by Brent Weeks
Kip said, “He planned this! He’s doing it on Sun Day on purpose. What everyone will be talking about will be Sun Day and this year’s party, and the new Prism-elect and what does anyone know about him, and there’ll be tributes to the White who everyone loved and speculation on who’ll replace her. Normally it would be a huge scandal that he stripped your commission, but this … That you and me got kicked out … Anything else that happens today will just be buried under the other news, right?”
“If you’re looking for justice, look not to earth, Breaker.” Ironfist looked up suddenly to the crystal embedded in the wall. It strobed yellow, then red, then yellow. The crystals were rarely used—the system was delicate and difficult to fix. It was only normally used for initiation day to announce the colors of new drafters coming through the Threshing—and for emergencies. Only the higher luxiats and Blackguards were supposed to have access to them.
“That’s not one of our codes,” Ironfist said.
“What?” Kip asked, but Ironfist was already on his way out of the room.
“Who’s going with Breaker?” Ironfist asked. “Quick! I can’t. My path is different.”
Slight Daelos seemed to be gathering his courage, and he spoke quickly. “My parents would die if I left, Breaker. This is all they’ve ever wanted for me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted for myself. Sorry.”
“I’m not blaming you, Daelos, but he only meant getting me to the docks—” Kip started.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Ironfist said. “You go with Breaker, you’re out of the Blackguard. Permanently. The promachos has spoken.”
“I’ll go,” Cruxer said. His voice was steady, but he looked like he was dying.
“Cut the stitching on the side of your insignia,” Ironfist said.
“Wait. What?!” Kip said. “Cruxer, what are you saying?”
“I’ll go,” Ferkudi said.
“In,” Big Leo rumbled.
“Wait, what is this?” Kip said.
“Same here,” Goss said.
“Wouldn’t be anywhere else,” Teia said.
Winsen shrugged. “Sounds fun. I’m in.”
“No time!” Ironfist said. “Line up now. You each found a paper in your pack. Sign it.”
“Stop it!” Kip shouted. “What are you doing? You’ve worked your entire lives to be Blackguards. You’re this close. I have to go, but me going means you can stay. Me going means I won’t ever have to fight you.”
“Breaker,” Cruxer said. “Don’t you understand? We’re all good enough to be Blackguards. The commander has offered promotions to every last one of us. But we wanted to be Blackguards not because we wanted to have the clothes and the admiration—”
“I thought the clothes and the admiration were pretty great,” Teia said.
“I like the clothes and admiration,” Ferkudi said.
“Ferkudi!” Cruxer said.
“Wha—she just said the same—ow! Ben, what’d you elbow me for?”
“All the trappings are wonderful,” Cruxer said. “But we all wanted to be Blackguards because we wanted to serve a high purpose.”
“But what if I’m not the—” Kip said.
“It doesn’t have to do with that,” Cruxer said, but Kip wasn’t sure the rest of the squad agreed. “What purpose is there in us serving evil men?”
Ben-hadad asked, “What good are the trappings of honor if the honor itself is dead?”
“I still like the trappings,” Ferkudi murmured. He was mournfully turning his gold inductees’ fight token over in his hand.
“Breaker,” Teia said. “We love it here. We don’t want to go. But we want to go with you.”
Just when he thought he was going to lose it all. Kip felt warmth suffusing him, like his body was filling with light.
“You’ll find two pairs of blacks in your bags,” Ironfist said. “I heard some of you only joined up in the first place because you wanted the clothes.” But no one laughed. The blacks were not just a gift rich beyond imagining, stretchy-soft and comfortable, luxurious and useful, they were the ultimate symbol of the elite Blackguard and what the squad was giving up. That their commander gave them the blacks anyway told them that he thought they were worthy of the honor and the brotherhood they were choosing to sacrifice. Ironfist growled, “What, am I gonna have to requisition handkerchiefs? Line up!”
Kip could barely see through his brimming eyes. But the squad lined up immediately, and he took his place at the end.
“You’re Blackguards no more,” Ironfist said. He walked down the line, took each signed release, and ripped the Blackguard insignia and rank off their sleeves. Kip was the last. It felt as if Ironfist tore his heart out.
“Lem,” Ironfist said. “Take these papers down to the secretaries’ desk and have them copied in triplicate and put on file.” He handed over the papers and simple Lem disappeared.
Ironfist dug into a bag. “You can call yourselves whatever you want now. Make your own patches if you don’t like these. The promachos called you the Mighty.” Ironfist went down the line again and slapped an insignia on each person’s left shoulder. It was of a powerful man in black silhouetted on a red field, standing with feet planted, head bowed, arms straight out to either side, and force radiating from each hand. It reminded Kip of his time in the jungle, when he’d expelled the leeches.
Ironfist said, “Now go, go with Orholam, and may I see you again. If not on these mortal fields, then in paradise.”
They went to the door, and Kip turned as the rest of them went into the hall. “Commander, if I may, where’d you get the patches?”
“Andross Guile had them made.”
“That many?” Kip asked.
Ironfist nodded. “And the weapons. And the supplies. Minus the blacks.”
Unbelievable. Just when Kip felt comfortable hating that old murderer, Andross had given him his squad back. Andross had not only given them weapons and gear, he’d arranged the writs of release so they wouldn’t have to pay back the signing monies that all of them had spent or given to their families or previous owners. Andross Guile, generous?
“Sir,” Kip said, “where are you going?”
“A different front of the same war.”
“Halt!” an unfamiliar voice shouted from the hall where the rest of the squad was. “Which one of you is Kip?”
“That’s me,” Goss said loudly. “What’s it to you?”
A musket shot rang out.
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 th
e 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 cl
ass—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.”