Chapter 86
Karris ran down the broad steps of the hippodrome’s tiered seating, not even trying to be ladylike.
With the broadness of the steps, she couldn’t take her eyes off her footing to see if Gavin still lived. But the audience still seemed transfixed, so she guessed he must. Maybe it was only torture.
As she descended the crowds got thicker, until she had to push through a mass of people standing at the chest-high fence that ringed the track. The track itself was fifteen feet below them. With her dress, Karris had to push through the crowd instead of dodging through it. But she wouldn’t be denied.
A man took umbrage at her shoving. He said, “Who the hell do you think you—”
Sometimes being short was a blessing. She swung a hand up between his legs, grabbed a fistful of cloth and his stones, and twisted, hard. He dropped, and she snatched his ghotra off his head as he fell.
From the spina, she heard a man’s screams. She recognized the voice. No, no, no.
She unwrapped the ghotra as she moved. Reaching the front, she vaulted over the worn stone handrail. She threw the ghotra into a knot around the rail and jumped, sliding down it until she ran out of cloth.
She dropped daintily onto the sand of the hippodrome floor and ran out onto the dirt racetrack before anyone could stop her.
There was a murmur from the half of the hippodrome that saw her immediately. What was a noblewoman doing running out onto the track?
But the people on top of the spina—drafters and what looked like a chirurgeon—didn’t see her immediately. They were looking at Gavin, bound to a table. He was screaming, throwing himself against his bonds, obviously in agony, but he couldn’t move. The chirurgeon was lifting a red-hot poker in gloved hands. Karris had never seen him in such pain. Gavin, admitting weakness, admitting pain? Gavin?!
They were blinding him. Dear Orholam, they’d already burned out one eye.
The soldiers standing around the spina saw her. These were the Nuqaba’s elite drafter soldiers, the Tafok Amagez. Bad luck. But then, Ironfist had once said that Karris was the fastest drafter that he’d ever seen, and Ironfist didn’t flatter. Karris’s white skin was a disadvantage in full battle. There was no way to draft vast amounts of luxin without it showing in her arms. But she’d learned a thing or two. There are advantages to apparent disadvantages.
The hot poker descended toward Gavin’s face.
Green luxin uncurled down the underside of Karris’s arm to make a ball that fit nicely in her fist. Her feet danced through a progression, positions on a clock, hips twisting like throwing a javelin, loading tension and snapping forward to impart it all into a projectile. It was faster than the Tafok Amagez could react. The green ball flew at the chirurgeon’s head. Connected.
She spun away hard enough that when she dropped the burning poker it didn’t fall on Gavin’s face.
Karris turned her odd steps into an awkward swaying dance, desperately trying to clear her skin of any hint of green luxin. The projectile had been small enough and so fast as to be invisible. That, together with the sight of Karris moving strangely, might leave the crowd simply baffled. More importantly, it might leave the Nuqaba baffled.
Play it to the hilt, Karris. Pretend you’ve got the confidence of Gavin.
She raised a hand, her index finger up. “Pardon me!” she shouted.
As she stepped forward, she remembered to alter her steps to a lady’s. Her sidesteps had triggered Ben-hadad’s other contraption. As subtly as she could after having just demanded the attention of fifty thousand people, she reached a hand down to the ridiculous huge bow and pressed it firmly to her hip once more. It clicked. Wait, had she landed on that hip? Had she destroyed the mechanism?
No, she’d landed on the other hip. Right?
She raised her other hand at the same time she checked the bow. “Pardon me?” she shouted again. She smiled, as if she were asking a man to come to her bed.
Which confused the hell out of them, as intended.
There was brief chaos on the platform on the spina. The chirurgeon was on her knees, in serious pain, but she wasn’t saying anything. An Amagez tried to pick up the poker. He was smart enough not to grab the glowing end, but not smart enough to realize iron didn’t need to be glowing in order to be hot.
He threw the hot iron away, cursing loudly, adding to the chaos.
Karris made it to the steps before the Amagez tried to intercept her. She ignored them, jutting her chin high and dismissive—and made it to the top before they brandished muskets and luxin to show her they were serious. Amateurs.
She stopped, now in full view of everyone in the hippodrome, as if shocked and put out that soldiers would threaten her. A young one stepped forward and started searching her.
Moment of truth. Big stage, big body language to let everyone see it.
