“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 class—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.”
He drafted green from the mag torch like it was water gushing from a well. “All of you, you’re going to have to run after me as fast as you can. Pick me up. As in, right now.”
While Ben-hadad and Cruxer each got under a shoulder, Kip drafted a disk under his own feet.
“Oh no, I need a bit of orange. But those things cost a fort—”
Teia snapped open an orange mag torch. “Life and death, Breaker.”
He didn’t object. He drafted a green platform, then orange lubricant below that, then green again, starting a curve.
“Oh! I’ve heard of these!” Ben-hadad said. “The ancients called them water balls? Drafted them out of blue so they could see out. Then they’d go out on rivers and lakes—”
“Footsteps. Above and below!” Big Leo said.
One of the squad fired a blunderbuss up the stairs above them. Kip heard the clatter of a man falling to the ground. The other blunderbuss fired. Curses and swearing and screams. Kip tried to filter it out, though with the green roaring in him, he wanted to smash them, shut them up. In moments, he’d drafted the bubble. He sprayed orange around the inside of the bubble before he finally closed it. He sealed it on the inside, putting the nexus of the knot close to the surface so he would be able to get out.
He was inside a vaguely translucent green bubble. His idea was to stand, letting his feet slide on the lubricative orange so that he stayed upright. He could tell immediately that it wasn’t going to work.
“I just realized that I don’t need to be inside the ball,” Kip said. “And actually it might be a really bad idea.” But with the bubble closed, the sound was muted. They didn’t hear him.
Kip waved to Cruxer, who took it as readiness.
Cruxer and Ben-hadad heaved the ball toward the stairs.
Kip fell immediately. Orange. Slippery.
He thought he saw Cruxer try to grab the ball to stop him, but Ben-hadad, thinking this was the plan, pushed harder on the Great Green Bouncy Ball o’ Doomed Kip.
And Kip bounced. The ball rolled down the stairs, slowly at first, skipping and bouncing, and then it hit the next landing and sproinged airborne. He rolled along the outside curve of the spiraling staircase—and flew at face level into a group of ten or twelve Lightguards running up the stairs. The ball was six feet wide, and the stairs nine or ten. Kip shouldn’t have blasted into all of them, but he did.
Kip was spun around and right side up for one moment, and he saw the squad following hot behind him, slashing at the scattered, fallen Lightguards, trying not to stumble over the bodies themselves, but trying to keep the men from following them. And then Kip was knocked off his feet again on the next bounce.
He didn’t even see the next group of Lightguards, just felt the shock of collision. And now he had such speed built up that there was no way the squad would be able to keep up. He landed upside down on the next bounce, only the curvature of the ball keeping him from breaking his damn fool neck. Another collision—this one so hard that it rattled Kip’s teeth—sent the ball bouncing back the opposite direction.
Finding himself flat on his back, Kip squinted through the barely translucent ball, wondering how many Lightguards he must have killed with that collision.
None. He’d caught the edge of the recessed doorway at one of the landings. His ball, now having ricocheted back into the stairs above, was rolling slowly back toward the edge of the descending stairs once more.
Through the distortion of the green luxin, Kip saw a young face coming up the stairs from below. A Lightguard, baffled at a boy in a ball. The ugly man had a musket in hand, but he stopped. In a heartbeat, half a dozen more Lightguards joined him. They, too, stopped, bewildered.
Kip waved to them, friendly. It had worked that one time out on the river.
But none of them waved back.
Then something else occurred to him. He hadn’t made any holes in the ball. It was getting hard to breathe. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it didn’t sound friendly.
An officer joined the men. “Shoot it!” he yelled.
Kip heard that.
The men raised their muskets. Kip had stopped musket balls with green luxin, once. But that had been open luxin, with all the power of insane Will behind it. He was still flat on his back, and the luxin of the ball wasn’t thick enough to stop bullets.
Why didn’t I make it thick enough to stop bullets?
Thinking was the wrong thing to do. Thinking took time.
A roar resounded through even the walls of his ball, and Kip saw the briefest flash of Big Leo, running down the stairs faster than you can run down stairs. Big Leo lowered a shoulder and flung his massive mass into the ball.
The Ball o’ Kip shot into the Lightguards’ faces amid musket fire.
Sometime in between that collision and the bouncing and the lack of air, the world went red and black and he lost everything.
Some time later, he regained consciousness with a gasp. Teia was standing over him with a knife in her hand, and he was covered with the dust of broken green luxin. It took him a few heaving, deep breaths to regain his wits. He’d passed out.
Teia had cut the seal of the green luxin. The squad were speaking to him, but he had nothing for them. Couldn’t understand.
They pulled him to his feet.
“Where’s Daelos?” Kip asked. Everyone else appeared to be here. Wherever here was. At the bottom of the slaves’ stairs, maybe? Ben-hadad and Ferkudi were reloading the blunderbusses, preparing to breach a door.
