He shrugged off the white-and-black-striped burnous and pulled the laces of his tunic open, dropping it to reveal impressive musculature. Karris wanted to hate him for his vanity, but she dabbled in vanity more than her fair share.
Odd, she thought. That would have made me hate him twice as much not too long ago.
Oh, she was supposed to respond. Something gutsy but that didn’t hint to the crowd that she was a fighter. “I would rather die,” she shouted, “than let you hurt my husband any more.”
The crowd cheered. The Nuqaba tried to whisper something to Enki, but he shook his head. She tried again, but the crowd was too loud, too impatient. He waved her off. Later.
As Enki jogged down the steps and across the sand toward the spina, looking vexed, the Nuqaba waited for the cheer to die and then shouted, “Then may your blood be on your own head!”
There was confusion on the spina as the soldiers tried to figure out what precisely they were supposed to do during a trial the likes of which they’d never heard of, much less trained for, all while under the watching eyes of fifty thousand people. The professional in Karris had some pity on them, but she said nothing. Any hint she gave that she knew exactly what she was doing could get her killed. This is why you strike fast—some part of the enemy force may have intelligence that will destroy you, but if they can’t communicate it in time, it doesn’t matter.
She bent her head and wiped at her cheeks defiantly, as if she were weeping uncontrollably but was angry about it. A fool wisp of a girl in a ridiculous dress, that’s what she was, not at all a Blackguard.
She wanted to look at Gavin. She wanted to go to him. But she’d lose herself if she did.
Finally, on quick orders from Enki himself, the Tafok Amagez set up a perimeter around the spina as he mounted the steps. An Amagez broke ranks and came forward for the offering of weapons. He was probably thirty-five years old, ancient for a warrior-drafter. He lifted his scabbarded longsword from his belt and offered it to Karris. Another Amagez joined him a moment later and offered a stabbing spear. Then another, with a scorpion. Enki himself wore a long, thin-bladed scimitar, scabbard and hilt encrusted with mother-of-pearl and rubies.
Karris looked at the weapons, and shook her head and waved her hand in denial, still making the motions large enough that they could be interpreted even by the farmers in the highest seats. “Oh, no, I shan’t need anything there, I think. But thank you.”
She glanced at Gavin as murmurs rippled through the crowd again. No weapons? What insanity was this? Was she simply committing suicide?
Gavin was still twitching, still obviously in great pain, but he said nothing, didn’t cry out in his agony, didn’t call out to Karris. He couldn’t see what was happening, and the not knowing would be driving him insane, but he held his silence. She knew at once it was because he trusted her. He knew she had a plan, and he knew it was desperate, and he wasn’t going to distract her from it.
For a man who’d been in control of everything, and been the driver of change in most of the great moments in the Seven Satrapies for the last two decades, to trust her that much moved her beyond words.
No time for that, dammit! She scrubbed a tear from her eye, a real one.
Unwilling to let her dominate the crowd’s eyes, Enki had stepped forward and raised both hands to heaven. “Orholam!” he cried. “Look upon the works of our hands! May your justice be done to traitors!”
He lowered his hands, and then took off his ghotra, as if this were connected to drawing Orholam’s attention. His black hair was woven with gold wire into clumps that hung past his shoulders. In Parian tradition, that hair was his glory, and he gloried in it.
The gesture wasn’t lost on the Ruthgari, who didn’t wear the ghotra, but were well aware of their neighbors’ beliefs about it. Nor were they immune to appreciating a handsome, athletic man who was six and a half feet tall.
He was like a smaller, vain version of Ironfist. Which was a bit disturbing, when Karris thought about it. Who picked a lover who looked so much like her own brother?
Karris walked up beside Enki and stood facing the Nuqaba’s box, waiting for him.
A flicker of doubt crossed his face. Karris was acting with such conviction that she could tell the big ignoramus thought that maybe these trials really were a tradition. He stood beside her, but not too close.
Around the spina in a circle, the Tafok Amagez drew in their colors. Any drafting would mean death.
