He smiled at her then, revealing his natural, broken teeth. Like an ancient circle littered with toppled stones where once there had been symmetric perfection, half incisors and dogtooth nubs slumped in front of shattered and missing molars.
“Only pain makes us sharp,” Murder Sharp said. “Only pain makes a Sharp.”
He opened the other box he’d taken from his pocket and lifted a new set of dentures from it. They were fixed with a nightmare assortment of fangs. “Weasel-bear for the dogteeth, naturally. Special animal to all Braxians. Hard to see, near impossible to kill. Takes down prey far larger than itself through patience and then sheer ferocity. Called a wolverine some places. Not sure why. Doesn’t share a thing with wolves so far as I can see. Fox fangs here. Quicker than weasel-bears, and can hide in plain sight, despite that ginger coat.” He smiled his ruined smile again. “And all the rest are piranha fangs, from the rivers of Tyrea that flow into the far ocean. Piranha are frightening by themselves. River pugilists. Jaw like a bare-knuckle fighter. But nothing wants to tangle with ’em when they swarm. That’s the Order, Teia. A river full of piranha with weasel-bears on the banks and foxes in the rushes.”
He tested the edges of the weasel-bear fangs.
“There’s this rare fish in those waters. Damn thing feeds on piranhas. Front fangs this long. Gorgeous, gorgeous fangs.” He sighed. “But too long to fit in a human mouth, sadly. I tried. Bloodied my mouth half a dozen times before I learned. So I settled for the piranha fangs instead. Thought it was appropriate, the predator that everyone fears in turn fears one—only one.”
“The Old Man.”
“The Old Man,” he agreed.
“Are you going to break out my teeth like he broke out yours?” she asked, gulping against the bile rising in her throat.
He laughed softly, exposing those weathered plinths and jagged spires of tooth stumps again. “You think he did this to me?”
Murder Sharp took out a handkerchief and bit down on it. Methodically he worked it around his mouth, keeping his lips back, drying his teeth. He pulled back the blue luxin protective strips from an adhesive lining and then carefully fit the fang dentures into his mouth. He moved his jaw back and forth and took a few experimental bites to see how the fangs meshed, careful to keep his lips clear. His eyes clouded over with something like bliss.
“No,” he said several moments later. “He told me he’d found my disobedience. He told me only pain makes us sharp. Then he gave me the tooth breaker and told me to get out.”
You broke out your own teeth? Teia thought, aghast.
“Murder came back the next morning,” an altered voice said from the shadows.
Teia flinched hard. She’d been so focused on Sharp, she hadn’t even dreamed there could be someone else up here. It was he.
“He came back swollen, and bloody. But he came back with the job done. I had never heard of such devotion, such readiness to pay penance,” the Old Man said. “I told him he had earned my trust and a Name, as were given to the mighty of old. He said only pain makes us sharp. You see?”
He chuckled and Murder joined in.
These people are fucking crazy.
As if she hadn’t figured that out already in nearly a year of serving them.
“I don’t get it. I don’t understand,” Teia said.
“That’s good. A tool should never be smarter than its wielder.”
She wanted to tell him where to go.
“Which brings us to our present difficulty,” the Old Man said. He stayed where he was, against one curving outer wall of the tower. He was hooded and cloaked, and a glint of spectacles was visible—the paryl ones, Teia guessed. “Your actions up until now had allayed my suspicions. Or so I thought.”
“You’ve got to be fucking joking,” Teia said. “I’m still proving myself? Fine. Tell me to kill her. I will. I don’t care. You told me to get close. I am. But I’ve never forgotten what I’m there for. And you still haven’t given me my…”—she took a sharp breath through her nose and corrected herself—“a cloak.”
“Allaying my suspicions is one thing; earning my trust is quite another,” the Old Man said. “But even that is in jeopardy now.”
Teia said nothing.
Murder Sharp had faded back, off to the side, far enough that he was out of Teia’s peripheral vision. The serpent fear in her guts wakened and turned. She looked at him with a challenge in her eyes.
