Teia’s hand.
“Shhh,” Teia said.
Marissia waited a few moments and tugged again. She wanted to say something.
What was Teia going to tell her? She hadn’t known Marissia outside of their work, but she’d felt a kinship and deep respect for the woman. They had both been slaves. Both were spies, and Marissia had risen as high as any slave or spy could.
Marissia had once told Teia that the Order would make her do something terrible. ‘Let it be on my head—but do it,’ she’d said.
But there was no way she could have guessed that the something terrible would be her own kidnapping and likely murder.
Another tug. Master Sharp had ducked into the slave’s closet off the main room, out of sight and earshot. “He’s gone. Only for a moment,” Teia whispered.
“Third drawer, left side,” Marissia whispered. “Halfway back, straight up. Push hard. Quick!”
Master Sharp had left the drawer open, so Teia had only to take one step and stoop. The surface felt flat, but as Teia pushed hard on it, she felt something snap with a slight chalky scent of broken blue luxin, and a tiny section of the wood sank in. A folded piece of parchment dropped into her hand.
Teia stepped back into place, stashing the parchment in a pocket. “Got it,” she whispered.
“Tug when you need me—”
Master Sharp stepped back in. “What’s she saying?”
“Um? What?” Teia said. For one terrifying moment, her mind went blank. “Oh, she’s trying to bribe me.” Teia said it like she was bored.
Staring at her hard, Master Sharp ran a freakishly long pink tongue over those horrid wide teeth. “I took a bribe…” He smacked his lips. “Once. Had no plan to let the man go, of course, and killed him as soon as I got the coin.” Sharp tucked a package of documents tied with red or green ribbon into his sack. Teia was color-blind, so she could tell only that it was one or the other. “No harm, right? The Old Man… disagreed. Emphatically.”
He smiled, too broadly. Something about those teeth twisted Teia’s stomach more than when he’d worn a full set of wolves’ fangs.
“How much did she offer?” he asked.
Teia froze. There was a hook in that question. Marissia the Prism’s room slave might have squirreled away a small fortune. Marissia the spy would have saved a lot more, and with her life on the line, would she not offer a large bribe? But maybe not too large, a spymistress would be smart enough to start small—
Too long, T, don’t take too long!