Karris curtsied carefully to the Nuqaba and a steely-eyed Eirene Malargos. Beside her, Enki bowed deeply.
The crowd fell silent.
The Nuqaba waved a hand, signaling they could begin, but Karris ignored it. She turned to Enki and curtsied, more elaborately, an old court curtsy, with sweeping arms bringing her skirts wide, and her ankles crossed. Enki bowed to her, but carefully, keeping his eyes on her.
And… nothing happened.
Ben-hadad! It wasn’t supposed to be like this!
Enki lifted his sword and readied himself, while Karris stood on one foot, her right ankle pushing against her left calf.
“One moment,” Karris said. She held a finger up. “I have an itch.” She moved her right foot up and down her calf.
Enki looked at her, incredulous. Was she mad? And then he laughed.
And it was as if Ben-hadad had made the catch to be activated by laughter instead of by crossing her ankles, as they’d discussed. Karris felt the catch give and the big ridiculous ribbon on her right hip popped out and the luxin holding together layers of skirt and petticoats let go, swinging open like a door over her thigh, giving Karris access to the quick-release scabbard that covered the length of the inside of her thigh.
At the same time the skirts popped open, the scabbard swiveled from the inner thigh where it had been hidden during her search to her outer thigh and hand.
Most scabbards required a blade to be stabbed into them, and likewise, drawn vertically out before it could be used: they took two motions. This was a tension scabbard, holding the blade in a hug instead, letting the blade come out horizontally, so that one could draw as one slashed.
It was only a fraction of a heartbeat faster than a normal draw, but a fraction was all Karris needed. She sprang forward in the moment Enki’s eyes crinkled with laughter. Onetwothree steps, the back of her left hand batting his sword aside—
And she buried the blade under his chin at the very instant he realized she’d moved. She rammed it all the way to the hilt, its point jutting out, gleaming red above his glorious braids. She twisted the blade hard, breaking bones in his brainpan, taking no chances. A man could still kill you before he realized he was dead.
And then she jumped back, out of reach, pulling the dagger free.
Enki dropped to his knee, dropped flat on his face. Someone in the circle of Tafok Amagez shouted, but Karris barely heard it.
She stepped forward again, now that she saw he wouldn’t attack, and knelt at his body. She pulled back his braids and took the scimitar from his twitching fingers. Taking a fistful of braids, she stood, lifting the body to put pressure on the neck, and hacked with the dead man’s own scimitar. Once, and then twice, and a bit of quick sawing for the last of the skin, and Enki’s head came free of his body.
Karris held the head high in one hand and the scimitar high in the other, and suddenly, she could hear the crowd again, a vast roar of confusion and horror and awe and disbelief and cheering all intermixed. “Orholam has seen! Orholam’s justice has been done!” she shouted. But her voice was probably lost in the roar.
“I am Karris Guile, and this man is Gavin Guile, your Prism. He is Gavin Guile!” She was shouting at the top of her lungs, but it was lost in the clamor of fifty thousand voices. Only the nearest could hear. She could only hope it was enough.
She switched hands and swung the head back and forth as she drafted off the banners nearby. She flung the head and gave it a little extra push with luxin as she threw it.
Karris couldn??
?t have made the shot so perfectly if she’d tried it a hundred times. The head flew all the way into Eirene Malargos’s box and landed in the Nuqaba’s lap.
The Nuqaba began shrieking, and Orholam forgive them, many in the audience laughed.
Karris didn’t care. She moved to Gavin quickly and cut him free as the Tafok Amagez stood around, baffled.
Oh, Orholam. Gavin’s face. His face!
“Gavin,” she said, “we have to run. Can you—”
“I won’t let you down,” he said, but when he stood, he almost collapsed. He put his left hand up to his face, and two of his fingers were gone. Those fucking animals.
But what mattered now was that Gavin was in no shape to fight.
