Chapter 62
Ironfist wore a peculiar white gem on his chest. Teia didn’t recognize the stone, which had always been tucked into his tunic, but she did recognize the leather thong from which it hung.
Apart from his size and musculature, it was the only thing about him she recognized. His bare limbs were manacled to the wall at his wrists and elbows, thighs and ankles. An iron strap held his waist flush against the wall. A helmet was bolted directly into the stone and encased his head completely, locking under the chin, the glass over his the eye slits so dark he could probably barely make out shapes as he twisted his head back and forth painfully.
Little wads of cloth had been stuffed into several of the manacles to cushion them. They were bloody. He’d lost weight, too.
How long had he been here?
Teia was so stunned that she almost didn’t move in time when the door opened behind her. The crying slave girl brought in a bucket of water and stood next to the tub awkwardly. Must have been new.
The Nuqaba touched the water. “You took so long it’s fine now. Begone, and see to it I’m not disturbed.”
The girl bobbed down to her knees and backed out to the door, then stopped. “Blessed? Would you like your bathers?”
“What part of ‘not disturbed’ was unclear? Out! Remind me tomorrow to have the captains put stripes on you.”
After the girl left, the Nuqaba rubbed her thigh in evident anguish. Teia saw what she guessed was a musket-ball scar, months old but still red and angry.
“I want you to know, I wasn’t always like this,” the Nuqaba said, though she didn’t look at Ironfist. “Your Prism friend shot me. I almost died. The musket ball is still in my leg, and the pain is… quite something.” She picked up a little cup of a brownish liquid that Teia assumed was tincture of poppy and drained it.
The Nuqaba gritted her teeth against the taste.
“I made it through four broken bones, a broken tooth, innumerable black eyes, and such humiliations as you would scarce believe at the hands of that husband you left me to, and I never once asked for poppy. But maybe I was scared that it would make me lose control, that I would tell him how I wanted to kill him, how I’d been planning it for years. How he reduced me to seducing his men because I knew I’d need help.”
She walked over to him and removed a pin at Ironfist’s throat.
“Turn your head away. I’m going to bathe.”
Ironfist turned his head, and she replaced the pin, locking his head in place.
She stripped off her overrobe and grabbed a pinch of the cut mushrooms on the table. She tucked them into her lip, then limped over to the bath. She got in, slowly, as she spoke. “They all want everything, Harrdun. I had everything arranged, you know? Hanishu would be my satrap, you would be my general. We would secede from the Chromeria and be our own ruling family, like the Guiles. Instead you refuse me? You get Hanishu killed? For the Guiles? You want to go after Gavin’s bastard son and save him? Why do you care less about us than about them? Where’s your loyalty, brother?”
Teia hadn’t even known Ironfist and the Nuqaba were related. At first, she’d thought this was some sort of weird seduction.
The Nuqaba was Ironfist’s sister?
Oh hells.
The jumble of emotions Teia’d felt on seeing him—terror that he was hurt, inexpressible joy that he was alive, determination to release him immediately, fury at this bitch for doing this to him, and relief that he would take care of things from this point if only she could free him—suddenly shattered.
Teia was here to kill Ironfist’s sister. Right in front of him.
He had never spoken of her, but this was the woman he’d kept a portrait of in his chambers. A man like Ironfist didn’t keep a picture of someone he hated.
“Why? Damn you! Speak!” the Nuqaba shouted, and she flung the empty laudanum cup at him. It shattered on the wall, but Ironfist said nothing.
A quick tap sounded on the door, and it opened. The chief eunuch poked his head in. “Blessed?” he asked.
“Out!” she said. “No, wait. Fuck. The prisoner’s gag is still in. Remove it.”
The eunuch went to Ironfist and pulled a different pin in the helmet, and manipulated something Teia couldn’t see. The eunuch then grabbed a few of the larger pieces of the broken cup.
“Leave them. Go to bed. I’ll not need your services for the rest of the night.”
The eunuch bowed. “Blessed, may I summon your bathers?”
