“Does the trick, though,” he said with a chuckle. He looked her up and down.
She set down the tankard on the lone table. Out of the way.
Then she turned back to him.
His eyes went round as he saw her hellstone stare. She pinched the nerves in his spine hard, and caught him as he fell.
She guided him to his knees, then released the nerves. “I know you’re in the Order. If you believe in repentance,” she whispered in his ear, “now’s the time.”
She would have a few seconds until he regained feeling. Should, anyway. She grabbed the hammer from the master cloak’s pocket, stepped up to him, and swung with all her might.
Teia had never killed a man this way. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but hadn’t expected the hammer to stick. It crushed through his temple in a splatter of blood and bone and brain, and stopped.
Ravi crumpled to the ground, his skull clinging to the hammer harder than her fingers did.
He tumbled to the floor, but somehow, he wasn’t dead.
“My teeth. You broke my teeth!” he moaned into the ground.
Teeth? What the hell?! But Teia was already moving, reaching out with paryl to squeeze his spine and grab his heart.
Make it stop. Dear Orholam, would you please just die?
He went limp as she found the right grip, but his heart kept stubbornly pumping on.
Then she saw them, glistening pearly beside his head. He’d broken his teeth against the floor as he fell.
But whinging about his teeth? When there was a hammer in his head?
Gradually, Teia found the nerves she needed, and Lord Ravi Satish died at her feet, sphincters relaxing, burbling, befouling his clothes and the air.
She rifled through his pockets to find his coin sticks and a knife, then stepped back quickly before the blood pool spreading from his head could reach her feet. The last thing she wanted to leave here was her small footprints.
She tore off his sleeve and looked at herself in the room’s small polished bronze mirror. She blotted off the blood spatter on her face and neck and hand—there wasn’t much, thank Orholam, and none at all she could see against her blacks.
She dipped his blade into the pool of blood, then flicked her wrist to distribute blood drops on the linens. Ravi’s body had no cuts on it, so they’d guess that he’d cut his attacker before he himself was killed.
Then she tossed the knife across the room.
It clanged loudly, but no one was going to look into such a small sound in a place like this.
She left, invisible. Several blocks later, she stopped at the dock where she’d almost simply pushed him into the water, where she’d missed her chance at murder without drama, or blood, or pain. Without broken teeth and blood spatter.
She’d told herself this wasn’t murder. It was sanctioned killing.
Granted: sanctioned without trial, commissioned in secret, committed in secret, and she would be prosecuted by the very state she served if she were caught, lest the Order find out how close the Chromeria had gotten to them. It had been murder in every sense except for a few words of permission spoken to the ephemeral air.
Teia hadn’t done anything but work in months. She’d never gambled or drank or listened to the minstrels or watched the puppets or the light shows. She’d needed to train. She’d needed to hunt. She’d needed to train some more. There was always more to do that might later mean the difference between life and death.
She’d passed her name day, and even she hadn’t noticed. She was becoming all warrior, all the bits of little girl and woman scraped away to leave only muscles and magic and blades.
If she were tough enough, and cold enough, and strong enough, she would go back to Aglaia Crassos’s estate right now. Murder the woman, or kill her, if there was any difference anymore, and be done with this before anything else could go wrong.
You keep moving before your enemy can recover and counter. You don’t stop until they can’t recover, until they can never counter again.
But she wasn’t tough, or strong, or cold in any way except physically right now.
It was time to find Quentin, and report, and then though she knew he didn’t really like to be touched, he was going to hug her while she cried for five minutes, then she would go out again. And she was only going to cry about killing people, not about the whole damned world and her loneliness and her stupid sisters and Kip and, and, and.
Maybe ten good hard minutes. No more than ten. She’d have to make sure she ordered Quentin to be silent. He was good at that at least, orders. Not hugging. He’d probably be a terrible hugger, actually. Too little and bony and fragile and awkward to make you feel safe and warm and enveloped like Kip could . . .
Okay! None of that!
A woman makes do.
Ten minutes, scrawny Quentin, and I don’t start crying until I’m where no one can see me.
Head high, she dropped her bloody cloth into the water, and the sea swallowed her sins, as it had swallowed so many before.
Chapter 59
“You want to know what’s the worst?” Kip asked, staring at the plinth.
“Rhetorical questions?” Ben-hadad asked.
“Swamp ass,” Big Leo said.
“A booger you can’t reach,” Ferkudi said. “Or mosquitoes. If you were trapped with mosquitoes and had a booger you couldn’t reach, that’d be really bad.”
“When you’re two pumps shy of drawing the happy water up from your well and the woman’s husband walks in?” Winsen asked.
“Insubordination?” Cruxer suggested. “Cluelessness? Obscenity?”
“No. Wiseasses,” Kip said. “But after that? When someone tells you the solution to a problem is obvious, and then you can’t figure it out.”
“Huh,” Ben-hadad said. “Never had that happen to me.”
“I hate you guys,” Kip said. “I know we’ve all got things to do, but what am I missing here?”
“The answer,” Winsen said.
“Win, shut it,” they all said.
Big Leo said, “Commander, were you lumping me with Ben’s insubordination or Ferkudi’s cluelessness?”
Cruxer ignored him, though, saying, “Liv Danavis—or whatever she is now—said she’d activated the Great Mirror here. But . . . there’s no Great Mirror here. Right? I mean, is it hidden somewhere else in Apple Grove?”
They shook their heads. It was a small town, and their people had searched all of it. Even if the Mirror were half the size of the one housed in Ru or Dúnbheo, it would still be impossible to hide.
“And saying it’s been ‘activated’ makes it sound like it’s functional, so it’s not lying in some barn or something; there has to be the whole frame system, right?” Kip asked. He looked at the plinth. Was it supposed to be the base of the frame, or where you’d set the frame?
“Well, then, it’s obvious, especially given that,” Ben-hadad said, pointing to the plinth. “The mirror’s buried right under us.”
“Well, yeah, obviously,” Kip said. He looked over at the cracked earth at the base of the plinth. “The crack made that impossible to miss, right?”
He’d missed it. Apparently so had some of the others. They were looking down uneasily.