The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,219

not at all,” Kip said.

“Tisis is going to be pissed,” Cruxer said. She was off checking on something on the other side of the fleet.

“Yep.”

“Because this is a bad idea,” Cruxer said.

“I know,” Kip said.

Cruxer made the sign of the seven again and then took a reed. “You know, Blackguard training has very specific rules about keeping one’s ward from putting himself in mortal peril unnecessarily.” He looked at Kip’s open, expectant face, and sighed. “So I guess it’s a good thing we quit before we got to that part.”

Chapter 64

Turning people into meat sacks was the easy part. The problem was disposing of the bodies. For all that Teia now knew dozens of ways to kill, she wasn’t superhuman. Even in her blacks, holding a spear, and soaking wet, she weighed less than two sevs. She’d done tens of thousands of push-ups and curl ups. She’d run thousands of leagues. She’d swum until her shoulders were small blocks of granite. She’d lifted salt bags until veins bulged from her forearms even at rest, and she’d run relays with the Blackguard trainees until she could run down a gazelle on the open plains.

She could climb and jump and balance and fight and shoot a bow and fire a musket and draft—dear Orholam, at the insistence of her Archer sisters, she could even dance tolerably well now—but when it came to lifting a corpse that was more than double her weight, she was hopeless.

The good news was that she wouldn’t need to drag Aglaia’s body far.

In quick glances, Teia watched the noblewoman have her cosmetics applied by a severe old slave woman who was, despite her age and her own plain features, obviously an artist. It was evening, but Aglaia had come fresh-faced from a steam bath at an unmarked private club in the Embassies District. The old slave applied delicate layers of powders and creams with a sure and speedy hand. Teia used the time to scout the estate again.

It was a meeting night for the Order of the Broken Eye. That meant Aglaia had taken dinner in her room, as she apparently always did on the nights when she attended the Order’s meetings, and she’d ‘dismissed’ the slaves except for this handmaid.

Of course, what a woman like Aglaia thought dismissing the slaves meant and what it really meant were very different. She would be angry if she came home and her dishes and food weren’t cleared from her room and her bed wasn’t turned down, a warming plate put between the sheets to prepare them for her.

As if these things happened by magic. As if she were giving her slaves a break rather than complicating their lives. For them, the dismissal meant, ‘Get all the usual work done without me seeing you, and pretend not to see me leave, and never ask about where I’m going or where I’ve been, and there will be extra laundry in the morning.’

At long last, the slave finished her duties. As far as Teia could tell, the slave woman had done magic of a sort Gavin Guile himself would envy. Old Horse Face actually looked attractive, though Teia had no idea why Aglaia was putting on cosmetics. The woman would be donning a cloak and mask, which were required to stay on for the rest of the night.

Well, she thought so, anyway.

Aglaia looked at herself in her mirrors. She seemed dissatisfied with what she saw—for all the wrong reasons, Teia thought. But after a few exasperated sighs, Aglaia dismissed the slave woman.

Teia waited with the patience of a coiled serpent.

The door closed and Aglaia moved to a closet. She pulled a hat box off the highest shelf she could reach. She carried the box to a bed but didn’t open it.

Teia crept forward invisibly on her rubber-sap-soled shoes, moving behind her prey.

Aglaia turned so abruptly, she almost collided with Teia.

Teia shrank bank, eyes downcast.

Aglaia moved forward quickly, but then stopped just as Teia was preparing to lash out with paryl.

Aglaia sat, grabbed a hair tie, and scowling at her reflection, rapidly bound up her long blonde hair into a sensible bun.

This was the moment Teia had been waiting for. She touched her chest where the vial of olive oil had once rested: it had been Aglaia’s threat of sending her to be a brothel slave at the mines.

The blade came free of its leather sheath noiselessly.

“You are not afraid, Aglaia Indomita Crassos!” Aglaia told her reflection. “You think of Marcus. You think of