“They’re all spies. Good night.”
He sighed. “Blessed, I worry—”
“Good night,” she said. It was a command.
And as the door closed, Teia had her plan.
“Brother?” Haruru said.
“I didn’t know,” Ironfist said, his voice low and rusty with disuse. “I didn’t know he beat you.”
“Because you were gone! Why? If you were here, you’d have seen. You’d…”
Ironfist, his head still trapped pointing away from her, only sighed. “When… when mother died, I swore vengeance on her killers. I thought it was my fault she’d died. And then I’d foolishly killed the man who held the blade, so we couldn’t be sure who’d ordered it. I know it may seem obvious in retrospect, but mother had many enemies, and not just enemies of our family. There were old rivals and bitter former friends. She was… apparently not an easy woman to get along with.”
“What are you talking about? Mother was beloved. Everyone loved her,” the Nuqaba said. She filled a golden chalice—though this simply with wine as far as Teia could tell.
“No, she wasn’t. You were too young, you don’t remember what she was like, Haruru. You were her baby, her only surviving daughter. She was difficult, but we loved her.”
“And you sure showed it!” she sneered. “Giving away everything she’d worked for to go to the Chromeria.”
A big breath, then, “I went to the Chromeria at the command of the Order of the Broken Eye,” Ironfist said.
Teia saw the shock on the Nuqaba’s face mirror her own. Ironfist? The Order? Ironfist was in the Order?
Ironfist was everything Teia had ever hoped to be. He was her patron Blackguard, for Orholam’s sake. Resolute, loyal, comfortable in command, supreme in competence, unrivaled in confidence. Hearing from his own lips that he was a spy and therefore a traitor, that he was actually part of the Order whereas she herself only pretended to work for it, was like taking your wedding ring in shame to a shop to pawn it, and then hearing the gold ring was brass over lead, that all the precious stones were nothing but colored glass.
Teia was so shocked, she almost lost her grip on paryl and became visible.
“Impossible,” the Nuqaba said.
Teia had told Iron fist everything: not just about Aglaia’s blackmail, but also about the Order. So why wasn’t she dead? Had he not told the Old Man? Why?
“You remember our uncle? He… was able to point me to the right people. I went to them and asked that mother’s murderers be killed. All of them.”
“What?”
“Of course, I didn’t know who those murderers were, or how many there were, and we had very little money then. I couldn’t pay the Order, so they took my service instead. It was too much for me, at first, to swear allegiance to such filth. But then I thought, who has a better claim on my fealty: a distant Orholam or my own family? So I went back three days later, and told them if they would not only avenge mother, but also protect you, I would join them. They said they were not bodyguards, but they would foil any assassination attempts against you they heard of, and would do their best to guard your life. They found and left the evidence for you to find that mother’s killer was in the Gatu tribe. My first test of fealty was to enroll in the Chromeria instead of hunting down the murderer myself. I didn’t know it until he was dying, but Hanishu followed me to the Chromeria because he found out about my oath to the Order. He hoped to save my soul.”
“This isn’t true,” the Nuqaba said. “You were n
ever a liar before. What have those Guiles done to you?”
“Sister, the Order has killed fourteen men for me. But they weren’t above keeping me in the dark. I didn’t know your husband was such a monster. They told me that only four years ago. The captain who helped you? Yattuy? He worked for them… us.”
“Lies. Lies. I did this.”
“Takama Tanebdatt. Tatbirt of the Ishelhiyen. Tadêfi of the coast. Ultra Sinigurt. Aghilas the spearman. Yuba Winitran. Sifax Winitran. Isil Gwafa. Azrur Badis. Idus Aziki. Izem of the Tlaganu. Usem Yuften. Ziri the Stranger. Udad Red. In return, I gave the Order information. It never seemed to really matter, what I told them. It was just family politics, right? Until this war—”
“I don’t care about that!” she said. But obviously now the intoxicants were fully upon her, and she was struggling for clarity. “Those are all the people who stood between me and becoming Nuqaba. You’re claiming you killed them all?”
