by Brent Weeks
A small, twitchy man came forward. “Hello,” he said to Teia. He glanced at her nonexistent chest, up to her eyes, away. “Name’s Lem. True name Will. You know, Will to Willum, to Lum to Lem.”
“Sure,” Teia said. I guess.
“Thing that’s special about Lem isn’t that he’s crazy,” Lem said. “We’re all all sorts of crazy. But Lem is crazy in one particularly valuable way.”
“And you’re going to tell me what it is,” Teia said as he glanced at her chest again. She couldn’t tell if he was being creepy or if he just never looked at people’s eyes.
“Lem here believes he can do anything in the service of the Blackguard. Lem here believes rock is like butter, in front of him. He’s a bit slow, which is good, because otherwise he’d probably be dangerous as all hell. That’s what the trainers said. See, Lem can punch grips in the rock for us, no problem. Got a will that’d make Andross Guile weep like a little boy. True name Will, you see.”
“Right,” Teia said.
Lem filled himself with blue luxin, then leaned over conspiratorially to Teia. “There’s something in the water,” he said.
How did this freak get into the Blackguard?
He’s a valuable freak. Like me.
Lem extended a hand and waited. He was chanting numbers under his breath. “Forty-one, fifty-three, forty-seven, fifty-nine, no, fifty-three, fifty-nine, sixty-one, seventy-one, no…”
A hammer of blue luxin shot from his hand and pierced the stone. It stuck, a horizontal bar connected to a spike sunk deep into the stone. The bar would make a good hand- or foothold. He checked it, pulling on it to make sure there was no play, then took a deep breath. He swept a hand down and eight more of the spikes leapt from his hands in order. It would make an admirable ladder.
Blue luxin—shot into rock. Holy hells. Just when Teia thought she couldn’t get any more impressed with the Blackguards.
Lem smiled at Teia; then, as if noticing he was making eye contact, he looked away. “True name Will, you see.”
Teia saw.
At Commander Ironfist’s gesture, Teia climbed the makeshift ladder. She was almost to the top when she heard the scrape of iron over rock and someone inside barking orders. The window was an open slot above her head. Then she saw a cannon poke out of the window. She clamped her hands over her ears an instant before the cannon fired.
The pressure wave nearly blew her off the makeshift ladder. And that shot was followed by half a dozen others, all around the semicircle of the fort. The cannons all rolled back out of sight from the kick of the shots, but when Teia raised her head to see if she could get a count of the men loading the cannons through the thick smoke—paryl cutting through it easily—she saw that the windows were barred. There was enough space for the cannons to be rolled forward and poke through the bars but not enough for the Blackguards to climb in. Maybe, maybe after a shot, a person could crawl through the wide area in the bars that the cannon occupied when it was forward.
So, crawl in front of a cannon and hope there was enough space, and attack armed men who would all be looking your way.
Teia felt rather than heard another set of handholds shiver into the rock next to her, going around the great windows up to the top of the fort. Looking down, she waved to Commander Ironfist that they wouldn’t be able to get in through the windows. Lem was already firing out another ladder to bracket the other side of the windows.
Above the rock, the fort continued in several floors of wooden towers. Teia was glad she wasn’t afraid of heights, because it was getting dizzying. There was a flat spot wide enough for three people to stand where rock and wood met. The heavy timbers of the fort’s wooden walls were sunk in deep holes drilled directly into the red rock. Teia used her paryl to look through the walls. She couldn’t see through the wood itself, but in the spaces where bark pressed against bark, she could catch glimpses. Even then it was cloudy—but she couldn’t see anyone on the other side.
A Blackguard joined her, and she saw that others were clambering up the ladder on the other side. Teia looked down and saw the soldiers still standing by the little gate below them, looking out at the sea. If those men turned around to watch their guns fire—and it was quite a sight, so it was entirely possible—they would see the Blackguards in full view. But for a moment as the fort’s guns pounded, Teia looked at what the soldiers were watching unfold on the waves. Ships were afire—mostly the Chromeria’s ships that had sailed too close to the fort.
