Chapter 93
Kip’s first shameful instinct was to run away from the sound of musket fire. But that passed as soon as he saw Ironfist’s face. Ironfist was restraining his first instinct, too. Except his first instinct was to run toward the sound.
But Ironfist didn’t see the fear in Kip’s face. “I can’t,” he said. “Even if it means— Go, Breaker, go.” He pushed Kip toward the lift, and ran the opposite direction himself.
In the very act of moving, Kip was broken out of his indecision. He ran toward the lift, but by the time he got there, not ten seconds after the musket shot, all four of the Lightguards were down. Two were screaming, one was crawling away with a torn-out throat, bleeding in gushes, slickening the stone floor.
All of the squad were still standing. Winsen and Big Leo went to the two screaming, dying Lightguards and opened their jugulars. The crawler collapsed. All four were twitching.
“Oh, shit,” Ferkudi said. “Goss, are you hurt? I thought—”
Goss was blinking. “I, Orholam’s balls,” he said. “I don’t know how he missed. Musket ball must have fallen out before he fired or something. Bad job packing the—” He collapsed.
Cruxer barely caught him in time, easing him to the bloody stones. But Goss was dead. There was a hole right in the center of his chest.
“They came to murder us,” Cruxer said. He closed Goss’s eyes. “No warning. That was no attempt at capture.”
“We gotta move,” Teia said.
But as she said it, they heard loud thunks from the lift shaft. Big Leo ignored it. He picked up Goss’s body. “I can’t just leave him here. I’ll catch up.”
The thunks continued, and Kip arrived at the lift shaft in time to see huge iron doors slam into place over the shaft at each level.
“It’s part of each tower’s defenses,” Cruxer said. “Parents told me about it. They’re hinged one way, so soldiers can be sent up the lifts, but no one can get down.”
“Surely we could draft levers and pulleys or something,” Ben-hadad said.
Cruxer said, “They estimate five minutes per floor for drafters to break through. We gotta go down the slaves’ stairs. The exits may be barred, but we can break through. Follow me!”
Ben-hadad grimaced. He clearly thought he could break through each level in far less than five minutes. But he followed orders.
They reached the stairs, and found the doors bolted. Ben-hadad moved to the front, locating the mechanism and studying it.
“Move,” a voice said behind them. It was Daelos. He was carrying two blunderbusses. He handed one to Cruxer as Big Leo returned.
“Big Leo?” Daelos said, lifting the matchlock.
Big Leo drafted sub-red to his fingers and touched each slow match, lighting it.
“Daelos, I thought you said you weren’t coming—” Kip started.
Daelos pointed his blunderbuss at where the hinges would be on the other side of the door. He fired.
“They killed Goss,” he said. “I’m coming.”
Cruxer’s matchlock misfired, and they all waited, tensely, while he cleared it. “What are you, rookies?” Cruxer demanded. “Defensive perimeter! Teia, get us two more from the barracks.”
Chastened, they did. Kip immediately saw a few curious heads poking out of doorways. Not everyone got out of the tower by dawn, not even on Sun Day. “Get back in your rooms!” Kip shouted. “Look out for the Lightguard. They just killed our friend.”
Two of the three ducked back immediately. But one just kept looking. And then Kip recognized him. Magister Jens Galden. He was the asshole who’d punched Kip the very day he had first arrived at the Chromeria.
The man obviously hadn’t forgotten Kip, either.
“I know a passage out,” Jens Galden said loudly. “I could save you all.” He smiled unpleasantly.
“Let’s go!” Big Leo said. He turned to the squad. “Stop shooting the door, we can go this way. This magister has—”
Several of the squad members started jogging over.
Jens Galden waited until he saw they were coming, then announced, “But Kip is with you, and I’d rather you all die.” He slammed his door shut. They heard a bar being slid into place on the other side.
Big Leo stared in disbelief.
A young woman poked her head out in the hall to see what was happening.
“Back in your room!” Big Leo roared.
The young woman’s eyes went wide, and she said something, but it was lost in the roar of the blunderbuss behind them.
