The Broken Eye (92 page)

“Best of friends one minute, fiercest enemies the next.”

“Do you ever win those fights with Gavin?” the old woman asks me.

I shake my head, glowering.

“You think I don’t like you,” Lady Janus Borig says. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m trying to save you.” She turns to my mother. “You should let those White Oak boys thrash him a few times.”

“What?!”

“You’re clever enough to pick one of the younger ones who won’t do real damage. Perhaps a broken nose spoiling Dazen’s looks a bit would be the best thing for him. And learning that he is not invincible, that would be best for the world, I think.”

My mother lowers her voice. “Is this … is this your gift speaking?”

“Pshh. This isn’t prophecy. I’m simply wiser than you, girl.”

My mother blinks, but accepts the rebuke. Suddenly she seems very young.

“I’ll tell him of black luxin, but I’ll tell him true, or I’ll tell him nothing at all. I think it would be best for him. But you’re the one who will have to live with the screaming in the night from the bad dreams.”

“If he thinks he’s ready,” my mother says, and her eyes are burning.

“You said you’re not afraid of anything,” Lady Janus Borig says to me. “Are you afraid now?”

Click.

Suddenly, Kip was standing in total darkness. He was himself once more. Where was he?
When
was he?

He drafted sub-red and widened his eyes. It was his own room. Click? What had that been?

He strode to the door, opened it, peeked out. Andross Guile was barely disappearing down the hallway.

What in nine hells?

The card memory had taken almost no time at all. The click was the settling of the latch.

He hadn’t been certain until this moment, but now he knew: he’d lied to Teia. He had bungled everything, but he hadn’t sprung a Janus Borig trap. He hadn’t erased the cards. He’d absorbed them all—and he had a sudden, clear, sick conviction they were going to drive him mad.

Chapter 81

Teia only pretended to flee. As soon as Andross Guile kicked her out to talk to Kip, she walked hurriedly past the Blackguards standing watch and headed down the hall and out of sight. She summoned the lift, but didn’t get on.

Instead, she pulled up the hood of her cloak. She looked left and right, saw no one, and willed herself to become invisible.

Nothing.

She felt up in the neckline and found the choker, a narrow band of metal that was attached to the cloak at many points. She pulled it up against her neck. She trembled, a shudder of revulsion coursing through her.

No one collared their slaves on the Jaspers. It was considered gauche. Beatings and other discipline were to be carried out at home, not in public. To need to discipline one’s slave in public reflected poorly on your own mastery. Slaves, of course, knew that any public defiance, however satisfying, would be met with double punishment later.

Other cities, and other men, were not so civilized—or perhaps not so hypocritical. This wasn’t the first time Teia had worn a collar, but it was the first time she’d done so voluntarily. The feeling of constriction around her neck was almost unbearable.

Things to do, T. Not much time, T. Could come out any second. Still have to figure out how to use the damned thing.

She moved the loose necklace that held the little vial of oil aside. Her hands held the choker’s clasp loosely. Unmoving. She was breathing deeply, almost hyperventilating, and not clasping the damned clasp.

Chains. I’ve done everything in my life to get away from chains.

Part of her argued with that. Some garbage about differences between slavery and a cloak that empowered her. It didn’t change the visceral revulsion.

These are the chains I choose.

The chains I choose.

She cinched the choker tight and extended her will. Teeth shot out of the choker and sank into either side of her neck. They hurt so bad she doubled over and almost screamed.

And then her breath was taken for another reason. She could feel it. The cloak had a presence within it. It wasn’t a whole personality; instead—if the chirurgeons were correct, and cogitation took place in the human brain—it was as if the cloak had all the parts of a person’s brain that dealt with light splitting and magic sunk into it, with a whisper of personality there. To make this cloak, someone had given her life—or had it taken from her. The cloak knew how to split light in the ways that Teia had barely glimpsed when she broke into the White’s office.