“I—they were all people who planned to kill you. Once others figured out that opposing you meant risking assassination, those who could be deterred by fear were deterred, and those who were more ambitious went straight to trying to kill you first. It wasn’t what I intended—”
“You’re saying you handed me this seat? That I am Nuqaba only because of you?!”
Teia saw his chest rise and fall in a silent sigh. “You never wondered why all those people died or disappeared? Your enemies certainly did!”
She was silent.
“What? You really thought that you were so lucky? So ‘blessed’ that everyone in your way fell dead at your feet? Dear Orholam, sister, how arrogant have you become?!”
He couldn’t see her face or he probably would have stopped talking, because after her initial shock was the briefest flash of embarrassment like lightning in a distant cloud, and then the thunder of her rage rolled.
Teia started drafting, and she was only lucky that the Nuqaba went to a side cupboard first. Dripping wet, the Nuqaba threw open a drawer and grabbed for something. She swayed, missed, and rummaged. Her hand emerged with a short, sharp knife.
She was so furious she didn’t even speak. She rushed toward Ironfist with murderous intent. Teia tried to make the Nuqaba’s arm go dead with paryl, but she missed the nerve as the woman moved.
At the last moment, Teia abandoned her magical efforts and chopped her hand down across the Nuqaba’s extending wrist. The knife clanged on the floor, nearly striking Ironfist’s leg on the way down.
Teia jerked her arm back within the confines of the master cloak as the Nuqaba rubbed her wrist, baffled.
She looked at Ironfist as if he’d done it somehow, and then she pounced after the knife, dignity forgotten.
This time Teia didn’t go after the nerve in the arm, she went for the spine. She’d had far more practice with this. Many slaves’ worth, Orholam forgive her.
It still took her until the Nuqaba had recovered the knife and stepped again toward Ironfist, undeterred.
“And now,” the Nuqaba said, “you mother—” She raised the knife as Teia got the right grip.
Teia squeezed hard, and the Nuqaba dropped boneless. Teia caught her, but lost the paryl.
It didn’t matter. The Nuqaba was so befuddled in her intoxicated haze by suddenly losing control of her limbs that she didn’t even fight.
“What’s happening? Haruru?” Ironfist said, neck locked to the side. The helmet rattled. “Who’s there?”
Teia had almost wrestled the bigger woman back to the tub when the Nuqaba started trying to fight. Teia squeezed hard again, but her hold on the spine must have shifted because this time the Nuqaba’s body bucked and seized so violently they both went down.
But Teia held on to the paryl at the woman’s throat. Perhaps her very life depended on it. Her grip shifted to the right place again as the Nuqaba fell on her, and the woman went limp again.
Teia scrambled out from under the woman’s dead weight, careful to keep the paryl grip. It was like lifting a fish live from the river, losing the hook, and finding it both too big and too heavy for your hands, praying it didn’t slip or thrash before you got to shore.
She’d lost her invisibility, but maybe it didn’t matter. Ironfist’s face was turned away, and though his helmet rattled with his efforts to see what was happening, he couldn’t—at least as far as Teia could tell.
The Nuqaba’s eyes rolled in terror as she saw the hooded figure standing over her, and her mouth gaped to scream, but nothing came out. She had no control over her body below the neck.
With difficulty, while keeping the paryl hold on her spine, Teia lifted the woman and lowered her into the bathtub. She flopped the woman’s limp arms over the sides of the tub to keep her from sliding down.
Her first thought had been to simply drown the Nuqaba. Drunks passed out and drowned all the time, especially in hot water. It had seemed to be what the chief eunuch had been nervous about. But that wasn’t going to work now.
Not if Teia freed Ironfist.
If she freed Ironfist and the Nuqaba was found drowned, they would assume he’d done it. It wouldn’t matter that there were no bruises on her face, no signs of violence anywhere on her body.
Damn. It had been a good plan.
Teia stood frozen with indecision.