He stared back blankly and started picking at his fangs.
“Let’s talk about your father,” the Old Man said.
“What? Why?” she asked, not able to keep the surprise from her voice.
“The White paid all his debts, right around the time you became a Blackguard. She had no reason to do that.”
There was no pretending ignorance, not with the Old Man. No deflection. “She told me it was normal to look into Blackguard scrubs’ lives to see if there were any ways enemies could exploit them, turn them. I was shocked, too. But she said she was dying and had no heirs, and her wealth could at least do some good.”
“You never told the other Blackguards about it.”
“Well, none of the ones on your payroll, apparently,” Teia said. She sounded like a snotty kid even to herself.
Murder Sharp tensed at her disrespect, and she made a soothing gesture.
“Easy. Sorry. Look, I didn’t tell anyone. Look.” She took a breath. “We all came from different places, and some of us talk about our pasts and some don’t. They can see my ear. They know I was a slave. A fair number of the girls who came from that life… well, we don’t volunteer much, and the others don’t ask. There’s everything from orphans to nobles’ children in the Blackguard. I thought that by telling what she’d done for me I would sound like I was bragging. But yes, absolutely, it meant the world to me.”
“Enough to buy your loyalty?”
“As a slave, I’m pretty attuned to people trying to buy me, thanks. It wasn’t that. She wasn’t using her money to put me in her debt, not precisely. To her, the money was negligible. The effort and the care were the real expenses. She was a great woman, and she was kind to me. I know she was clever, too, but I saw no falsehood in it.”
“But it was enough to buy your loyalty all the same,” the Old Man said.
“If you have to put it like that, yes. Like you ‘bought’ mine by melting down all those silver items I stole that Lady Crassos was using to blackmail me, I suppose.”
He chuckled and wagged a finger. “Point. Very clever, very true. Did it work?”
“It did, until now,” she said gloomily. No, it had never worked. It had always been clear to her that she was working with monsters.
“We killed Orea,” the Old Man said. “Specifically, Murder did. Your master. That a problem for you?”
Teia flinched. As soon as the old woman had come up, she’d been desperately searching her mind for any time Murder had mentioned her, and if she was supposed to know that the Order had killed her—but all her information had come from sources the Order couldn’t—shouldn’t—know about. “I suspected as much,” she said.
“But you never asked. Despite feeling loyalty to her,” Sharp asked skeptically.
“I cared about her, yes. But she was old, dying already. I wasn’t going to ask about it until I knew you trusted me. I look forward. Why risk my own neck for someone who’s already dead?” It seemed so easy, somehow, here in the darkness, to talk and think like those who were empty.
“This,” the Old Man said. “From a girl who likes to hold grudges? You’re not angry at me or Sharp?”
“Oh hell yes! I’ve got a list of things I’m furious at you for,” Teia said. “But I’m not an idiot. Being mad at you isn’t like being mad at your neighbor who gets loudly drunk every night after you go to bed; it’s like being mad at the weather. Raise your fist to your neighbor, you might change things. Raise your fist to the sky, and you’re a fool.”
He seemed to appreciate the flattery. But then he walked over to one of th
e great mirrors on the east side of the tower. It was blackened, burnt—not just soot on the glass, but the silver backing itself was mottled and melted, ruined. “I asked you to meet us here for two reasons: The lightwells are handy to dispose of a corpse if necessary—we can’t disappear a Blackguard, and slipping down these is easy enough that it could be accidental. Second, for this. I like physical illustrations when I can afford them.” He patted the mirror. “Do you know how this happened?” he asked.
“Sir? No.”
“No one does. It happened during the executions on Orholam’s Glare—which is when anything would fail, one imagines. The intensity of that light scared off no few of our newest members. The caretakers of these mirrors are slaves, of course, but highly prized, intelligent, taken excellent care of, like the Blackguards themselves. They swore it must be sabotage, for they would never, never leave so much as a smudge on one of the great mirrors, certainly not before such a grand occasion. Others claim it was the djinn himself who reached his will up and smote the mirror, but that he couldn’t break even one before he died.
