The Blinding Knife

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.”

Of all the colors, only the Color Prince’s orange drafters were better than the Chromeria’s. Their illusions crafted into the depths of other luxins were as good as Chromeria students’, but they also did something that Liv had heard rumors about, but that the Chromeria denied was possible: they cast feelings. You had to see the object on which they’d cast the hex, and you had to be susceptible to such things-the more emotional you were, the more powerfully you would experience the hex. But this wall was their masterpiece in two parts. First, the Color Prince’s men inside the city had cast hexes on every building and street and on the wall itself for several blocks around here. The hexes could be cast thin enough that the eye wouldn’t even pick them out, especially against backgrounds with lots of colors or patterns. But the effect remained-going right past the mind, straight to the guts, blanching the liver, putting water in the stomach. In one small neighborhood on the opposite side of this wall, everyone felt dread.

It wasn’t an alien feeling for someone to experience in a city under siege, and it accomplished what it had been intended to-people avoided this area. That meant they studied the wall less closely than they would, which meant the illusion held.

Liv asked how they did it. They said they cast their will into the creation, the same way golems were made. It made the magic alive in some sense. Forbidden by the Chromeria, of course. The luxiats thought that tearing part of your will off to make magic tore part of your soul off, and that such lost parts of your soul were never regained.

The Blood Robes knew better. So they said.

The trebuchet on the Red Cliffs above threw its great stones on every quarter hour, and it threw stones close to this neighborhood. The oranges had reached the wall, and when they set their charges, they timed them to go off when the trebuchet’s stones rocked the earth.

One Atashian captain had been assassinated, and another bought off, guaranteed safety for himself and his family when the city fell. They’d burrowed a hole in the wall, then covered it with an illusion. Blue luxin, overlaid with red and yellow and orange, twisted into illusions that looked nearly the same as the wall itself. It would fool a quick glimpse from twenty or thirty paces, but not a close inspection.

The drafters and sappers had worked through every night, with thick wool blankets draped over them to hide the light of the mag torches, emerging exhausted and coated in sweat every morning. But in mere days they’d made an unseen gate, with supports drafted to hold up the wall above them, wide enough for five men to pass abreast.

It wouldn’t be wide enough to let in the entire army, and it was too short for horses to pass, but that wasn’t the strategy. An hour after Liv’s team entered the city, the Color Prince would send five hundred of his best drafters and warriors through this tunnel, with instructions to open the city’s south gate and let his armies in.

Ultimately, Liv didn’t see how it could fail. The Color Prince hadn’t been so sure. He’d wanted to deal with the Chromeria’s fleets on one day and Ru the next in case the fleet landed ashore and attacked him from the rear instead of trying to bring supplies directly in to Ru. But he’d made his gamble: to spring his trap, he needed to do both things today.

If things didn’t work out, Liv was going to find herself very, very alone in a hostile city.

“Time!” the orange barked. As the sun drenched them, he and a blue and a yellow all touched the wall in slightly different places, reaching the control nodes that they’d left on the surface. They pulled back the illusion like a curtain.

“Remember what our prince has said,” Liv said. “What we do today, we do for mercy. The price of freedom is always paid in blood. And if the price must be paid, better that it be paid by few. Let us be swift and implacable.”

It wasn’t much of a speech, but Liv had never done this before. Her men nodded, then they went into the wall first. She was second to last. If she died, their entire mission would fail, so they would protect her above all. The price and privilege of being a superviolet.

She ducked in behind them. The wall was eighteen paces thick at its base. Immense. This was the reason they hadn’t bombarded the wall straight on with the trebuchets-it would have taken them months to break through. Cannons could have done it, but they didn’t have the amount of powder necessary, nor easy access to saltpeter mines to make more. But whoever had told the Color Prince that five men could pass abreast had been lying. The space was so short that Liv had to stoop deeply to get through, and five men abreast? She could reach each wall with her outstretched fingers. It was enough for their purposes, and Liv was momentarily glad that she was going into the city first, rather than in the middle of five hundred men straining to get through this tiny hole while under fire and magic.

Grateful to be going alone into an enemy city. I’m mad.

And then they were out. Some of the men were dusty. One, a seven-footer named Phyros, was dabbing his head, which was bleeding freely from smacking it on the roof of the tunnel. They slapped off the dust from their faded blue shirts-the closest thing to a uniform the Blue Bastards had-and bound a bandage quickly around Phyros’s head.

“Follow me,” Phips Navid said. He was a cousin of Payam Navid, the gorgeous magister Liv and every other girl at the Chromeria had half loved. Phips had grown up in Ru, though his father and older brothers and uncles had all been hanged after the Prisms’ War. He’d been twelve years old, and narrowly avoided the noose himself.

