The Blinding Knife (93 page)

It must have been difficult to get the catapults up to the top of the cliffs, or to find materials to build them up there, but there was no way to stop them once they made it there. And if the Blood Robes brought one up, surely they would now bring more. There was no defense against that.

The trebuchet loosed another shot. It looked to Kip like it was nearly random. It was such a long distance that it might take them days to breach the walls—but days of raining death into a city were days of terror for those inside.

The walls of the city still looked whole, though the entire waterfront was burning, and hulks of burned-out ships rested in the shallows everywhere. Apparently the Color Prince’s rented pirates had done good work.

But Gavin obviously didn’t care about the city right now. They pulled in a broad arc, seeing that the army had entirely encircled the city and seized all the towns around it.

“Greens, anyone got a feel yet?” Gavin asked. The sun had fully cleared the horizon now. Musket shots were crackling from the shore, aiming at them, but they were three hundred paces out.

“If anything, it feels weaker here than out—” one of the men started.

“Shit!” Gavin said before he could even finish. “Of course! ‘Most of the times,’ she tells me! Most of the times.” He turned the skimmer sharply back out to sea. Karris made hand signals to the other skimmer.

“What is it? What is it?” Kip asked, and he could tell he was speaking for some of the others, too.

“The bane’s huge. If it’s nearby, but it isn’t here, where is it?” Karris said.

Kip still didn’t understand. Up ahead, he saw the guns of the fort on Ruic Head open up, pillars of black smoke blowing out with every shot. It had to be home to the biggest guns Kip had ever seen. Below, the Chromeria’s fleet had taken a tentative course. They weren’t
hugging the north coast closest to the fort, but neither had they gone straight for the middle.

Now, as the guns opened up, cratering the waters around their fleet, the Chromeria’s ships were reacting quickly, tacking to the middle. But instead of the Color Prince shoring up the middle to keep the Chromeria’s ships in range of his guns, they were melting away instead. One Chromeria ship was afire and had lost its mainmast, but the rest were fleeing.

Sure of salvation, the Chromeria’s ships were heading straight for the gap, amazed at their own escape.

The fort’s big guns set half a dozen of the smaller ships aflame, though. Men were screaming, and Kip saw shapes moving through the water faster than they should have been able to, jumping out and hurling luxin. Birds—ironbeaks, no doubt—crowded the air.

But when Kip took his eyes away from the individual stories unfolding before his eyes—the men dying, the fires started, the amazing shots hit, the luxin bent into shapes he’d never seen—he saw that the Color Prince wasn’t even trying to hold the center. No ships were rushing to shore up the defenses there.

And Kip was feeling wild. What the hell?

It was getting harder to think strategically. Kip wanted to kill, he wanted to run, he wanted to move—and though he was flying at greater speeds than most men know in their whole lives, it wasn’t enough. He wanted to move like this as his own master, under only his own control.

What had Karris said? “If it isn’t here”?

It is here.

“The bane float,” Gavin said. “Most of the times!”

As soon as Kip realized was that meant, he saw that everyone else had already figured it out. Gavin had turned the skimmer toward the middle of the strait. There, lost among the fires coming from each shore, were a dozen rowboats—boats filled with the Color Prince’s drafters and wights.

“Split!” Gavin said. “Kill them before they can finish!”

Finish what?

The skimmer split into its component parts—six sea chariots and the central skimmer, leaving Kip with Gavin and Karris, who were each manning one of the reeds. Kip took off his sub-red spectacles with one hand and tucked them into their case, but the skipping of the
skimmer was so jarring that instead of drawing another pair to ready himself for the fight, he had to use both hands to grip the railing.

The snap of muskets firing sounded in Kip’s ears and a torrent of every color of luxin flew between the sea chariots and rowboats. Half the drafters in the boats seemed to be there solely to defend the others, and Kip saw massive shields of green luxin springing up around every one of them, far more powerful than the drafters should have been able to make. Fire and luxin and even musket balls were absorbed easily. The other men on the boats were heaving at great green chains that disappeared into the depths below them, and even as Kip watched, something seemed to give. First one crewman fell down and the tight chains suddenly went slack, and then another and another.