In all her life, Teia had had to struggle for every excellence. She could sing, but had seen other slaves remember every note in a tune in one or two hearings. She could fight, but she’d seen other Blackguards combine throws and punches and kicks into series as fluidly as if fighting were a language and they were constructing elaborate arguments. Her own style was terse, fast, but ultimately simple, without nuance. She could look at Cruxer or Winsen and see that they were already maturing into the best in the world, their skills growing by leaps and bounds. That was beyond her, and always would be. Her speed would get no better. Her reach was terminally short. In a continuum that began with Big Leo and Kip and Ironfist, she was not strong. Her aim would improve, as would her knowledge of where and when to strike. Among the best, she would become mediocre, every scrap of her skill earned only by the most challenging labor.

Nor had she any excellence in her studies. Despite his difficulty reading, Ben-hadad could extemporize, looking at the gears and pulleys and weights and strengths of each luxin and designing machines as if it were play to him. Kip could memorize, and make great intuitive leaps. If study were scrivening, they wrote in a perfect hand, and illuminated their manuscripts for fun while the dullards caught up to them. By contrast, Teia held the quill in her fist.

At the touch of whatever will was animating the cloak, Teia knew two things immediately. First, light splitting at the level of the old mist walkers was as difficult as any magical or mundane skill in the world. It was as difficult as juggling and sprinting and singing at once. Blindfolded. Second—more importantly—it made sense to her.

Simply using this cloak would teach her more than any master could.

She already saw how this cloak was superior to the other. None of the cloaks—not even this one—split light beyond the visible spectrum. Sub-red was too long a wave to be diverted and reformed within the thin layer of fabric, and superviolet was too fine.

Even among lightsplitters, the only people who had a chance to be fully invisible to all spectra would be paryl drafters. A true mist walker might use a shimmercloak to handle visible light while using a paryl mist to handle the last two spectra herself.

And then it was obvious: they were called mist walkers not because they were invisible or could only be seen as though through a mist, but because they walked within their own cloud of paryl, always.

And this cloak would teach her how to do it.

Without ever expecting such a thing, Teia had found her purpose and her excellence. It was quite possible that no one in the world understood this like she did. For the first time in her life, she didn’t feel inferior. She would have started crying if she hadn’t heard the door open around the corner down the hall and Andross Guile grunt something to his Blackguards.

Drafting even a thread of paryl was enough to activate the cloak. Teia threw the hood up and reached to lace it up over her face. But there were no laces. She fumbled, looking for some kind of fasteners, and when she drew the edges close, they snapped shut firmly, as if lodestones were sewn into them. Much faster than the other shimmercloaks. Even with this cloak, though, she couldn’t cover her eyes completely unless she wanted to be blind: no light, no sight. It might be worth covering them in certain situations, but it would also be terrifying. Instead, she would have to rely on taking quick sidelong glances or creeping around at low levels where enemies wouldn’t be looking for eyes.

Being short helped the latter, of course, but she was going to have to take care that she not get overconfident.

The approach of Andross and his guards presented an instant problem. How much did she trust the cloak, really?

She took deep breaths as the three men approached and stood off to the side, sneaking only quick glances at them to keep her eyes hidden. They passed right by her.

A thrill went through her body from head to toe. Invisible!

Andross turned to his Blackguards as they waited for the lift and said, “I’ll be heading to my home. Immediately. Summon a squad of Lightguards to accompany us.”

Of course, they were insulted by that, and of course, they said nothing, taking it like the professionals they were. But what Teia thought was odd was that she couldn’t remember Andross Guile ever going to his home on Big Jasper. Why would he be headed to his home now?

The lift appeared before Teia heard any response, if there was any.

Andross Guile was going to his home on Big Jasper on the very day that his lost grandson showed up at the docks? From how Samite told it, it sounded like the boy was announcing who he was to anyone who would listen. Teia couldn’t imagine Andross Guile going home if the boy was headed to the Chromeria. Andross Guile would go to where the center of action was—or have the action brought to him.

Which meant Andross Guile was having the boy taken to his home, to meet him away from spying eyes.

Well, other than Teia’s.

