Chapter 65
Teia and Cruxer ran into Winsen not a block from the safe house. Cruxer hesitated. They didn’t know Winsen as well as they knew each other, but he was in the squad.
“We’ll need all the help we can get,” Teia said, but she let Cruxer make the call.
“Someone’s going to try to kill Kip,” Cruxer told Winsen. “We’re heading to the docks to stop them.”
Give Cruxer this: right or wrong, he made his decisions quickly. And his penchant for trusting people and believing in them might get him killed eventually, but it meant that the circle of people who liked him and wanted him to approve of them was always growing.
Winsen blinked once. It was the closest to surprise Teia had ever seen from him. “Then you don’t want to go to the docks. I passed him not two minutes ago. He said he was going out bane hunting with Lytos and Buskin, but they’d told him to meet them in Little Hill. He was headed there.”
“The slums? Why there and why go sepa—” Cruxer started to ask.
“Fewer witnesses,” Teia said. “If they go out to sea and come back without him, they’ll be suspected. He meets them in a slum, they kill him, and if the deed itself isn’t witnessed, it’s clean.”
Cruxer hesitated, appraising her. “Sometimes you scare me, Teia.”
“I’ll get my bow,” Winsen said.
“Be quick,” Cruxer said. As Winsen ran off, he breathed a curse. “Blackguards, Teia. How do we kill Blackguards?”
“By surprising them,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
He looked at her and was suddenly just a boy again. “How could they?”
“Ask it later. Captain.”
The pain didn’t leave his eyes, but the boy in them receded. “Right,” he said. “Treat it like Specials. We could be wrong, so we follow as close as we can without being seen. If they’re guilty, we can expect them to be nervous. Teia, your paryl’s no good from a distance, so I want you to follow hard behind them. If you give us the signal, we’ll shoot. We see them draw weapons, we shoot.”
“Got it,” Winsen said, rejoining them. He was wearing street clothes now, and holding not one but two bows. One was one of his yew longbows, a foot taller than he was, and the other was a simple recurve that he tossed to Cruxer.
“If we do this, and we’re wrong,” Cruxer said, “we’ll look like traitors. It’ll be Orholam’s Glare for all of us. We don’t know that Breaker is who we think he is.”
“We know him,” Teia said. “That’s enough for me.”
“Me, too,” Cruxer said. “Winsen?”
Winsen shrugged. As ever, he was a loaded musket. He didn’t care so much which direction he was pointed, so long as he could fire.
“Then let’s go!” Cruxer said.
Without another word, they ran, heedless of who would wonder at them. Cruxer was tall enough that he appeared merely to be loping, though his gait forced Teia to run full out.
When they got to Little Hill, they slowed. They walked briskly, but no faster than many merchants on their errands. With a wink and a smile, Cruxer got an old baker to tell them exactly when some Blackguards had passed through and where she thought they were going.
They pushed faster than they would have if they were tracking anyone else. The likelihood of blundering over their prey at the speeds they were moving was high. But Buskin and Lytos didn’t know they were being hunted.
The base of Little Hill was a Tyrean slum. Not precisely dangerous, at least during the day, but the neighborhood bore unmistakable signs of the origins of so many of its residents. Almost half the women wore long tunics over trousers, and the men wore strong green-and-black-patterned tunics, more shapeless than the tailored tunics most people favored on Big Jasper. Most notable, though, was that the domes on the buildings in this area were either perfunctorily small or had been hollowed out. The Tyreans liked to use their roofs as another room—an open room. Most of the hollowed-out domes, standing bare in their frames on flat roofs, at least at one time had shutters, which when closed retained the dome shape, but in their poverty, the people here didn’t fix such frippery when it failed.
“Tssst!” Cruxer said.
Teia saw his hand signals: two blocks ahead, then right. We’ll overwatch.
There wasn’t time to see exactly what they planned. Teia jogged toward the corner. It started raining. She threw her hood up, and drew in as much paryl as she could hold. She stepped around the corner, nonchalant, just in case.
Nothing.
She moved down the narrow street at a half jog, as if hurrying from the rain. Dozens of others traversing the same street were doing the same. The only thing she could hope was that Lytos and Buskin were wearing their blacks so they’d be easy to spot.
Throwing glances left and right as she passed intersection after intersection, Teia’s heart was beating harder and harder. With people ducking their heads and hurrying, it would make murdering Kip and getting away with it easier and easier.
She heard a musket shot above her and jumped. No, not a musket, someone slamming shut a shutter against the rain. Broken stones and broken bones.