The sea chariots and the skimmer closed on all of them.

Something enormous moved beneath the waves and Kip saw a tangled, coiled mass rising toward the surface with terrible speed.

And then the entire sea exploded into the sky.

Teia’s skimmer hissed across the water in the darkness. Her right hand was clamped to the railing in a death grip as the boat skipped from wave to wave at great speed. She felt blind for several minutes, too tense to relax her eyes into sub-red and paryl. Terror was sufficient to dilate the pupils, but apparently mere crippling anxiety did not suffice. She looked around and saw that not a few of the others also had white-knuckled grips on the rail, but among the more dour expressions, not a few of the Blackguards were grinning eagerly, some at the amazing speed and the wind whipping their ears, others no doubt at the prospect of putting their training to the test. Most of the Blackguard runts had been kept back, just as Trainer Fisk had promised, but at the last moment, Commander Ironfist had decided that Teia’s gifts might serve a purpose.

Now she had to prove herself, and she wasn’t ready. She knew she wasn’t ready.

Gradually, she relaxed marginally. She realized her other hand was clenched on the front of her own tunic and on the vial she wore beneath it. She hadn’t gotten rid of it yet. Wouldn’t until the papers were signed and filed and the money sticks were in her hands. Somehow, it felt like it could still be snatched away from her. She’d do something today to disgrace herself, and the Blackguard would change its mind and reject her. She unclenched her fist and let the vial go.

There wasn’t much to see except misty waves and the rock looming ever higher in front of them. People were going to die here today, and Teia couldn’t help but have the premonition that she was going to be one of them.

They were approaching Ruic Head directly. The Head was five hundred feet tall, with only narrow goat tracks up the bare face of the cliffs on this side. They would be guarded, and a single alarm would be enough to doom the entire attack.

But Commander Ironfist seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He turned them north and approached the coast, then came back south, mere feet from the rocks. Then he brought them up against a rock. He squatted and the others came close. “There’s a dock two hundred paces from here around the corner. It’ll be guarded. I’m going to bring us to a spot forty paces from it. Tlatig, Tugertent, Buskin, you’re the best archers. String your bows.” The two Archers and the man did so immediately as the commander continued, “You’ll get up on the rock and take your shot from there. Teia, can you spot if the guards are wearing mail beneath their cloaks from forty paces?”

She nodded. “I could, but I don’t have enough paryl right now to…”

“Over there.” He pointed.

He continued giving orders to the others while a Blackguard showed Teia a tiny white mag torch. The woman beckoned Teia to sit cross-legged on the deck of the rocking skimmer. She draped several cloaks over her head.

“It’ll burn for ten seconds. If you need a second torch to fill up, let me know,” the woman said.

It felt odd to put on dark spectacles and then use a mag torch, but
Teia knew even from her brief time with Magister Martaens that she couldn’t look directly at a mag torch without risking blindness, so she huddled down and snapped the tiny torch. It burned brilliantly, white-hot. She filled herself with paryl easily in a few seconds and had to wait while the tiny torch burned itself out. She knew such a thing must have cost a small fortune, and it seemed a waste. If she relaxed, even at night she could fill herself with paryl within a few minutes.

Then she realized that fifteen lives depended on that little torch, and that time was of the essence. Maybe not a waste after all.

When the tiny torch sputtered out, Teia came out. Having stared into the white-hot magnesium flame even indirectly, she was, she realized, completely night-blind now. She thought of forcing her eyes to relax, but maybe overcoming her body’s defenses wasn’t always best. The Blackguards had pulled out oars wrapped in wool and were paddling the skimmer slowly forward. They reached a rocky point that must have been what provided the protection from the sea for the dock beyond it. The waves, even on this calm morning, were such that the Blackguards had trouble keeping the boat in place. With the waves and the height of the good grips, Teia had to be helped up onto the top of the rock. The three archers were taller, even Buskin, who’d gained his nickname for wearing heeled shoes to compensate for his diminutive stature. They all came up nimbly.

