Nothing.
She widened her eyes to paryl and saw paryl gas dissipating. Teia jumped to her feet, pulling on her tunic, eyes darting to the master cloak hanging on its hook by the door. She expected that paryl gas to come questing out toward her. It had to be Master Sharp looking to see if she was in the room.
But it did nothing instead.
She moved to the door, and heard only retreating footsteps. She pulled on long trousers and, after one moment of indecision, grabbed her cloak. There was someone disappearing down the hall. Not Master Sharp. But at her feet, there was a wineskin. Its spout had been pushed under the door, and then it had been stomped flat, expelling the paryl gas within. Teia picked it up. In tiny script, but undoubtedly Master Sharp’s hand, there was one word: “Follow.”
Oh hells! Here it was. Finally.
Swallowing hard once, Teia ran on silent feet after the man. She caught sight of him quickly. She’d been right. It wasn’t Murder Sharp. Just a slave. He had a paryl mark floating above him, invisible to anyone’s eyes except Teia’s.
The man walked to the servants’ stairs, and up. Teia followed at a discreet distance. In the entrance hall, his paryl mark abruptly blinked out.
It happened, of course. Paryl was so fragile that the slightest brush would usually shatter it, and that was especially true of the lighter-than-air gel marks appended to targets. Teia kept the man in sight, but within moments the mark bloomed over a slave woman.
What the hell?
Teia followed the woman as she headed outside. Teia put on her dark spectacles so she could continue glancing in paryl intermittently in the bright light without blinding herself. Mercifully, she didn’t look out of place with them on. It was a bright, blustery, cool day. Distant clouds dotted the heavens like harbingers of the autumn coming on.
Just after the Lily’s Stem, the paryl mark passed from the slave woman to a merchant heading down a side street.
This time Teia was ready. Marking someone with paryl required that the paryl drafter be nearby.
But Sharp was either being terribly devious, or he was using his own shimmercloak, because Teia never saw him.
Eventually she ended up in front of a tiny, run-down house in the Tyrean quarter with a paryl “Enter” written on the door.
Drawing a surreptitious dagger to conceal behind a wrist, she knocked.
It opened and Sharp grinned at her through his exquisite white teeth. He beckoned her inside, but made her step close past him. Orholam, how he made her skin crawl. He sniffed as she slipped past him.
He closed the door. “Are we forgetting our mint?” he asked. “Not to mention the parsley.” He took her face in his hands, his manicured fingers on each of her cheeks, angling her chin up, a gesture all too intimate for her taste. He smelled her breath. Grimaced as if she’d farted straight in his face. Slapped her gently.
The gentleness made it almost worse.
“You know what we do, Adrasteia?” he asked. “Stealth. Stealth is what we do. Well, it’s the necessary building block for what we do. You know what’s not stealthy? Haltonsis. Haltonsis isn’t sneaky, Teia. Might as well chew garlic.”
He meant ‘halitosis.’ Moron.
But Teia didn’t say anything. Moron Sharp might be, but he was a dangerous one.
Moron Sharp.
Teia almost grinned at her new mental nickname for him. She couldn’t be afraid of someone she had a stupid nickname for, right?
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I, um, I did it on purpose. I’ve been wondering if you were ever going to check in with me again. So I thought it’d be funny if when you did, I had stinky breath.”
“Cute,” he said. “Don’t be cute.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
He slugged her in the stomach. She dropped, gasping. He grabbed a handful of her short hair and drew back a fist. But then he paused. He pushed her lips around, looking at her teeth.
“Ah, that’s right,” he said. He ran a tongue around his own teeth and let her go. “Sit.”
There was only one small chair and a small bed in this room. There was a coil of rope hanging off the back of the chair. All Teia’s old fears came alive at the sight of it, but she sat. What could she do against Sharp anyway?
He bound her to the chair expertly, quietly whistling to himself. Excellent whistler. After he finished, he looked at himself in a tiny mirror on the wall. He checked his dentures, mostly, moving his jaw this way and that, smiling broadly or just cocking his lip up to reveal a tooth in a faux grin, looking at the teeth from different angles.
“We have a problem,” he said, not turning from the mirror. He touched a dogtooth with his tongue. “You didn’t tag anyone for me to kill.”
Teia had known this was coming. Had been dreading it for a long time now.
“Why? Lose your nerve? Or are you not quite what you represented to the Order? Perhaps a spy?” he asked as if inquiring after the weather.
So Sharp had been intended to be the murderer if she’d tagged someone. That suggested that he was the only other Shadow that the Order had on Big Jasper.
“I did tag someone,” Teia said. “Did the assassin never find him?”
“That’s impossible. Did you tag him poorly? Perhaps you tagged him poorly on purpose?”
Of course, this gambit had meant casting aspersions on the skills of whoever followed her. Now that Murder Sharp had suggested it was he, that got dangerous.
“No, but I did try to be tricky. I wanted to see how good my tail was. I didn’t know it was going to be you.”
Sharp stopped looking at his teeth. He turned around, and for an instant, Teia thought she saw fear in his eyes. He was, Teia realized, terrified of anything that would threaten his value in the Old Man’s eyes. “I’d been up for two days straight, but you were only out of my sight for perhaps an hour—surely not…?”
“The night of my vigil?” Teia asked.
“Anat’s cunt!” Sharp said.
And that gave Teia another peek at one of Sharp’s cards: Sharp himself didn’t have sources among the few Blackguards who’d been around on her vigil. That was good to know. She was always slowly compiling a list of Blackguards she knew she could trust.
Of course, Sharp’s not having a source wasn’t the same as the Order’s not having a source. But every little bit of information helped.
“I wasn’t gone long,” Teia said. “Because I changed my mind.”
“Wait? You took the tag off?” Sharp asked. He sounded angry and yet relieved, too. If he’d missed a tag because she’d removed it, it wasn’t his fault, was it?
On the one hand, it was nice to see him scared; on the other, it was good to see him relieved. On the third, impossible hand, Teia was crossing a person Murder Sharp was terrified of.
Teia said, “The rules made it all pointless, didn’t they?” Bitter girl, hateful, spiteful, right?
“What rules?”
“I couldn’t kill anyone important. I mean, I briefly considered killing someone who’d irritated me who was close to someone important like that asshole slave Grinwoody, but I figured there was a good chance the Old Man would take that as me being impudent if not disobedient, so why risk it? And then I thought that if I wanted anyone who wasn’t that important dead, I can do it myself now. I mean, it would be easiest if I have the shimmercloak—which I’d like to start learning to use better, thanks—but even without it, I could start throwing paryl crystals into someone’s blood until they die. No one can find it except you, so no one can catch me. So if I’ve got a favor coming to me from the Order, I’m going to save it for when it matters.”
“One doesn’t save up favors from the Old Man. You obey or you take the consequences.” Sharp scowled. “He told me how to deal with you if you’d been disobedient or if you’d betrayed us… but this is something different. He’ll be irritated. But I guess he’ll have to deal with it himself.”
“Himself? What’s that mean?”
“I’m leaving,” Murder Sharp said. By the way he said it, it was clear he meant for a long time.