The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,307

imagined it.

He headed back to work.

Chapter 88

It was no pleasure to cut through the layers of defense Kip had set up at his headquarters. If Teia could do it, so could other Shadows. The best of them anyway.

Fine, there was some pleasure in it: for the first time, she was able to experience the blend of using her magical and her physical dexterity without having to dread why she was doing it. Before now, an infiltration meant she was going to commit murder.

Today, she was simply going to . . . what exactly?

She wanted to talk to Kip before they died. Maybe she knew something that could help him. Maybe she could do something to help him. Hell, she was an assassin, wasn’t she? She could probably make all sorts of his problems go away.

And for Kip she’d do it. No questions asked.

After all, what was one more soul in her ledger?

There was one paryl drafter in Kip’s entourage. Slow girl, paryl leaking out of her like a sieve, inefficient, unfocused. Teia could have gotten past her without even being invisible.

Still, she had to be careful. Anyone who glimpsed a heel or the eyes of an otherwise-invisible intruder was going to shoot first and ask questions later, literally.

Teia was good now, but enervating a finger before it twitched on a trigger? She wasn’t that good. And paryl certainly wasn’t going to stop a musket ball.

It took only half an hour of being on the street until she slipped into Kip’s suite, not completely certain that she’d managed to silence the hinges from outside the door, though she had wrapped them in layer after layer of paryl.

This was not Kip’s suite, she realized as she got inside.

It was Kip and Tisis’s suite. And Kip was gone. Tisis sat at a large table, quill in hand, scribbling. She looked tense.

Teia took a step forward. The plush rug under Teia’s foot sank pleasantly, but then—

Click.

Oh shiiiiit.

“I would hold very still, were I you,” Tisis said, laying down the quill and raising her gaze, studying the emptiness in the air as if she might see through Teia’s invisibility. She took a deep breath as she realized she really couldn’t. “Trouble with being a Shadow: your eyes have to be visible to gather light, so you like to only look up in little glimpses, huh? Keeps you from studying ceilings carefully.”

Gathering the folds of the master cloak between her eyes and Tisis, Teia looked up to one side. Half a dozen muskets and crossbows pointed at various angles toward her and around her, in case she jumped away from the trap she’d just stepped into. All of them were behind a sheet of glass thick enough to defeat paryl from penetrating it, but thin enough that a bolt or musket ball would have no such difficulty. She assumed the other side had another half-dozen as well.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” Teia said.

“Teia, I presume?” Tisis asked.

Teia shimmered into visibility and took down her hood. “ Benhadad’s work?” she asked, pointing a thumb to the death trap. Thanks for telling me about this, Ben. Jackass.

“His design. An underling did the work. That’s why it’s not armed yet.”

“It’s not armed?”

“I know how bureaucracies work. I figured that if someone ordered an assassination by a real Shadow, getting permission and then setting it up would take at least until this evening, whereas you might come immediately. But that was just a guess. I’m glad I was right. Nice to, um, see you.”

“I’m, uh, real glad to see you again, too,” Teia said. Because getting caught in a stupid trap like a moron is exactly how I wanted to re introduce myself to Kip’s gorgeous and competent wife. “So I can step off this?”

“Of course,” Tisis said.

Bobbing her head to look down at her feet, Teia stepped off the pressure plate.

A thwang and the sound of breaking glass made her head snap up. Shards of glass fell from its frame in front of the weapons to the floor, shattering. One crossbow had discharged.

Teia’d heard too many tales of men being fatally wounded without realizing it to feel relief immediately. Had that been a breeze she’d felt on her neck?

She reached up to the back of her neck. It was dry, mercifully dry. But something tickled her neck. She pulled it into view: a clump of her hair, cut by the crossbow quarrel.

If Teia hadn’t dipped her head to look at her feet . . .

Their gazes locked.

“I am