The Broken Eye
Page 147
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.
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.