They jogged through the streets. Near the wall, because of the dread hex, there was no one at all out. But soon they jogged past some soldiers, who merely nodded at them. They swung one block wide to avoid a troop of the Blue Bastards-only the top few commanders of the mercenaries knew their plan. Any underlings who saw them would ask what they were doing.

Most of the city was untouched as yet by the war. The Color Prince wanted a new power base for his war, not another drain on his resources, so he’d had the trebuchets on the Red Cliffs concentrate their stones on a few neighborhoods, and the artillery batteries. There were whole markets and palaces that remained untouched. The buildings were whitewashed adobe with flat roofs that served as extra rooms, especially on hot nights, just as they did in Tyrea. But here there were far more palaces built around central courtyard gardens. Whatever damage had been inflicted on Ru during the Prisms’ War had long ago been scrubbed away by their wealth.

But the people on the streets didn’t look like they felt fortunate. They looked like dread hexes had been painted on every wall. As she passed beneath three- and four-story-tall palaces, Liv spied men with long lenses on not a few of those palaces, peering out toward the sea. The sound of cannons was barely audible down in the maze of streets, though.

They passed unmolested all the way to the temple district. The Great Pyramid of Ru suddenly towered above them. Liv instantly saw both its kinship and its rivalry with the ziggurats of Idoss. The Idossians had gone for height, and their great ziggurat was taller and steeper than the Great Pyramid, but for sheer mass and grandeur, it couldn’t compare to this: whitewashed limestone laid out precisely on the cardinal points of a compass, with great brass braziers burning day and night up each corner, the great steps up the east face sheathed in burnished copper, shining like red gold in the sun, the pinnacle itself sheathed in electrum, the great mirror like a star held high. Every season, the facings of all four sides were changed-though this year, with the army approaching, they hadn’t gone to the expense to change to the autumn trappings. Every summer, the pyramid was made a garden, a veritable mountain of flowers, the design given over to a new director every year, with a noble family underwriting the costs.

This late in the year, the flowers should have been withered and dying, the full splendor long passed. Instead, every plant was still in bloom, an effect of the green bane, the Color Prince had said. This year, the gardens had been designed to evoke a sun resting on the pinnacle of the Great Pyramid, in the jagged, runic old Atashian art style. Lilies and gardenias and white irises and white hydrangeas yielded to daisies and buttercups and marigolds. In zigzag steps, orange roses and lilies and tulips represented the rays of the sun, stabbing through a sky of hyacinth and bluebells. A forest of vibrant greens took up the middle, and the base was a maze of rhododendrons, camellias, and roses of every color. Streams came down every side, even passing over the great steps in whimsical aqueducts. Fountains spat water from heights to land in pools a dozen paces below. And all of this was temporary, to be switched out next season for something equally lavish. The noble families did this to compete with each other.

The sheer scale of the wealth necessary for such a display simultaneously enthralled and sickened Liv. This city was wealthy, but they’d passed their share of beggars and slatterns and cripples and orphans, even in half an hour.

“Staring,” Phips Navid said gently.

Liv pulled her eyes away. No one seemed to have seen her gawking. Idiot. Gawking was a sure way to break their disguise.

But everyone else seemed busy, concerned with their own business and keeping their heads down. In another two minutes, Liv and her men were at the base of the great steps. One of the commanders of the Blue Bastards was there, a bent-nosed blue-eyed old goat with no front teeth named Paz Cavair, talking with one of the city captains who was guarding the base of the pyramid with six men.

“Liv!” Paz shouted. “Was hoping I might see you. Come here.”

Liv scowled and jogged over with her men. “Sir,” she said, “I was headed over to check how much powder-”

“Never mind that. I got a message I want you to take up to Lord Aravind up top.”

Grimacing, playing dumb, Liv said, “Can I send one of my men?”

“No, it’s important. Him only. Besides, how are you going to keep that little ass of yours so tight if you don’t sweat a bit?”

The captain laughed with Paz, and Liv’s men snickered quietly, as if trying to suppress it.

Liv looked at her men. “I don’t know what you boys are laughing about. If I gotta go up, you’re coming, too.”

That shut them up.

The captain laughed, but then looked uncomfortable. “I’m afraid I can only let two of you up there. We could take the message for you if you want, but I can’t let armed parties up the Great Pyramid.”

“We’re in the middle of a war. You’re joking, right?” Paz Cavair said.

“I hate to be a stickler, but orders and all,” the captain said. He was a young man. Dark-haired, beautiful blue eyes, beaded beard. “You know how it is.”

“I do,” Paz Cavair said. “Jump.”

“Huh?” the captain asked.

It was the code. Paz Cavair’s one guard and all of Liv’s attacked the Atashian soldiers, drawing knives and stabbing them through mail, breaking necks and savagely hacking into the flesh of the captain and all his men. It was over so fast, and the bodies carried away so swiftly, that there was no immediate outcry.