Kip flinched hard, though he should have been expecting it. Cruxer wasn’t one to waste time cursing about a plan that didn’t work out.
Cruxer and Ben-hadad and Winsen grabbed and pulled the shattered door. The central bar was still in place on the opposite side of the door, but it was only anchored on one side, and they were able to rip the door open and slip through.
Teia came jogging back up. “Both loaded,” she said. She tossed one blunderbuss to Big Leo, and the other to Ferkudi.
They all squeezed through the door.
“I’d rather—” Ferkudi said.
“Shhhh!” Cruxer said. He’d been holding his hand up for silence. The squad hadn’t even seen it. In some ways, Kip thought, talented rookies were still very much rookies.
But they quieted immediately now.
Then they all heard it. From far below, the sound of many footsteps coming up the stairs toward them. The stairs were not quite three paces wide, curling around one of the great lightwells, lit dimly by a few small windows into the lightwell itself. Whatever resistance they encountered would be hidden by the curvature of the stairs until they were right on top of it.
If the Lightguards were smart and disciplined enough to set up a spear wall or a few ranks of musketeers arranged so they could fire a volley into the squad, the squad would die.
They all looked at each other.
“If we can hear them coming up, they’ll hear us coming down,” Ben-hadad said. Surprise was impossible.
A chunk of wood from the door they’d just pushed through shot out into the stairwell as a musket shot rang out. The wood hit Big Leo. He yelped in surprise.
“Down one,” Cruxer ordered. Better to only face attacks from two directions than from three. Kip emptied himself of green luxin, reinforcing the door. It wouldn’t stop pursuit, but it would slow it.
He caught up to the rest of them on the next landing, not running into any opposition. The door here was locked, too. Big Leo was patting his body, searching to see if he had a wound from the musket ball.
“Light’s weak in here, everyone fill up now,” Cruxer said.
But even as he said the words, the slaves’ stair dimmed. Kip looked at one of the windows into the lightwell in time to see it slide shut, plunging them into utter darkness.
“Oh hell,” Ferkudi said.
“Winsen?” Cruxer said.
A yellow luxin light bathed them weakly. “I can keep this light for thirty seconds at the most, Captain.”
“We’ve got to get out of the stairwell,” Big Leo said.
“The stairs are our only way out,” Kip said. “If we leave the stairs, we just give them more time to surround us.”
One flight down, someone knocked loudly on the door. The doors had all been barred, but they were barred on the squad’s side. Kip froze.
Muffled by the wood and the distance, he heard someone say, “Kip? Ben-hadad? Adrasteia?” Kip wasn’t certain, but the voice sounded familiar.
“Nothing to lose by going down one more flight,” Cruxer said.
They ran down the steps and took up defensive positions as they unbarred and unlocked the door. They threw it open.
A woman was standing on the other side, alone. At the sight of the squad’s raised weapons, she threw her hands up. “I’m here to help!” she squeaked.
For another moment, Kip didn’t recognize her. She was in her mid-thirties and had bad posture, and still wore her green spectacles on a gold chain around her neck, but her wiry black hair had been combed out and oiled glossy, and she was smiling.
“Magister Kadah?” Kip said, disbelieving.
“I read their code in the room crystals. Not even a code, really. It’s an old maritime mirror signal. They think you’re on one of the upper floors, and they’ve got only one squad double-checking that every door to the slaves’ stairs is locked. But it’s the only way out. I knew you’d be coming.”
“Magister Kadah?” Kip repeated. This woman couldn’t be the same one who’d hated and humiliated him.
“Not a magister, not anymore. I’m doing research now, as I’ve always wanted.” She smiled, and looked ten years younger than Kip had ever seen her look. “I brought you these. They were all I could find.” She handed him a bag. It had half a dozen mag torches in it. “Now go. There are people on this floor who would betray you.”
“Is there no other way out?” Cruxer asked, as Teia grabbed the bag from Kip and distributed the mag torches.
“Rumors only. None that I know,” Kadah said.
“Use ’em,” Cruxer ordered the squad. “Fill up now!” The squad instantly began popping the mag torches.
“Magis—I mean, Kadah, why? Why are you helping us?” Kip asked.