She suddenly grinned. She leaned out into the lift shaft to see where it stopped. Ground floor.

After waiting half a minute, she stepped onto another ring of the lift mechanism and set the weights. She descended slowly.

At the ground floor, she had to dodge several old luxiats piling into the lift. But they moved slowly, and she made it out with little trouble before they could observe that the weight settings of the lift seemed off.

She searched for Andross Guile then, and couldn’t see him anywhere. She went to the great, open door, soon to be shut for the evening, and spotted him through a swirl of white and black cloaks. He was heading out of the Chromeria. She followed.

There was something totally empowering, even intoxicating, about walking unseen. Here were the drafters of the world, the cream of the Seven Satrapies, and they couldn’t even see her. No wonder the Order’s assassins loved these cloaks, even without using them to their full potential. This was amazing.

It was also surprisingly challenging. Teia was used to ducking and dodging through a crowd, but it was one thing to brush past someone who barely saw you, and something altogether different to actually get run over by someone who didn’t see you at all. That, and the fact that the shimmercloak completely cut out her peripheral vision, made simply moving at a walk almost exhausting. She was constantly turning her head, sneaking glimpses of everything, adjusting the paryl bubble as the evening crowds head back across the bridge from Little Jasper to their homes on Big Jasper.

She was lucky that Andross Guile hadn’t chosen to ride. As a Color, much less as promachos, it was his prerogative. He’d chosen instead to walk, which she hoped meant that he wasn’t going far. She should know where his home was, but the truth was, she’d spent all her time in the wrong neighborhoods. Still, it was an odd thing for a man who just a year ago had seemed practically an invalid. That he walked also meant that he’d picked up four more Blackguards, and an equal number of Lightguards. Six Blackguards might seem overkill, but it was a time of war, and Andross was the promachos. Teia barely counted the Lightguards, other than to note their presence. Pretenders.

Once they were in the open streets, following was much easier. They didn’t go far, either, and soon Teia saw the Guile estate. Its dome was, of course, gold. The great doors were black oak, studded with garnets. The great crossbeams were black oak over forever-burning atasifusta wood, which had been set alight to announce the Lord Guile was in residence. The garnets picked up the red glow and reflected it beautifully in the fading sunlight.

The Guile estate was so large it was home not only to one of the tallest of the Thousand Stars, it also had a small yard and garden—enormous luxuries on the overcrowded island.

Sentry boxes stood on either side of a thick, tall gate sheathed in iron. Some estates had simple wrought iron gates, presumably, Teia thought, to let pedestrians see through them to show off their owners’ wealth. But open-iron gates were a terrible idea for a city full of drafters: stick your hands through the gaps and draft freely. The Guiles valued their privacy or their defense more.

And here’s where it gets sticky.

Suddenly, Teia had to ask herself just how much she wanted to follow Andross Guile. He might well simply go into his home and go to bed. All she had was wild guesses and intuitions. She could be risking her life for simple curiosity.

The Guile guards opened the gate for them. Two of the Blackguards slipped inside, weapons drawn, while two kept an eye on the guards, despite that the men were older and must have served the Guiles for decades. The last two waited with Promachos Guile, carefully scanning the crowds who gave them wide berth.

Teia took a deep breath and started moving. How good was she at using this cloak? If she did it wrong, this was going to be the shortest infiltration in history.

Tucking her fears into a pocket, she strode confidently. She drafted her bubble of paryl mist around her. Maybe it would help.

Someone jostled her, stepping into the seemingly empty space in the crowds where she was walking. Her paryl bubble broke apart silently, but she simply formed it again and kept moving. Andross went inside, one Blackguard in front of him, one right on his heels. The last two, Presser and Essel, nodded at each other, then Presser slipped inside while the Lightguards stood around, shifting, not even professional enough to stand still when at rest.

Teia didn’t mind; it meant they took up more room, and gave her more space to move.

The petite, curvy Essel would wait two seconds, scanning the crowd once more, then come in and shut the door immediately. Teia pressed herself against the closed side of the gate and slipped through the crack right in front of the woman.