Kip yelled in alarm, but Tallach had too much momentum to stop. Instead, he tried to leap all the way over the pavilion and the pit.
He wasn’t going to make it. Kip leapt from his platform as Tallach came down, crushing the pavilion and hitting the far edge of the pit. Kip flung the flash grenado toward where he thought the mag torches had been. A fraction of a heartbeat later he hit the ground.
He rolled perfectly—Ironfist would have been proud—but Tallach had been running at terrific speed. Kip flipped and flipped, trying to keep his limbs in. A flash split his vision and he hoped that had been the grenado, and not his head hitting a rock.
Somehow he found himself on his feet, only slightly dizzy. There was a strong stench of tea leaves and tobacco. Someone had drafted a lot of red luxin here.
But he was more worried about the four wights in front of him, each carrying a lit mag torch. Two of them appeared to be blinded and dazed from the flash. One, a blue, bolted.
One of the dazed wights lifted a pistol in Kip’s direction. It pulled the trigger, noticed that nothing happened, and cocked the hammer. Then it disappeared in a blur of fur and saliva and snarling. Coming in from the side, a mastiff had clamped its jaws on the wight’s gun arm and whipped him around. The war dog outweighed the man and had hit with great speed.
The wight was flung aside, and in moments the snarling dog was atop him, this time knocking aside frantic arms and going for the throat.
Kip turned and spiked the other dazed wight before it could recover. He saw another wight he’d missed before as the young woman drew an arm back and threw her burning mag torch toward the hole.
The hole. That was where all that red luxin Kip was smelling must be pooled.
Tallach was half out of the massive hole, recovering from his shock, claws piercing the ground, back legs churning for a grip, fur smeared with pyrejelly.
Kip shot out a dozen fingers of fast superviolet at the arcing mag torch, each streaming a line back to him. One hit, and along that guide line, Kip threw all the last of his orange luxin.
The burning mag torch was blasted safely away from the pyrejelly and into the distance.
Something knocked Kip off his feet as a musket went off, deafening him. From his back, he saw a war dog atop the wight who had thrown the mag torch. A musket lay on the ground beside her. She was limp already; the dog whipped her back and forth, his jaws clamped around her neck.
It must have knocked Kip down to save him.
But Kip was already scanning the distance for the blue wight who had run away—and he found him.
He hadn’t run away. He was running toward the wagons laden with black powder, mag torch in hand.
Figures illumined only by that bobbing star flashed and shifted as the two camps fought, shadows in a night made darker by the contrast. The sprinting wight wasn’t thirty paces from the wagons.
Kip had only a little superviolet and yellow left. Still lying on the ground, he shot out the yellow as hard as he could. The molten yellow twisted in the air, connected to Kip’s will by trailing tendrils of superviolet.
In midair, it solidified and curved.
The projectile connected with the blue wight’s head—but it hadn’t totally solidified. A failure. It splashed into light.
But Kip was already up and running after the wight.
The wight had fallen. Being hit from behind while running, even by a fist of water, had been enough to knock him off his stride.
The blue wight staggered to his feet and picked up the burning mag torch, mere steps from the wagon.
A Cwn y Wawr soldier ran in from the darkness and clubbed him with the butt of his blunderbuss.
But it was a glancing blow to a shoulder, and the hit spun the wight between the soldier and the wagon loaded with black powder. The Cwn y Wawr soldier lifted his blunderbuss.
“No! Don’t shoot!” Kip shouted, running. “Oof!” he tripped over a body in the darkness.
The soldier looked back, whether he understood what Kip had said or simply thought it was another attack.
He squinted against the darkness, unable to see Kip, and died as the wight’s blue spikes rammed through his neck.
The wight released the spikes back to dust, and switched the mag torch from his wounded left hand to his right. He lofted the torch—
—and jerked forward several paces as Cruxer’s giant elk rammed its antler through his back. The giant elk lifted the wight high in the air, but even then the wight didn’t drop his torch.
Cruxer’s first stab missed as the giant elk’s animal instincts took over and it tried to shake the wight off its antlers. Then it paused and lowered its head, about to buck the wight up and off the tines of its antlers.
The wight threw the torch.
But Cruxer threw himself backward so he was lying on the giant elk and, upside down, swung his spear, slapping the torch off to one side.
His momentum carried him and he flipped off the giant elk’s back just as the animal flicked its head upward. The wight flew into the air and somehow Cruxer flowed into position, his spear butt planted on the ground.
The wight landed, his momentum impaling him on Cruxer’s spear. Cruxer took his hand out of the way at the last moment, casually releasing the haft of the spear and then taking it back as the wight thudded to the ground. He spun the spear, its blade slashing the wight’s throat, and stepped out of range, eyes already looking for any other threats.
He gave a command to the giant elk, and it charged off.
Kip kicked dirt over the torch and walked to join Cruxer in guarding the wagons.
The Cwn y Wawr soldier was dying nearby, holding his throat, gurgling, his eyes on Kip accusing him of betrayal.
“You were going to shoot a blunderbuss toward a wagon full of black powder,” Kip told him. “You would have killed us all.”
But the soldier was beyond hearing.
Moments later, the rest of the Mighty swept in and surrounded Kip.
“What are you doing?” Big Leo shouted. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
“Why isn’t Tallach with you?” Ben-hadad asked.
“How did we manage to lose him again, Mighty?” Cruxer demanded.
“It’s a trap,” Kip said, over labored breaths, still trying to yawn away his one deafened ear from the musket blast. “Was. Was a trap. Fire. Wagons. Black powder.”
Conn Arthur, animating Tallach, must have realized that coming to help Kip keep the wagons from blowing up when Tallach was utterly soaked in pyrejelly was not the best idea. He’d gone elsewhere.
The other possibility, that he had run away, was simply impossible.
“These are rigged?” Ben-hadad asked from atop his night mare. “Then what the fuck are you doing right next to them?”
But for the next minutes, they kept everyone away from the wagons. Not that any of their foes had any interest. Most of the men had no idea they’d been bait for a trap. The camp had been broken now.