The slave shuddered at the sight of her irisless black eyes, monstrously agape, swallowing all light.
He bucked against his shackles. He tried to scream, but whoever had gagged him had not just bound a rag around his mouth—which did little to nothing. They’d filled his mouth with a rock and then bound it in place. Poor bastard.
And old, and male. Because an old worker slave was cheap. An older woman could be put to work inside, watching children or knitting or doing simple tasks. Not all were, of course, but enough that they generally cost more than old men broken by long physical labor.
Teia felt far away from herself. As she streamed paryl through one of his arms, looking for the nerves, another part of her immediately started concocting schemes, each more impractical than the last. She could take the man out of here under the cover of her cloak—too small. She could wait until darkness—and what if someone came before then? She could find a dead body about his age and size—where? She could kill the Order’s lackey who came to get the body—and who was to say that wouldn’t be just some innocent grave digger? Even if it was one of the Order’s people, killing them would tip her hand, wouldn’t it?
It was already too late to go after Murder Sharp and try to kill him and then pretend she’d never gotten the orders. She hadn’t even thought of it when he’d left.
“Mmm! Mmm!” His eyes rolled back in his head and he bucked again, making her lose the paryl stream, dammit.
He thrashed, tearing the skin at his wrists, blood trickling down his bare arms.
She could simply disobey—and show that she wasn’t loyal. That was death. But perhaps she could disobey for some excellent reason—she refused to kill slaves because she’d been a slave, or, or…
It wouldn’t matter. Not to the Order. Not in wartime. Disobedience was death. Their secrecy was more important to them than having another assassin.
She’d have to run away, far, far from here, to some city or village where they would never find her.
She found a thick tendon and pulled the paryl tight around it. His arm barely twitched before the paryl shattered. Apparently she wouldn’t be pulling anyone around like a marionette with paryl.
In the right place, though—say by making a finger twitch on a trigger—it could make all the difference, couldn’t it?
She was doing it. Exactly what the Order had commanded. She was using this slave like a practice dummy. A whetstone on which to hone her skills razor sharp. Not a human. Not an old man with fears and hopes and a history.
I’m a Blackguard. This is what I must do. I’m a soldier, under orders. This is war, and I am a soldier. I could have run away, but I chose this. I could run away now.
She could get money. How could you stop a thief who could make herself invisible?
How she wished she were back in the Prism’s training room. She could bathe in superviolet and blue until there was only the cold logic of necessity.
The nerves! At last. She tweaked a bundle at the slave’s elbow. His arm dropped, paralyzed, until the shackle caught his wrist. He gasped.
The problem was how much sense it all made. It made sense for the Order to train her. It made sense that she be trained on old, useless slaves who would die within a couple of years anyway. On the Chromeria’s side, it made sense that Teia be ordered to comply with whatever the Order demanded. It was the only way they could get her close enough to uproot them.
Karris was an admiral accepting the death of her men on the front lines to protect more at home. Accepting, even, the corruption and breaking of those at the front lines to protect the lives of those at home.
But all that logic couldn’t argue with the fear on the face of this man, who’d done nothing to deserve a death that accomplished something so near to nothing it surely couldn’t measure against his life.
She would use these skills she would learn here with this man’s pain and his death against the Order—but first she would use her skills for it. How did that balance any scales?
She wasn’t killing an innocent on purpose; that was the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. Bad guys killed the innocent on purpose; good guys sometimes killed the innocent, but only by accident while trying to kill the enemy.
But she was killing an innocent deliberately in order to get a chance to kill the guilty. How was she any different from a marksman who shoots a child in the legs so that he can gun down any combatants who came to save the child?
No, the Order was making her do this. It was the Order who would kill her if she refused.
Alone, the Chromeria would never order this. Experimenting on and murdering a slave for practice was the Order’s way of doing things.
Yet here she was.
The Order would keep sending her slaves until she mastered all the skills they demanded of a Shadow. If she mastered them quickly, they would send her sooner to kill targets out in the world. If she mastered them slowly, they would send her more and more slaves to practice on—and then murder.
There was no good choice, if she stayed. Nothing that would let her stay innocent.
If she ran, she wouldn’t be a murderer. But she would never avenge Marissia, either. The spymaster was probably dead, but to run would mean giving up on her. Then Teia would never stop the Order, and they would continue murdering whomever they wanted. They would forever take their tithe of blood.
If she ran, she wouldn’t be guilty of anything except cowardice.
I don’t run.
Fear was a shackle. Fear was a shackle she would never wear again.
Orholam, forgive me for what I am about to do.
Teia pulled off the man’s gag and removed the stone from his mouth. “What’s your name?” she asked quietly.
“Rajiv.”
“Rajiv? You don’t look Atashian. What’s your birth name?”
He looked at first as if he couldn’t remember. Finally, in a tone that said, ‘Must you take also this?’ he said, “Salvador.”
“You’re Tyrean.”
He nodded.
“Any family, Salvador?”
“A son.”
“Slave?”
“No longer. They took him from me. Beat him to death years ago.”
“As they do,” Teia said. Fuck them. “I wanted to tell you, Salvador, that your death today is going to accomplish something. That it’s part of winning this war, once and for all. That it’s a secret, but I swear you’re part of something good.” She looked down at her hands. “I wanted to tell you that, but I’m not sure it’s true.”
I don’t run away.
But I promise this, my innocent Salvador, hollow though my promise may ring: I will avenge you.
Perhaps that’s all that’s left for me.
She rubbed a sore dogtooth absently and then, gathering her will, went to work. And when she was finished, she had by no means mastered paryl.
He would not be the last.
Chapter 48
Of all the improbable situations Kip had found himself in during his short life—killing a king, killing a god, actually having friends, being able to jog more than a few steps without collapsing and dying of equally lethal doses of heart attack and embarrassment—this situation struck him as the most implausible yet.
He was standing at the open flap of his tent with a beautiful woman who wanted him, who seemed to genuinely want him. Tisis practically glowed with pride in Kip and hunger for him. It was so weird it actually gave him pause, and made him think.
Thinking was clearly the enemy here.
The Cwn y Wawr and Ghost camps had joined together on the island, and tonight they were celebrating the end of generations of internecine strife and oppression. It was the wildest party Kip had ever seen. The kind of party where before you slipped into your tent, instead of worrying that you were going to disturb your neighbors, you worried that it might already be occupied.