Karris steadied him. Around her, the Tafok Amagez looked uncertain as to what they should be doing. She had won a trial that their Nuqaba had established, so they should let her go, but then, she’d also thrown the head of one of their leaders into the Nuqaba’s lap, so, should they arrest her? Could they, after what she’d just done?
There was no point in waiting to find out what they decided.
But just then, one of the hippodrome guards ran to the steps of the spina. “It is Gavin Guile!” he shouted. “I recognize him from the old days! They dyed his hair and dirtied his face, but he is Gavin Guile!”
Karris veritably pulled Gavin down the steps, and the soldier fell in with them, desperately signaling to other Guile family troops to join them.
“Kill them!” the Nuqaba shrieked suddenly. “Kill them both!” Karris shot a look over at her. She was covered with blood. More blood than you’d think would leak out of a man’s severed head. She’d smeared it somehow on her face.
“No! Ignore that order!” Eirene Malargos shouted. “You’re not in your right mind, Haruru!”
“Kill them!” the Nuqaba shouted. “Block the exits! That’s an order!”
“That’s an act of war! I forbid it!” Eirene Malargos shouted.
Chaos.
“This way!” the Guile soldier said.
He unlocked a door set at the level of the sand. They stepped through and he closed it behind them, locking it.
“Captain Eutheos, you son of a bitch,” Gavin said. “I thought I ordered you out of here.”
“Wasn’t much good at orders at Blood Ridge either, my lord.”
Gavin laughed briefly at some shared memory, then cut off abruptly, as if anything that made his face move spawned such pain that it nearly felled him.
“I can get us to an exit, but they’ll get there faster,” the soldier said.
“There has to be some kind of service exit,” Karris said.
“First thing they’ll think of,” Gavin said. And he was right. Dammit.
“Can you get us to the top tier, west side?” Karris asked.
“Absolutely.”
And he did. They dodged through corridors where only servants and slaves went, and crossed halls clogged with spectators eager to get out—the sight of men drawing swords and pistols and drafting and ready to kill anyone who opposed them did crazy things to people. Other people, who’d been outside the hippodrome and heard that amazing things were happening within were pushing to get in, creating vast snarls. One musket shot and this was going to turn into a stampede.
The Guile soldiers manning the exits were shouting, trying to bring order, but they were confused themselves. Were the Tafok Amagez now the enemy? Or were they still friends who should be helped? What had happened inside?
Gavin collapsed several times, apologizing each time. Karris and Eutheos ended up each taking a shoulder—another thing that being short made her ill-suited for. He was shockingly light.
But in minutes they made it to the arch where Karris had entered. She poked her head out over the drop.
Oh my.
But there was Ironfist. At the sight of her, he grinned big.
When Gavin poked his own head out, Ironfist’s grin slipped. Gavin’s eye was still bleeding. But Gavin smiled, delighted to see the big man.
“Are you going to make your own way down, Lord Prism?” Ironfist asked.
Gavin jerked back and turned. “Company coming,” he said.
Karris saw five Tafok Amagez running up the stairs she’d run down not fifteen minutes ago. These upper decks had cleared out. They definitely saw them.
“Afraid not,” Gavin said, quickly poking his head back out. “What’s the plan? Quickly.” He looked out at the river. It was a long way away, and a long way down. “Oh no, tell me that’s not the plan.”
“That’s it,” Karris said. “Captain, thank you. Now get the hell out of here. Five count, Gavin. Commander, I’ll come five after Gavin.”
Gavin had already backed up. He wobbled, but gathered himself. Eutheos steadied him. “Go, Captain, and bless you.”
Karris stood at the edge so both of them could see her. “One, two, three, four, five.” And Gavin leapt, right in front of her.
She didn’t watch. Couldn’t and make it to her spot in time. The Tafok Amagez were charging up the stairs. Oh damn, a five count was too much. By four she’d be dead.
She ran for the edge as metal cut the air. “Five, five, five!” she shouted. And dove into the air.
For a sickening heartbeat, she fell. She kept her body rigid, no time for a prayer or a curse.