The murder done, Paz Cavair flipped his cloak around. He had the eagle sigil of Ru stitched on the other side and he took up position as if he was a soldier himself. Liv and all her men flipped their cloaks around as well. Paz Cavair’s bodyguards stripped the cloaks off the other guards, and they piled several others on top of each other and hid them as well as they could. “Five minutes to reach the top if you run. You need to get there before the guard’s changed.”

“This was supposed to be the new guards,” Liv said.

“Their relief is late. Nothing we can do about it now. Go!”

So they ran, straight up the steps. It would only be a matter of time before Lord Aravind’s men saw them. If they were lucky, their cloaks would buy them peace until they reached the top-most of the city’s soldiers had little official insignia, but only elite soldiers were supposed to approach Lord Aravind en masse. But it was war, and the old way of doing things always breaks down in war.

Liv ran.

Cannons went off to the south, and she could see part of the Color Prince’s army massing, charging toward the gates. It was mostly a distraction-for her.

“Liv,” the Color Prince had said last night. “I’ve been testing you. To see if I can trust you with something.”

“I know. I’d say, of course you can trust me, but I suppose I would say that regardless.”

He smirked. It was a little gruesome with his burn scars, but she barely even saw those anymore. “Not testing your loyalty, not now.” The sun was setting early, lighting up the Red Cliffs, making the shadows of the trebuchets stretch out forever. “Your competence. It’s a test that I’m forced to give you because I have so few superviolet drafters, and I need a good one for this. The best one. I’d like to keep you safe, but instead, I need to risk you so that we might be victorious. If you succeed, I will reward you more highly than you can imagine.”

“What do I need to do?” Liv asked.

And here she was, sweating, heaving, feeling like she was going to throw up. She stopped for a moment and looked out to sea, feeling something, thinking she’d heard something.

A vast green island had risen from the depths of the sea and now floated in the middle of the neck. Ships, small specks, were crashing and capsizing. Huge waves were rolling out from it. An enormous spire rose out of the center of the island. Her heart soared and she swore she felt suddenly wild and strong. The green bane.

To the south, she could hear the sounds of battle. Cannons and muskets were being fired from the wall, shaking the city. The soldiers at the top of the pyramid hadn’t seen the bane or Liv’s team yet, their vision narrowed to the battle playing out in front of the walls.

But despite feeling wild and strong, sprinting up the steps was exhausting. Liv slowed and the men on either side of her each grabbed one of her arms and helped her up the rest of the way. They didn’t harass her for it. They were fighters and their bodies were trained for this. She wasn’t. It made her feel weak and helpless-and some small part of her felt trapped and wanted to wrench free. But she suppressed the urge.

They slowed as they came close to the top of the pyramid. Almost invisible from below, there was a square patio at the pyramid’s penultimate level, where lords could gather and religious rituals be carried out. It was from here that the men and women of Ru’s royal family had been slaughtered and thrown down the steps. Fuschias hung from baskets and pools of water and fountains kept the nobles cool, slaves brought fruit and wine from within the pyramid itself.

The drafters in Liv’s team had all pulled on their spectacles, and she did the same. She drafted a shell of superviolet and filled it with liquid yellow, as Gavin Guile himself had shown her. It felt like so long ago now.

“Who are you?” a voice asked from above. A soldier, challenging them.

A spear of blue shot through the man’s nose and into his face, and blood exploded from his eyes. Liv’s team charged.

There were more people on the top of the pyramid than Liv had guessed, but no drafters. She shot her flashbomb into the middle of the crowd and it burst, blinding the half of the men who were looking their way. Liv’s men were ferocious-easily some of the best drafters and fighters she’d ever seen. Phyros spun two axes that looked like halberds with their hafts shortened, and everywhere he went, men died, slaves died, women died. The blue drafters shot spikes through faces and necks, left and right. Phips Navid charged Lord Aravind, shouting vengeance, and was cut down by the noble’s bodyguards.

Liv stood back and shot flashbombs, feeling vaguely cowardly, but knowing that she was irreplaceable, and her flashbombs did their work. She only had to draw her pistol once, when a crazed slave had rushed her with a flowerpot. The woman had dropped at Liv’s feet, powder burns around the bloody hole in the center of her chest.

Then, abruptly, it was done. Men and women were moaning, but there was no fight. Liv’s team was down to five, somehow, and each of them was checking bodies, dispatching wounded enemies who were scrambling to hide or to find weapons.

“Got ten soldiers coming up the outer steps,” Phyros said. “I’ll hold the inside steps.”

Phips Navid was whimpering over by the throne. Liv walked over to him. His left eye was crushed, and there was a spear all the way through his stomach and coming out his back, and his knee was bent the wrong way.

“We get him?” Phips asked. “That swine Aravind? We get him?”

“Yes,” Liv said. “Looks like he took a spike in the groin. Phyros just opened his throat.”