She looked at him curiously. “Kip, you saved my life. I was planning to suicide. I’d even picked the day. And then the White summoned me. I’ve spent the last five months trying to figure out how to thank you.”
Kip hadn’t even thought of Magister Kadah since he’d left her class—well, except to think how glad he was that he wasn’t still there.
“No time!” Cruxer said. “Thank you! But we have to go!”
“He’s right,” Kadah said. “Go! And Orholam defend you!”
They barred the door. The squad had already taken up positions on the landing, each one full to bursting with luxin.
“Breaker,” Ben-hadad said, “GBBBoDs?” He said it ‘G-bods.’
“What?” Teia said.
“Great Big Bouncy Balls of Doom,” Ben-hadad said.
“Or Green Bouncy Ball of Doom,” Kip said. “It’s less cumbersome than BGBBoDs, Big Green Bouncy Balls of Doom,” Kip said, distracted. He was already soaking up green.
Winsen was using yellow, filling himself so he could throw flashbombs, and he held it out so Kip could fill himself with that color, too. Despite Mistress Phoebe’s best efforts, Kip wasn’t nearly proficient enough at making solid yellows to draft anything instantaneously in combat, but preparing a weapon beforehand was possible.
Kip soaked up some yellow and flung his hand down, drafting, trying to make a yellow sword as he’d practiced a thousand times.
“Quickly,” Teia said. “Quickly.”
Kip fumbled, and he lost his concentration on the fine mesh point of yellow. The yellow sword broke apart near the hilt, and, unsealed, it all splashed into light.
He cursed. Why had Andross Guile sent men after them now? It was far too early. Had he betrayed Kip, or had something gone wrong?
Andross had expended so much effort making this plan that Kip didn’t think he’d try to have him killed. Maybe the Lightguards had jumped early, hoping to curry favor with Andross by killing his ‘enemy.’ Or maybe it was just another betrayal from the man who specialized in them.
Cruxer offered him a blue mag torch and a green. “Spikes and shield?” he asked.
But Kip’s eye was caught by the insignia of the Mighty: a man with hands outstretched, power radiating in circular waves from his hands. “I have a better idea.”
He drafted green from the mag torch like it was water gushing from a well. “All of you, you’re going to have to run after me as fast as you can. Pick me up. As in, right now.”
While Ben-hadad and Cruxer each got under a shoulder, Kip drafted a disk under his own feet.
“Oh no, I need a bit of orange. But those things cost a fort—”
Teia snapped open an orange mag torch. “Life and death, Breaker.”
He didn’t object. He drafted a green platform, then orange lubricant below that, then green again, starting a curve.
“Oh! I’ve heard of these!” Ben-hadad said. “The ancients called them water balls? Drafted them out of blue so they could see out. Then they’d go out on rivers and lakes—”
“Footsteps. Above and below!” Big Leo said.
One of the squad fired a blunderbuss up the stairs above them. Kip heard the clatter of a man falling to the ground. The other blunderbuss fired. Curses and swearing and screams. Kip tried to filter it out, though with the green roaring in him, he wanted to smash them, shut them up. In moments, he’d drafted the bubble. He sprayed orange around the inside of the bubble before he finally closed it. He sealed it on the inside, putting the nexus of the knot close to the surface so he would be able to get out.
He was inside a vaguely translucent green bubble. His idea was to stand, letting his feet slide on the lubricative orange so that he stayed upright. He could tell immediately that it wasn’t going to work.
“I just realized that I don’t need to be inside the ball,” Kip said. “And actually it might be a really bad idea.” But with the bubble closed, the sound was muted. They didn’t hear him.
Kip waved to Cruxer, who took it as readiness.
Cruxer and Ben-hadad heaved the ball toward the stairs.
Kip fell immediately. Orange. Slippery.
He thought he saw Cruxer try to grab the ball to stop him, but Ben-hadad, thinking this was the plan, pushed harder on the Great Green Bouncy Ball o’ Doomed Kip.
