by Brent Weeks
“You wipe the wall as clean as you can get it. You peel the tab off, and you stick it immediately to the wall, hard. It’ll hold five times your weight. When you climb down, you pull this off the bottom.” He flipped out a ring. “It’s attached to a string. The string is coated with a solvent. You use the string to pop the crescent off the wall. This is important. You’re to leave no trace, understood? There may be a little luxin left on the wall. It’ll dissolve in minutes.”
“What am I supposed to do when I get there?”
“There will still be a Blackguard or two posted right outside the door. Her room slave has been dealt with.”
“Killed?” Teia asked. He still hadn’t answered her question.
“Sent on a task. We believe the shimmercloaks are in the bottom drawer of the White’s desk. That or in her slave’s dresser in the attached slave quarters.” So that was the goal. Shimmercloaks. Just like they’d guessed. “We expect you have half an hour. The door to the balcony has been left unlocked.”
“You have a Blackguard in your employ,” Teia said. “Why not have him get it for you?”
Master Sharp looked at her like she was stupid.
Oh. Because they didn’t want to expose him. Or her. The Blackguards would be the first people suspected—even though no one would want to suspect them, who else could steal something from the White’s very chambers?
The further implication was that whichever Blackguard was the Order’s man, he would be somewhere with a good alibi during this job. Perhaps it would be someone who was with the White right now. Regardless, it would also have to be someone who could have gotten into the White’s room quite recently in order to unlock the balcony door—which was kept locked at all times since the assassination attempt a few months ago. Between those two bits of information, surely Teia could limit the pool of possible traitors.
Later.
“What do the cloaks look like?” Teia asked.
Murder Sharp bared his too-white teeth at her. Maybe it was a grin. He showed her the inside of his cloak. It was a supple gray cloth, fine-woven. He flipped the cloak over and showed her the pocket at the neckline, gave her a glimpse of the golden choker inside. “One of them is burned at the hem. There should be two. We know the burned one is there. If you bring both, you will find great favor. If you bring only the burned one, they may still not trust you.”
“You’re telling me I could bring you a treasure as great as a shimmercloak and still not be trusted?” Teia demanded.
“The room’s Prudence twenty-seven. Get moving,” Master Sharp said. He scowled, as if he wished he hadn’t given away the part about the two cloaks. “Oh, and the trick with the paryl bubble is to support it with the gas itself. No hard points. If the gas is dense enough, you can hold an open connection to it, and without your eyes black orbs of night. My own master said that our ancient forebears could hold the cloud in formation around them without a shell even as they moved, even in wind, or while sprinting or fighting.”
That was impressive, but… “Why would that help?” Teia asked.
“The shimmercloaks help us lightsplitters attain invisibility. The mechanics of the cloaks are different, but the idea was based on something, you know.”
“You mean…?” Teia started. It was impossible.
“The ancient masters were called mist walkers for a reason. They didn’t need cloaks.”
Chapter 72
Think of it this way, T: you hate waiting. For some insane reason, like every soldier, you prefer the moments of terror to the monotony of boredom.
Teia remembered leading the Blackguard up the cliff path to the fort on Ruic Head. She’d led an assault by the best force in the entire world. Surely she could climb a ladder. She’d climbed up the side of the fort with enemies shooting cannons mere feet away. This would be easy.
To distract herself as she walked, she tried to support the paryl bubble with paryl gas alone. It worked, easily. If she left the bubble open at the bottom, a hands’ breadth above the ground, she could float along inside it and still breathe.
She rounded a corner and saw Kip coming out of the lift. She stopped suddenly and ducked backward so he wouldn’t see her. She forgot to push the bubble back as she did so it shattered when she moved back into it—but it shattered silently and invisibly. She waited. If Kip was coming her direction, she’d see him any second.
But he didn’t come. He must have been headed to the library.
She made it to the lift unseen. She went up to the floor named Prudence—the luxiats’ name for one of the upper floors—and made it unseen. There was no one in the hallways. She made it to room twenty-seven unseen.