He had to push hard against the many petticoats to try to feel the inside of her legs. For a moment, she let him search as if stunned and violated. But she had to let him search enough that he could be convinced to stop.
She stepped back, as if horribly insulted, flinging her arms wide. In her loudest battlefield voice, she projected, “Pardon you, sirrah! I no more have a weapon between my legs than you do!”
And she slapped him. Not hard, not with the correct body mechanics to put the poor fool on the ground, but sloppily, tossing her hair like a dimwit.
The audience roared with laughter, still wondering what the hell was happening. Was this part of a show?
She held up her hand again, turning to face the Nuqaba’s box. She was sitting right at the front, beside Eirene Malargos.
The young guard moved toward Karris again, chagrined, but she boomed out, “Your Excellency!” toward the Nuqaba. “Move aside, young man,” she said in a withering whisper. “Your betters are speaking.”
It was enough to freeze the young Tafok Amagez. Accustomed to taking nonsense orders from an imperious woman who demanded his obedience without question, he felt suddenly bereft of authority.
This is how tyrants fall. By destroying their people, they destroy themselves.
Blackguards knew exactly what they were entitled to do, and they were authorized to do it to whomever entered their sphere. A lord might complain, but not even a luxlord would go without being searched in an area where weapons were forbidden. No Prism or White or Black would ever reprimand a Blackguard for doing his duties thoroughly. The Nuqaba was clearly not so rational.
She stood in her box, and motioned to the young Amagez to move back.
“Who are you?” the Nuqaba demanded. “What is this?”
“This man,” Karris projected, so that not only the Nuqaba, who was near enough to easily hear, but all the hippodrome could hear as well. “Is my husband.” Karris turned, to shout it the other direction. “This man is my husband!”
What she hadn’t planned was to see him as she turned. He was strapped down so he couldn’t turn his head. But he heard her. “Karris?” he shouted. “Dear Orholam, Karris, get out of here!”
His left side was to her, and blood trickled out of his eye, down his cheek, a stream of red tears from a wound that hadn’t been fully cauterized.
Her stomach caught and she tried to stifle a sob. She hunched over, but set her jaw. Weeping and running to him would mean death for both of them.
Put it aside, Karris.
“Your Excellency!” Karris snarled, whipping around to face the foul bitch who’d done this to Gavin. Her fear was gone, and her rage wasn’t red. “I declare my husband innocent of any wrong. By your own old traditions, I demand trial by combat!”
“I demand trial by combat,” she announced to the other half of the stadium. If only she had an orator’s voice that could be heard over fifty thousand murmuring souls. But most orators couldn’t pull off this dress, either.
She turned to the Nuqaba and lowered her voice, trying to project just enough for the woman and those privileged few in the front row to hear. “Or I tell everyone here our surname and rally those who are not traitors.”
The Nuqaba’s face gathered a storm. Eirene Malargos interjected some question. A quick volley of questions and responses between them, impossible to hear. Both angry. Both insistent.
There was no ancient Parian tradition of trial by combat. It was pure horse shit.
But the fifty thousand bloodthirsty Ruthgari spectators in the hippodrome didn’t know that. And they loved the idea. Chariot races could be bloody—crashes frequent, injuries common—but true blood sports had been banned and reinstated, banned and reinstated repeatedly for the last four hundred years. They had been illegal for the last ninety or more. A licit taste of an illicit activity? A taste of a vice that the audience could blame on Parian barbarity rather than their own? It was irresistible.
But that pressure wasn’t enough. The Nuqaba didn’t mind angering fifty thousand of some other satrapy’s people. But the pressure wasn’t the bait.
Karris looked closely as the Nuqaba and Eirene Malargos bickered. She could lip-read ‘wife,’ and multiple curses. The Nuqaba nodded her head and said some words to a handsome, muscular Parian man who was still seated next to her. Then she stepped forward and raised her hands. Eirene put a hand on her arm, but the Nuqaba shook her off, giving her a poisonous glance. Eirene surrendered, trying not to make a scene, but clearly furious.
When Marissia had pitched the idea to Karris, she’d said, ‘I’ve studied Haruru for fifteen years. She’s hateful, petty, jealous, and vindictive—and she was involved with Gavin once. If she can do anything to hurt him, she will.’
And now we find out just how competent Marissia really is.
