Kip was deafened and saw black spots swimming in front of his eyes. The door was shredded, but somehow he rolled to his feet.
In a bit of idiosyncratic military doctrine, the Blackguards were taught to attack an ambush. They were taught that the only way to regain initiative, having lost it to the enemy, was to attack. Immediately. Ferociously. This meant you didn’t give yourself time to regroup or time to think—but you didn’t give it to the enemy, either. They didn’t get a chance to enact phase two of their plan, because they were suddenly busy getting killed.
And Kip’s training took. He charged the young woman just as she had turned her back and was trying to light another fuse. He chopped across her arms as she reached out, but given his dazed state, cut deeply across only one forearm.
It was enough to make her drop the linstock. She turned, baffled that he was still alive, bleeding, and tried to draw the pistol tucked into her sash. He rammed his yellow luxin sword through her belly, but immediately dropped it to grab her pistol as it cleared her sash.
He trapped it in his left hand and wrenched it aside. She wasn’t strong enough to stop him. And with her left arm wounded, she didn’t have a chance to stop his right uppercut to her jaw.
She fell to the ground, insensate, doing little more than groaning as she fell on the hilt of Kip’s yellow luxin sword, driving it deeper into her gut.
Kip rolled her over and pulled his sword free. No small amount of blood followed it. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, if that. Atashian dark hair and eyes, poor clothes. Just a girl taking orders.
He should have felt something. She was unconscious, bleeding, certain to die slowly if not quickly. But he only heard Trainer Fisk’s voice: ‘Never trust the dead. Men will faint from fear at the first charge and lie at your feet, but find their courage again when you show them your back. The mortally wounded will rise to play hero one last time. You can’t always pause to make sure a dying man’s incapacitated, but when you can, you damn well better!’
After Kip’s sword came free of her body, he slapped it back into the side of her neck with all the emotion he’d summon to sink a hatchet into a stump after he was finished cutting firewood.
Satisfied from the sword’s recoil in his hand that he had cut deep enough, he didn’t even look down; he was already peering deeper into the gloom of the barge’s hold.
He followed the fuse the young soldier had been trying to light. It went to a charge against the hull, and then another, and another.
What the—?
A boom shook the ship. Not an explosion here, but on the other barge. Dammit! It must have been rigged identically to this one.
But it wasn’t a trap. If it had been, there would have been more than one guard.
Kip moved farther into the hold. There was nothing here except all the slaves at their oars on overcrowded benches and plenty of slaves in reserve.
Slaves, while the White King railed against the Chromeria for practicing slavery. Asshole.
There was no grain.
But if there was nothing here, why set charges so you could scuttle the boat?
For that matter, why were these barges up here at all? Kip had barely noticed in Cruxer’s report, but this foraging party had already sent two barges directly to Deora Neamh… but had left these here.
Charges and separation had to mean a cargo. But what cargo?
Kip had been flickering his vision between sub-red and normal vision to pierce the darkness for any violent moves toward him, but now he held up a green orb, drafted to shimmer back to light.
Despite the darkness, all the slaves wore blindfolds.
Kip ran back to the dead girl in her spreading pool of blood, and found a key around her neck. He ran to a tall man on the first bench, his pale Blood Forester arms permanently stained blue and green and yellow with luxin. Kip pulled off his blindfold.
“Who are you?” Kip demanded. He pointedly didn’t unlock the man’s manacles.
“I’m Derwyn. I’m Aleph of the Cwn y Wawr,” the man said quietly. “Repaid for our faithlessness here.”
“What faithlessness? Quick!” The Cwn y Wawr, the Dogs of Dawn, were Blood Forest’s hidden society of warrior-drafters.
The man’s stony sorrow said that he knew he was speaking his own death and he didn’t care. “We saw no path to victory, so to save our villages and families we tried to make a separate peace with the White King. He ambushed us instead. Captured us. We’re being taken to him. We either give him our fealty or he takes our eyes.”
“Same on the next barge?” Kip asked.
“Yes. There’s—there were two hundred thirty of us.”
“You fucking traitors!” Kip exclaimed. He paused for only one moment more. He couldn’t tarry here; his friends might be dying outside at the other barge even now. He said, “Meet me at Fechín Island if you want to find your honor again. Otherwise, fuck off and at least don’t fight for him.” He slammed the key against the man’s chest. “Scuttle the barge when you leave.”
No wonder the Blood Robes had set charges. A resource like two hundred thirty neutral warrior-drafters wasn’t to be scoffed at—and it certainly wasn’t something you wanted to fall into the hands of your enemies.
Kip ran onto the deck in time to see the other barge list to one side, great gaping holes in the hull from the charges. Ferkudi and Big Leo were on the shore, bloodied. Kip couldn’t tell how badly they were injured. But there were no slaves with them. That barge was going down with more than a hundred semi-innocent men chained belowdecks.
Cruxer was shouting at Kip, telling him that the bridges connecting shore and ship were about to collapse—that it was too dangerous, too late. He was right. Those men were going to die because of their own choices. Their own cowardice had led them to their chains. It made no sense for Kip to risk himself and everything he could accomplish to try a hopeless rescue. A man who can’t swim shouldn’t attempt to save the drowning.
But Kip surged forward anyway and ran for the widening gap between the sinking barge and the sloping planks.
Ah fuck me, he thought as the gap yawned wide. Why do I have to be so dumb?
And then he leapt.
Chapter 33
The seal sat in his reflection at the height of his forehead. Before he got too exhausted to be amused, it amused him to be scratching out the dead man’s third eye, or his own.
It took two sweaty desperate days of cramping hands and blood to hit the seal.
He barely felt the nub when he finally reached it; his dogtooth skipped across the uneven knot of luxin like a stone across water for only a few strokes, and before he could stop, the seal broke suddenly.
A section of the prison wall as wide as his own spread arms simply disintegrated into chalky blue dust.
Freedom whispered then, but she said, ‘I’m too far away. You’ll never see me.’
“It’s impossible,” the dead man said. “You built these prisons too well. You’ll never get out.”
The sand was draining through the glass now that Gavin had broken the cell. If he’d been more aware of the seal, he would have slept, waited, gathered his strength before he broke through. As it was, there was no time. A small alarum was rigged to ring in the chambers above if the cell’s seal broke.
Gavin hadn’t remade the alarum for this cell since his brother escaped, but he couldn’t be sure that Andross hadn’t found it, hadn’t repaired it, hadn’t heard it. There was no way to tell what time of day it was, so there was no way to guess when he could trigger the alarm without Andross’s being in his room to hear it. If a slave heard it while Andross was out, she likely wouldn’t know what it was. Gavin couldn’t imagine his father’s trusting anyone as much as he had trusted Marissia. Maybe his father trusted Grinwoody that much.
No. Not even him.