Blade-Dancer

The Blade-Dancer is on the Crimson Hand's southern-bureau roll under the contract-name Cadence (no surname; the intake-clerks have learned that this category of operative does not give one), age twenty-four, three years on the roll. Before the Hand she was the second dancer of the Lantern Hall in the Vesper district for six years, and the Hand noticed her the way the Hand notices things: the Hall's guests kept losing their signets during the third number, and the losses stopped the week she left. The bureau-master's intake note reads 'entered on the half-beat,' which the clerks assumed was a description of her audition and which was, in fact, the whole finding.

Her combat-grant is tempo. The two daggers are frozen light — light that has been stopped, by a Syndicate glazier in the Vesper district who is also missing a signet and has never filed the loss — and they cut cold and do not rustle, but the blades are not the discipline. The discipline is that Cadence does not enter on the beat. She enters on the half, so the eye that follows the music is a half-step late to wherever she is, and the Hand's after-action reviews describe her closures, uniformly, as 'losing track of where the dancer was standing.' The bureau records her engagements not by date but by the number of the piece that was playing. There have been twenty-nine pieces. Twenty-eight of them were the third number. She has been asked about the one exception and has answered by counting to three under her breath, which the clerks have recorded as a non-answer and which was not.

She is on professional speaking terms with the bureau's contractor class and on quiet, careful terms with Cassia Arden, who attended the Lantern Hall's third number twice in the seasons before Cadence left it and who is remembered, by everyone, for the dress. Cadence remembers Cassia leaving. Nobody else does. The two have not discussed this and the handler who debriefs them both has stopped asking. She does not work for the Meroveil Empire or the Arcane Syndicate; the Syndicate's glazier has offered, twice, to make her a third blade, and she has declined on the grounds that three is a count, not a pair, and she only dances in pairs.