The door was unlocked.
No one inside.
She checked the window. It was big enough. It opened easily, and the rope was hanging precisely where it was supposed to be. It was even knotted for easier climbing—which Teia appreciated greatly. She could make it up an unknotted rope, but with difficulty. Her upper-body strength wasn’t what she wished.
She checked the door behind her, secured the bag she was carrying with the climbing crescents, and prayed for about ten seconds. Don’t give yourself too much time. Too much thinking will stop you. You take long enough to prep your gear and gather your wits, but don’t take any time to gather your courage. Courage delayed is cowardice. Courage is action.
But I don’t want to die.
Move, T.
She grabbed the rope, tugged on it. It felt solid. Of course, it would. If they were trying to kill her, they—
They wouldn’t do it in the tower.
She was climbing before she knew what she was doing. Much better. She avoided looking down and worked her way up, knot to knot to knot. It was late afternoon, not exactly the time she would have picked. But this was when the White was out of her room, and Teia didn’t have any choice regardless. At least she was climbing in the shadowed side of the Prism’s Tower, so while the sun was descending, anyone looking her direction would be dazzled by the sun beyond her.
Thank Orholam it was a cold spring day with a chilling wind: hardly anyone would be outside.
The tricky part was always making the transitions, from rope to balcony this time. But Teia was a good climber. She hitched up a foot, swung the rope around it, locking the rope against one of its knots, and used that as a step. With that and both hands on the balcony rail, she vaulted into the balcony as if she did this every day.
It made her think about climbing the balconies at the Lucigari estate with the little girl she’d been bought to be a playmate for, Sarai. Easy.
She checked the door, and found it was unlocked, as it was supposed to be. She glanced inside. There was no one inside. It was a small, plain room, but this high in the tower, it must be the room of a favored slave. Or a room reserved for such, but empty now. Teia’s curiosity was hot, but she didn’t have time to poke around. She stepped back outside, closed the door gently, and examined the climb.
She wished she could use a grapnel, but she knew why she couldn’t. She would descend by the same rope, and that would mean leaving the grapnel behind as evidence. The whole point of this job was that the shimmercloak would simply disappear.
Mercifully, she had plenty of the climbing crescents. She wasn’t going to have to make it a stretch to reach each one. She scrubbed the wall with a sleeve in an area not too high above the balcony railing off to the right, peeled off the blue luxin cap, and stuck the crescent there. She snapped the blue luxin cap in her hand, and it dissolved into dust.
The next crescent went higher, up to the left. Left foot onto railing, right foot up onto the crescent, left hand reaching to the top one. And repeat. No hurry.
The climb wasn’t far, but Teia took her time. As she climbed, she angled to the left. If she fell now, she’d hit the balcony below. In two more steps, there would be nothing below her but the great yard far, far below.
The clouds were thickening and it was getting darker rapidly, exacerbated by being o
n the shadow side of the tower. Teia had a thought, and drafted the paryl gas. With it floating above her head but still connected to her will, she could use it as a torch.
So the ‘ancient masters’ hadn’t only been thinking of invisibility. Having the torch close, but above her instead of in her line of sight, made it much more useful.
The wind gusted hard and she lost the paryl. She clung to the crescents like a spider, pressing her body against the tower.
The wind abated, and Teia drafted paryl again and kept climbing. Easy. She had enough crescents that she climbed higher than the balcony so she could simply step from the crescents to the railing and then drop into the balcony. Her hands were getting stiff and clumsy from the cold anyway. No reason to take chances. She just prayed it didn’t start raining before she got out of here.
She dropped into the balcony and landed lightly. Easy. She squatted there, low, with her hands in her armpits, bringing feeling back to them and resting her tired arms. If she opened that door and there was a Blackguard standing right there, she was going to have to come out here and climb down at breakneck speed.
Thinking of that, she stood and found the tabs on the two crescents she could reach and popped them down. If she had to cut away the crescents to frustrate pursuit, she was going to have to do it fast.
