The Black Prism

Chapter 80

“Kip, whatever happens, stay close to me,” Karris whispered, leaning close.

She said it with a tension and certainty that told Kip something was going to happen. Soon. Though he wanted to, he didn’t ask. Their guards were close, though everyone’s attention was focused on Lord Rainbow up front and his verbal feces about duty and justice. Kip had long ago stopped paying attention. He was staring at a girl, not ten paces away. Liv.

He could have sworn she’d been pushing closer to him and Karris for a while, but for the last ten minutes she’d stood as though frozen, listening to Lord Rainbow. The crowd between them moved, and he saw that she was wearing yellow cloth vambraces. Liv was a yellow. It had to be her.

Kip craned his head around, looking toward Brightwater Wall.

“Stop acting suspicious,” Karris said through gritted teeth. Which left Kip with absolutely zero places to look. If he stared at Liv, that would draw attention to her, the speech disgusted him, he couldn’t look at the wall, and when he looked at Karris, he couldn’t help but notice her dress. Karris had been thought-freezingly gorgeous when Kip had seen her wrapped in a heavy black cloak over her Blackguard garb. In the thin black dress she was wearing, her beauty ripped Kip’s breath out of his chest, stomped on it, and set it on fire. She stood straight, imperious, regal, elegance personified. No one had given her a shawl despite the coolness of the night. In the rising light, Kip could see the gooseflesh on her arms.

“Cold out, huh?” he said.

One of their guards snorted.

“I will beat you to death if you ask for it,” Karris said, still staring straight ahead.

Kip had no idea what she was talking about, or why the guard was laughing. “What did—” He looked down at her chest. Her nipples were clearly defined against the thin silk. Kip gaped just as she looked over and caught him looking.

“Kip. Dark spectacles are not a license to ogle.”

Will the earth please open and swallow me now? She thought he’d been being snarky about… Oh, Orholam. He was the stupidest boy in history.

The speech ended without anything special happening. Kip glanced carefully at Karris. She looked toward the east, where the sky was lightening.

“He’s waiting until it’s almost dawn,” Karris whispered, as their guards pushed them to start walking. “Be ready.”

“He?” Kip asked.

“Shut it!” the Mirrorman to Kip’s left said. He smacked Kip with the butt of his musket.

Oh, I can make inappropriate jokes on accident, but you’ve got a problem when I’m just trying to escape?

At first, Kip couldn’t see very well where they were going through the vast crowd. Gradually, though, he saw that the drafters were joining a much larger group that was being addressed by King Garadul.

Kip lost sight of Liv quickly. The dark spectacles he was wearing made him almost blind. He could see out of the sides if he strained, but it made it impossible to search the crowd. With his hands tied behind his back, there was no way to fix that either.

Tens of thousands of soldiers surrounded King Garadul. The man was waving his arms, shouting, but Kip could only hear snippets as the drafters joined the outskirts of that group: “cleanse this city… Take back what has been stolen from us… punish…” It sounded pretty grim.

Again, Kip seemed to be the only person who wasn’t hanging on every word, so as the sun rose, first touching Brightwater Wall behind them because it was higher than the plain below, he saw movement on the wall.

He couldn’t see it well around the frame of the spectacles, but the forms of five men—a cannon crew—became three, then in a violent motion two, then just one. The cannon on the wall had been pointed at a high trajectory toward Garriston, but the man was angling it down and down.

A quick spark.

Boom!

The cannon spat fire. Kip didn’t see the shell hit, but he felt it. The earth seemed to jump.

For a moment, no one did anything, thinking it must have been a mistake. Screams of fright and pain. Then Karris collided with him, knocking him off his feet.

Kip smacked his head as he fell, so at first he wasn’t sure if the second explosion was just his imagination.

“Canister shot!” Karris said. “Shit! We have to move! Ironfist’s aiming for that wagon.”

Wagon? Ironfist? Why was Ironfist shooting at them?

Kip was blinking. Something was strange about his vision—oh! Smacking his head against the ground had knocked one of the black lenses out of the frame of his spectacles.

“Grab that lens and cut my hands free!” Karris barked.

They were both lying on the ground, hands bound. The crackle of musket fire filled the air.

One of the Mirrorman guards grabbed Kip, trying to haul him to his feet.

Despite lying flat on her back, Karris kicked the back of the man’s knee with her left foot. He folded, and by the time he landed on his back her right foot had swept up and then down in an ax kick across his throat. There was a crunch and blood sprayed through the mail flap over the man’s mouth.

Kip could hardly believe what he’d just seen, but Karris was already moving on. She scrambled over the dying man, lying right on top of him. With her hands still behind her back, she drew the man’s belt knife a hand’s breadth and cut her wrists free.

“Stop!” a Mirrorman yelled, his musket pointed at Karris’s head.

There was still screaming everywhere. Chaos. Shouting and gunfire and the screams of the dying.

Kip lashed out, kicking for the Mirrorman’s knee as Karris had done seconds before.

The Mirrorman saw it coming and swung the butt of his musket for Kip’s leg—

—and was flung away like Orholam’s own hand had slapped him.

A concussion, a roar, a pressure so vast Kip’s vision went black for an instant. Everyone standing was torn off their feet. Things—Kip couldn’t even tell what they were—blasted overhead.

He must have lost a few seconds. He rolled over, tried to stand, fell. His wrists were bloody, but no longer bound. The acrid aroma of gunpowder filled the air. Bits of wood rained down on the ground.

When Kip tried to stand again, someone helped him. Not even a hundred paces away where the powder wagon had been, he saw a crater in the ground a good ten paces across and at least two paces deep. Everyone in a huge circle around it was dead.

Karris turned him around, her mouth moving, skin smudged with powder. He couldn’t hear her.

He saw her mouth a curse as she realized the same thing. He was pretty sure she was mouthing “Ironfist” and a series of curses. She put a musket in his hands and said, slowly enough that Kip could read her lips, “Can you walk?”

Kip nodded, not sure how much he was hearing her and how much he was reading her lips. She pulled at him and they started jogging. He was still disoriented, but he saw that he wasn’t the only one. Dozens of men and women with powder-darkened skin and clothes were staggering around, some of them bleeding from their ears. A man was carrying his left hand in his right hand, looking for the rest of his arm as blood pumped out of his mangled shoulder.

Teams of soldiers were forming up now and running toward the wall. Others stood back and were firing their muskets at the gun emplacement, but Kip didn’t see anyone on top of the wall returning fire.

Someone was shouting at Kip. Good, so he could hear. He turned.

He didn’t recognize the soldier standing in front of him. “Form up, soldier!” the man shouted. “Move it!”

They thought he was a soldier because he had a musket. But then, with his powder-blackened clothes, it was no wonder.

“Come on, soldier, we’ve got a city to take!”

There were at least twenty soldiers with the man, and only the officer had a real uniform. Kip shot a glance at Karris. She was wobbling back and forth, holding her hands over her eyes like she was blind, just another wounded person. Kip realized that if they saw the violet caps over her eyes, they’d capture her immediately. Or kill her outright. With that dress, it was best not to let their attention alight on her any longer than necessary.

If Kip refused, the man could summarily execute him. And he looked grim, ready to do it. “Yes, sir!” Kip said. He joined the lines, glanced at Karris, looked once more for Liv and didn’t see her, and then ran with the soldiers toward the city and the sound of guns and the flash of magic.