In this past year, she’d adjusted to the quick glances necessary to keep her eyes unseen, to the dodging and darting while keeping the cloak tight about her form so her feet wouldn’t show. She knew when to be visible and when to disappear, when to gather luxin and pack it so that she’d never be without if she had to dodge indoors or to some dark area where paryl was scarce.
But there was something in one’s mind that refused to believe one was truly unseen. It was too unnatural. When eyes crossed one’s face, something in the mind fiercely held that one had been ignored but wasn’t actually invisible.
Thus, the paranoia that popped up at irregular intervals—a sticky, oily feeling, like a predator’s eyes were on you in your bath.
And right now the feeling was strong.
The entrance to the luxin bridge called the Lily’s Stem was a natural choke point. Here half a dozen of Andross Guile’s Lightguards stood watch. They were thugs one and all, armed with muskets and blunderbusses smarter than most of them. Less conspicuously, four Blackguards would be somewhere farther back. Teia took her time finding them, hanging to the edges of the crowd so she wouldn’t be bowled over while she searched. Being terrifically short was terrific when you wanted to disappear in a crowd, and horrific when you wanted to find anyone else.
She found them all, and knew them all. Not one was a sub-red or superviolet.
So she should relax a little.
But she couldn’t. She kept flaring her eyes to paryl, kept circling, kept searching, searching, gnawing on that feeling like she was one of those tiny dogs trained to run in a wheel that turned a spit for cooking, and she’d been thrown an ox bone and couldn’t crack it open with her weak little jaws.
She couldn’t draft paryl or keep the cloak working forever, though.
Fine, I’m afraid. Since when has that stopped me?
She moved, slipping into the stream of humanity passing gushing into and then out of the Lily’s Stem. The waves battered the covered luxin bridge as effectually as her fears. She moved fast, as fast as she could, riding right at the edge of foolhardiness. If her worst nightmare was true, and she was being pursued by some other Shadow, sent to murder her for her disobedience and to reclaim their Fox Cloak, they’d have a hard time matching this pace. Teia was damn good at this now.
Coming upon the exit of the bridge, she slipped into the back of a narrow wagon transporting empty tun and hogshead barrels from the Chromeria’s larders. She wedged herself into a narrow spot where she could only see the sun, and thus not be seen herself, and let her invisibility go.
Without the paryl in her, it seemed the rational blue light from the luxin tunnel did much less to ease her. She felt shaken, jittery, a runner wobbly long before the last lap.
She had leagues to go yet before she was safe.
She pulled herself together, removed and rolled up the master cloak, and put on the Fox Cloak; loosed her belt, letting out the extra folds of her tunic to make a simple dress, colorful banding already stitched to it; pulled up her trouser legs and bound them at each knee; flipped her belt over to the opposite side, red for black; and rolled her sleeves up and her tall boots down. She donned a large necklace and bound her hair tight and pulled on a wig of wavy brunette.
Fear is a tortoise; its jaws will snap you clean in half if you let it—but it’ll only catch you if you don’t move, Teia’d learned.
Teia moved too fast for fear to follow.
Right now, she was just a lazy serving girl hitching a quick ride so she didn’t have to walk. A little innocent mischief. She emerged from the barrels and slipped from the back of a wagon as it passed through a knot of people near an intersection.
In moments, she was better than invisible. She was anonymous. Unremarkable. Unseen.
The bright, rich districts—where the Chromeria’s every be-serifed whim was captured by bespectacled scribes in official green ink and stamped with a reeve’s seal and enforced by women armed with abacuses and bad attitudes and wearing ridiculous plumed hats—soon yielded to neighborhoods ruled by attitudes as foul and condescension as thick, but wielding tools sharper than a quill that writ decrees in a redder ink.
But Teia couldn’t tell the difference between green and red anyway, and here her heart quieted some of its panicked thunder as of a summer squall passing into the distance.
She didn’t let down her guard, of course. It was still a dangerous neighborhood, and the slight but perilous possibility of having picked up a tail was still present.
Her goal now was a series of blind alleys she’d discovered in a slightly nicer neighborhood nearby. The alleys led to . . . well, to nothing. Situated here on the dark side of Weasel Rock, the neighborhood wasn’t the kind to attract passersby, but not quite a slum, either. The locals would avoid a dead end, but they also wouldn’t allow any gangs to take up residence.
Teia could hide and wait for an hour or two for any pursuit. If none came, there was a spot where she could climb out of the alley to a rooftop in case her highly hypothetical pursuer followed this far, actually knew that this alley was a dead end, and tried to wait her out.
You poor bastards, she thought. You have no idea how good I’ve gotten.
No one’s chasing you. They don’t know there’s anyone to chase. The Order doesn’t even know you’re here, T.
From little contextual clues, Teia’d guessed out that Murder Sharp was the best of the Order’s Shadows. And further, that he was gone, which could mean he’d be gone for months yet. That meant any Shadow who might possibly come after her was second-rate. She was just being paranoid.
It was easy to impute legendary status to these people, but Teia had seen a little glimpse behind the façade. Anyone can kill if you give them invisibility. And the Order had to take those who were (1) murderous, (2) loyal, (3) able to split light, and (4) able to draft paryl.
That couldn’t leave that many candidates.
Martial prowess, intelligence, flexibility? None of those could even make the list of requirements.
Being a bit scared made her careful, and that was good when the stakes were so high, but she couldn’t make them out be to gods or something.
She’d take up a position around the third sharp corner, she thought. Just in case she was a bit slow to take down her opponent and there was a fight. A brief fight. That she would win.
Stepping around the corner, she saw the briefest hint of distortion like a floater in her eye, so close she couldn’t focus on it—and she ran nose-first into something that wasn’t there. She reeled back, but instead of trying to keep her feet, she flopped to the side, her body reacting faster than her mind.
Someone! Not something! her mind shrilled. Paryl! Move or die!
Rolling, desperate, eyes streaming at the blow to her nose, Teia jumped to her feet, her hand stabbing down into the gun pouch at her hip, slipping over the smooth ball handle of the pistol.
And then someone unseen cuffed her upside the head, like she was a child, not an assassin. An arm circled around her chest and another around her neck, and as he tightened that arm on the sides of her neck—a dangerous move no Blackguard would use, because though it was meant not to, it could kill—she heard a voice, his voice.
“All my work, and you throw it away at the first tough job. You’re such a disappointment, Adrasteia,” Murder Sharp said.
The blackness was rising even faster than her terror, but Teia clawed at the pistol in its pouch. His foot was right next to her own, and there would be no time for aiming carefully before she lost consciousness.