And Kip bounced. The ball rolled down the stairs, slowly at first, skipping and bouncing, and then it hit the next landing and sproinged airborne. He rolled along the outside curve of the spiraling staircase—and flew at face level into a group of ten or twelve Lightguards running up the stairs. The ball was six feet wide, and the stairs nine or ten. Kip shouldn’t have blasted into all of them, but he did.
Kip was spun around and right side up for one moment, and he saw the squad following hot behind him, slashing at the scattered, fallen Lightguards, trying not to stumble over the bodies themselves, but trying to keep the men from following them. And then Kip was knocked off his feet again on the next bounce.
He didn’t even see the next group of Lightguards, just felt the shock of collision. And now he had such speed built up that there was no way the squad would be able to keep up. He landed upside down on the next bounce, only the curvature of the ball keeping him from breaking his damn fool neck. Another collision—this one so hard that it rattled Kip’s teeth—sent the ball bouncing back the opposite direction.
Finding himself flat on his back, Kip squinted through the barely translucent ball, wondering how many Lightguards he must have killed with that collision.
None. He’d caught the edge of the recessed doorway at one of the landings. His ball, now having ricocheted back into the stairs above, was rolling slowly back toward the edge of the descending stairs once more.
Through the distortion of the green luxin, Kip saw a young face coming up the stairs from below. A Lightguard, baffled at a boy in a ball. The ugly man had a musket in hand, but he stopped. In a heartbeat, half a dozen more Lightguards joined him. They, too, stopped, bewildered.
Kip waved to them, friendly. It had worked that one time out on the river.
But none of them waved back.
Then something else occurred to him. He hadn’t made any holes in the ball. It was getting hard to breathe. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it didn’t sound friendly.
An officer joined the men. “Shoot it!” he yelled.
Kip heard that.
The men raised their muskets. Kip had stopped musket balls with green luxin, once. But that had been open luxin, with all the power of insane Will behind it. He was still flat on his back, and the luxin of the ball wasn’t thick enough to stop bullets.
Why didn’t I make it thick enough to stop bullets?
Thinking was the wrong thing to do. Thinking took time.
A roar resounded through even the walls of his ball, and Kip saw the briefest flash of Big Leo, running down the stairs faster than you can run down stairs. Big Leo lowered a shoulder and flung his massive mass into the ball.
The Ball o’ Kip shot into the Lightguards’ faces amid musket fire.
Sometime in between that collision and the bouncing and the lack of air, the world went red and black and he lost everything.
Some time later, he regained consciousness with a gasp. Teia was standing over him with a knife in her hand, and he was covered with the dust of broken green luxin. It took him a few heaving, deep breaths to regain his wits. He’d passed out.
Teia had cut the seal of the green luxin. The squad were speaking to him, but he had nothing for them. Couldn’t understand.
They pulled him to his feet.
“Where’s Daelos?” Kip asked. Everyone else appeared to be here. Wherever here was. At the bottom of the slaves’ stairs, maybe? Ben-hadad and Ferkudi were reloading the blunderbusses, preparing to breach a door.
“Broke an ankle jumping over some bodies,” Cruxer said. “We had to leave him.”
“You left him?” Kip demanded.
“We gave him a Lightguard cloak and tunic. The chirurgeons will help him and he can get away. The Blackguards will help him, Kip,” Cruxer said. He was defensive. He hated leaving someone behind, too.
Orholam damn it. We’re children. Even Cruxer.
“It was the right thing,” Teia said. “Now shut up and let’s go.”
“Fire in three!” Ben-hadad announced.
Ferkudi fired before any of them could cover their ears.
“Sorry, I heard fire,” he said.
Ben-hadad fired right behind him, and he winced at the deafening sound. “Deserved that,” he said.
“Reload,” Cruxer said. “Everyone, ready luxin.”
Kip took a step to take a defensive position at the stairs, and almost fell again as his orange-luxin-coated foot shot out from under him. Ugh, he had orange luxin goop everywhere, even in his hair. Someone handed him the lit orange mag torch. He drafted a wad of orange luxin into his hand, and then used that to suck the open orange luxin off his body and out of his hair. Mostly.
He checked himself quickly. His green spectacles were unbroken, and the spectacle case on his left hip had successfully protected all his other colors.