And then a sick thought punched Karris in the stomach: It’s not as if Marissia has an incentive to send me to my death.
Sudden fear shivered down Karris’s back.
Her rival.
Oh, Orholam, what have I done? I thought I’d finally won her over. I thought we shared a love for Gavin that trumped the rest. I thought she was working with me. I’ve taken everything from her, and this is her one chance to reclaim her work, if not her man, whom she knew was lost to her forever.
This is what you get for trusting a slave.
It had been a colossal blunder. The kind Karris never would have missed if she hadn’t been so pressed for time. How long had Marissia sat on that information, in order to make sure Karris was pressed for time? Marissia could have known about Gavin’s imprisonment for weeks, and held it back just so Karris would rush off and get herself killed. Even the trial by combat had been Marissia’s idea.
But the White trusts her. And she loves Gavin. She wouldn’t hold back information when he was in danger, would she?
But Gavin had pushed her aside without a thought when he’d married Karris. How would Karris react if a man had done that to her?
Orholam have mercy.
The crowd quieted, and Karris waited for the word. She would be dragged off as a co-conspirator. Alone, with no one to speak for her, all that needed to happen was for the Nuqaba to say that Karris was a madwoman, and that a trial by combat was never part of Parian history. There would be those in this vast crowd who knew that was true.
It was all falling apart.
“It has been many, many years since the trial by combat has been requested,” the Nuqaba said. And Karris’s heart soared. She had a chance. “As set down in our ancient laws, the trial by combat can only be requested once, and must be fulfilled by the one who asked for it. No champions!”
Bait, swallowed.
Before the crowd could shout, enthralled by the idea of some insubstantial little girl in a dress fighting in a trial by combat herself, the Nuqaba continued. “There is no drafting allowed in trials by combat, and the trial is to the death!”
Now the crowd roared.
So Marissia didn’t betray me.
But this was almost worse. All Karris’s preparations to hide her drafting abilities were for nothing. Either the Nuqaba or Eirene Malargos had known who Karris was and that she could draft. The Nuqaba was vicious, but she wasn’t stupid.
Shit.
The Nuqaba quieted the crowd again, and gestured to the man who’d been sitting to her left. As he stood, the Nuqaba said, “Do you, O common woman, wish to face the hand of our justice, the Lord Commandant of the Armies of Paria, Enki Hammer?”
On his cue, the man, clearly the Nuqaba’s consort, came forward out from under their shade to stand full in the noon sun. He was tall, very tall, with slim hips and shoulders but the reedy forearms that told a warrior like Karris that under his rich Parian cloak—his burnous—and his gold-brocaded tunic that he was a soldier. He wore the ghotra, too, to cover his head, but there was nothing of pious humility in him. Even his ghotra was woven through with gold.
He shrugged off the white-and-black-striped burnous and pulled the laces of his tunic open, dropping it to reveal impressive musculature. Karris wanted to hate him for his vanity, but she dabbled in vanity more than her fair share.
Odd, she thought. That would have made me hate him twice as much not too long ago.
Oh, she was supposed to respond. Something gutsy but that didn’t hint to the crowd that she was a fighter. “I would rather die,” she shouted, “than let you hurt my husband any more.”
The crowd cheered. The Nuqaba tried to whisper something to Enki, but he shook his head. She tried again, but the crowd was too loud, too impatient. He waved her off. Later.
As Enki jogged down the steps and across the sand toward the spina, looking vexed, the Nuqaba waited for the cheer to die and then shouted, “Then may your blood be on your own head!”
There was confusion on the spina as the soldiers tried to figure out what precisely they were supposed to do during a trial the likes of which they’d never heard of, much less trained for, all while under the watching eyes of fifty thousand people. The professional in Karris had some pity on them, but she said nothing. Any hint she gave that she knew exactly what she was doing could get her killed. This is why you strike fast—some part of the enemy force may have intelligence that will destroy you, but if they can’t communicate it in time, it doesn’t matter.
She bent her head and wiped at her cheeks defiantly, as if she were weeping uncontrollably but was angry about it. A fool wisp of a girl in a ridiculous dress, that’s what she was, not at all a Blackguard.
She wanted to look at Gavin. She wanted to go to him. But she’d lose herself if she did.
