Chapter 84
“Karris, you have to wake up. Right now.”
Karris blinked to find Marissia shaking her. “Marissia, what are you doing? It’s not even light out.”
“It’s Gavin. One of my spies has just reported.”
That woke her instantly.
“Gavin’s imprisoned in Rath, and he may be executed.”
“When? How do we know? How good is the source? Where?” Karris moved toward the bureau where she kept her blacks.
Marissia stepped in her way, put a hand on her arm. “Today,” she said.
“Today?! And we’re learning this now?!”
“I have an idea,” Marissia said. “Mind you, not a good one.”
And now here Karris was, agreeing with the last part more and more with every windswept league. Gavin’s invention of the skimmers should change everything. They might even save his life.
She’d grabbed all the Blackguards she knew could keep their silence and whom she knew had a fair bit of drafting left until they broke their halos, but she hadn’t told everyone. There hadn’t been time. She’d hadn’t looked for Ironfist, certain that he would have seen this foolishness for what it was and tried to stop it.
But there he’d been, at the Luxlords’ dock at the back of the Chromeria, waiting.
She took a deep breath and lifted her chin, gathering her thoughts. He was as imposing as his arguments would be good. And that was if he even bothered to argue with her, rather than simply throw her over his shoulder and carry her away.
He scowled at her and she moved to speak. He spoke first. “You can go get yourself killed, but you’re not going to do it alone.”
“You have to let me— What?”
Ironfist let her struggle under a glare that weighed more than she did. Then a little smile stole onto his face.
She jumped onto him and hugged him, hard.
“Gah!” He caught her, startled, then pushed her away. “Karris, there’s no, there’s no hugging in the Blackguard!”
She smiled up at him. “You’re cute when you’re flustered.”
Karris couldn’t count the emotions that passed over his face, but twice his mouth opened to say things, and nothing came out. He stepped back away from her, then looked irritated that he’d retreated. He settled on a glower. “I brought baggage,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder.
“I’m baggage?” the Blackguard inductee named Ben-hadad asked.
But Ironfist ignored him, noticing all the Blackguards looking at him, grinning their fool faces off. “What is this?!” Ironfist barked at them. “Lives in the balance. The whole point of the Blackguard, and you’re lolling about? Skimmer! Now!”
They scattered like deer at a musket shot, and only then did a small, satisfied smile steal over his face. He looked at Karris and sniffed. “The room slave told me your plan. Terrible plan. This one here will make it work, though.” He made a grudging motion to Ben-hadad.
“I … what?” Ben-hadad asked. His hinged spectacles, with their multiple lenses sticking up, looked like alarmingly distended eyebrows.
“The baggage.”
Ben-hadad looked nonplussed. Then, “Oh! Oh, the dress! What’s the dress for?” He pulled out of a bag the frilliest riot of a dress that Karris had ever seen.
“Lady White Oak needs a maid,” Ironfist said. “The dress is for you.”
Ben-hadad’s mouth dropped open. He looked down at the dress in his hands. Dislodged by his movement, the lenses on one side of his spectacles drooped.
“He’s joking,” Karris told Ben-hadad.
“He’s, he is?” Ben-hadad asked. Relief washed over his face.
Ironfist looked as close to smug as he got. “You do gears and whatnot. Machines?”
“Yes, sir,” Ben-hadad said, confused. “But I’ve never—”
“You’ll make one for Lady White Oak.” Ironfist seemed to stress ‘lady.’ “While we ride.”
So they’d started, in those hours before dawn, burning a fortune’s worth of magnesium torches to do what drafting they could early. It was enough to get halfway through building the skimmer.
Usually the Blackguards made sea chariots. With the difficulty of the drafting and the expense in life lost to draft so much so quickly, their craft needed to last more than a few voyages to be worth making. Thus they made heavier, durable, and slower craft.
Not this time.
But even with seven of them together, they couldn’t draft the craft as quickly as Gavin could have done it alone. The man could intuit the shape and density of luxins required, and, of course, didn’t need to communicate which luxin needed to go where to anyone else. He just did it.