There! She’d crossed one of the crooked alleys and caught a glimpse of black. No street in the city was supposed to be crooked. It made dark places where the light of the Thousand Stars couldn’t reach. But slums were slums the world over.
She was only behind the Blackguards by about thirty paces now, and the alley cleared out. No one except Teia and her prey.
And what am I supposed to do when I catch them?
What if Lytos and Buskin were just here to get some gear for their trip? It wasn’t out of the question, was it? The Blackguards would have used supplies and weapons from their stores and safe houses near the docks first, but eventually those supplies would be exhausted, and they would have to dip into what they’d planted even in warehouses in the slums. Usually, slaves could do such work, but safe houses were kept secret.
Maybe it was all innocent. Karris could be wrong, right?
The sun was still high in the sky, but the clouds were so thick and black that it was getting dark. The rain became a full downpour, leaving Teia in a race between rising fears and wet-kitten hopes.
She heard Kip’s voice and poked one eye around the corner.
Too late.
Lytos had drawn a knife, left side, unseen by Kip and was stepping—
He dropped to one knee, almost gracefully, as if making obeisance, the barest whisper of arrow feathers disappearing fully into his armpit. He looked down, doubtless wondering what had happened, but it looked like he was bowing his head to Kip.
“Lytos?” Kip asked, turning, all unaware of what had just happened.
The ting of bare steel hitting a stone as Lytos dropped his blade made Buskin’s head pivot sharply. He saw Teia first, then saw Lytos pitch onto his face. The look on his face was pure guilt, then rage.
His hand dipped to his belt where he kept his throwing knives. Being short and not strong, Buskin liked his throwing knives, and he was one of the few people Teia had ever seen for whom throwing knives were not an affectation.
Teia’s hand was already up, but it wasn’t the familiar paryl that came through her. A wave bigger than her own body rushed through her and snapped like a whip at her fingers.
All the world was fire. She dropped. Kip staggered. Buskin flinched in mid-throw, sending his knife into the sky even as he jumped backward, throwing his hand up over his face.
The wave passed.
Silence. They all looked at each other, staggered. No one was on fire.
An arrow streaked through the space Buskin had been occupying not a heartbeat earlier and shattered against the stone wall beside him.
The moment snapped; Buskin fled as if loosed from a bow himself.
Kip was agog, looking at Teia and then himself, apparently wondering why he wasn’t on fire. “What th—”
“Get him!” Teia shouted. She bolted after Buskin. Kip didn’t follow, at least not fast enough to be helpful.
Buskin turned at the first intersection, his lead on Teia only thirty paces. Lightning crashed nearby, the frenetic flashing of multiple strikes coming at the same instant thunder rattled windows through all of Big Jasper. The lightning threw a shadow into the intersection. Faster than her conscious mind could grasp what she had seen, Teia reacted. Trap.
She was already sprawling, slipping instead of jumping aside. Her feet skidded across rain-slick stones. One foot shot forward while the other went back. She slid, doing the splits, right past the corner. A glittering blade flashed right over her head.
Buskin staggered, almost stepped on her as his blade didn’t meet the resistance he expected.
On hands and feet, Teia scuttled backward. She twisted her wrist on an unseen stone and fell flat on her back.
Buskin advanced, raising his sword for the killing—no wasteful, big, theatrical slash from a Blackguard; he would stab the point straight into her heart, twist quickly in case he’d pierced a little to the right or left, and be gone in less than a second’s time.
But as he stepped forward, an arrow flashed past his face. He shot a glance back up the alley, must have seen Winsen or Cruxer or both, and leaped back and away. Teia shot paryl at him from her back, but it shattered easily with his rapid movement.
She struggled to her feet and went after him. Lightning flashed again, this time farther away, hitting the great lightning-catchers above the Chromeria, the boom of thunder following a few heartbeats later. Teia found herself in a market. It was in an uproar. All the shoppers had already departed as soon as the rain began pounding, but the merchants were trapped, gathering their goods, trying to soothe panicking donkeys and oxen. Others were running around their shops, shuttering windows and pulling merchandise inside.
In all the chaos, a lone runner was nearly invisible. Any other time, such a sight would stick out and cause outrage. Now it was one whitecap in a storm-tossed sea.
A crash rang out as a cart lost all the barrels inside it. Teia saw Buskin running past it, having opened the back gate to loose the barrels. One giant barrel ruptured as it fell, and dumped its contents—olive oil—in a vast slick across the wet stones. Half a dozen pedestrians rushing past went down in tangles of limbs. A horse pulling an empty cart shied as its driver sawed on the reins, trying to avoid crushing the fallen. He lost grip of the reins, though—and it was a miracle he did. The horse, head free, looked down and quick-stepped over the people lying at its feet.