Finally, on quick orders from Enki himself, the Tafok Amagez set up a perimeter around the spina as he mounted the steps. An Amagez broke ranks and came forward for the offering of weapons. He was probably thirty-five years old, ancient for a warrior-drafter. He lifted his scabbarded longsword from his belt and offered it to Karris. Another Amagez joined him a moment later and offered a stabbing spear. Then another, with a scorpion. Enki himself wore a long, thin-bladed scimitar, scabbard and hilt encrusted with mother-of-pearl and rubies.
Karris looked at the weapons, and shook her head and waved her hand in denial, still making the motions large enough that they could be interpreted even by the farmers in the highest seats. “Oh, no, I shan’t need anything there, I think. But thank you.”
She glanced at Gavin as murmurs rippled through the crowd again. No weapons? What insanity was this? Was she simply committing suicide?
Gavin was still twitching, still obviously in great pain, but he said nothing, didn’t cry out in his agony, didn’t call out to Karris. He couldn’t see what was happening, and the not knowing would be driving him insane, but he held his silence. She knew at once it was because he trusted her. He knew she had a plan, and he knew it was desperate, and he wasn’t going to distract her from it.
For a man who’d been in control of everything, and been the driver of change in most of the great moments in the Seven Satrapies for the last two decades, to trust her that much moved her beyond words.
No time for that, dammit! She scrubbed a tear from her eye, a real one.
Unwilling to let her dominate the crowd’s eyes, Enki had stepped forward and raised both hands to heaven. “Orholam!” he cried. “Look upon the works of our hands! May your justice be done to traitors!”
He lowered his hands, and then took off his ghotra, as if this were connected to drawing Orholam’s attention. His black hair was woven with gold wire into clumps that hung past his shoulders. In Parian tradition, that hair was his glory, and he gloried in it.
The gesture wasn’t lost on the Ruthgari, who didn’t wear the ghotra, but were well aware of their neighbors’ beliefs about it. Nor were they immune to appreciating a handsome, athletic man who was six and a half feet tall.
He was like a smaller, vain version of Ironfist. Which was a bit disturbing, when Karris thought about it. Who picked a lover who looked so much like her own brother?
Karris walked up beside Enki and stood facing the Nuqaba’s box, waiting for him.
A flicker of doubt crossed his face. Karris was acting with such conviction that she could tell the big ignoramus thought that maybe these trials really were a tradition. He stood beside her, but not too close.
Around the spina in a circle, the Tafok Amagez drew in their colors. Any drafting would mean death.
Karris curtsied carefully to the Nuqaba and a steely-eyed Eirene Malargos. Beside her, Enki bowed deeply.
The crowd fell silent.
The Nuqaba waved a hand, signaling they could begin, but Karris ignored it. She turned to Enki and curtsied, more elaborately, an old court curtsy, with sweeping arms bringing her skirts wide, and her ankles crossed. Enki bowed to her, but carefully, keeping his eyes on her.
And … nothing happened.
Ben-hadad! It wasn’t supposed to be like this!
Enki lifted his sword and readied himself, while Karris stood on one foot, her right ankle pushing against her left calf.
“One moment,” Karris said. She held a finger up. “I have an itch.” She moved her right foot up and down her calf.
Enki looked at her, incredulous. Was she mad? And then he laughed.
And it was as if Ben-hadad had made the catch to be activated by laughter instead of by crossing her ankles, as they’d discussed. Karris felt the catch give and the big ridiculous ribbon on her right hip popped out and the luxin holding together layers of skirt and petticoats let go, swinging open like a door over her thigh, giving Karris access to the quick-release scabbard that covered the length of the inside of her thigh.
At the same time the skirts popped open, the scabbard swiveled from the inner thigh where it had been hidden during her search to her outer thigh and hand.
Most scabbards required a blade to be stabbed into them, and likewise, drawn vertically out before it could be used: they took two motions. This was a tension scabbard, holding the blade in a hug instead, letting the blade come out horizontally, so that one could draw as one slashed.
It was only a fraction of a heartbeat faster than a normal draw, but a fraction was all Karris needed. She sprang forward in the moment Enki’s eyes crinkled with laughter. Onetwothree steps, the back of her left hand batting his sword aside—
And she buried the blade under his chin at the very instant he realized she’d moved. She rammed it all the way to the hilt, its point jutting out, gleaming red above his glorious braids. She twisted the blade hard, breaking bones in his brainpan, taking no chances. A man could still kill you before he realized he was dead.