“Carver Black himself hasn’t been able to replace it. The backup mirrors appear on their lists of inventory they purchased years ago, but not in their storehouses. Not our work, actually, just old-fashioned corruption—someone long ago lining their pockets. Creating new mirrors of the quality needed to replace this one has been impossible because of the war. They require Atashian or Tyrean glass and silver from the Karsos Mountains bonded by one of three lens makers in Ru. So here it sits, long months after its failure. Marginally useful, kept in place mostly because the other mirrors need the counterweight, not because it does much of anything. It failed its purpose. Perhaps it never should have been put in service in the first place.” He stepped away from it. “I don’t want you to fail me, Adrasteia. I won’t allow it. So I will test you to your limit, and perhaps beyond.”
He took a breath, studying her, and she held herself still and reflective as silver. Let him see only himself in me, she thought.
Then he said, “Your father is here. On the Jaspers.”
And suddenly the cloud of danger suffusing the room like paryl gas crystallized in Teia’s chest, choking her heart. Father? Here? He’d mentioned coming to the Jaspers in that letter last year that Orea Pullawr had shown her, but Teia’d never imagined he’d actually follow through on it.
And the Order had known about him before anyone.
“I want you to prove yourself. I want you to earn my trust like Elijah here did.”
No, no, no.
The Old Man said, “Only pain makes us sharp. Only pain makes a Sharp. Are you ready, Teia? Ready to become a Shadow? Ready to become my left hand as Murder is my right?”
Murder Sharp’s eyes were orbs of midnight. Teia couldn’t expand her own eyes without his seeing it, couldn’t look for the paryl that she knew must be around and through her right now like a choking cloud. Any move that so much as smelled like hostility would mean death now. “We’re your family now, Adrasteia,” Sharp said.
“To become Teia Sharp, you must sever the last link of your loyalty to any other before us,” the Old Man said. “You’ll be given one hour to say your goodbyes, and then you’ll kill your father. You’ll be well paid for this. The rest of your family will be taken care—”
“Fuck you,” Teia said. “No. Never.”
Murder Sharp growled, bestial behind his fangs, but the Old Man held up a gloved finger to him. “Refusal is failure. Refusal is death, child.”
“Then kill me,” she said. She turned her back and started walking away. It was the longest walk of her life, those steps to the door. They stretched out as if she were trekking across the great deserts of the Broken Lands, hope as distant as water.
But nothing happened. It was a torture in itself. She reached the door and put her hand on the latch.
“Stop,” the Old Man said softly.
She turned. He could have stopped her easily enough with Sharp’s skills. Apparently the Old Man was used to the force of his personality doing more than any magic could.
“There are only two kinds of people who will agree to commit patricide—unless they are victims of horrific abuse, in which case all bets are off. But we know your father was no abuser. Those willing patricides? Spies who have no intention of obeying, and those soulless folk who are willing to betray anyone because they are only capable of feigning loyalty, not feeling it. The Order excises both kinds of cancer without remorse. You see, Adrasteia, the thing that makes the Order great is that we are able to do the monstrous without becoming monsters. A girl who will kill her father for nothing more than her own ambition is a viper, and anyone who takes a viper to his breast deserves the bites he gets.”
“You’re telling me this was another test?” Teia asked. “Are you f—” She wrestled the words down. How many could she pass? What kind of lunatics were these people? How many times could she gamble her life before she lost just once?
“And your tests aren’t finished,” the Old Man said.
“I can’t do this forever,” Teia said.
“One more. One last test. One test that will make you a Sharp. One I would entrust to no one else.”
How many Shadows do you actually have? Teia suddenly wondered.
“So what is it? What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Perhaps it just got old. Perhaps it simply… gave up.” He stared again at the blackened mirror, and then he put a gentle hand on it. “The backbone of the Order’s rising power is the shimmercloaks, Teia. Our assassins are frightening, where we have them, but the Shadows are terrifying. No one is safe from you. That power has two limits—there are few paryl drafters, though more than you might think—and fewer shimmercloaks. It means I have to think long and hard before sending Shadows on truly risky missions, because while the men and women wearing them can be replaced, the cloaks cannot.