But it turned aside to do so, and the wheels of its cart hit the slick and lost traction immediately, sliding the cart inexorably into the olive oil wagon—and blocking the lane entirely.
Teia dodged into another pathway through the market, ran straight into a young woman and knocked her flat. Teia spun out of the collision, jumped over a rack of thobes that had fallen into the street, and kept going.
Something lit the sky that wasn’t lightning, but as soon as Teia looked for the luxin strike, she plowed into someone else, much bigger than she was, and turned her eyes back to the market and her target.
She made it to the edge of the market, just in time to see Buskin snatch up two burning lanterns and hurl them at the ground in the alley behind himself. One ignited, but the other didn’t—at least until he sprayed the alley with red luxin.
The flames roared up, blocking the alley, and for half an instant Teia thought of trying to leap through the flames before good sense asserted itself. She barely stopped in time. The red luxin would gutter out in a minute at most, but that was too long. She didn’t know this part of town well enough to be certain that going one block to either side would take her back to Buskin’s path: she might get lucky and find that he’d turned the same way she did—or not.
She was looking for another path, a way to climb around the flames, a window above them in the second story, anything, when Buskin’s flames died as if a giant had stomped on them, splattering liquid orange in every direction.
A figure tore past her. Kip.
He was drafting even as he ran. On top of the fire-smothering orange luxin, he threw down planks of green to give himself footing, and sprinted right across where the fires had been.
His momentum carried him past Teia, who was standing still. He flicked off the spectacles that he was wearing, holstered them in the pouch he wore, and drew out another pair as he ran. He threw a hand up into the air and shot yellow symbols into the sky that dissolved into light even as they arced upward—directions for Cruxer and Winsen about where Buskin was going.
Teia saw them running across a roof, each holding a bow, approaching an alley gap that was too far to jump. Cruxer sped up and leapt anyway—and made it. Winsen followed his lead, except he threw his hands and a gout of unfocused luxin out of them to give himself extra lift the way they’d practiced.
It would have worked if he hadn’t been holding the longbow in one hand. Instead, it impeded the luxin thrust and threw him off balance even as he was flying through the air. But Kip was running right under that gap, and he threw up a wide hand of green luxin that bobbed Winsen gently back up into the air. Instead of smashing into the side of the building, Winsen landed sideways just at the top of it. He rolled across the roof and smacked his head on the dome, but was unhurt.
They were almost to the great fish market near the docks when lightning struck again, blinding Teia. The boom of thunder literally threw her from her feet. She tumbled as she’d been taught, throwing one hand down hard so that her head didn’t take the impact.
She regained her senses in time to see that one of the Thousand Stars had been struck by lightning. They were supposed to be insulated with the copper lightning-catchers, but either it was gone or hadn’t worked. The entire stiltlike Star was leaning, shattering, stones raining down. Then the arch collapsed all at once, coming down in roar of stone and dust in the heavy rain.
The placement couldn’t have been worse—right in front of them, and between them and Buskin. As if the gods themselves had intervened to save him. On the other hand, the arch had hit the edge of the building on which Cruxer and Winsen stood. If Cruxer hadn’t stopped to help Winsen, he would have been crushed by the falling rock.
Teia stopped behind the rubble. She could climb over it, but every stone was shifting. Too much delay. Oh, hells. Kip!
Kip had been ahead of all of them.
Teia looked for him. He was nowhere in the fish market beyond the rubble.
Oh, no. No no no.
Her heart stopped. The air of the intersection was awash in a cloud of dust, only slowly being beaten down by the downpour. People were screaming, horses were whinnying in terror, but Teia had no mind for any of it. She drafted a paryl torch, the beams of its light cutting through the dust cloud. She charged forward, barely pausing long enough to pull a cloth in front of her face so she could breathe. The ground was littered with broken masonry, shattered mirror-glass, and there—dear Orholam, a body. Was it—
Teia grabbed the hand she could see and pulled. It came out, with half an arm. She held the arm in both hands, part horrified beyond words, part cold and analytical. This arm seemed skinnier than Kip’s. The skin was … covered in grime, colorless in her paryl vision. She went back to the visible spectrum, but it was too dusty. She couldn’t see anything. She turned the arm over, went back to paryl.
No drafter’s scars on the hands or wrists.
It wasn’t Kip. It was a star tower slave. What were they doing up there in a storm?
She tossed the arm aside. She didn’t care about some slave.
A part of her wrote down that thought in stone. It would come back to haunt her. But right now, she didn’t care. Kip. Dear Orholam, where’s Kip?