And then she jumped back, out of reach, pulling the dagger free.
Enki dropped to his knee, dropped flat on his face. Someone in the circle of Tafok Amagez shouted, but Karris barely heard it.
She stepped forward again, now that she saw he wouldn’t attack, and knelt at his body. She pulled back his braids and took the scimitar from his twitching fingers. Taking a fistful of braids, she stood, lifting the body to put pressure on the neck, and hacked with the dead man’s own scimitar. Once, and then twice, and a bit of quick sawing for the last of the skin, and Enki’s head came free of his body.
Karris held the head high in one hand and the scimitar high in the other, and suddenly, she could hear the crowd again, a vast roar of confusion and horror and awe and disbelief and cheering all intermixed. “Orholam has seen! Orholam’s justice has been done!” she shouted. But her voice was probably lost in the roar.
“I am Karris Guile, and this man is Gavin Guile, your Prism. He is Gavin Guile!” She was shouting at the top of her lungs, but it was lost in the clamor of fifty thousand voices. Only the nearest could hear. She could only hope it was enough.
She switched hands and swung the head back and forth as she drafted off the banners nearby. She flung the head and gave it a little extra push with luxin as she threw it.
Karris couldn’t have made the shot so perfectly if she’d tried it a hundred times. The head flew all the way into Eirene Malargos’s box and landed in the Nuqaba’s lap.
The Nuqaba began shrieking, and Orholam forgive them, many in the audience laughed.
Karris didn’t care. She moved to Gavin quickly and cut him free as the Tafok Amagez stood around, baffled.
Oh, Orholam. Gavin’s face. His face!
“Gavin,” she said, “we have to run. Can you—”
“I won’t let you down,” he said, but when he stood, he almost collapsed. He put his left hand up to his face, and two of his fingers were gone. Those fucking animals.
But what mattered now was that Gavin was in no shape to fight.
Karris steadied him. Around her, the Tafok Amagez looked uncertain as to what they should be doing. She had won a trial that their Nuqaba had established, so they should let her go, but then, she’d also thrown the head of one of their leaders into the Nuqaba’s lap, so, should they arrest her? Could they, after what she’d just done?
There was no point in waiting to find out what they decided.
But just then, one of the hippodrome guards ran to the steps of the spina. “It is Gavin Guile!” he shouted. “I recognize him from the old days! They dyed his hair and dirtied his face, but he is Gavin Guile!”
Karris veritably pulled Gavin down the steps, and the soldier fell in with them, desperately signaling to other Guile family troops to join them.
“Kill them!” the Nuqaba shrieked suddenly. “Kill them both!” Karris shot a look over at her. She was covered with blood. More blood than you’d think would leak out of a man’s severed head. She’d smeared it somehow on her face.
“No! Ignore that order!” Eirene Malargos shouted. “You’re not in your right mind, Haruru!”
“Kill them!” the Nuqaba shouted. “Block the exits! That’s an order!”
“That’s an act of war! I forbid it!” Eirene Malargos shouted.
Chaos.
“This way!” the Guile soldier said.
He unlocked a door set at the level of the sand. They stepped through and he closed it behind them, locking it.
“Captain Eutheos, you son of a bitch,” Gavin said. “I thought I ordered you out of here.”
“Wasn’t much good at orders at Blood Ridge either, my lord.”
Gavin laughed briefly at some shared memory, then cut off abruptly, as if anything that made his face move spawned such pain that it nearly felled him.
“I can get us to an exit, but they’ll get there faster,” the soldier said.
“There has to be some kind of service exit,” Karris said.
“First thing they’ll think of,” Gavin said. And he was right. Dammit.
“Can you get us to the top tier, west side?” Karris asked.
“Absolutely.”
And he did. They dodged through corridors where only servants and slaves went, and crossed halls clogged with spectators eager to get out—the sight of men drawing swords and pistols and drafting and ready to kill anyone who opposed them did crazy things to people. Other people, who’d been outside the hippodrome and heard that amazing things were happening within were pushing to get in, creating vast snarls. One musket shot and this was going to turn into a stampede.
The Guile soldiers manning the exits were shouting, trying to bring order, but they were confused themselves. Were the Tafok Amagez now the enemy? Or were they still friends who should be helped? What had happened inside?