“Murder Sharp?” Ironfist said. “Is that you? Morteza? Is this you and Nouri Sharp? Speak to me, please. You can’t do this. Things are different than whatever the Old Man thought when he sent you, please…”
Teia didn’t answer. It was all true, then. Ironfist really was in the Order of the Broken Eye. It felt as if her world were coming down. The best man she knew was on the same side as the worst men she knew: Murder Sharp and the Old Man of the Desert.
“Don’t you dare hurt her!” Ironfist hissed. Teia had never heard him angry before, had never heard his voice skittering along the edge of control.
She approached him, pulling her invisibility back around her. It didn’t work fully. The master cloak had gotten wet from the Nuqaba’s soaking body and bathing robe, and the master cloak shimmered weirdly in the air where it was damp.
“I can convince her,” Ironfist said. “Whatever it is we need. I’ll make whatever deal you want. I’ve given my whole life and all my integrity for this. Please!”
Teia said nothing. She felt as if her heart had been ripped out. She couldn’t keep this up. She was still barely holding on to the Nuqaba’s spine, and this…
“You leave me no choice,” Ironfist said, and his chest lifted as he took a deep breath to shout an alarm to the guards. But Teia anticipated it, and she slid the spiky gag inside the helmet into his mouth as he opened it, and pinned it in place.
But he hadn’t been inhaling to scream. Instead he spread his arms, wrapping his hands around his chains, bracing his elbows against the wall.
Teia could only watch. There was no way he was going to break those massive chains.
Breath hissed out from the huge man. His muscles went taut throughout his torso and arms. Veins jumped out.
But the chains held.
A moment later, he gasped a breath and went limp.
Teia turned and picked up the knife the Nuqaba had dropped.
A moment later, Teia heard Ironfist’s manacles rattle as he flung himself against them.
Teia stepped close to the Nuqaba. She whispered so Ironfist wouldn’t hear her or recognize her voice if he did. “And now, you bitch, now you pay for your treason.”
She dropped the invisibility so that the last thing the Nuqaba saw would be Teia’s paryl-widened eyes, all black as the hell that awaited her. The woman blanched in terror, and Teia calmly pushed her arm under the water so there would be no spurting, and sliced her veins open from wrist to forearm.
A gush of blood incarnadined the bathwater.
The chains rattled again. Another grunt of expelled air and failure.
Teia grabbed the Nuqaba’s other arm and slashed it underwater, too. Then she lifted it just enough to
drape it over the side of the tub. Blood poured onto the floor like wine from the slaves’ pitchers at the party downstairs.
Teia doused the blade of the Nuqaba’s knife in that already-slowing stream, and then dropped the knife onto the stones beside the tub, careful lest the blood spatter her cloak.
After the action came the horror of it. The Nuqaba was blinking wildly, eyes rolling, face contorting. She clearly wanted to scream. She wanted to weep. She wanted to run. But there was to be none of that, not for her. She was to watch herself die, knowing that her murderer would go free, that this would look like self-slaughter. If she could but yell a single word, she would live.
Teia held the woman, eye to eye, her own muscles knotting with the tension of holding the paryl grip tight on that spine, for long minutes. Under one fluttering eye was a tattoo in Old Parian: justice. Under the other: mercy. But neither winked, neither was any different from the other or different from any woman’s eyes. Haruru was no longer the Nuqaba. In her dying, she was no more a symbol of Orholam than she had been in her living. She was now only a victim of those stronger than she was. Now she was just a woman, dying in her bath.
Teia held the Nuqaba’s spine. The water was a deepening red when she heard Ironfist say around his gag, “Heeaa! Heeaa! Theeaaa!”
Teia.
Fuck!
With a muffled roar, he threw himself against the chains again.
Something gave. Not the chain, Teia saw. The bolt that held one of the chains to the wall had pulled forward.
No, not the bolt—the bolt had held—Ironfist had pulled an entire block nearly clear of the wall. Blood streaming down his arms, he threw them forward again, like an injured eagle flapping its wings, longing to be free.
The masonry broke; an anchor block tore clear.