She paused one heartbeat more. She couldn’t use the paryl to look through the wood door; that only worked with thin, permeable materials like clothing. Courage is action, T.
She tested the door handle, turning it slowly. It turned, unlocked, exactly as it was supposed to be. She hadn’t heard any creak from the mechanism, but here on the outside with the wind, she wouldn’t. There was nothing for it. She completed turning the handle and opened the door a crack.
With the curtains drawn, the White’s chamber was dark. The difference in temperature between the chamber and the outside air meant Teia was causing quite a draft. She ducked inside, keeping low, and closed the door behind her. The curtains blew—and settled.
With a quick paryl torch in her hand, Teia scanned the room for hiding places. Had the wind rattled the outer door in its hinges? If it had, the Blackguard standing outside would check it immediately or not at all.
Heart in her throat, she dashed on tiptoe toward the White’s desk as fast as she dared. She stumbled on the edge of a thick carpet and fell to her hands and knees, extinguishing her paryl torch. Because of the luxurious thickness of the carpet, however, the fall was neither loud nor painful.
Teia almost burst out laughing from the ridiculousness and the tension. And then she remembered: laughing might mean death here.
The door didn’t open. The Blackguard outside didn’t check.
Teia collected herself and drew in paryl. She thought for a second, and drafted the shell again. She filled it with paryl gas to be a floating overhead torch for her, and the room lit in her vision. Now that was more like it.
One of the mysteries of paryl was that it was so distinct. It was farther down the spectrum from sub-red, and sub-red was indistinct. Teia had assumed that there was some qualitative property of light that made it finer at superviolet and less fine at sub-red. But something must happen between sub-red and paryl, because she could see perfectly.
Teia glanced into the slave’s quarters. Empty. Easy.
She went to the desk—and immediately broke her paryl shell on the wood. The paryl gas inside, however, was inert. It didn’t go rushing anywhere. With a little sigh—was this the time to be figuring out paryl?—she reformed the shell. She moved forward, let it break, but held the rest of it so that only the part that physically was hit broke. With Murder Sharp’s revelation that she could hold an open connection to the paryl through the gas, it was actually simple.
With great care, Teia went through the desk. How many lethal secrets sat here? Papers and notes and ink and even a number of Nine Kings cards—funny, Teia didn’t know the old lady played. In the bottom drawer, carefully folded, there was a dark cloak. Teia shook it out, revealing a snarling fox stitched subtly gray on gray. The hem was burned short; a gold choker adorned the neck, and the material was thin, silky, but strong. Easy.
Too easy? Teia licked her lips. She rolled the cloak, tucked it into the pack on her back, secured it.
There was no other cloak.
For one moment, panic closed her throat. Then she thought, no, of course there isn’t. This is all a setup, but it’s not a setup for me.
This cloak is so short only a petite woman or a boy could wear it. How many lightsplitters exist? How many of those were petite women or boys? One. They couldn’t kill Teia if she was the only one who could make use of this cloak for them.
It could be a lucky accident, but Teia saw the White’s hand in it. Or if not the White’s, then Orholam’s own. Of course, by some accounts of how Orholam worked, this was his doing even if it was the White’s doing. So…
Thank you, sir. I’ll pray properly when I’m not, uh, risking my life. And I’ll stop skipping weekly worship.
So often.
She was finished. Even if the other cloak was in some other closet, she realized now that it would be tempting death to bring it with her. Forget it.
She was walking toward the balcony when she heard a voice outside the door. The door opened and a Blackguard poked his head in. It was Baya Niel, a green who was a veteran of the Battle of Ru. He’d fought Atirat himself alongside Kip and Karris and Gavin Guile. He was illuminated in the pure yellow light of a lux torch.
