“I know! Why are the magisters so—”
“You’d be mopping for the miss,” Teia said.
The girl’s brow wrinkled and her mouth pursed.
“Look,” Teia said. “I’m sorry for scaring you.”
“I wasn’t scared!”
“Truth is, Clara, you scared me.”
Clara looked incredulous.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” Teia said. “Well, I sort of am. It’s complicated.”
Orholam, I can’t kill her. You’re the god who spares the innocent. Can You keep this girl’s mouth shut? Because I can’t do this anymore. I can’t kill the innocent anymore, not to justify a hundred other murders. Not to justify saving a thousand lives someday, maybe.
“I’m working for the White,” Teia said very quietly. “It’s a secret mission. I’m not supposed to be on the Jaspers at all. If you tell anyone you saw me, people will die. Me among them. Can you . . . can you not tell anyone you saw me for one week? I’ll probably be dead by then anyway. It’ll be a juicier story if I turn up dead, and then you can tell everyone. But if you tell anyone now—even your friends—Clara, I can’t even tell you how bad it could go. A lot of people will die. Good people.”
Clara shrugged, offended. “I can keep a secret!”
Right, and how many fourteen-year-olds will admit they can’t? “One week,” Teia said. “Two if you can. Unless I turn up dead, then tell whoever you want.”
Her duty had become like that old little flask of olive oil that she’d gripped so hard in her fist that her fingers cramped. Holding on to it had meant everything, everything. Now she prised her fingers open one by one.
Orholam, this is Your war. If You want us to win, You’re going to have to handle this little girl. I’m done killing innocents.
“You’re serious,” Clara said. “I thought you were just going to make love with that boy and were looking for an empty room.”
“Ben?” Teia said. Oh hells. Now she’d said Ben’s name.
“He’s cute!” Clara said.
“Cute?” Teia asked. “No! I mean, sure, he’s fine. But he’s like my brother—look, I’m not talking about this!”
“Will you show me paryl tricks?” Clara said. “I think it’s what I want to study. I’m a yellow myself, but I love research, and no one’s done credible research on paryl since Aldib Muazon.”
This was turning all sorts of directions Teia hadn’t expected. But maybe this was salvation. “If . . .” Teia said. “If you show me you can keep one secret, I’ll tell you more.”
I am screwing the future me.
But I’m totally fine with screwing the future me. If I’m alive to be screwed, that’s a win.
“It’s a deal. Can I . . . can I get my mop?” Clara asked.
I almost killed this girl, Teia thought. “Of course.”
In five minutes, the girl was gone, happily humming.
Teia didn’t know if she’d just signed a hundred death warrants, but somehow the worry that she had sat side by side with a specter of faith that it was all going to work out.
She was afraid to examine that specter for fear it would fall apart at a touch, but it sat there, quietly, at the corner of her eye. And when she took a breath, it was a little less tight than her breaths had been for a year.
The room, as it turned out, did have a secret door, hidden behind a hinged bureau. The magister who lived here was using it to store her extra clothing and books and a couple skins of good brandy.
Of course some of the secrets would have been found over the centuries by others.
The next hidden room they found had been converted to a private drug den, with narcotic plants growing everywhere next to an access to the tower’s lightwell and pornographic texts on the shelves. The next, on another floor, hidden among the married couples’ apartments, appeared to have been found but then lost again for decades, with a heavy coating of dust, a desiccated rat on the floor, and a single pair of wadded-up men’s underclothes that looked brittle with age.
There was a story there that Teia wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
As they found each, Ben-hadad seemed to home in more easily on the next, as if not just the architecture but the architecture of the builder’s own mind was opening up to him. “Last one,” he said, “it’s on the way. Then I’ll take you to the place I think it really is now.”
The access room to that one was occupied, but Ben-hadad came up with some breezy lie and the old magister toddled her way off to lunch.
In the hidden room behind her apartments, they found a corpse, nearly skeletal, facedown, with the back of his head caved in.
“Dead many years, I’d guess,” Ben-hadad said.
“But when he was fresh, how could they not smell him?” Teia asked. “These rooms aren’t airtight.”
“The infirmary occupies the entire floor below us. I’d imagine many unpleasant aromas escape. Or perhaps the occupant was herself the murderer, and had stayed long enough that the odors disappeared. A mystery.”
“But not our mystery,” Teia said.
“Agreed,” Ben-hadad said. “If we make it through all this, we’ll dig deeper and see if we can get him justice.”
They left that room undisturbed, and with as little evidence of their passing as possible, in case the current occupant was the murderer herself, as unlikely as that seemed. Regardless, they wouldn’t want to spook her.
But they didn’t head back to the slaves’ stairs.
“This last one . . .” Ben-hadad said. “This last one’s special. We can’t use the stairs. It’s accessed from the lift.”
“From the lift?” Teia asked. “But the lifts have got to be the most frequented areas in the towers.”
“Not at the top levels they’re not.”
The idea that the Old Man of the Desert might have access to the top levels of the Chromeria shot a chill through Teia. But it wasn’t like it was a new idea to her. She’d figured the Old Man had to be a high-level diplomat or noble or even Blackguard. Of course he’d be rich, and he’d have access to all sorts of disguises. But knowing that his lair was within spitting distance of the Blackguard barracks—an assassin lord, right under the noses of those whose main purpose was to stop assassins?—sickened her. It made it real. Ironfist wasn’t just a one-off. They were everywhere.
“It would have to be quick to access,” Teia said.
“It’s between floors. You get to it from the back of the lift. A quick pause, set the brake, reset the weight to an empty lift, and the lift returns to the top floor automatically.”
“So the Old Man has to be someone who gets on the lift alone often,” Teia said. It narrowed her list a little. A Blackguard captain? “No, never mind. That isn’t true,” she said. “I was assuming the Old Man would have to visit his lair often. But he might only visit fortnightly, or even monthly. Anyone who takes these lifts regularly would have many chances to be alone briefly enough to get into such a room.”
She wasn’t going to find out who he was in time. She was going to fail again.