Gavin collapsed several times, apologizing each time. Karris and Eutheos ended up each taking a shoulder—another thing that being short made her ill-suited for. He was shockingly light.
But in minutes they made it to the arch where Karris had entered. She poked her head out over the drop.
Oh my.
But there was Ironfist. At the sight of her, he grinned big.
When Gavin poked his own head out, Ironfist’s grin slipped. Gavin’s eye was still bleeding. But Gavin smiled, delighted to see the big man.
“Are you going to make your own way down, Lord Prism?” Ironfist asked.
Gavin jerked back and turned. “Company coming,” he said.
Karris saw five Tafok Amagez running up the stairs she’d run down not fifteen minutes ago. These upper decks had cleared out. They definitely saw them.
“Afraid not,” Gavin said, quickly poking his head back out. “What’s the plan? Quickly.” He looked out at the river. It was a long way away, and a long way down. “Oh no, tell me that’s not the plan.”
“That’s it,” Karris said. “Captain, thank you. Now get the hell out of here. Five count, Gavin. Commander, I’ll come five after Gavin.”
Gavin had already backed up. He wobbled, but gathered himself. Eutheos steadied him. “Go, Captain, and bless you.”
Karris stood at the edge so both of them could see her. “One, two, three, four, five.” And Gavin leapt, right in front of her.
She didn’t watch. Couldn’t and make it to her spot in time. The Tafok Amagez were charging up the stairs. Oh damn, a five count was too much. By four she’d be dead.
She ran for the edge as metal cut the air. “Five, five, five!” she shouted. And dove into the air.
For a sickening heartbeat, she fell. She kept her body rigid, no time for a prayer or a curse.
And a soft cloud of Ironfist’s open luxin caught her for half a moment, and then flung her hard.
The timing was off, and the throw was less than perfect: instead of catching her at her chest and hips and throwing evenly, it was a little behind her. Being flung from that position spun her, hips over head, flipping. She would land flat on her back in the river.
From this height, it would break her.
Karris twisted hard. First lesson of fighting, how to fall.
But she had also turned sideways—and her feet hit the water first, before she was ready, and suddenly—black.
The next she was aware, she was underwater in billows of clinging skirts with no idea which way was up, and no breath. She flailed, and the last of her breath escaped with the wave of pain that crashed over her. Her left arm felt like someone had tried to tear it off, and her ribs and left breast had been crushed.
An unnatural hand—more hook than hand—grabbed her many petticoats and dragged her, upside down, to the surface. It shot water up her nose, and as she hit the blessed air, she coughed and spat and fought to push the blinding, suffocating layers of cloth away.
Ben-hadad dropped the open green luxin claw he’d used to grab her and extended a hand. Karris made the mistake of offering her left hand, and regretted it immediately when he hauled her up. Pain took what little breath she had.
“Ben!” Essel shouted. “Need you! Need you now!” She was standing over Gavin, who had also been pulled out of the water. He was wet and whimpering and holding a hand to his bleeding eye. He would be no help.
The sparse crowd that had already filled the market when they arrived was now a thick crowd with the events inside the hippodrome and the sudden spectacle of the insane people jumping all the way from the hippodrome into the river. Soldiers were trying to fight their way through to get to the river’s edge where the skimmer was docked.
Karris couldn’t see whose soldiers they were, just the fighting in the seething crowd, and the bobbing points of muskets.
She fought to stand, and saw Hezik break through the crowd and run for the stairs. He jumped halfway down the first flight. “Ironfist says go! Go!” Hezik shouted.
A musket shot rang out. Flesh and blood and cloth puffed from Hezik’s left arm. He was already running down the second flight of steps and it threw him off balance. He tumbled, rolled down the remaining steps.
The crowd bolted, and despite the clear visual marker of a big black cloud of smoke from the musket, people who’ve never been in combat do the craziest things. They went all directions at once. Some were pushed off the wall to fall onto the docks, shrieking, screaming, breaking legs and backs and necks, grabbing on to those who pushed them to try to save themselves.
Others pushed toward the soldiers, who turned their muskets and started beating anyone close with the stocks. One must have had his musket grabbed by someone in the crowd, because it discharged into the air.
Karris fought to her feet. “Ignition!” she shouted at Ben-hadad, who looked paralyzed.