He listened closely at the stairs and thought that he could hear the groans and whimpers of the injured and dying above, and maybe distantly, the sound of reinforcements coming down. With the musket fire, the Lightguards had figured out where the squad was. Now they could concentrate their forces. The noose was tightening.
“Where are we?” Kip asked. He filled himself with green luxin rapidly, then swapped spectacles and pulled in blue off one of the white mag torches. The torches were already getting low, and Kip could feel the bruises he was going to have tomorrow. Provided he had the luxury of seeing tomorrow.
“Main floor,” Ben-hadad said. “Main hall should be that third door on the left.”
“How do you know that?” Kip asked.
“I don’t really get lost,” Ben-hadad said. “I was eight years old before I realized a person could.”
“Where did Ironfist go?” Kip asked. “I mean, he was leaving, too, right?”
“No time,” Cruxer said. “Let’s go.”
Kip followed, but he couldn’t shake the thought. Ironfist was getting out of here, too. He hadn’t gone toward the lift.
So Ironfist had some other way out.
But Kip didn’t know that for sure. Maybe Ironfist had stopped on one of the other floors, grabbing some personal items, and got stuck on the wrong side. Maybe he planned to make his escape later. Maybe he’d bluffed his way through the Lightguards.
They ran through the empty halls, fanned out, weapons drawn. Everyone but Kip was a bloody mess. Big Leo had his left arm in a makeshift sling, half cloth, half luxin, and the skin was bulging in his forearm. Nasty break, but he didn’t seem to be feeling it yet.
Cruxer’s nose was bloodied, and he had a cut down his forehead, seeping blood into his mouth. Ferkudi had drafted what looked like a fighting glove around his left hand. Probably had broken some bones punching someone. Winsen was grinning broadly. He looked insane. He was carrying a short bow with bodkin arrow nocked. Teia had wiped blood off her face, but she was careful to wipe it onto her grays, not on the shimmercloak. It was a steely, metallic gray now, not the dull gray of an inductee’s cloak. Maybe this was its true color, if it had such a thing. On the back of the cloak Kip noticed barely touching circles, one white, one black, with the black over the white a little, like an eclipse of the moon.
“They know about the cloak,” Teia said. “At least, they know enough. I told them while you were out.”
“I wouldn’t say we know enough,” Ben-hadad said. “I have got a hell of a lot of—”
“We know enough for now,” Cruxer said. “Enough to use her. Teia, take point.” She did. As they moved down the hall, people’s mag torches began sputtering out. “Fill up,” Cruxer whispered.
But they’d all been drafting long enough that the order was unnecessary. Each of them drew in as much luxin as they could before the torches burned out.
As they reached another door, Teia made the hand motion to Cruxer: scout? He nodded permission, and she put her hand to the crack in the double doors, lowering her head, her eyes flaring wide.
She stood there for perhaps a full minute. Then she came back. “Fifteen, maybe twenty. Semicircle of musketeers around this door. It’s a death trap.”
Kip’s heart dropped, and he could tell that all of them were thinking the same thing. They hadn’t run fast enough. If the Lightguards at the base of the Prism’s Tower knew that they were coming, this wasn’t the only choke point available. The Lightguards could also cut them off at the Lily’s Stem. With enough men and muskets in narrow places, the squad’s skills would be beside the point.
“I could go green golem,” Kip said. “I’ve done it before. I stopped bullets once.”
“Can you do it reliably?” Ben-hadad asked. “Can you differentiate between friend and foe when you’re golem?”
“No,” Kip admitted reluctantly.
“There’s some other way out,” Ferkudi said. “My parents mentioned it once. I overheard. Some way to get to Cannon Island directly. No boats.”
“Where?” Cruxer asked.
“I don’t know,” Ferkudi said. “It’s hidden, that’s all I know.”
“Well that doesn’t help us, does it?” snapped Big Leo. It looked like the pain was starting to come through his initial shock from his messily broken arm. He was rarely irritable.
“Breaker?” Teia prompted.
“I know another way out exists,” Kip said. “My father told me that. He didn’t say where it was. But it’d have to be in one of the lower levels if it goes out under the bay?”
