The Blood Mirror

Thank Orholam that magic and black powder had rendered shield walls and phalanxes mostly obsolete. Teia preferred a buckler or even a targe, which required more agility and perhaps more luck, but less strength and endurance.

“Then from your training you should know,” Karris said. “Shields also kill.”

Teia remembered the lesson now. She quoted Trainer Fisk: “Those who use a shield only to block are ignoring a weapon in their hands.”

Well, shit. There went her whole metaphor about being a shield.

“Teia, you are my shield. You guard me well, but if I get the chance, I absolutely will bring you down on the neck of my enemies.”

And when I shatter, you will cast me aside. Teia didn’t say it aloud.

But Karris must have seen the look on her face. “Yes. If you break, I will take up another. We are not so different. I too am serving in greater hands, and I too fear that I am inadequate for what I’ve been called to do. I too wanted something different from this life.”

“A slave to your duties, huh?” Teia asked.

Karris shot an iron glare at her. She hadn’t missed the notes of bitterness and scoffing in Teia’s voice. “Yes,” she said. “If I had my way, Teia, I would send you and every drafter after my husband, and then I would add every slave and every tradesman and every soldier in my command, and to hell with it if all the satrapies together burnt. Gavin would be ashamed of me, but I could live with his disappointment if I could but live with his presence as well. No, mine is not actual slavery. No one beats or rapes me, but you’re a fool if you think my cold, empty bed is much more a comfort to me than a slave’s pallet or a soldier’s bunk.”

“I’m sorry,” Teia said. The one person she could trust, the one person who knew her now that Kip was gone, and she was venting her bile on her.

“As am I,” Karris said. “Not least for what I’m doing to you. The good news is that this will give us your first solid scent in your hunt for the Order.”

“How so?”

“Here’s one of the few beauties of war. Sometimes pieces put into place secretly must be used openly if they are to be used at all. In the same way that you had to break our normal protocol so that you could meet quickly with me today, someone will have to work hard to get you—of all the Blackguards—onto that ship. That someone will be in the Order. There are really only two options: it’s one of my watch captains or someone of high rank will ask a watch captain to do it for them. So when that captain comes in and shows me the deployment orders, I’ll say that I’d prefer you to stay here; you’re my favorite. If that captain is himself the Order’s plant, he’ll insist on you for some reason. If it’s just a favor he’s doing for some ambassador, he’ll say who asked him to get you on this detail. The watch captain could lie, of course, but I can check on lies. No matter what they do, it gives us something. Given enough time, I’m sure the Old Man could come up with a better stratagem, but he has to act fast here, and he’s juggling other subordinates and tasks—as I am. He’ll have to opt for a direct approach.”

A lead on the Order. That meant an end to infiltration, and an end maybe to all of them. Teia could hardly wait.

“Wait,” Teia said. “Did you say that my second target was the satrapah? The satrapah of Paria? The satrapah is the Nuqaba’s spymaster? I’m to kill both of the most powerful people in Paria?”

Chapter 53

The game seemed trivial before Gavin understood it. His daily bread came down the chute. He caught the loaves if he could before they hit the ground, which would damage the crust.

Then he would examine every bit of each loaf’s surface, looking for an injection site. He often couldn’t find it. The loaves dropped down the chute and collided with several locks on its way to him, so finding a small hole was often impossible.

He would tear open a loaf and smell it, sometimes catching a faint whiff of something off. Then, with a carefully cleaned, dry finger, he would touch the soft flesh of the broken bread, feeling for wetness or any temperature variation.

If he didn’t find it, he would close the loaves up as well as possible and wait. The poison, being liquid, would make the affected bread go gummy after a time.

Then sometimes Andross would baste the poison onto the outside of a loaf, as if buttering a pastry as it baked. That tended to affect either the flakiness or the color of the crust, so Gavin took to examining each loaf for those variations.

It was harder to examine the weekly fruit, not least because that sweet treat called to him in a way the boring bread never could. Some weeks, only a single segment of the lime would be contaminated. Other times, it would have seeped through numerous segments, and he would debate with himself about how much of the poison he might be able to ingest without losing consciousness.

Nor was he always perfect. He’d gotten woozy a number of times when he’d eaten some of the narcotic by accident.

He’d fought through his sleepiness and never lost consciousness.

But that wasn’t the game. That was only the beginning of the game.

As the long days passed, until the summer must surely be over, and deep into autumn, Gavin saw that the game was one of endurance, to see if he could keep the same level of boring vigilance day in and day out, as his emotions cycled down and further down and the sands scoured the gilded grandeur of the idol he’d erected to himself, and it was revealed to stand on bare scaffolding and feet of clay.

This game was not a game; it was his whole life. He had become a bread inspector.

Andross Guile wasn’t checking on him. Had never once come to talk.

There was no one to whom to prove himself. There was, finally, no escape.

Not for him.

There was an escape hatch in this cell. He’d put it there. It required drafting a key whose design he had carefully committed to memory, and affixing it to a pole he would draft in a particular shape to fish down around the corners of the cell’s waste hole and into one dead end. If he could draft, it would have taken him no more than a day to escape.

If he could draft.

“Eat,” the dead man said. “Let Karris be a widow. Let her move on. She probably already has. No one can mourn forever. Especially not a beautiful woman like that.”

Gavin said nothing.

“What if she’s already moved on? The mourning period is over. She probably needs allies badly. A political marriage to the White isn’t something anyone would scoff at. You staying alive only gives her a reason to feel guilty.”