Phips barked a laugh, but it ended in a whimper. “Good, good. Fourteen years I been hunting that bastard. Wish I could have done it myself. Wish… wish I hadn’t needed to. You believe in heaven?”

“I believe in hell,” Liv said.

He looked like he tried to laugh, but his face twisted in pain. “Do me the favor, will you? I’ll go find out for both of us.” He grinned again fiercely and held that grin stubbornly against his pain and fear. She told herself it was mercy, but she couldn’t move until she drafted superviolet once more. It had to be done.

She did it, blade slicing neatly through carotid and jugular. She stepped back on shaky legs. Turned away before she could watch what she’d done.

“Ladder’s back here,” Phyros called.

Liv hurried back to him and climbed up the ladder. There was a small ledge beneath the great polished mirror. But as soon as Liv approached it, she knew it was no ordinary mirror. Not only was this mirror massive-fifteen paces across at least-it was spotlessly clean. There was no dust, no scratches on its face. There were old, old runes carved into the iron frame, black with age.

From the top of the pyramid, Liv could see the battle unfolding at the walls. The Prince’s five hundred, decimated, had made it through the bloody smoky hell of that tunnel, and were pushing against soldiers in every street in that neighborhood. The black smoke of muskets rattling and the sound of men screaming rose even to here. But the Blood Robes were pushing in, gaining ground. In another half a block, they would push into a market, giving their superior skills a wider battle front. After that, Liv couldn’t imagine it would be long before they would reach the gate. But the fight wasn’t over yet, and it seemed that the Atashians on the top of the wall had a limitless supply of loaded muskets, pulling them out, shooting, being handed new ones, shooting, shooting, raining ceaseless death on the attackers.

Liv tore her eyes away. Her fight was here. She tightened her eyes to slits. The mirror seemed to hum in her vision. Strange. She looked down at the base and saw a black panel. She probed it with fingers of superviolet and felt the mirror shudder. It felt like there were little invisible levers inside it.

What am I doing? She looked at the soldiers coming up the pyramid. This was her last test. This was what she was made for. If she did this, the Color Prince would give her more than she’d ever dreamed. She’d never again be inconsequential. She could never again be ignored, despised, powerless.

They were going to win the battle for the city, but out there, somehow, the battle for the sea would turn on what she did here. This was her chance to pay back the Chromeria for every sneer, for using her against her father, for making her break her oaths, for defiling everything.

The tendrils of her superviolet luxin sank into the black box, found levers within, pulled-and the mirror swung, almost taking her head off. She let go of the luxin, and the mirror stopped abruptly. She drafted again and pulled another and the mirror tilted. She pulled another, and the mirror shimmered and turned blue.

“Quickly, my lady, they’re almost upon us!” one of the men cried.

“Working!” she shouted.

With the superviolet controls, Liv pulled another lever, and a green filter bubbled to the mirror’s surface. From there, it was a simple matter of pushing and pulling the first two levers. She caught the sun’s rising light in the huge mirror and shot it out over the bay. She turned it left and right and up and down, wondering if she would have any idea when she finally got it right, or if she was already getting it right. She felt something when the beam was aimed far out to sea, over Ruic Head, but that must have been her trying too hard. That wasn’t even remotely the right direction. She turned it over the bay, up and down, searching.

Then something vibrated-she lost it. She reached again and turned the beam back, the tiniest bit. It caught, and hummed. In a moment, the mirror went from a mirror to something else entirely.

The mirror collected all the sun and was sending a vibrant emerald beam out to the bane. It was visible in the very air, burning bright green. That wasn’t right; it wasn’t even possible. Mirrors never shone so bright that you could see the beam during the day. Maybe in fog, or smoke, or at night, the light might be visible, but not an hour after dawn.

And yet it was.

But as it vibrated on that perfect frequency, humming like music, Liv’s perception was pulled through the great lens itself-and suddenly, she could see the tower shivering up out of the sea, growing, right in front of her, as if it were only a hundred paces away, not thousands.

As she saw, she knew that Koios White Oak had been wrong. She’d passed the test of competency easily. This was a test of loyalty. For she saw Kip, and Karris, and Gavin Guile himself on the bane, and she knew that if she obeyed the Color Prince, she would doom them all.

If she was to have the power to change the world, if she was to save ten thousand naive young women in the future from the sharks and sea demons, she must let her friends die. She had begged the Color Prince to save Kip and Karris before-had traded Blood Robes’ lives for theirs in Garriston. Not half a year ago, her friends had been worth her oath and the lives of a few strangers. Was saving them now worth the dream of a new, changed, pure world?

“Do you know what Atirat needs, Aliviana?” the Color Prince had asked her last night.

“Sacrifices?” she hazarded.

“Light. Every god is birthed in light.”

And, weeping, light she brought.