But when she did dilate her eyes, she saw something altogether different. Below sub-red, below sub-red as far as sub-red was below the visible spectrum, farther, was her color—if color it was. The books called it paryl. Paryl was pure and beautiful and mostly useless. It was so fine it couldn’t hold anything. So fine the few books she’d ever found that tried to make some translation of paryl called it spidersilk.
Except, of course, spiders could hang from their webs. Teia knew better than to try that with her color.
She was starting to get nervous about the mirror slaves’ shift changing. They didn’t mind her being in their tower, but they couldn’t get out while she was inside. And the moment when she left the tower in her disguise was the most vulnerable time of her day. She’d dilated her eyes all the way to paryl when something flickered at the corner of her vision.
A wisp of paryl smoke swirled and disappeared over the crowd, a hundred paces away.
No one noticed it, of course. No one could notice it. Teia hadn’t even met anyone who could see paryl, much less draft it.
It had to be her target. That was how her targets came marked: wisps of paryl in their hair or on top of their hat, burning like flameless fires. It made a perfect beacon, invisible to anyone but Teia. But she’d never seen her counterpart; the man or woman who marked Teia’s targets for her had always kept well out of sight.
Teia watched, looked everywhere. There! A beacon, passing below the foot of her tower. She couldn’t quite get the angle to see her target, but this was going to be easier than usual.
She slid down the ladder with her bag slung over her back. At the bottom, she pulled out the tall shoes, put them on, put her bag over one shoulder, and made sure that the straps hadn’t displaced her “breasts.” She breathed deeply. Confident but not aggressive, Teia. No, not even confident. Just busy. Enough sway to make it look like I have hips, but not so much that I look like a prostitute. Checking her wig one last time, she exhaled, opened the door, stepped out, and closed it unhurriedly behind her.
The foot of the arch here was right next to the side of a building, so she was able to step into a narrow side street quickly. She scanned the crowd once she got away from the arch, and relaxed her eyes briefly. It was as important for her to look for people who had noticed her stepping out of the arch as it was for her to find her target.
She found the beacon in seconds. But it wasn’t on her target. It was in a woman’s hair, and it was knotted, tight. Not loose and fiery.
Teia knew it was a bad decision, but she followed the woman immediately.
If what Teia had seen was this woman being marked, the other paryl drafter might be here.
But rather than pure excitement, Teia felt that she’d stepped into something dangerous. Whoever had marked this woman didn’t know that anyone else could see her. It was like stumbling across a secret message and opening it. Whoever had sent the message wouldn’t be pleased to have their correspondence read—even if the words meant nothing to Teia.
There were powerful undercurrents in this city, and a slave could get sucked down into the weakest of them. It was a rare morning on Big Jasper that the Cerulean Sea didn’t carry away at least one body.
Teia kept her eyes open, but didn’t draft. Any drafting would alert the other paryl to her presence. The woman was perhaps fifty paces ahead of her, and not in any particular hurry, browsing the stalls, moving deeper into the market. Her very lack of haste made it almost impossible to find the other drafter. If she were heading somewhere, the number of possible followers would be limited to the people who were heading in the same direction and at roughly the same speed. With the woman browsing and impossible to lose because she had a beacon on her head, the woman’s pursuer—her spy?—could focus on blending with the shifting crowd.
Trying not to be obvious, Teia circled to get a better look at the woman, who was now chatting with a textiles dealer, gesturing to a silk scarf checkered with bright greens and black. The woman was petite with a heart-shaped face, frizzy hair, well dressed in a pale blue dress, big earrings. Attractive, perhaps late thirties.
No hint why someone would be following her.
Nothing to do with me. I should get the hell out of here.
But Adrasteia couldn’t help herself. Her mother had always said that she was the kind of girl who needed to burn her hand on the stove twice before she was convinced it was hot.
A vendor selling clay jars glazed with garish snarling animals approached Teia. “Ah, the lady has excellent taste,” he said.
She smiled neutrally. “Just looking, thank you.”
“Any particular uses you’re looking—”
“I’ll let you know,” she said. She sort of surprised herself. She wouldn’t be so rude in real life, but wearing a disguise was strangely freeing.
“Very well,” the merchant said, giving her a false smile. He turned away and cursed her under his breath, none too quietly.
She had more important things to worry about, but it made her blush nonetheless. What an—
She almost missed it. A quick pulse emanating from near the fountain. She looked for the source, but couldn’t narrow it down between three men standing there, all of them looking toward the pretty woman.
Teia knew that pulse. She’d used it herself. It was, in fact, the only reason she had a chance at getting in the Blackguard. The special thing about paryl that no other color could do was that it went right through clothing. With paryl, you could see exactly where anything metal was on a person’s body. If they wore mail concealed beneath a tunic, or had a concealed dagger strapped to their thigh, it wasn’t concealed to Teia. That, and marking things with beacons no one else could see, seemed to be the only practical uses of the color that Teia had found. One book had discounted it from being a true color at all for that very reason, calling paryl “singularly ephemeral, and singularly useless.”
It was easy to get tunnel vision when hunting, and Teia’s fighting masters back in Odess had beaten her for it a number of times. So she tried to breathe deeply and be aware of her surroundings. That intense focus could give you away or cause you to make mistakes.
And just in time, too.
Glancing up and down the main street of the market, through the swirl of humanity—traders from every satrapy, slaves, luxiats, beggars, and nobles—Teia saw the last thing she wanted to see. Her own target—her target for Lucretia Verangheti—was walking straight toward her. Worse, the direction he was going would take him straight in front of the other paryl drafter. Her target had the familiar paryl beacon woven into his hair. If he walked down the street with that intact, the other paryl drafter couldn’t miss him. And that might set him hunting Teia.
Teia was moving before she was sure what she was going to do. If she had one flaw, it wasn’t passivity.
She shot out a pulse of superfine light herself, making it as brief as possible. A couple of the best things about paryl were that it could be drafted faster than any other color and it was everywhere, even on the cloudiest day, so there was rarely any problem finding a source. It was present weakly even at night, so long as you were outside. Her focused stream cut through her target’s clothes, making them look like shadows shaking in the wind.
From long experience, Teia was able to pick out the fuzzy shapes of all the metal items he carried. Sword, knife, belt buckle, silver worked into belt, narrow chain links to secure his purse to his belt (paranoid about being robbed, then), coins within the purse, tips of the laces on his shirt, necklace, cloak chain and gold thread worked into the cloak’s mantle, an earring, and—finally!—a snuff box in his cloak’s chest pocket.