The rest of the fleet was heading for a gap at the middle of the neck. The Color Prince’s small ships—Teia didn’t know enough about ships to identify them—were fleeing from that area. But most of the Chromerian fleet wasn’t going to make it. Teia had seen how far the fort’s guns reached, and with some of the fleet only turning now, they’d be in range of the guns for ten or fifteen more minutes. The fort would manage hundreds of shots in that time. Orholam have mercy. Teia turned away and, far to the west, thought she could see the whisper of two skimmers crossing the waves, coming back to join the battle. Had they not found the green bane?
“How many soldiers?” the Blackguard asked Teia. He meant inside. She shook herself. She could do nothing about the crises and stupidity out there except help stop the guns up here.
“I don’t see any,” she whispered.
“Maybe we have a chance then.” The man gestured over to the other team, and Teia saw that there were eight people lined up on that ladder, and six more below her. The Blackguard—Teia didn’t know his name—was drafting a charge against the wooden wall, placed off to the side as far as he dared.
The other team was drafting another ladder, this one merely propped against the wood like a traditional ladder. They climbed it rapidly and Commander Ironfist gave the go-ahead.
Pushing Teia to the side, the Blackguard ignited the charge. It blew, and for a moment, Teia was surprised that no one cried out in alarm from within the fort.
Of course. They’re firing cannons of every size. An explosion wouldn’t alarm them.
With prybars of luxin, the Blackguards quickly tore out the remaining wood and poured into the fort. There were dead bodies everywhere. Atashians, mainly, but also scruffy men with no uniforms at all, and drafters, even a few color wights. There’d been a battle here yesterday.
The fort was huge, covering Ruic Head in a spiky wooden crown and sunk deep into the rock. But there was hardly anyone in sight. There were two men standing watch at the gate, looking out the opposite side of the fort. Blackguard archers killed them, arrows punching through their mailed backs. The Blackguards who’d climbed the other side found a cannon crew on top of the fence and killed them in seconds.
Teia ran with them, going down a staircase into the fort proper, down a wide hallway to a wooden doorway. It was dark and smoky, but Teia had no trouble seeing in sub-red.
“Four on the left, five on the right. Looks like a wight giving orders in the middle,” she whispered. Then she ran down the hallway on tiptoe even as the cannons roared to where another team stood outside the door to another battery. “Three right, six left.”
Ironfist gestured that she should stay where she was. He quietly drew a long, gorgeous scimitar that she’d never seen before. The grip was inlaid with turquoise and abalone, and there was something that looked like burned wood inset along the spine of the blade. Ironfist didn’t look at the blade, as if he couldn’t stand the sight of it, but he presented it to Buskin, who reached a hand out from his spot in the stack and touched the wood on both sides of the scimitar.
As the atasifusta wood burst into flame, both teams burst into action. The Blackguards stormed the rooms simultaneously, Ironfist visible through the thick gunsmoke as a giant wielding a bar of flame. Teia heard shouts, anger, terror—and pistol fire. Her own pistol was drawn in her sweaty hand, cocked and ready.
A door opened on the opposite side of the hall, and a drafter poked his head out into the hallway, looking confused. He saw Teia.
The pistol ro
se of its own volition, the flint snapping down, sparks flaring, the shockingly hard kick and the hot smoke. Teia blinked and saw the drafter on the ground at her feet, his left eye and a quarter of his skull blown off.
He wasn’t dead.
“Reload,” Commander Ironfist said in her ear. Somehow back already. She flinched and found her hands doing what she’d been told: swabbing, popping her powder horn open, tamping the wadding. The commander peeked into the room from which the drafter had come, then, finding no one, jabbed his flaming scimitar down into the man’s back, into his heart, pulled it out, and jogged down the hall.
She ran after him, barely having charged her musket, but suddenly not wanting to be left behind. They stumbled straight into ten enemy drafters. Teia lurched to a stop, but Commander Ironfist was already flowing through the steps that looked like the yeshan ka, scimitar in one hand, luxin in the other, killing men left and right. The other Blackguards joined him a moment later, blasts of light painting the walls.
