A knife proved surprisingly easy to procure from the sleeping surgeon’s bay. Much harder was the effort of will to cut into his own flesh. He washed the site as Gretl insisted, and made the short incision while biting down hard on a leather strap. Fortunately the splinter was not deep, and he tweezed it out without ripping any big holes in himself. The charm itself was a needle made of twisted gold-and-silver wire, with the eye at one end filled with a tiny onyx stone: representing blindness, he suspected. Blood didn’t dispel charms like water did, so Sedgwick had put the charm in the one place it was never likely to get lost or wet. Funny that the eye itself had showed him where it was.

Jean-Claude poured water over the needle and scrubbed it clean. Pain etched its way across his face. The glamour had prevented him from noticing the eye, or from feeling it as anything but normal. Without sorcery to suppress it, the ache, burn, and itch of his wounds rose to the surface. He imagined he would never again lose a game of who has the better scar.

Also, the smear across Jean-Claude’s vision vanished and the world snapped into focus more crisp and clear than it had ever been, even in the days before he’d needed spectacles. Moreover, his head no longer ached when darkness descended and his clockwork vision took over. Most likely the power of the artifact to give him vision had been fighting the power of the glamour to convince him he couldn’t see in the dark.

Without the glamour getting in the way, the absolute darkness of the hold appeared in shades of black and green. Cloth and rope were all but transparent and he could even see shadows moving behind wood. Once he held that idea in his mind, it even worked with the lantern turned on. He doused his light and looked up through the ceiling. The boards were too thick to see much past them, but he made out two blobs moving about in the space where the purser’s office ought to be.

This would definitely come in handy, and it explained much about why Ivar had given him to Travers. The alliance between Hasdrubal, Czensos, and Travers was never meant to last past the end of mutual need. Czensos had put Jean-Claude on the Potencia ostensibly because he knew where the Conquest shard was, but that was a ruse. In fact, Czensos had put Jean-Claude there as a spy. Even if Travers turned Jean-Claude into a bloodhollow, he’d still have the eye.

The thing about eyes was, they generally came in pairs. Jean-Claude was willing to bet that this eye had a counterpart somewhere and Ivar was using it to watch every single thing Jean-Claude did.