“Tssst!” Cruxer said.

Teia saw his hand signals: two blocks ahead, then right. We’ll overwatch.

There wasn’t time to see exactly what they planned. Teia jogged toward the corner. It started raining. She threw her hood up, and drew in as much paryl as she could hold. She stepped around the corner, nonchalant, just in case.

Nothing.

She moved down the narrow street at a half jog, as if hurrying from the rain. Dozens of others traversing the same street were doing the same. The only thing she could hope was that Lytos and Buskin were wearing their blacks so they’d be easy to spot.

Throwing glances left and right as she passed intersection after intersection, Teia’s heart was beating harder and harder. With people ducking their heads and hurrying, it would make murdering Kip and getting away with it easier and easier.

She heard a musket shot above her and jumped. No, not a musket, someone slamming shut a shutter against the rain. Broken stones and broken bones.

There! She’d crossed one of the crooked alleys and caught a glimpse of black. No street in the city was supposed to be crooked. It made dark places where the light of the Thousand Stars couldn’t reach. But slums were slums the world over.

She was only behind the Blackguards by about thirty paces now, and the alley cleared out. No one except Teia and her prey.

And what am I supposed to do when I catch them?

What if Lytos and Buskin were just here to get some gear for their trip? It wasn’t out of the question, was it? The Blackguards would have used supplies and weapons from their stores and safe houses near the docks first, but eventually those supplies would be exhausted, and they would have to dip into what they’d planted even in warehouses in the slums. Usually, slaves could do such work, but safe houses were kept secret.

Maybe it was all innocent. Karris could be wrong, right?

The sun was still high in the sky, but the clouds were so thick and black that it was getting dark. The rain became a full downpour, leaving Teia in a race between rising fears and wet-kitten hopes.

She heard Kip’s voice and poked one eye around the corner.

Too late.

Lytos had drawn a knife, left side, unseen by Kip and was stepping—

He dropped to one knee, almost gracefully, as if making obeisance, the barest whisper of arrow feathers disappearing fully into his armpit. He looked down, doubtless wondering what had happened, but it looked like he was bowing his head to Kip.

“Lytos?” Kip asked, turning, all unaware of what had just happened.

The ting of bare steel hitting a stone as Lytos dropped his blade made Buskin’s head pivot sharply. He saw Teia first, then saw Lytos pitch onto his face. The look on his face was pure guilt, then rage.

His hand dipped to his belt where he kept his throwing knives. Being short and not strong, Buskin liked his throwing knives, and he was one of the few people Teia had ever seen for whom throwing knives were not an affectation.

Teia’s hand was already up, but it wasn’t the familiar paryl that came through her. A wave bigger than her own body rushed through her and snapped like a whip at her fingers.

All the world was fire. She dropped. Kip staggered. Buskin flinched in mid-throw, sending his knife into the sky even as he jumped backward, throwing his hand up over his face.

The wave passed.

Silence. They all looked at each other, staggered. No one was on fire.

An arrow streaked through the space Buskin had been occupying not a heartbeat earlier and shattered against the stone wall beside him.

The moment snapped; Buskin fled as if loosed from a bow himself.

Kip was agog, looking at Teia and then himself, apparently wondering why he wasn’t on fire. “What th—”

“Get him!” Teia shouted. She bolted after Buskin. Kip didn’t follow, at least not fast enough to be helpful.

Buskin turned at the first intersection, his lead on Teia only thirty paces. Lightning crashed nearby, the frenetic flashing of multiple strikes coming at the same instant thunder rattled windows through all of Big Jasper. The lightning threw a shadow into the intersection. Faster than her conscious mind could grasp what she had seen, Teia reacted. Trap.

She was already sprawling, slipping instead of jumping aside. Her feet skidded across rain-slick stones. One foot shot forward while the other went back. She slid, doing the splits, right past the corner. A glittering blade flashed right over her head.

Buskin staggered, almost stepped on her as his blade didn’t meet the resistance he expected.

On hands and feet, Teia scuttled backward. She twisted her wrist on an unseen stone and fell flat on her back.

Buskin advanced, raising his sword for the killing—no wasteful, big, theatrical slash from a Blackguard; he would stab the point straight into her heart, twist quickly in case he’d pierced a little to the right or left, and be gone in less than a second’s time.

But as he stepped forward, an arrow flashed past his face. He shot a glance back up the alley, must have seen Winsen or Cruxer or both, and leaped back and away. Teia shot paryl at him from her back, but it shattered easily with his rapid movement.

She struggled to her feet and went after him. Lightning flashed again, this time farther away, hitting the great lightning-catchers above the Chromeria, the boom of thunder following a few heartbeats later. Teia found herself in a market. It was in an uproar. All the shoppers had already departed as soon as the rain began pounding, but the merchants were trapped, gathering their goods, trying to soothe panicking donkeys and oxen. Others were running around their shops, shuttering windows and pulling merchandise inside.

In all the chaos, a lone runner was nearly invisible. Any other time, such a sight would stick out and cause outrage. Now it was one whitecap in a storm-tossed sea.

A crash rang out as a cart lost all the barrels inside it. Teia saw Buskin running past it, having opened the back gate to loose the barrels. One giant barrel ruptured as it fell, and dumped its contents—olive oil—in a vast slick across the wet stones. Half a dozen pedestrians rushing past went down in tangles of limbs. A horse pulling an empty cart shied as its driver sawed on the reins, trying to avoid crushing the fallen. He lost grip of the reins, though—and it was a miracle he did. The horse, head free, looked down and quick-stepped over the people lying at its feet.

But it turned aside to do so, and the wheels of its cart hit the slick and lost traction immediately, sliding the cart inexorably into the olive oil wagon—and blocking the lane entirely.

Teia dodged into another pathway through the market, ran straight into a young woman and knocked her flat. Teia spun out of the collision, jumped over a rack of thobes that had fallen into the street, and kept going.

Something lit the sky that wasn’t lightning, but as soon as Teia looked for the luxin strike, she plowed into someone else, much bigger than she was, and turned her eyes back to the market and her target.

She made it to the edge of the market, just in time to see Buskin snatch up two burning lanterns and hurl them at the ground in the alley behind himself. One ignited, but the other didn’t—at least until he sprayed the alley with red luxin.

The flames roared up, blocking the alley, and for half an instant Teia thought of trying to leap through the flames before good sense asserted itself. She barely stopped in time. The red luxin would gutter out in a minute at most, but that was too long. She didn’t know this part of town well enough to be certain that going one block to either side would take her back to Buskin’s path: she might get lucky and find that he’d turned the same way she did—or not.