The Blinding Knife

Chapter 108

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?

“Brave,” Tugertent said. “And crazy strong.” She cursed in appreciation.

“Double-check he’s dead,” Commander Ironfist said.

Tugertent saw Teia looking at her, the question obvious in her eyes. She put a finger to her lips. Quiet. Teia let it go. There were more important things.

Tlatig gave a signal from the cabin that Teia thought was the all-clear, and Buskin motioned something back to her. Buskin trotted back down the line.

“You can see through walls and water?” he asked. He was old for a Blackguard, one of the ebon-skinned, blue-eyed Parians who usually only came from noble families, but he was almost painfully thin where Commander Ironfist was thick. His halos were red, and streaked out in lines through his irises.

“Only if they’re close enough, and thin enough,” Teia said. “I saw through the leather at the windows.”

Commander Ironfist said, “Teia, you go first up the trail, start now. Look for men and traps. Tugertent will be with you in thirty seconds. Their relief might be coming down at any time. I want to be up before they start coming down.”

The Blackguards were already carrying the bodies toward the dock to throw in the water.

Teia stopped them, found the smallest man, and stripped off his sword belt, floppy hat, and jacket. She pulled the jacket on over her own clothes, strapped on the sword, and pulled the hat over her hair. There was blood on the jacket. She put it out of her mind.

The Blackguards looked at her oddly, but she ignored them. She refilled her hand with imbalanced paryl to make a torch. Her mouth was dry and it was hard to swallow, but all she had to do was jog and look. She could do that. She moved to the head of the trail, and when Tugertent joined her, she felt overwhelmingly grateful.

“Let me go around corners first,” she said.

The rest of the Blackguards gathered behind them. She took the lead and the three archers followed thirty paces behind her. The rest were ten paces behind them. The path itself soon changed from a goat track winding around trees and bushes to one cut into the rock of the head itself. It was barely three feet wide, and Teia saw that some of the men behind her had to turn their shoulders sideways to slide along the wall. The wall itself was worn smooth from decades or centuries of other soldiers doing the same. They ascended sharply in long switchbacks, back and forth across the face of bare rock wall.

Teia kept her paryl beam cutting left and right, expanding her pupils to see, searching for booby traps or alarm wires, then tightening them back to the visible spectrum. Magister Martaens had said that her mistress’s master had navigated completely by paryl light? There was so much noise in that spectrum, Teia could barely believe it. But she found no traps.

She stayed half a switchback ahead of the Blackguards, and when they were all about halfway up the cliffs, Teia heard voices above them.

“-says, ‘She would of if I were rocking her boat!’ ”

At least four men laughed, including the speaker.

Teia glanced back. In contrast to her own panic, the Blackguards behind her looked calm. But the soldiers were behind and above them, and coming down, as if racing them for the corner of the switchback. The archers didn’t have any angle to shoot them, and if they waited until the soldiers rounded the corner, the soldiers would certainly have time to sound an alarm.

Retreating back around the corner, out of sight, Teia looked back for orders.

“Get a count,” Buskin mouthed to her.

Both parties were walking toward the same switchback corner, a hundred paces away, and the two trails got closer and closer as they neared each other. In another forty paces, if the descending soldiers looked down, they’d be able to see the ascending Blackguards.

Teia held up four fingers, five fingers, shrugged. Commander Ironfist was already coming forward, his tall, muscular body somehow weaving around the other Blackguards on the trail as if certain death wasn’t beckoning at the slightest wrong step. He came to the center of the line. In his hand, he held a long green luxin rope. Behind him, struggling more to make it around the Blackguards because she was shorter, came the smallest of their number, a woman named Fell.

Ominous name right now, Teia thought. Ironfist helped Fell wrap the rope tightly around her waist, then threw the ends of the rope down the rest of the line. Everyone grabbed the rope except for the two Blackguards immediately beside Ironfist, who grabbed on to his belt. It was as if they were able to communicate volumes without speaking a word.

Commander Ironfist looked at Teia. “Exact count. Signal when they’re directly above us.”