“If we want to go to the lower levels, we’ve still got to cross the great hall,” Cruxer said. “The slaves’ stairs don’t go down there. The only access is on the other side.”
“Well, that’s a stupid design,” Ben-hadad said. “Why don’t the slaves’ stairs go all the way down?”
“It’s for defense,” Cruxer said, “and as you can see, it’s working.”
“Breaker, that wasn’t what I meant,” Teia said, giving him a significant look.
“Huh?” Kip asked.
“You know,” she said, nodding her head.
“No. What?”
“I pulled a thing. You know?”
“A thing?”
“Off your—”
“This is getting intriguing,” Winsen said.
“Skin, Winsen! Off his skin!”
“Oh!” Kip said. The cards. She was asking if he’d seen anything in the cards that showed an escape route. Given that the cards were of the most powerful people in the world, it made sense that any number of them would have known about an escape route. “I don’t … I don’t remember anything helpful.”
He hadn’t been having the flashbacks—flash-sidewayses? flash-cardwises?—for the last half hour. Not that he missed them. He still had the headache, though it was less acute now. It had seemed the cards had been triggered by words, right?
Escape, he thought. Tower. Prism’s Tower. Cannon Island. Flee. Run Away.
Nothing.
Cruxer said, “Check the other doors on this level. Maybe we can go around to the stairs down or to the outside. Now, go! Not you, Breaker. You think.”
They ran off in all directions except through the double doors. Kip tried to think. He’d absorbed those cards. All those cards. Something should come to him. One of them surely must have known this secret. Any of the Blackguards would know, right?
But none came to mind. No matter what he thought. He couldn’t just call them up.
What the hell?! What use were the bloody cards if they didn’t come to mind when he needed them? Right after he’d come out of the Great Library, the cards had been leaping into his brain so fast he couldn’t stop them. They’d been triggered by every little thing.
I’m a Guile, I’m supposed to remember everything!
But he couldn’t remember any of the cards. Except the one he hadn’t lived yet. The White’s card. The puzzle card. Which was perfect. As if Kip needed puzzles now, with every passing second bringing the Lightguard closer. What had she said? ‘Not only Prisms fly’? Right. That was it. But what the hell did that mean? That she’d known about Gavin’s flying machine, his condor? Karris had flown in the condor, too. Maybe Karris had reported it. But even if the White had known about it, so what? Gavin was the only person in the world who knew the proper design of the condor or could draft enough to make it work, and after a full year of work and practice, he’d still found it incredibly difficult and dangerous. Someone could give Kip a condor, and it still wouldn’t do him any good.
‘Not only Prisms fly.’ What could it—
Oh, not fly fly. Fly like flee.
Dumbass! The White knows the secret exit! Of course she does!
It’s got to be in her card!
“Barricaded!” Big Leo shouted as he ran back to them.
“My way, too!” Teia said.
“Men coming down the stairs. Fast!” Ferkudi said.
“All of them are locked,” Cruxer said. “Kip, what you got?”
“I need light, full-spectrum light!” Kip said.
“Stairs are no good,” Ferkudi said. “Only way to get natural light is to get out.”
“Surely we’ve got a white mag torch,” Leo said. “That’d work, right?”
“Teia?”
She was already looking in the bag, as if looking would change things. “Gone. They’re all gone,” she said.
“We could go up the stairs one floor and get full light from one of the balconies there,” Big Leo said.
“There is no way I’m going up the tower,” Cruxer said. “We’re trying to get out, and the exits are all down. We go up and we have to fight through the Lightguards twice more.”
Ben-hadad came back at last. He was huffing. “I got, I got, far as the lift. Should be able to, to squeeze through. But saw out front. Out the main gate at the Lily’s Stem, there’s, there’s an ambush. Forty, fifty Lightguards. Musketeers.”
“We go up,” Kip said.
They looked at him like he was mad. And he was. Even if they got to the lift, they’d be exposed to fire from the main hall until they could go up.
“Breaker. Up?” Cruxer said.