“What? I, I don’t—I don’t draft—”
The red lens had popped out of her eye somewhere. She tore into his pack. Found the flint and steel and her red spectacles, the pain in her arm making black spots dance in her vision. Pulled the spectacles out and put them on, and filled her left hand with red luxin.
She turned her eyes in time to see Hezik stand with effort—it looked like one of the falling men had hit him. A soldier with a musket stepped to the edge of the wall, and fired.
Hezik dropped, a splash of red jumping into the air from his head.
“No!” Karris shouted. Drafting red for the first time in six months, she reacted instead of thinking. Like the old Karris, like she hadn’t learned anything. With enough red feeding constantly into her left hand to keep a fire constantly burning low, she made a red luxin ball in her right, and hurled it through the fire at the satisfied young soldier. It hit high on his chest, in his beard, and splashed over him, liquid red luxin drenching him for one heartbeat, then flames roaring over him the next.
Screaming, he turned to his fellows. Panicked, one of them lashed out with the already raised butt of his musket. The man on fire plunged off the wall, where he almost landed on a child.
“We’ve orders to go!” Essel said. She threw a line from the cleat back onto the dock and pushed off.
“We wait!” Karris said. “Out of my line!”
She braced her feet and brought the flaming luxin in her left hand up as if she were sighting down a musket.
“Kill them!” a familiar voice shouted. Orholam damn her, it was the Nuqaba herself.
Karris shot a thin, continuous ribbon of red luxin through the air. It ignited in a huge fan. She dragged it back and forth in front of the wall and the soldiers there. All the luxin burned away before it hit the men standing there, but a roiling wall of flame wasn’t something anyone wanted to approach. The heat itself would be a slap in their faces.
“She can’t throw it far enough to hit you!” the Nuqaba shouted as soon as Karris let the first wash of flames die.
Fool doesn’t know the difference between mercy and a lack of will.
But the truth was, Karris killing one soldier could be overlooked, called an accident. Killing a dozen was a diplomatic incident, war. War in the middle of war. Against Paria, their ally; Paria, which the Chromeria needed.
But they needed Gavin more.
Karris stopped, indecisive for the first time.
“The commander said to go!” Essel shouted. “We don’t even know if he’s leaving this way!”
“Get on the reeds, and turn us,” Karris ordered Essel and Ben-hadad, “but wait for my word. I’ll defend. We wait for Ironfist!”
Then a fireball arced through the air toward the skimmer and plopped into the water with a hiss and a kick of steam. Drafters. The Nuqaba’s Amagez drafters were on their way through the crowd.
One arm near useless, drafters and soldiers closing in, muskets being fired at them, and all Karris could think was that her real problem was that she was no longer a watch captain of the Blackguard and therefore was in no position to give orders at all, and that as soon as Essel realized it, the woman would take charge.
Karris threw another narrow stream of flame, hard. It was difficult to gauge the force needed as the distance changed, but luck smiled on her. Most of the red burned off in the air in a frightening display, but some little hit the massed musketeers across their muskets and chests.
The screams were immediate, but they were screams of surprise and fear, not of agony. With most of the flammability of the red exhausted, the men weren’t consumed. Hands were burnt, muskets thrown away, tunics hurriedly stripped off, men fell over each other as even those in the second and third rows threw themselves backward, away from the billows of flame.
“We have to go, now!” Essel said.
Karris hesitated again.
“He’s coming,” Gavin mumbled, from the deck where he was lying. He sounded delirious. “Don’t you see him? His angel’s fighting through the crowd.”
Essel said, “He’s not in his right mind. Karris, we have to—”
“We stay!” Karris snarled, but even as the words crossed her lips, she knew they had more to do with the red she was still drafting to keep the flame alive in her left hand, and the green she was drawing in that refused to be told what to do, and her own fear at what she’d seen in Gavin’s good eye.
His blue, unprismatic eye.
Before the smoke cleared in the gap where the musketeers had been, Karris saw a glow like a torch, lighting the dissipating smoke from within. An instant later, four of the Nuqaba’s Tafok Amagez appeared. Warrior-drafters. One had hands encased in red luxin, already aflame. He threw fireballs, right and left.
The right-hand shot was wide. A lefty then, or a feint. It gave Karris time to hurl a green projectile out to intercept the other fireball, batting it aside.
“Go, go, go!” Karris shouted. It was one thing to wait for Ironfist; it was another to commit suicide.
