“Kip. It’s Kip. He’s going to be murdered. We have to go help!” Teia said.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Now, Crux!”

Chapter 64

Kip was sitting at his desk with mounds of books threatening to bury him when someone knocked on his door. It could only be Tisis Malargos. Kip had been preparing for this since he’d left the old man’s room. He still wasn’t ready.

The truth was, Kip didn’t really know Tisis. Sure, she’d pretended that she was going to kill him during his Threshing. Sure, she’d single-handedly made him fail by giving him back the bell rope after he’d thrown it away, but perhaps Kip shouldn’t take it personally. He was starting to understand what it was to inherit the enmities of your people. How could it have been personal? She’d never even met him before that day.

And of course, Kip had later killed her uncle. That kind of made them even, didn’t it?

He got up, braced himself, and opened the door.

It wasn’t Tisis. It was two Blackguards, Buskin and Lytos, looking almost like a comedy, Buskin was so short and Lytos was so tall. But they weren’t smiling.

“Know how we been searching the seas?” Buskin asked.

“For my father?” Kip asked eagerly.

“No,” Lytos said at the same time Buskin said, “Yes.”

They shot a look at each other.

“No need to keep it from him if he knows,” Buskin said. “Some of us go looking for the bane, and some of us go looking for the Prism. It’s supposed to be secret.”

“My grand—the promachos told me about it,” Kip said. “And he said I’d get a chance to go.”

“This ain’t that. With so many of us full Blackguards training everyone, Watch Captain Fisk has got us dipping into the nunks to help look for bane. Your number came up.”

“Watch Captain Fisk?” Kip said. “You mean Trainer Fisk?”

“You’d know about his promotion and the schedule if you bothered coming to practice more often,” Lytos said in his odd eunuch’s tenor.

Fisk had been promoted to Karris’s old position as watch captain? That was a small disaster. Fisk had worked with Andross to try to keep Kip out of the Blackguard. For all the times he’d seemed friendly, he was a traitor at the core.

“How long we going to be gone?” Kip asked.

Lytos said, “Back before dark. They don’t want the nunks missing any training—any more training, maybe I should say—so you all don’t do overnights.” He looked around Kip’s room. “Nice quarters. You sure you want to give this up for a barracks?”

Right. Because my life is so wonderful and easy. Kip let retorts dance behind his teeth, as if taking the jibe with good humor. “Enough of the easy life for me. I’m ready to buckle down and really start to work.”

“Good. Well, let’s get to it, then,” Buskin said. He really was incredibly short. Even with his silly high shoes.

Suddenly though, Kip really didn’t want to go with these two. There was something off. They hadn’t ever before been hostile to him. It was like something had worked them up. Had he done something to insult them? Maybe it was like his father had warned him: they disliked how easy it seemed he was getting a good life handed to him.

Whatever it’s costing me, at least I’m coming out ahead of Lytos, whose parents made him a eunuch in hopes it would help him get into the Blackguard.

And it was Kip’s first chance to get to take part in the search for his father himself, even if only tangentially.

He grabbed his stuff. “Ready.”

Chapter 65

Teia and Cruxer ran into Winsen not a block from the safe house. Cruxer hesitated. They didn’t know Winsen as well as they knew each other, but he was in the squad.

“We’ll need all the help we can get,” Teia said, but she let Cruxer make the call.

“Someone’s going to try to kill Kip,” Cruxer told Winsen. “We’re heading to the docks to stop them.”

Give Cruxer this: right or wrong, he made his decisions quickly. And his penchant for trusting people and believing in them might get him killed eventually, but it meant that the circle of people who liked him and wanted him to approve of them was always growing.

Winsen blinked once. It was the closest to surprise Teia had ever seen from him. “Then you don’t want to go to the docks. I passed him not two minutes ago. He said he was going out bane hunting with Lytos and Buskin, but they’d told him to meet them in Little Hill. He was headed there.”

“The slums? Why there and why go sepa—” Cruxer started to ask.

“Fewer witnesses,” Teia said. “If they go out to sea and come back without him, they’ll be suspected. He meets them in a slum, they kill him, and if the deed itself isn’t witnessed, it’s clean.”

Cruxer hesitated, appraising her. “Sometimes you scare me, Teia.”

“I’ll get my bow,” Winsen said.

“Be quick,” Cruxer said. As Winsen ran off, he breathed a curse. “Blackguards, Teia. How do we kill Blackguards?”

“By surprising them,” she said.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

He looked at her and was suddenly just a boy again. “How could they?”

“Ask it later. Captain.”

The pain didn’t leave his eyes, but the boy in them receded. “Right,” he said. “Treat it like Specials. We could be wrong, so we follow as close as we can without being seen. If they’re guilty, we can expect them to be nervous. Teia, your paryl’s no good from a distance, so I want you to follow hard behind them. If you give us the signal, we’ll shoot. We see them draw weapons, we shoot.”

“Got it,” Winsen said, rejoining them. He was wearing street clothes now, and holding not one but two bows. One was one of his yew longbows, a foot taller than he was, and the other was a simple recurve that he tossed to Cruxer.

“If we do this, and we’re wrong,” Cruxer said, “we’ll look like traitors. It’ll be Orholam’s Glare for all of us. We don’t know that Breaker is who we think he is.”

“We know him,” Teia said. “That’s enough for me.”

“Me, too,” Cruxer said. “Winsen?”

Winsen shrugged. As ever, he was a loaded musket. He didn’t care so much which direction he was pointed, so long as he could fire.

“Then let’s go!” Cruxer said.

Without another word, they ran, heedless of who would wonder at them. Cruxer was tall enough that he appeared merely to be loping, though his gait forced Teia to run full out.

When they got to Little Hill, they slowed. They walked briskly, but no faster than many merchants on their errands. With a wink and a smile, Cruxer got an old baker to tell them exactly when some Blackguards had passed through and where she thought they were going.

They pushed faster than they would have if they were tracking anyone else. The likelihood of blundering over their prey at the speeds they were moving was high. But Buskin and Lytos didn’t know they were being hunted.

The base of Little Hill was a Tyrean slum. Not precisely dangerous, at least during the day, but the neighborhood bore unmistakable signs of the origins of so many of its residents. Almost half the women wore long tunics over trousers, and the men wore strong green-and-black-patterned tunics, more shapeless than the tailored tunics most people favored on Big Jasper. Most notable, though, was that the domes on the buildings in this area were either perfunctorily small or had been hollowed out. The Tyreans liked to use their roofs as another room—an open room. Most of the hollowed-out domes, standing bare in their frames on flat roofs, at least at one time had shutters, which when closed retained the dome shape, but in their poverty, the people here didn’t fix such frippery when it failed.