Karris spent all morning as they crossed the waves trying to come up with a better plan. She had no doubt Commander Ironfist was doing the same. From his silence, she guessed he had failed, too.
Five exhausted Blackguards traipse into the middle of fifty thousand angry civilians whipped into a frenzy by the brutal chariot races and whatever lies the Nuqaba had dreamed up and do … what, precisely?
There just weren’t good options. Not with time running out. What could Karris do? Threaten the Nuqaba? With what? Bribe her? With what? Say that an army would avenge Gavin? Perhaps even true, but it would come too late for him.
She looked at Ironfist. “Could you…?” The woman was his sister. He kept a picture of her in his room. She knew he thought about her often.
“You don’t know the Nuqaba,” he said. He never called her his sister; he never used her name. “If she even sees me, this only gets worse.”
Dawn was nearly six hours past now, the sun perilously near noon.
Around the skimmer, the five drafters who’d come with her—two of the others had exhausted themselves building the craft and stayed behind, not worth the weight they would add to the skimmer—were all bent against the wind, cutting up the Great River past galleys and galleasses. Everyone other than Karris and Ben-hadad wore eye caps rather than spectacles, enduring the glue and the discomfort in a trade for keeping them on and being able to see even at these great speeds.
Everywhere, they attracted stares. None of the people on shore had ever seen a ship move at such speed, and though they might have heard rumors of skimmers and sea chariots, seeing one was different.
They angled the skimmer up river channels. Karris and Commander Ironfist both had been here before. The hippodrome was carved into Rathcore Hill—the smaller twin to Jaks Hill in an otherwise flat plain. But while the hippodrome complex was elevated above the floodplain, a deep canal had been dug to allow ferries to transport horses and goods directly to the hippodrome’s basement.
As they approached the vast iron gate blocking river access, Commander Ironfist looked at Karris. “New plan?” he asked.
They both looked at the defenses. The gate itself could be blasted open or opened by a guard at the counterweights. The soldiers guarding the gate and the hippodrome, ironically, were wearing Guile livery. The Guiles must be sponsoring these races, so they were in charge of the expense and manpower of securing the hippodrome during the race and clearing and cleaning it afterward.
It would have been a great stroke of luck if they’d had hours to call the Guile steward, convince him or her who Karris was, and enlist them to help. There was no time for that.
We could just kill them. Tragic, but their lives against Gavin’s? Karris was willing to make that trade.
But there were at least a dozen of them, most of them at the gate to the basement itself, where someone was shouting up the results to the races to them as they happened.
They could kill twelve, no problem. But how many more were around the hippodrome, within a minute’s run? Karris and Ironfist could get in, but what if Gavin wasn’t there yet? Or what if he’d already been taken above?
“The timing’s impossible,” Karris said.
Ironfist veered the skimmer into an open space between two riverboats. They spilled out onto the dock, ignoring the stares of the merchants and sailors. “Ben-hadad, Essel, guard the boat. Ben-hadad, that spot there.” He pointed out in the canal. “Make sure it stays clear. If it isn’t deep, make it so.”
“How am I supposed—”
“Your problem. Essel, ten minutes, fifteen at the outside. Hezik, with us.”
“Ben-hadad, do whatever you’re going to do.”
He approached her warily. “This is not going to be comfortable,” he said. “Hold your left eye open. You can’t blink.”
She did and he lifted a tiny lens on delicate luxin fingers, swabbing the lens itself one last time to make sure it was free of dust—and then placed it directly on her eye. It was about as enjoyable as she’d guessed getting poked in the eye would be. She blinked.
“No—you weren’t supposed to blink—” Ben-hadad said. “Is it still in? Next one.”
They repeated the process. It took two tries, and left her streaming tears.
But she looked up at him and Ben-hadad said, “I’m a genius.”
Commander Ironfist grabbed her face in his meaty hands and turned her toward him. It was so disconcerting when he touched her face.