And a soft cloud of Ironfist’s open luxin caught her for half a moment, and then flung her hard.
The timing was off, and the throw was less than perfect: instead of catching her at her chest and hips and throwing evenly, it was a little behind her. Being flung from that position spun her, hips over head, flipping. She would land flat on her back in the river.
From this height, it would break her.
Karris twisted hard. First lesson of fighting, how to fall.
But she had also turned sideways—and her feet hit the water first, before she was ready, and suddenly—black.
The next she was aware, she was underwater in billows of clinging skirts with no idea which way was up, and no breath. She flailed, and the last of her breath escaped with the wave of pain that crashed over her. Her left arm felt like someone had tried to tear it off, and her ribs and left breast had been crushed.
An unnatural hand—more hook than hand—grabbed her many petticoats and dragged her, upside down, to the surface. It shot water up her nose, and as she hit the blessed air, she coughed and spat and fought to push the blinding, suffocating layers of cloth away.
Ben-hadad dropped the open green luxin claw he’d used to grab her and extended a hand. Karris made the mistake of offering her left hand, and regretted it immediately when he hauled her up. Pain took what little breath she had.
“Ben!” Essel shouted. “Need you! Need you now!” She was standing over Gavin, who had also been pulled out of the water. He was wet and whimpering and holding a hand to his bleeding eye. He would be no help.
The sparse crowd that had already filled the market when they arrived was now a thick crowd with the events inside the hippodrome and the sudden spectacle of the insane people jumping all the way from the hippodrome into the river. Soldiers were trying to fight their way through to get to the river’s edge where the skimmer was docked.
Karris couldn’t see whose soldiers they were, just the fighting in the seething crowd, and the bobbing points of muskets.
She fought to stand, and saw Hezik break through the crowd and run for the stairs. He jumped halfway down the first flight. “Ironfist says go! Go!” Hezik shouted.
A musket shot rang out. Flesh and blood and cloth puffed from Hezik’s left arm. He was already running down the second flight of steps and it threw him off balance. He tumbled, rolled down the remaining steps.
The crowd bolted, and despite the clear visual marker of a big black cloud of smoke from the musket, people who’ve never been in combat do the craziest things. They went all directions at once. Some were pushed off the wall to fall onto the docks, shrieking, screaming, breaking legs and backs and necks, g
rabbing on to those who pushed them to try to save themselves.
Others pushed toward the soldiers, who turned their muskets and started beating anyone close with the stocks. One must have had his musket grabbed by someone in the crowd, because it discharged into the air.
Karris fought to her feet. “Ignition!” she shouted at Ben-hadad, who looked paralyzed.
“What? I, I don’t—I don’t draft—”
The red lens had popped out of her eye somewhere. She tore into his pack. Found the flint and steel and her red spectacles, the pain in her arm making black spots dance in her vision. Pulled the spectacles out and put them on, and filled her left hand with red luxin.
She turned her eyes in time to see Hezik stand with effort—it looked like one of the falling men had hit him. A soldier with a musket stepped to the edge of the wall, and fired.
Hezik dropped, a splash of red jumping into the air from his head.
“No!” Karris shouted. Drafting red for the first time in six months, she reacted instead of thinking. Like the old Karris, like she hadn’t learned anything. With enough red feeding constantly into her left hand to keep a fire constantly burning low, she made a red luxin ball in her right, and hurled it through the fire at the satisfied young soldier. It hit high on his chest, in his beard, and splashed over him, liquid red luxin drenching him for one heartbeat, then flames roaring over him the next.
Screaming, he turned to his fellows. Panicked, one of them lashed out with the already raised butt of his musket. The man on fire plunged off the wall, where he almost landed on a child.
“We’ve orders to go!” Essel said. She threw a line from the cleat back onto the dock and pushed off.
“We wait!” Karris said. “Out of my line!”
She braced her feet and brought the flaming luxin in her left hand up as if she were sighting down a musket.