Winsen drew his arrow and let fly. A man forty paces back stumbled and fell as he burst through the door to the slaves’ stairs. Winsen already had another arrow nocked, and released.
“Let’s go!” Cruxer said.
Winsen sent four more arrows down the hall in rapid succession while they ran, then reached into his quiver and found no more.
Ben-hadad led them through a small door where he’d knocked a huge bureau over to be able to get in. “Not by strength,” he said. “Application of a lever.”
They pushed through tiny, connected rooms, all empty. Past another narrow hall. Ben-hadad pointed. “Leads back to the barricaded door you tried, Captain.” Another: “Leads to the kitchens, there’s a door to the outside, but it’s a wall this time of day. Problems of a rotating tower,” Ben-hadad said. “Designing doors in the island mantle—which doesn’t rotate—that can be used all day long. The designer solved the problem a few years later, but the Prism’s Tower had already had its base constructed by then. Inefficient, I agree.” Kip knew what he meant—he’d experienced the same thing down in the baths—but he could tell no else did. Not that now was the time to ask questions about things that didn’t pertain to their immediate survival.
Ben-hadad said, “That hall leads to more slaves’ housing and then to a door off to the side of the ambush. We’d have some surprise. If we want to try our luck?”
“I say we do it,” Teia said. “I’ll use my little trick and cause a distraction. They’re musketeers. If I can get them to fire a volley wildly, they’ll be vulnerable. They attack me on the opposite side and then, you all fall on them from behind.”
“Twenty men? The seven of us?” Ben-hadad asked. “We’re good, Teia, but I don’t know if we’re that good.”
“Why are we discussing this?” Winsen said. “We’ve got a command structure.”
“Do we?” asked Big Leo. “We’re out of the Blackguard, Win. Maybe we should all have a voice.”
“Enough,” Cruxer said. “Breaker, you sure?”
“If we have to wait until we’re sure to decide, we’re fucked.”
“Damn it, Kip!” Teia said. “Now is not the time to be un—”
“Breaker,” Cruxer corrected.
“Breaker,” Teia said. “I saw what those things did to you. It might kill you to look at another card. Or it might take half an hour. And up? Goss died to get us down this tower. You want us to go back up?”
“The White would have an escape. It has to be near her apartments.”
“You want us to go all the way up?” Ferkudi asked.
“I’m telling you, get me light, and—” Kip started.
“Enough!” Cruxer said. “Enough! Kip, Breaker, we’re with you because we believe in you. Anyone who doesn’t, get the hell out. Make your choice.”
“I’m with you,” Teia said, but it was softly. It was surrender. To death. She would die to prove her loyalty, but she knew Kip was wrong. Everyone else was in.
“Was just a question,” Ferkudi muttered.
“Then let’s go,” Cruxer said. “And, Breaker, next time I ask if you’re sure? Lie.”
Kip took a deep breath. They were placing a great deal of faith in his intuition. If he was wrong …
If he was wrong, they would all die, instead of most or all of them dying, which was what would happen if they charged the main hall.
They arrived at yet another hall. “This way to the lift,” Ben-hadad said. He pointed down the other direction. “That way goes to a wall that will become an open door in half an hour. It should rotate open far enough for us to slip through in … maybe ten, fifteen minutes. It would put us behind the Prism’s Tower, but we’d still have to make it past the Lightguards in the yard.”
“How many of these bastards are there?” Teia asked.
“Five hundred eighty-two,” Ferkudi said.
They looked at him. It had been a rhetorical question.
Ferkudi said, “As of last week, anyway. What? Like I’m the only one who looks at the kitchen manifests?” His voice dripped sarcasm.
“Holy shit, Ferkudi,” Big Leo said.
“What? I wanted to know if there would be any Tyrean oranges at the Sun Day parties.”
Kip didn’t know whether to be more amazed that it had never occurred to Ferkudi that the Tyrean orange groves were held by the enemy—along with the rest of Tyrea—or that the big clod had somehow done the arithmetic to figure out how much food meant exactly five hundred eighty-two Lightguards, and then had remembered it.
“Trying to hold a hall against musketeers for fifteen minutes is suicide,” Cruxer said. “We go up.”