Teia waded in at the same time as the Blackguard who’d blown open the fence for them. Zero. His name was Zero, she remembered now. They faced two drafters who were already gathering light. “You take the green, I got the red!” Zero shouted. He moved before Teia could say anything.
Teia attacked the drafter on her side—the same man Zero attacked. The drafter on the other side shot a blade of luxin into Zero’s torso. He stumbled and fell and looked at Teia as if he couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid.
I’m color-blind, damn it!
Zero fell, but then both enemy drafters were down, killed by the other Blackguards.
A snarling red wight lit himself on fire, and Commander Ironfist roared, shouting for Teia to go after—someone—she couldn’t understand the words over the shouting and the fires.
Then she saw a young man running away, and she went after him. He was dressed in a white shirt and cloak, both with thick bands of many colors on it: one of the Color Prince’s polychromes. He ran down the halls and disappeared. Teia followed as fast as she could.
Rounding a corner, she ran right across his extended foot and into his shoulder and went flying. Ambushed! She slid across the smooth stone floor and saw that he had her pistol in his hand. She thought he’d broken her finger from tearing it out of the trigger guard. The boy was perhaps seventeen years old, his face bloody where his spectacles had been shattered, the glass cutting his cheeks and his hawkish nose. He pointed the pistol at her, and she froze.
On her knees, she watched as a dozen soldiers armed with muskets ran up to join the young man. They must have been on some other gun emplacement or in the barracks. He tucked her pistol away. He grinned at her and said, “Kill her, then go reinforce the men inside.”
Teia didn’t want to die. But there was nothing she could do. Orholam, there was nothing she could do. Then, even as three of the soldiers raised their muskets, she felt something vast beyond comprehension passing by her, over her, through her like a rushing wind. It whispered: Like this.
She could suddenly hear Magister Martaens saying, “You’ll burn to death.” But Teia felt serene. No fear. Her hands came up, fingers spread. Rapid pulses of open color streamed out of her—something beyond paryl, or paryl in a way she’d never considered trying to draft it.
It felt like she’d dipped her hands in fire. The soldiers screamed, ducked, dropped their weapons. Two fled. Several fell and curled into balls.
Teia heard the steps of running men coming up behind her and she snapped a hand out toward them, ready to kill.
They were Blackguards. She stopped, her eyes instantly tightening back to the visible spectrum. She looked at her hands. They were untouched, unburned but still tingling. She turned back to the soldiers she’d incapacitated, expecting them to be charred husks. They were unharmed, dazed, then scrambling for their weapons as the Blackguards fell on them.
Teia jumped to her feet. The boy in charge was one of the ones who’d fled, shielded from her blast by the bodies of the men in front of him. She ran after him.
She got to the yard in time to see him slipping out of a gap in the gate.
Damn. She wasn’t going to go after him.
And just like that the fight seemed to be over. Teia went down to the battery, rubbing her tingling palms. The Blackguards weren’t taking any time to celebrate their victory, they were already loading the cannons under the watchful eye of one of the men who’d worked with big guns before.
Teia said, “Commander, is Zero going to—”
“Dead,” Commander Ironfist said. He’d extinguished his sword, but there was smoke and soot and blood and bloody hair on the blade. “The boy? The polychrome?”
“I didn’t—He was able to get—”
Commander Ironfist held up a finger and walked toward the window. “Am I seeing things?” he asked.
A line of Blackguards joined him. Vanzer, a green, said, “Oh no. I can feel it.”
The battle on the sea was still going strong. The Chromeria’s fleet didn’t seem to have even noticed that the fire from the fort had ceased. Every ship was still under way, heading for the center. And the Color Prince’s fleet had yielded the center completely.
But the Blackguards were looking at the sea itself. It was a different color in a vast circle, at least a league across, directly under the center.
“They’ve lured us right to the middle of the neck,” Ironfist said. Right into the center of that great dark circle.
