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Blackguard! Before the blades come out, you have to decide where you stand. King Ironfist had decided to stand for himself. He’d thrown off his loyalty to Gavin, and now he must be trying to do the same with the Order.
    Why else would they be sending Teia to assassinate him? He was one of their own.
    Had been, anyway.
    Now Teia would be the shield that came down on his neck. Hers would be the hand that brought his head to her masters.
    It would hurt to kill Ironfist. But it wouldn’t break her. She was beyond that now.
    Invisible in the master cloak, Teia made her way out onto the lonely dock. Cheerless dawn was threatening the horizon as sailors prepared the ship in hushed tones. There was no harbormaster present, nor any of the usual dockhands or slaves or attendants Teia would have expected. It was a ghost ship—fitting for the departing condemned.
    Three figures stood on the quay. One was hunched and swaddled as if ill, or perhaps to hide his height. The second was a broadly gesticulating man with a wild, woolly beard with match cords woven into it and a gold-brocaded jacket worn open over his bare chest, despite the chill of the morning. The third figure had his back to Teia. There was something in his carriage that spoke of being human freight, a slave about to be passed from one man to another. Teia had seen that broken shuffle before; in truth, she’d walked like that herself.
    So she dismissed that one, flaring her eyes to paryl to look at the others just as the heavily cloaked man presented a sword.
    Its appearance hit her like a rapid blow to the nose, leaving her blinking: that blade should have shone white in her paryl vision. Metal always did, with minute variations of tone for different metals. This thing was
invisible
.
    No, the shimmercloaks made things invisible—when you looked at an active shimmercloak, you saw whatever lay beyond it. This was a bar of black, heavy nothingness. Usually, darkness is a hole, an absence, as death is the absence of life.
    This was a piece of hungry night, of darkness breathing.
    This was more than Death, hammered and folded into killing shape. This was not made by the hand of man. Perhaps in the youth of Old Man Time, some dead demigod, after his descent to the all-devouring depths of the ninth hell, had rallied instead of despaired at his imprisonment there. He’d charged hell’s gates from the inside. Then, confronting the three-headed hound who guarded that way, terrifying all lesser souls, he smashed its faces on the gates, using its snarling snouts as battering rams, snapping lupine teeth and bones, one, two, and three, throwing the mighty gates from their hinges.
    Then the demigod had gone his way, triumphant to the heavens, heedless of the hellhound he left behind.
    If such might be true, then this blade was one of hell’s jagged, broken fangs.
    The cloaked man laid it across his gloved palms and offered it up.
    But not to the flamboyant captain.
    And there was another blow. A paryl marker, visible only to her, the sign that this man was her target, hung in the air above the wretch she’d dismissed as a slave.
    He couldn’t be—he
wasn’t
Ironfist.
    He wasn’t Ironfist.
    Even from the back it was clear this man was too small. Broad across his hunched shoulders, square-jawed, but light-skinned and not tall enough. Hair covered with a grubby hat. He was just some broken old warrior.
    All the cold courage she’d been knotting tight loosed its tension from her limbs and she could suddenly breathe.
    She didn’t have to kill Ironfist.
    Something like a prayer of thanks made its way to her teeth. But there it stopped.
    Why would the Old Man think I’d have a hard time killing some stranger?
    The man a sailor had referred to as Captain Gunner whistled a melodious little trill. “C’mon!” he said, waggling his bushy eyebrows at the slave. He had a winsome, goofy grin, but he struck Teia as not very stable, and very, very dangerous. “What’ll it be? Death