“There’s a man, Teia, who’s going to go do something vitally important for me. You’re to help him in any way you can. Then, after he’s done it, you’re going to recover whatever weapons he’s carrying, and you’re going to kill him. Just in case he fails—or succeeds in a way I’ve not foreseen. You’ll kill him with this dagger, and you’ll do it while he’s awake. Not drugged, not asleep. Only awake will this dagger capture his will. You will stow away in his ship, and you will be given the Fox cloak to help you.
“You’re going to kill a man after he’s served you?” Teia asked.
“A poor thanks indeed, I agree. But this man is far, far too dangerous to be allowed to live. He would, after this service, hunt us all.”
And then she had a stomach-turning intuition. Who had served the Order, and was now too dangerous to be allowed to live? Ironfist.
But Ironfist wasn’t here, was he? She’d heard some rumor that he’d become King Ironfist. Another that he was coming to the Chromeria for some diplomatic discussion.
Could he have come already? By skimmer?
And what? Been kidnapped by the Order, just like that? Sure, they’d done it with Marissia, but Ironfist?
“If you succeed, you will keep the Fox cloak permanently, and I will return your father to you. He will not only be allowed to come or go as he pleases, he will go home with papers of membership in some very important traders’ blocs with some very important monopolies. In short, he will go home a very wealthy man.”
“Or not at all,” Teia said. “If I disobey.”
He brought his fingertips together and nodded. “And as for you, I’ve already prepared how to explain your absence. You will return to the Blackguard seamlessly, with very few questions asked.”
“My absence?” Teia asked.
“Only pain makes a Sharp, Teia. You’ll understand when you see who you’re being asked to kill.”
So it was Ironfist. Please, Orholam, no.
Teia was that damned mirror. This was her great test, and the heat was too much for her. She was deforming, chipping, cracking. Or this demon before
her was smashing her with his will. In all the time she’d had, she hadn’t tracked down the Order’s membership, hadn’t retrieved the secrets bound up in ribbon, hadn’t found the Old Man’s office, much less broken into it. She’d murdered all those slaves for nothing.
Her father’s life against the life of someone who was serving the Order? Some traitor?
What if it was Ironfist? But Teia couldn’t save Ironfist if she wanted to. She couldn’t save herself, now.
But she could save her father.
“There’s a ship, The Golden Mean. You get aboard secretly and then hide belowdecks until you’re well under way. The crew all belongs to me, but Captain Gunner is… unpredictable. You come back as Teia Sharp, or don’t come back at all,” the Old Man said. He held forth a slender black knife that looked like writhing smoke in his hand.
She took the black dagger.
Chapter 76
“Ah, good, you live.” Grinwoody came in the room with fresh clothes and a basket of food.
Gavin was quivering on the floor. The vomiting had turned to dry heaves quickly enough, and the stomach cramps from the diarrhetic had passed some time ago. He’d been weakly sponge bathing himself since then. He was mostly clean now, for all the good that did him.
Grinwoody gave him water first. Gavin rinsed his mouth of the residual taste of vomit and spat it out. Then real food and clothes.
Nor did the old man rush him. But finally, when Gavin was feeling warm and full for the first time in a year, and a little tipsy from what could have only amounted to a single cup of wine, the counterfeit slave motioned it was time to go.
They left everything. “I’ll burn it later,” Grinwoody said.
Within a dozen paces out into a dim hall, he pushed against a section of wall, and a secret door opened on unseen hinges, silently.
“What’s this?” Gavin asked.
“I made another gamble, months ago. I bet that you would end up in the black cell eventually, because I know your father.”
The narrow tunnel ascended sharply, barely wide enough for Gavin’s turned shoulders to pass, and so short that he had to stoop to walk. But there was no stopping. He felt as if the darkness were chasing him with eager fingers.