The Blinding Knife(59)

Like every other intersection in the city, each entrance to the market was straddled by arches that supported one of the city’s Thousand Stars. Though they were primarily intended to extend the power of drafters, in between the drafters’ uses each district could employ the great elevated mirrors for whatever they chose.

This market had rented out its stars to whatever merchant paid the most. So some focused beams of sunlight on particular shops. Others had colored filters fixed over them and focused on luxin jugglers who wandered the market, doing tricks and promoting one shop or another. Adrasteia made her way to the base of one of the stars, unlocked the tiny door with a key, closed and locked the door behind her, and crawled up the painfully narrow shaft. She had an arrangement with the tower monkeys, the slaves who kept this arch. As long as she didn’t get in their way or do any damage, they let her use one of the ventilation windows partway up as a lookout.

She opened her bag as she waited. Ordinarily, she hated her flat, lifeless hair, but this was why she kept it cut short. With a few clips, she was able to fasten a wig to her head with no problem: this time, long, wavy Atashian. Bound it with a red handkerchief. She fished about twenty bracelets out of the bag. Gaudy, flashy—anything to take attention off her face. She put rouge on her cheeks and lips, and folded her other handkerchiefs. She tucked her shawl into the bag, loosened some ties on her dress, and pulled it down—when she left the arch, she would put on tall shoes that would disguise her height, and the hemline needed to hang low enough to disguise the shoes. She pulled on a bodice and cinched it loosely around her ribs and stuffed the folded handkerchiefs into the bodice to give the appearance that her breasts were larger than mosquito bites.

Almost everything she hated about her body made her good at this work, she knew. It was doubtless part of why she had been chosen. Not too short, not too tall, skinny—that was easier to disguise with clothes than fat was—facial features pleasant, but not so pretty as to stand out from a line of other girls. As much as Kip had peeved her for saying it aloud, she could—and had—even disguised herself as a boy.

When she was finished today, though, she thought she probably looked like a woman. Lower-class Atashian wife, mid-twenties, tallish, bad taste, one tooth blackened with a mixture of ash and tallow. Which tasted awful.

The disguise wasn’t flawless, but Adrasteia wasn’t trying for perfection. The best thing about this disguise was that if she were pursued, she could take it all off in a couple of seconds.

Finished changing, she waited. Finding one nobleman among the human stockyards of Big Jasper would have been impossible on her own, much less stealing a particular item within that same day. But Adrasteia wasn’t required to find her target. He would come to her, and he would come marked.

She waited for an hour, dilating her eyes every minute. Her vision, as she’d told Kip, was alternately average, incredible, and terrible, with no logic behind which was which that she could divine. Superviolet didn’t register at all, her perception of violet, purple, and blue was merely average, green possibly average, yellow average, and then red indistinguishable from green. But then, below the spectrum that was visible to mundanes and many drafters, her sight sharpened. She couldn’t draft sub-red, but she could see it better than most sub-red drafters. Teia barely had to consciously dilate her eyes to see it; as long as she was relaxed it was as easy to her as going from focusing on something near to something far.

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.