The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,221

this war, if innocents had to die, innocents had to die.

More innocents, she thought, seeing the faces again.

She pulled Aglaia’s body out into the hall, rolling it until she got to the edge of the damned carpet runner. No blood seeped out, though on this patterned red carpet it wouldn’t have been disastrous.

Hugging the corpse against herself to be able to pull it down the hall without leaking blood was somehow less repulsive to Teia than it would have been to hug Aglaia in life. This was simply meat. The vile part of it had departed, her spirit had been a putrescence worse than the merely physical odors of urine and decay.

Teia made it to the latrines. No problems. There was no blood. It was all clean. Professional.

Teia jogged back and grabbed her rocks. Made it back, put the rocks into the waxed bag with the body, and closed it again. The latrine opening wasn’t overly wide, but mercifully Lady Crassos had been a big believer in girdles and the bag was cinched tight.

“One last thing, Lady,” Teia said. She drew the short dagger again and stabbed it low in the corpse’s stomach to pierce the intestines. She almost gagged at the gases it released as she withdrew the knife, but those were smells not out of place in a latrine.

She pierced the bag in several other places. The stones at Aglaia’s feet would pull those lowest, so Teia made the holes near her head.

Then she began stuffing the body down the latrine. Bit by bit, each grunt and heave a labor pang, Teia squeezed Aglaia’s body through the death canal and out of this life.

Shit you were, my lady, and to shit you return.

But the body only dropped a few feet. With a muffled clang, the rocks inside hit metal. Teia froze for a moment, then remembered. This mansion’s indoor latrines had a metal plate below that swung open to drop waste and then swung closed again to keep the odors below from being blown constantly back up into the house.

Teia found the handle, and with effort because of the weight of the body on the plate, was able to slide it aside.

Lady Aglaia plopped like an especially large turd into the effluvia below. Teia slid the plate closed, went invisible, and waited in the hall.

With every corpse she left, Teia was inviting the Order to suspect her existence, so every kill had to account for the body somehow. Here, Teia had already scouted the mansion for disposal areas, going as far as directing paryl gas between the walls and eventually down the latrines. Here there was a holding area for the sewage—a septic pit?—Teia hadn’t known anything about sewage.

But with what she’d learned from Quentin, she’d made her bag. Enough murdered bodies washed ashore every week on the Jaspers that Teia knew they bloated with gases and floated to the surface, white ghastly things. So she needed the rocks to keep Aglaia’s body down. She’d pierced the stomach to allow the release of accumulating gases and pierced the bag to make sure it didn’t inflate and buoy the body to the surface.

Their hope—they hadn’t done this before—was that the body would decay naturally in the sewage but that the bag would slow the rate of decay. They didn’t want the body to bob to the surface, where it had a chance of being seen. They also didn’t want it to decay so quickly that anyone using the latrine would smell death.

Instead—they hoped—the air that blew through the sewage ducting would have a chance to take the smell of decay a little bit at a time.

Teia almost left before she remembered the hat box. As she slipped back into Lady Aglaia’s chambers, she saw a slave on her way back up the steps to clean out the room.

Teia grabbed the hat box with its Order mask and robes and walked to the closet.

Damn. Me.

Aglaia had gotten the box down from the highest shelf she could reach. Unfortunately, Aglaia had been significantly taller than Teia was. The shelf was too high for Teia.

Teia hopped and tried to shove the box into its spot.

Not even close to high enough.

Oh, for Orholam’s sake, a stupid hat box!

But any wrong detail could give her away—even stupid ones. She had to be a ghost, and ghosts don’t leave evidence. She looked at the door. She had only one shot at this.

If she missed, it was going to be a disaster. This closet was a