The Broken Eye (101 page)

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.