Teia squared her shoulders, pulled the hat down in front of her eyes, and tried to remember the dead soldier’s gait. She rounded the corner, walking quickly, but making sure her feet were wider apart than usual to minimize the motion of her hips. She kept her head down, held her shoulders tight, as if they were bigger and more muscular than her own, and kept glancing out to sea to make it believable that she didn’t see the soldiers coming toward her.

“Arvad!” one of the men called out. “What are you doing coming up early?”

Teia bobbed her head up toward them. Trick with faking a man’s voice was not to try to become a bass-go for an easy tenor, and keep it short. “Rogue wave! Was knocked off the dock! He’s hurt!” She pointed a hand down toward the dock, standing close enough to the edge that the Blackguards could see her hand. With her fingers and thumb outstretched: five. Then she brought the other fingers in to point with her index finger alone. Plus one. Six.

She gestured for the soldiers to follow her before they could ask more, and turned her back. She got to the corner and pointed again to the dock, her arm outstretched. Then as the soldiers came directly above the Blackguards, Teia dropped her arm.

The descending soldiers weren’t fifteen feet away from the Blackguards. Ironfist turned his back to the wall, his feet pointing out, and Fell stood in front of him, in almost a hug, facing his big chest. His big hands wrapped around her hips.

After a quick count, Ironfist flung Fell up into the air and she landed with her feet in his hands at shoulder level, then he pressed straight above his head. Blue luxin blazed out from her hands, blasting her back against the green rope out over the abyss, but still she shot out more. The stretchiness of the green rope allowed her to push back and back, and Ironfist leaned out and out to be able to continue holding her feet, his body going diagonal to the trail, held only by the tension of the green rope and the two men holding on to his belt.

Fell didn’t try to blast each of the men with luxin spears or missiles. Instead, she shot a blue frame against the wall behind them, and merely made it so thick that there was no space to stand on the trail. It nudged them off. With nothing to hold on to, it didn’t take much.

As one, six men tumbled off the trail above the Blackguards. Only one gave so much as a squawk of surprise as he plunged to his death. But that nearest man hit the green luxin rope as he fell. The man flipped and continued his fall, but Fell was yanked hard to the side. At the same time, she stopped shooting out blue luxin, so she rebounded toward the wall. Ironfist leaned crazily over to one side, but couldn’t run to the right because the Blackguards were crowded thick on the ledge. Instead, he pivoted, put both of her feet in one hand, and extended that hand along the side of the ledge as both of the Blackguards on either side of him had to let go of his belt lest it throw both them and him off the ledge.

Ironfist set Fell down gently, the motion costing him his own balance-and fell off the ledge.

His big fingers slapped on the lip, slipped, and then held. The Blackguards pulled Fell in among them, and before Teia could blink, numerous luxin ropes were already around the commander. With their help, he levered himself up and stood. He didn’t seem fazed in the slightest. “They’re all dead,” he said. “But we need to hurry.”

He’d been calmly inspecting their work while he was dangling off the ledge? Bloody flux!

The sun rose to full light as they jogged up the path. When they neared the top of the path, Teia scouted ahead and saw that around the last bend, there was a stout wooden gate, ten feet tall, with sharpened spikes at the top. In the paryl light, through small gaps, she could see that it was reinforced with iron, and there were four men behind it. The drop-off beside the gate wasn’t sheer like the rest of the cliff they’d just traversed, but it was too steep to climb while armed men were above you. She thought she could make out the shapes of spears and muskets among the men stationed there, too.

She had barely reported back when the cannons above began firing out on the water. During the whole climb, Teia had been so focused on merely staying on the path and watching for booby traps or pitfalls or approaching soldiers that she’d barely looked out to sea. Their view was astounding. Gorgeous: the sun barely up, the bay blue and deeper blue-green, the sails of the ships unfurled, and now thick clouds of smoke rolling out from the broadsides as the Chromerian fleet tried to enter the bay. There were only a few small ships holding the center of the Color Prince’s lines. They fired back a volley.

“Lem,” Commander Ironfist said. “Up front.”

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 rose 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 materiel 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.