A spire as wide across as a tower shot up out of the water, causing huge waves that battered the ships around it. Then smaller towers shot up hundreds of paces away, in a circle. One of them pierced right through the hull of a galleon and lifted it entirely out of the water until its hull split and rained men and matériel into the sea.
Then it seemed the sea itself jumped in a disk an entire league across and the bane surfaced. The waters jumped, and then crashed down, swamping entire ships, crushing others—and then the waters went racing off the sides of the newly surfaced island in vast torrents in every direction.
It looked like some of the ships fortunate enough to be turned in the right direction would race right off the island, but vines as thick as tree trunks lashed out as the island surfaced. A forest of vines, living, grabbing like the tentacles of a kraken, whipped out—not in one single place, but in hundreds. The bane was a living, writhing carpet.
Though Teia’s eyes couldn’t tell her, she had no doubt what color this was. The wildness of green, undampened by the seas, now hit the drafters like a slap in the face.
The ships that weren’t crushed were beached on the green island, leaning over crazily, immobilized.
In one minute, the Chromeria’s fleet was simply gone. The defense of Ru aborted. Thousands killed. The battle lost.
From the island itself, Teia saw hundreds of men—small as burrowing insects from up here—emerge. They pointed their hands at the sky, and light shot up from hundreds of green color wights. A tiny group in the center of that burgeoning army was fighting them, hurling every other color around them.
“Those are Blackguards,” someone said. “The Prism’s down there. Fighting. Against all that.”
Orholam have mercy. They didn’t stand a chance.
Chapter 109
“Five minutes until sunrise,” the orange drafter announced. He was nervously, noisily sucking his spit back and forth across the khat he had tucked under his lip.
A dozen orange and yellow drafters were gathered at the base of Ru’s southern wall, waiting for dawn, nervously commanding Liv and her team to be quiet. Liv’s team was made of four drafters and four soldiers. With her, they made the holy number of nine. Liv would have preferred to make the holy number of ninety-nine. She would have preferred to have fighters who could draft and drafters who could fight, but the Blood Robes were years away from having anything remotely as good as the Blackguard.
The Blood Robes’ army was awake and armed, but the closest of them were four and five hundred paces
back from the wall. The Atashians surely had guns that could reach that far, but they’d decided to conserve their powder. Liv could only guess that their situation was nearly as dire as the Blood Robes’. The Color Prince’s battery on the south side of the neck had only enough powder for one shot from each gun. His hope was that the Chromeria’s fleet would avoid that shore altogether and instead hug the opposite coast, which they believed their Atashian allies still held.
Liv wouldn’t know how that turned out until it was all over, if ever. Her own mission was the next thing to a suicide mission. Her soldiers were dressed in scored and scarred leather armor and faded blue cloaks of the Blue Bastards, a mercenary company that had been hired by Ru. Mercenary companies rarely took bids volunteering to endure sieges, so Ru must have paid them a fortune.
And as might be expected of men whose primary loyalty was to their purse, they’d been willing to come to an understanding with the Color Prince. They had refused to fight for him, fearing that a reputation as turncloaks would interfere with future contracts. But they did agree to grease the skids for Liv’s team in return for leniency when the Blood Robes took the city.
Like every leader, the Color Prince hated mercenaries and still had to use them. He was convinced that the pirate lord Pash Vecchio had betrayed him. The weedy pirate had sworn that his great ship would hold the south shore, herding the Chromeria’s fleet straight into their trap. They’d had word that his ship had been seen, so maybe he’d show up at the last moment. More likely, he was waiting at the outskirts like some of the other pirates, hoping to swoop in on the wounded ships after the battle and take slaves and plunder.
The sound of distant guns, rumbling over the sea, came before dawn did. Liv wondered if people she knew were dying out there. She turned back to look at the wall, watching the sunlight creep down its face.
“I thought this was impossible,” she said to the orange-eyed khat chewer.
“Chromeria trained, aren’t ya? Chromeria lies, princess.”