Teia froze. There was no cover. Nothing within a jump. Her heart stopped. Battle juice flooded her veins, but where every other of a thousand times it had thrown her into action, this time it failed her, or she it. She couldn’t move. She knew what was going to happen next. Through the paryl cloud surrounding her, she saw something odd about the yellow light reflected off Baya Niel’s ghotra, his nose, his arm, which was turning, turning.
If it wasn’t her imagination, the yellow seemed to give Teia a strange clarity, a fast understanding beyond her own intelligence. She could kill Baya Niel, the logic of it told her, she had the paryl in hand, and she knew how to drop him limp to the floor in no time.
But she couldn’t kill a Blackguard. Not to save herself.
A thought flitted through her head: I could have just asked the White for the cloak, and she would have given it to me.
When Baya Niel saw her, he would have already been briefed by the White on the plan and he would do nothing, or he would capture her, and Teia’s usefulness as a spy would be destroyed. There were ways out of this, but none of them were acceptable—and that was the strength of yellow. It wasn’t the pure, detached logic of blue or the passion of the reds. It was logic and emotion balanced. Teia surrendered to that implacable human logic. She stood still, unthreatening, as Baya Niel swung the lux torch into view.
Teia’s skin tingled like snowflakes teasing every nerve. Some disembodied part of her felt like her skin was kneading dough, pulling apart and drawing back together.
Baya Niel’s gaze passed right over her. He shot glances around the room, searching. His eyes went right past her again, through her, beyond her, and again. She wasn’t six steps away. He wasn’t pretending not to see her. She saw his eyes. They didn’t even hesitate. There was no flicker of refocusing. He wasn’t being clever; he was blind to her. And as he swung the lux torch this way and that, Teia’s brain seemed to hiss and spit.
And in that second, Teia knew. That lux torch. Her cloud of paryl. The lux torch gave off a single tight spectrum of yellow light. That, paired with the paryl’s refocusing properties, meant that Teia’s light splitting had to deal only with one single spectrum of light. It was a small enough challenge that she was doing it—unknowing. This was what the ancients did, while moving, with every spectrum of light at once. Teia was doing that, albeit without moving, and with only a fraction of yellow.
Baya Niel swung his torch back out of the way and closed the door.
Teia was off like a bolt. She
ran to the door. As she opened it, gently, she heard Baya Niel’s voice. “You know,” he said, “I should check the locks out to the balcony. Those boys they’ve jumped up to full ’guards keep forgetting—”
She didn’t hear the rest. She slipped out of the door, shattering the paryl and losing it. She closed the door just as the other door opened. The difference in air pressure was a quick hiss. She climbed over the railing and onto her climbing crescents. She pulled the tab of the first one, exposing the razor string. She pulled the razor string in a quick circle, cutting the climbing crescent off the wall.
Teia took a quick step down as the door to the balcony opened and full-spectrum light flooded out. Despite her prayers, there must have been misting rain while she was inside, because the lower crescent was slick and her foot slid right off it. With one hand filled with a climbing crescent and one foot flying into space, she grappled spasmodically to keep from flying off the tower.
Her body swung and slapped against the tower. She lost the climbing crescent in her free hand, scrambled, and held. She was low enough that her knee was almost in the foothold she’d missed. But that was no good. The spacing was for feet and hands. She pulled, her left arm trembling, her hamstring screaming, and pulled herself back up, got her right foot back where it belonged.
There was no time to pause. If he looked over this edge, he’d see her. She pulled a tab, circled the razor wire, and retrieved the next crescent, putting it in her pack. Took a careful step down onto the next slick crescent, repeat. She had barely disappeared under the balcony and taken a deep breath when she heard a “Huh.”
Yellow light stabbed the darkness as Baya Niel held the lux torch out over the side where Teia had just been. Then it swung back.
She heard the door open and close.
She let her muscles recuperate for a few moments. They needed the rest, but waiting too long would mean letting her cold fingers get stiff and clumsy.
Nonetheless, she was methodical, and she made it down to her balcony with no problem. There was a heavily cloaked man inside the room sitting with his back to her. The sight of him suddenly there almost made her faint.
