“Recruiting.”
“You fail. Now get out.” Recruiting?
He made no move to leave. “You made a good decision back there at the docks, though it made my life more difficult. Bright girl, aren’t you? Seeing the paryl but ignoring it? You saw an enemy with unknown abilities asking you to meet on ground of their choosing—and you chose not to come into that fight. That was … wiser than your years. It makes me want you more. I have a job for you. And if you do it, I will give you your papers.”
“What papers?” Teia asked, playing stupid.
“Indeed?” he asked archly. “After I’ve complimented your intelligence? You are a child, aren’t you? An uncut gem, though. If you perform my task today, I will give you your papers, I swear by my very soul and my hope of illumination. If you do not, I will give them to Andross Guile, for whom I have worked in the past. A little reminder to him of who and what you are will be sufficient to make your life difficult, don’t you think? Do you think these manumission papers will ever see the light of day if I take them to High Luxlord Guile?”
The answer was obvious. “How do I know you’ll give them to me?”
“I hold oaths holy. If, however, you attempt to circumvent my plans again by going to some other authority—”
Teia attacked him, jabbing a fist at his throat.
And promptly fell, nerveless, into his arms. He lifted her easily and laid her on Kip’s bed as gently as a lover. She couldn’t feel anything. Her body was simply gone, a blank in her senses. She smelled the odd man named Murder. He smelled of orange peel and ginger and mint, invigorating, appealing even. She hated him for that.
He smiled toothily with the whitest, most perfect teeth she’d ever seen, and arranged her limbs for her. He put two fingers against her upper lip, not shushing her but instead feeling her breath, and withdrew when he did, seeming content. “Can you speak?” he asked.
She opened her mouth, but there was no control of her air to scream, she couldn’t even whisper. Something was very, very wrong. Confusion threatened to break into panic.
“The body is such a mystery, don’t you agree? The sheer number of things that must go right from moment to moment to keep this meat operating.” He picked up her limp arm and dropped it. It fell, lifeless. “Let me tell you the most interesting thing: the more you know, the greater you realize the mystery is. The wisest chirurgeons in the satrapies still believe blood sits static in our limbs, that it ebbs and flows like tides, perhaps even tied to the moon. My people, on the other hand, have known for centuries that blood circles the body, that the heart is a pump. We know because we can see it. And yet even to us, we who see plainly what a hundred generations of chirurgeons have not yet discovered, there are mysteries. We are not so much greater than they are, after all. Different in degree, but not in kind. I know that a pinch here or a crystal there will, if I’m lucky, produce this and this. You moved so fast. So fast. Do you feel any tingling in your feet yet? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
Teia felt nothing. Nothing. She was a prisoner, trapped in her own unresponsive flesh. She felt tears forming. Then, tingling, one foot and then the other. She blinked, almost involuntarily.
“Good. Tingling should begin in your fingers any moment.”
He was right. For all his supposed ignorance, he was exactly right. That didn’t make it less terrifying, just differently so.
Murder said, “Stop thinking about your fear. Your feeling will all come back. I’m very good at what I do. By the time you’re able to speak, I want you to guess how I did it.”
Teia hated being easily biddable, but there was something intoxicating about the man. Further, he was right. She took a deep breath, and realized she could feel it in her chest when she did so. Thank Orholam.
It took a few more breaths and frustration before she could relax enough to open her eyes full to see paryl. What she saw took her breath away.
The entire room was filled with paryl. A gaseous, luminous cloud of the stuff filled every nook and cranny. More than that, the paryl appeared to suffuse both her and Murder’s bodies. It went through them. Murder had used that property to reach inside her body and tweak something. Her Blackguard training had only begun to delve into what kinds of wounds resulted in what kinds of damage. She knew that was something the full Blackguards studied. And her own experiences of battle, of watching the dead and the dying and the injured, were still too raw for her to take them apart and think about what kind of wound produced what. But she had seen animals slaughtered at Lady Lucigari’s estate growing up. Goats and pigs and cattle. The cook preferred a deep slash across the throat to bleed the animal, but her husband Amos had liked to use his ax.