It was a meeting night for the Order of the Broken Eye. That meant Aglaia had taken dinner in her room, as she apparently always did on the nights when she attended the Order’s meetings, and she’d ‘dismissed’ the slaves except for this handmaid.
Of course, what a woman like Aglaia thought dismissing the slaves meant and what it really meant were very different. She would be angry if she came home and her dishes and food weren’t cleared from her room and her bed wasn’t turned down, a warming plate put between the sheets to prepare them for her.
As if these things happened by magic. As if she were giving her slaves a break rather than complicating their lives. For them, the dismissal meant, ‘Get all the usual work done without me seeing you, and pretend not to see me leave, and never ask about where I’m going or where I’ve been, and there will be extra laundry in the morning.’
At long last, the slave finished her duties. As far as Teia could tell, the slave woman had done magic of a sort Gavin Guile himself would envy. Old Horse Face actually looked attractive, though Teia had no idea why Aglaia was putting on cosmetics. The woman would be donning a cloak and mask, which were required to stay on for the rest of the night.
Well, she thought so, anyway.
Aglaia looked at herself in her mirrors. She seemed dissatisfied with what she saw—for all the wrong reasons, Teia thought. But after a few exasperated sighs, Aglaia dismissed the slave woman.
Teia waited with the patience of a coiled serpent.
The door closed and Aglaia moved to a closet. She pulled a hat box off the highest shelf she could reach. She carried the box to a bed but didn’t open it.
Teia crept forward invisibly on her rubber-sap-soled shoes, moving behind her prey.
Aglaia turned so abruptly, she almost collided with Teia.
Teia shrank bank, eyes downcast.
Aglaia moved forward quickly, but then stopped just as Teia was preparing to lash out with paryl.
Aglaia sat, grabbed a hair tie, and scowling at her reflection, rapidly bound up her long blonde hair into a sensible bun.
This was the moment Teia had been waiting for. She touched her chest where the vial of olive oil had once rested: it had been Aglaia’s threat of sending her to be a brothel slave at the mines.
The blade came free of its leather sheath noiselessly.
“You are not afraid, Aglaia Indomita Crassos!” Aglaia told her reflection. “You think of Marcus. You think of what the Guiles did to him, and you make them pay.”
It should have stirred something in Teia. Some human emotion. If not an emotion, a question at least. Paryl was supposed to make you more susceptible to feeling, but even handling paryl didn’t do more than make Teia aware of the spot that was numb, like tapping frostbitten fingers against a stranger’s flesh. There was pressure registering farther up your fingers, and you could see the touch. You remembered what feeling was like, but that spot had been pushed so far past pain it wasn’t capable of anything at all.
But this was no time for thoughts or second thoughts.
This isn’t payback. I am merely predator, you are merely prey. No torture. No final words.
Teia squeezed the nerves in each of Aglaia’s shoulders and watched her arms fall unfeeling to her sides. As the woman looked down, wondering why her arms had dropped, Teia grabbed that sensible bun with one hand and rammed the dagger into the back of Aglaia’s neck. With paryl illuminating the gap between skull and spine, Teia’s blade slid in as easily as if Aglaia had lubed herself up for the unwanted penetration with olive oil, and penetrated to the hilt.
Aglaia’s body went limp instantly, but Teia held her in place by her hair, that beautiful blonde hair that provided such a nice grip, and guided her back into her seat.
Teia wrenched the blade back and forth to ensure she’d fully severed the spine, then left it in Aglaia’s neck as she grabbed a rag from a pocket.
She barely got the rag in place around the blade to blot up the blood before it leaked onto the fine chair’s back.
Teia rolled Aglaia out of the chair and onto the bare floor, face-down, dagger up.
Then Teia left her prey and locked the door.
When she came back, she waited a few more heartbeats, and then used paryl to feel for life. You could punch a hole in a man’s heart and he might yet move as you made a full count to ten. The body could be stubborn. It was faster with the spine, but it never hurt to be sure.
Aglaia Crassos was dead. Easy.
A bit of blood and spinal fluid seeped out around the dagger’s blade and into the rag, but with the wound elevated and the heart stopped, there was no more bleeding than that. Teia had picked a short dagger deliberately so it wouldn’t pierce all the way through the woman’s neck. By design, but also by luck, she’d severed the spine without also slicing the big arteries in the neck.
The dead woman had pissed herself, but only a little, and her petticoats had held most of it. A few dribbles had escaped onto the wood floor and none onto the upholstered seat of the chair. Excellent.
Lest it get stained, Teia removed the master cloak and got to work. She untied the two bags she’d tied tight around her waist. The first held half a sev of rocks. The second was larger and made of waxed canvas.
Unhurried, Teia laid out that bag next to Aglaia’s body and opened it. Then, carefully, she put the body onto the bag: lifting and moving feet, then knees, then hips, shoulders, and arms, keeping the dead woman’s face down and wound up always. She slowly stuffed the body inside the bag, buttoning the buttons as she was able.
Then she left off buttoning the bag and cleaned the floor fastidiously. Last, she slid the dagger out of Aglaia’s spine and cleaned the blade, and tucked the rag into the bag as well.
From here it got dicey.
She tested dragging the body, being carefully to keep the wound elevated.
Easy . . . on stone. Teia’s disposal site was a latrine at the end of a long hallway—a long hallway with one of those runner carpets that’s easier to kick out of the way than to keep in place. And Teia was going to be dragging a body down that. Dammit.
There was no way she could add the weight of all those rocks and do that.
That meant she was going to have to drag the body down the hall, then come back, get the rocks, take them down the hall, open the bag, put the rocks in, then lever the body somehow into the latrine.
If she were caught, would she kill the servant who saw her? How about a slave?
Yes, she thought. She’d already decided that. Why did she keep revisiting the choice? In this war, if innocents had to die, innocents had to die.
More innocents, she thought, seeing the faces again.
She pulled Aglaia’s body out into the hall, rolling it until she got to the edge of the damned carpet runner. No blood seeped out, though on this patterned red carpet it wouldn’t have been disastrous.
Hugging the corpse against herself to be able to pull it down the hall without leaking blood was somehow less repulsive to Teia than it would have been to hug Aglaia in life. This was simply meat. The vile part of it had departed, her spirit had been a putrescence worse than the merely physical odors of urine and decay.
Teia made it to the latrines. No problems. There was no blood. It was all clean. Professional.
Teia jogged back and grabbed her rocks. Made it back, put the rocks into the waxed bag with the body, and closed it again. The latrine opening wasn’t overly wide, but mercifully Lady Crassos had been a big believer in girdles and the bag was cinched tight.