Three of the four Tafok Amagez attacked, throwing blue missiles that exploded in shrapnel, and green spears, and red fire. The fourth tried to fire a long musket, but it misfired and he was working to clear it. The Tafok Amagez were brute force drafters: if something didn’t yield when they hit it, they hit it harder.
Unable to use their physical strength against her except to throw their luxin really hard and fast, and unable to use their numbers to surround her, they kept doing more of the same. But Karris didn’t merely have to protect herself, she had to protect everyone on the skimmer and the skimmer itself. With a weak left arm.
She dodged through the lux forms—the modified martial arts moves that compensated for the balance shifts of throwing the weight of luxin—always giving herself an anchor to throw shields left and projectiles right and absorb and divert.
Not having used luxin for so long gave her an unusual edge. Like drinking several cups of kopi when you haven’t had any for a while, the luxin hit her hard. The wild energy of green roared past her injury, and the heat of red burned out the voice of her pain. But her long experience took that energy and passion, and made it a blade.
She was fast, faster than she’d ever been. She was instinctive, shooting missiles out of the air with missiles of her own, impossible shots, impossible speeds. Left left left—as they realized her weakness—and right and high, and diverting a huge curtain of flame that the red tried to drop on them from above.
It was only seconds, but the fury of the attacks made it seem an eternity. Essel and Ben-hadad were throwing luxin down the reeds, but the skimmer’s inertia was significant: its own weight, and the weight of four people on its decks, and neither Essel or Ben-hadad were particularly strong, physically or as drafters.
All it would take was one slip.
More Tafok Amagez joined the first ones, pausing only a moment to see what was happening. Half a dozen more.
Too many, and the skimmer was still too close.
And then the fourth stood, his musket cleared and reloaded. Karris saw him, and dread filled her. A premonition that cut off air like drinking tar.
She couldn’t counterattack: the missiles and fire were coming in too thick. He leveled the musket, took aim.
But Karris heard a familiar roar, a man bellowing.
A blue wedge, a V of shields as tall as a man, appeared behind the four Tafok Amagez. They didn’t even see it coming. And then a huge figure appeared, holding that V like a battering ram, running full speed. The wedge split as Ironfist rammed through the Tafok Amagez.
Sweeping his massive arms wide, bellowing that legendary shout that had melted the knees of enemies throughout the Seven Satrapies, holding the blue luxin shields to either side as he came through the middle of a dozen Tafok Amagez, Ironfist leapt off the wall, blasting the shields out into the Amagez and back, sending him flying with incredible speed.
He flipped in the air, and it looked for a moment like he was going to make it all the way to the water, but instead he dropped from that great height onto the end of the dock. Ironfist threw a gush of unfocused blue down as he landed, but the shock was still enough to stagger him and splinter wood.
His tunic had been torn half off, and blood was streaming from a cut on the side of his head, but he gathered himself and refilled with blue.
Karris had seen Ironfist run across the waves before. He drafted a narrow platform of blue, half floating on the water. He could make it fifty feet or more, and the skimmer wasn’t that far out yet. Her heart soared.
The Tafok Amagez were in chaos behind him. Several had been pushed off the wall. But as Ironfist drafted, his chest heaving from the exertion of Orholam-knew-what fighting he’d done to get through the crowd, Karris saw the Amagez with the long musket. He’d been at the far end, and he recovered first, lifting the musket with an ease and precision that told Karris this would be an easy shot for him.
He was too far away for Karris to hit with a drafted projectile. Karris was fast. Karris was accurate. But she wasn’t that fast or that accurate. She heard the shot, saw the sudden jerk and the smoke blossom from his musket—but he’d twitched off-aim at the last moment.
Karris realized that the musket she’d heard was behind her. Almost beneath her. The young marksman on the wall dropped his musket and tumbled down to the dock, dead.
And then the skimmer was picking up speed and Ironfist leapt aboard, and in less than a minute they were safely skimming down to the river, outrunning any order that could arrive to tell anyone to stop them.
Karris looked at Gavin, lying bloody on the deck, still holding the smoking musket he’d fired to save Ironfist’s life.
Gavin was grinning fiercely. Blood from his ruined left eye had trickled into his mouth, and it painted his teeth red. “Not quite useless. Not yet,” he said.
Then he passed out.