She picked her way over the rubble, looking in paryl through the dust.
The rubble ahead of her shifted and sank. Suddenly, she heard coughing. With quick, light steps, she crossed the rubble. There was Kip, upside down. He’d drafted an egg of luxin around himself as the arch fell all around him, but had quickly run out of air and let the egg collapse.
Teia grabbed his hand and pulled him up and out. He was besmirched, the heavy rain turning the dust coating his features into mud in instants.
For a split second, he’d looked so terrified coming out of that little space that Teia couldn’t reconcile the little-boy terror on his face with the kind of drafting she’d just seen out of him. He stared at her, frantic, frightened, chest heaving, coughing still.
She tried to hand him a cloth to breathe through, but he swept her up into a bear hug.
For one moment, she was utterly stunned. Then, in the next, a sudden thawing. She hadn’t been really touched in so long, she couldn’t even remember the last time. Kip’s pure, delighted-to-see-you, I-care-so-much-for-you touch? Oh, dear gods. There was something about the pure physicality of it: an acceptance beyond words, a joy that spoke only truth. But she was frozen, too surprised by the sudden emergence of Kip from death, by the flood of emotion. She didn’t hug back, even as the complete, total, abject need to hug back rose in her. She wanted to cling to someone—no, not to someone; it wasn’t just a need to connect, though it was that, too—to connect with Kip, her friend.
Her best friend. The one who saw her.
The tides rising in her were obliterating, scouring away the dross of every preconception and prejudice.
And Kip dropped the hug, suddenly awkward at her failure to hug back.
No! her mind cried, but her arms—her treacherous arms—didn’t rise.
“Sorry. Thanks,” Kip said quickly, as if to cover, as if to ignore, as if he didn’t feel rejected.
No, Orholam no, I didn’t mean it like that.
But Teia said nothing, didn’t move.
Kip turned. They were on the very edge of the rubble—they’d come through it, together. But they were too late. Kip pulled his blue spectacles on. They were miraculously unbroken, and he drafted quickly, again as if it were nothing. In a few moments, there were stairs from where they stood up to the edge of the building where Cruxer and Winsen still stood.
They joined the young men there. They hadn’t given up the hunt. They stood ready as hounds at the leash. Cruxer pointed. “There!”
Buskin was almost through the crowded, emptying fish market. People were running everywhere, still packing up their stalls, trying not to lose all of the day’s catch and sales. Winsen was standing with an arrow nocked, though he hadn’t drawn it—there was no shot yet, and holding a longbow drawn for any length of time was impossible.
Buskin reached the far side of the market. He turned and grinned fiercely at them. He put his fingers under his chin and flicked them forward in rude salute. Then he turned his back and walked away.
Winsen pulled the arrow back into the big longbow, using the thick muscles of his back to help with the massive draw-weight, even as people ran to and fro, obscuring Buskin. The shot was at least two hundred paces. A young mother tried to pull three children out of the street, but found herself with too few hands, juggling tools in one hand and recalcitrant kids in the other, at least one crying.
“Winsen,” Cruxer said sadly, “it’s too far. You can’t—”
Winsen loosed the arrow.
Teia put a hand to her mouth, certain she was going to see a child die. The arrow flew too fast for eyes to follow. She and Kip and Cruxer and Winsen, too, all looked to Buskin. He reached the corner and looked back—and suddenly hurtled to the ground sideways as the arrow ripped through his chest, lodged in whatever mail he was wearing, and flung him down.
It took them several minutes to cross the empty market and get to him. He was dead. No one lingered in the market or the streets. No one wanted to involve themselves in whatever private quarrel this was. Not today, not in the storm and the rain and the lightning that might slay good or bad.
Winsen finally unstrung his great yew bow when he saw that Buskin was dead. He didn’t seem moved in the least, other than being satisfied. Cruxer looked at him, disbelieving, and not just of the accuracy of his shot.
“What the hell, Winsen?” Kip asked. “There were nearly a hundred people here. How’d you even make that shot, with that many innocents in the way?”
Winsen looked at Cruxer, then at Teia, and finally at Kip. Teia had killed before, and it had left her shaken and weepy. She’d been stunned at first, sure, not able to understand or process what had happened exactly. The finality of it had sunk in immediately, so she was slow to judge those who seemed cold when they killed. It wasn’t the same for everyone. But Winsen’s eyes didn’t have that numb look in them that said he hadn’t processed the killing yet, that he was stunned. His eyes were clear. Buskin had been a bad man. He needed to be killed. Winsen had done it. What more was there to say or think about?
Winsen shrugged, puzzled. “I didn’t care if I missed.”