She might have been teasing. Teia couldn’t see the Nuqaba’s facial expressions in the few brief upward glimpses she afforded herself.
Teia was, of course, invisible, but coming into the feast in the great hall had not been one of her better ideas. It was called a great hall, and indeed, it was huge, but it was also filled with nearly a thousand people. They weren’t quietly sitting at their tables and talking and eating, either. They were milling about, grabbing wine jugs and food from beleaguered kitchen slaves, gambling, singing along to musicians, grabbing the asses of the slave dancers, kissing, gambling, and Teia didn’t even know what else. A yellow show drafter appeared to have eaten a large quantity of hallucinogenic mushrooms and was sketching wonders in the air and blathering incoherently.
It was still a good five hours until midnight.
“This what happens when the first four courses consist of beer, wine, brandy, and arak,” a nobleman said to Teia. He started when he looked toward her and saw nothing. “Oh, Nwella, I thought you were standing right here,” he said to a woman a few paces away.
He must have sensed Teia’s presence. Her breathing? Had she made a sound? How could he have heard that in this cacophony?
She hadn’t come directly to the high table on purpose. Instead she’d been driven here as she’d dodged into what gaps she could see. She’d thought it would be safe to come in here, that anyone who ran into her would likely be drunk and not even notice it. Instead, because whenever she wanted to see she had to uncover her own eyes, it meant she was giving hundreds of people a chance to discover her, over and over again.
Satrapah Azmith looked baffled. “You’re not really considering…”
The Nuqaba picked up a narrow sausage and looked at her. She took a bite and chewed, apparently in no hurry to answer her.
“So tell me again why you think I shouldn’t unveil him here. Would it not be a demonstration of my power? To have plucked such a prize from the Chromeria itself?”
“Fuck that. I’m not even talking about that idiotic idea now,” Satrapah Azmith said. “Are you really considering letting them demote me?”
“Oh, I’m considering doing it even if we reject their proposal. You seem to be forgetting your place in our partnership.”
It hit the satrapah like a punch in the face. “Are you…” She looked as if she were struggling to contain herself, and failing. “Are you fucking insane?”
The Nuqaba sucked the juices off long, gold-lacquered fingernails. “Careful, old woman. Addressing me with such language flies perilously close to blasphemy.”
“Blasphemy? Who do you think…” But the satrapah regained control of herself, and stopped speaking, though she did set her cup down with a bang.
Teia wanted to see how this turned out. What the satrapah did, what she said afterward, and what she would do when the dinner was over. Would the Nuqaba apologize when she was sober? Would she take some vengeance? For Orholam’s sake! The satrapah was the Nuqaba’s spymaster! If there’s one person you don’t threaten, it’s got to be your spymaster, right?
But it was all irrelevant. Satrapah Azmith was flushed with rage, and that was all Teia needed. What she might do or might say, or that she seemed like a nice woman, that all meant nothing.
The warm, red light of the fire in the great hearth and the many torches suffused Teia and gave her all the passion she needed.
She was become death, and she would collect her due.
She’d already scanned the satrapah’s body. The blood vessels around her heart were already narrowed, as Teia would expect in one who’d had so much stress and so many years and a rich diet to boot.
One by one, Teia brought paryl crystals into the woman’s bloodstream, making many little crystals of it in the vessels leading to her heart. One for each slave she’d had to kill for these bastards.
The satrapah’s own body attacked those invaders immediately, forming clots. Teia merely nudged the clots closer toward each other, helping them glom together. One passed through the narrow opening and whooshed right through.
Then another, as Teia had to dodge a servant carrying the next course of the meal.
But Teia had made half a dozen clots, and one caught. Then another, on another ventricle of the heart. She started moving to get out, and barely heard the woman grunt.
How dare you act decent and kind? How dare you merely do your duty while you served this monster? A thousand slaves might die at your word, and a hundred thousand if you nudged the Nuqaba one way rather than the other. And you didn’t care. All you cared for was yourself.
How dare you? How dare you show a face to me that seemed kind and good?
There is nothing kind and good.
Teia slid as far as a slaves’ door before she turned around. Tilleli Azmith was grabbing her left arm and grimacing.
It was over. Teia had claimed some small vengeance. She didn’t even need to see her work.
As she turned away, Teia heard a crash as the woman fell.
“Tilleli?!” the Nuqaba said. “Satrapah! Damn you! What’s wrong?!”
Teia felt only a warm satisfaction, the lambent radiation into her soul of a big fuck you to all of them.
“Tilleli?!” the Nuqaba shouted, as everyone else went quiet in waves—music cutting out, awkward laughs hanging in the air from people who hadn’t seen yet, and gasps from those who had. “Tilleli, don’t you do this to me!”
Teia looked at the Nuqaba’s puffy, stupid face, and thought, One down.
The night wasn’t over yet.
Chapter 59
“The question is why the White King changed his strategy so drastically. All these months of raiding, and we haven’t answered that damned basic question!” Kip said.
Weeks after the attempted assassination in the woods, the Mighty were seated around yet another fire at yet another camp, having yet another talk. It was not the first, nor indeed the fifteenth time Kip had asked the question aloud.
“I know we need to talk about the battle tomorrow, but this first,” he said. He had grown more comfortable with giving commands, even ones nobody liked. And they’d grown more comfortable accepting them, too. Not even Winsen complained that it was late and they probably weren’t going to solve what he saw as a nonproblem.
They knew he’d get to the battle plan, and that they’d need to be sharp when he did, in case he had in-depth questions about their positions.