He looked troubled, but said nothing, merely nodding.
Ben-hadad had not only made almost impossibly thin blue lenses that sat directly on her eyes, he had patterned them exactly to the luxin patterns already on her retinas. To anything other than long study, Karris would appear to simply have blue eyes.
“How long?” she asked.
“A few hours. Try not to blink too hard.”
It would have been great, she’d joked, if she drafted blue. Ben-hadad took the criticism to heart, and had incorporated a bit of red luxin—which someone else had needed to draft for him, on a speeding, windy skimmer—into the lens itself, but only directly over the pupil. With the black pupil behind that dot of red, it was unnoticeable. One lens red, one lens green.
Karris wished she could try it out, but drafting at all risked destroying the disguise. Cursed pale skin. She would undo the good months of abstaining from drafting had done.
“Ready,” she said. She didn’t look a drafter at all.
Ironfist and Karris and Hezik ran up the steps from the docks, Karris especially drawing stares with her dress that was all cleavage and a flood of white lace and blue satin and a pink ribbon on her right hip the size of a great ship. She hiked up skirts and petticoats and thanked Orholam that she hadn’t put on the elevated shoes, too.
As usual, Ironfist moved with purpose. He cut between stalls, heading straight for the hippodrome’s wall. Karris’s wide skirts knocked over a rack of petosae, and she cursed the dress again, never mind that her life was going to depend on it in moments.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said, shooting the biggest, stupidest smile she could at the old man who ran out to catch his hats.
He looked at her face, her dress—and then her cleavage—and seemed to forget his anger, at least long enough for her to escape.
Ironfist brought them to the wall. It wasn’t the lowest wall, but it was clear. All the entrances were packed with people and Guile soldiers. Twenty feet above them here was a sentry box and a narrow walkway that disappeared into the hippodrome: a lookout to spot supplies arriving.
Ironfist must have already given an order to Hezik while Karris was flirting with the merchant, because Hezik’s brown skin was already tinged blue. He moved instantly to the wall, put his back to it, and squatted slightly, putting his thigh at a good angle to step up on.
Without hesitation, Commander Ironfist approached at a slow jog. The rhythm was important, and as always with Ironfist, the rhythm was perfect. He stepped on Hezik’s thigh, then up off his shoulder, then into the hand Hezik had raised above his head. A small luxin platform sprang up out of Hezik’s palm, shooting Ironfist into the air, his own jump magnified.
The jump was so perfect that Ironfist merely put his hands on the railing as his body went over it and into the walkway, as effortless as a farmboy vaulting a stone fence.
And then it was Karris’s turn. In this damned dress.
She gathered up skirts in both hands, and took a deep breath against the rib-breaking bodice, nodded the tempo to Hezik and jogged. Step, step, step.
Karris wasn’t as tall or as strong as Ironfist, but she was a great deal lighter. Hezik overcompensated and launched her luxin platform too hard. She flew up and off to the side, but Ironfist was there, dodging to the side fast enough to arrive in place and put out his hand and arm as stable targets. She snagged his hand, and he swooped her up and into the walkway.
It worked perfectly except that the boned skirts smacked Ironfist in the face as she spun, poking him in the eye. He didn’t let it interfere with setting Karris down in the walkway, but he was left blinking.
Karris looked down in disgust. “This thing is hideous,” she said.
“The very pinnacle of fashion is to wear the hideous with great confidence.” Ironfist rubbed his eye, but he did it as he jogged over to the door. It was chained shut, and the door itself was stout old wood. The hinges were on the other side. Ironfist was in the lead, and he went right to the barred window. Who the hell put a door that sturdy up here? Who bothered to chain it shut?
Shaking the door to test its hinges, Ironfist immediately got the attention of someone on the other side.
“Would you open the door?” he asked smoothly. “My lady friend and I seem to have gotten locked out.” He smiled as if they’d been up to mischief.
“Go to hell,” Karris heard from the other side.
Brave words, when Ironfist was on the opposite side of a chained door.