Teia crawled forward to the top of the rock—and with the barest tread of leather to warn her, found herself staring at a boot less than a hand’s breadth away as a man stepped out from behind the rock outcropping. He saw her.

He was so surprised to find a little girl that he didn’t even raise his voice. He said, “Hey, there, what are—”

His head shot backward as an arrow punched through his eye and popped his helmet off.

Tlatig dove under the man even as he fell, and caught his helmet before it could clang on the rocks. The dying man fell across her outstretched body, cushioning and muffling his fall.

Rolling the man off of Tlatig carefully, Buskin turned the spasmodically twitching man facedown. He drew a knife and drove it into the guard’s neck at the base of the skull. The twitching stopped immediately. Buskin turned expressionless eyes on Teia and motioned for her to get to work. Still shocked, she returned to the spot and peered south. There were three soldiers standing on the dock, chatting with
each other and enjoying the rising dawn. All three had bows, but all were unstrung, as if they expected to have warning.

They’re dead and they don’t even know it yet.

The dock was barely fifteen paces long, and had two small rowboats tied to it, bobbing in the waves and creaking as they rubbed and bumped against the wood of the dock.

Shooting out a beam of paryl light, Teia could see that all three men were wearing full mail and helmets. She wasn’t going to be much help. “All of them have full—”

A bowstring thrummed above her. She rolled over and saw Tlatig drawing another arrow smoothly from her quiver. She’d been looking farther to the right. Teia had been so focused on the dock, she hadn’t even noticed that there was a little shack for the guards. And two men there were down—in full sight of the men on the docks.

Tlatig was already turning toward the docks.

“Three,” Tugertent said. It wasn’t a count of the guards; it was a countdown, and moments later, three arrows jumped into the air as Teia watched.

The guard farthest left took an arrow through the side of his neck. It must have cloven his spine, because he fell instantly, limply, straight into the water. A second guard grabbed the side of his neck, which was spurting blood like a fountain. A dim whine sounded as the third man turned, his helmet deflecting the arrow intended for his neck. It spun his helmet in front of his eyes and he slapped at it, already moving. The archers all loosed another volley. Teia couldn’t see if they’d hit the man or not, but when he dove into the water, his dive looked purposeful.

“Go!” Buskin hissed. The three archers ran down the trail, arrows fitted to their bows.

Teia drew her knife and followed them, not knowing what else to do. She turned the beam of paryl onto the little hut. The paryl light cut through the leather flaps over the windows. She saw a man in mail moving toward the door.

“Hut!” she whispered. “Front door!”

Tlatig was already headed toward the hut, and as the front door opened, Teia saw her loose an arrow from five paces into the darkness beyond. In the paryl light—the leather window flap dimming her vision only as much as silken gauze would—she saw him fall to the floor.

Buskin and Tugertent were out on the dock, searching the water. It
was still dark enough that the sun didn’t help them at all. Teia ran out to join them. The archers were moving up and down the length of the dock, peering into the depths as well as they could.

Teia’s paryl beam cut through the water, scattering, but much better than visible-spectrum light.

“There!” She pointed. “Swimming!” The man was swimming—underwater—twenty paces distant. Heading for the shore to the north.

“Balls,” Tugertent said. “Swimming in full mail. Didn’t think you could even do that.” She drew an arrow. “I got this one.” From where she was, standing right next to Tugertent, Teia thought she saw a tiny shimmer around the fletching of her arrow.

The swimming soldier reached the shore seventy paces distant or more and surfaced slowly, silently. Tugertent’s arrow met his bare head, and he slumped back into the water. Teia swore that the arrow had curved slightly in the air. What the hell?