Ironfist turned. “I saw a man on the spina. Being bound for punishment. It’s not Gavin.” He hesitated, though.
“Let me look,” Karris said. She went to the window, but wasn’t tall enough to see over the standing crowds.
Without needing to be asked, Ironfist stooped and wrapped an arm around her and lifted her up.
“That’s him,” she said instantly. Even emaciated and with his hair dyed, she couldn’t mistake him. “Sir,” she said louder. “Please…?”
The man turned, frustrated. “Do I look like I have a key? I’m trying to watch the show.”
Karris nearly shot a spike of luxin through his head.
There had been some hope while they’d thought the chains might just be looped around the other side. But locked, too?
She looked at Ironfist. They could break through the door, but it would take time and noise. That would draw soldiers. And if Gavin was already on the spina …
Ironfist looked up. There were no more walkways or sentry boxes above them, but there were open spaces between the broad arches—twenty-five feet up. Not only was it higher than their first jump, but it would mean running forward, jumping forward, and grabbing sideways. If they did anything wrong, Karris would be launched away from the hippodrome and would land in the market below. Far below.
It was too dangerous.
“Ladder?” Ironfist asked. It was possible, but it would take time to make one that would bear even Karris’s weight over this kind of height.
“Shh. The crowd just went silent,” Karris said.
Ironfist took his place instantly, squatting slightly, right hand over his shoulder, a flat blue platform already drafted in it. “If you need to, you come out the way you went in,” Ironfist said. “They won’t expect it. Five count. Gavin first. Plank out.”
“You think you can?” Karris asked. She’d taken her position already. Plank, from up there? She paled. As if that was the insane part of this plan.
But before Ironfist could answer, the crowd in the hippodrome erupted in groans. Something terrible had happened. It was the same sound they made when a chariot wrecked, or a man was dragged to death by his horses. That was how it always went: a shared groan, then a cheer.
They cheered.
Karris drafted green for the first time in half a year, carefully packing it in areas covered by the dress, and the wildness filled her. Her eyes lit. This, this was life. She wasn’t too late. She couldn’t be too late. Not when she was this close. “One, two, three, four,” she said, giving the tempo for the jump.
Ironfist’s face was stone, the tight muscles in his jaw giving the only indication that he’d entered battle readiness, the whites of his eyes flooded with blue.
Karris jogged the few steps. With battle juice flowing and green luxin, she rushed the tempo she’d set. But Ironfist had practiced with her, fought with her. He knew; he adjusted.
But the faster tempo and the harder jump meant her skirts—which she had to release as soon as she made the first jumping step—flattened more than they had on her earlier jump with Hezik. The first step was fine, the step to Ironfist’s shoulder was fine, but the skirt caught for a fraction of a heartbeat between her foot and Ironfist’s hand.
Ironfist threw her hard into the air, springing the platform high and hard to give her the maximum height. But that little hitch put her off balance. Her leg strained to take all the pressure and she flew up—but not high enough, and out into the empty air.
Something big and blunt smacked into her butt, adding to her fading momentum, shooting her higher into the air. It was Ironfist. He’d noticed her jump was wrong and immediately tried to help her get higher. But the blue luxin scoop snapped immediately as he tried to use it to angle her in.
Worse, the boost twisted her body so that she was facing the street. All the green luxin she’d readied to extend in hooks was useless. Then some primal part of her remembered something and acted before it could rise to the level of thought. She snapped her hands out and streamed unfocused green luxin into the empty air.
Like a tiny rudder steering a mighty ship, it didn’t take much. She threw luxin, and the luxin threw her back—toward the vast open arch. She started spinning, but too late. Her left leg hit stone, and she tumbled.
In.
She’d made it. Her butt had cleared the ledge, just barely.
Karris hopped to her feet amid the standing crowd. No one had even noticed her entrance except one little girl on her father’s shoulders. The girl was patting his head, trying to get his attention. Karris straightened her skirts, brushed off the dirt, and pushed hair out of her eyes.
Now, the hard part.