“Broke an ankle jumping over some bodies,” Cruxer said. “We had to leave him.”
“You left him?” Kip demanded.
“We gave him a Lightguard cloak and tunic. The chirurgeons will help him and he can get away. The Blackguards will help him, Kip,” Cruxer said. He was defensive. He hated leaving someone behind, too.
Orholam damn it. We’re children. Even Cruxer.
“It was the right thing,” Teia said. “Now shut up and let’s go.”
“Fire in three!” Ben-hadad announced.
Ferkudi fired before any of them could cover their ears.
“Sorry, I heard fire,” he said.
Ben-hadad fired right behind him, and he winced at the deafening sound. “Deserved that,” he said.
“Reload,” Cruxer said. “Everyone, ready luxin.”
Kip took a step to take a defensive position at the stairs, and almost fell again as his orange-luxin-coated foot shot out from under him. Ugh, he had orange luxin goop everywhere, even in his hair. Someone handed him the lit orange mag torch. He drafted a wad of orange luxin into his hand, and then used that to suck the open orange luxin off his body and out of his hair. Mostly.
He checked himself quickly. His green spectacles were unbroken, and the spectacle case on his left hip had successfully protected all his other colors.
He listened closely at the stairs and thought that he could hear the groans and whimpers of the injured and dying above, and maybe distantly, the sound of reinforcements coming down. With the musket fire, the Lightguards had figured out where the squad was. Now they could concentrate their forces. The noose was tightening.
“Where are we?” Kip asked. He filled himself with green luxin rapidly, then swapped spectacles and pulled in blue off one of the white mag torches. The torches were already getting low, and Kip could feel the bruises he was going to have tomorrow. Provided he had the luxury of seeing tomorrow.
“Main floor,” Ben-hadad said. “Main hall should be that third door on the left.”
“How do you know that?” Kip asked.
“I don’t really get lost,” Ben-hadad said. “I was eight years old before I realized a person could.”
“Where did Ironfist go?” Kip asked. “I mean, he was leaving, too, right?”
“No time,” Cruxer said. “Let’s go.”
Kip followed, but he couldn’t shake the thought. Ironfist was getting out of here, too. He hadn’t gone toward the lift.
So Ironfist had some other way out.
But Kip didn’t know that for sure. Maybe Ironfist had stopped on one of the other floors, grabbing some personal items, and got stuck on the wrong side. Maybe he planned to make his escape later. Maybe he’d bluffed his way through the Lightguards.
They ran through the empty halls, fanned out, weapons drawn. Everyone but Kip was a bloody mess. Big Leo had his left arm in a makeshift sling, half cloth, half luxin, and the skin was bulging in his forearm. Nasty break, but he didn’t seem to be feeling it yet.
Cruxer’s nose was bloodied, and he had a cut down his forehead, seeping blood into his mouth. Ferkudi had drafted what looked like a fighting glove around his left hand. Probably had broken some bones punching someone. Winsen was grinning broadly. He looked insane. He was carrying a short bow with bodkin arrow nocked. Teia had wiped blood off her face, but she was careful to wipe it onto her grays, not on the shimmercloak. It was a steely, metallic gray now, not the dull gray of an inductee’s cloak. Maybe this was its true color, if it had such a thing. On the back of the cloak Kip noticed barely touching circles, one white, one black, with the black over the white a little, like an eclipse of the moon.
“They know about the cloak,” Teia said. “At least, they know enough. I told them while you were out.”
“I wouldn’t say we know enough,” Ben-hadad said. “I have got a hell of a lot of—”
“We know enough for now,” Cruxer said. “Enough to use her. Teia, take point.” She did. As they moved down the hall, people’s mag torches began sputtering out. “Fill up,” Cruxer whispered.
But they’d all been drafting long enough that the order was unnecessary. Each of them drew in as much luxin as they could before the torches burned out.
As they reached another door, Teia made the hand motion to Cruxer: scout? He nodded permission, and she put her hand to the crack in the double doors, lowering her head, her eyes flaring wide.
She stood there for perhaps a full minute. Then she came back. “Fifteen, maybe twenty. Semicircle of musketeers around this door. It’s a death trap.”
Kip’s heart dropped, and he could tell that all of them were thinking the same thing. They hadn’t run fast enough. If the Lightguards at the base of the Prism’s Tower knew that they were coming, this wasn’t the only choke point available. The Lightguards could also cut them off at the Lily’s Stem. With enough men and muskets in narrow places, the squad’s skills would be beside the point.
“I could go green golem,” Kip said. “I’ve done it before. I stopped bullets once.”
“Can you do it reliably?” Ben-hadad asked. “Can you differentiate between friend and foe when you’re golem?”
“No,” Kip admitted reluctantly.
“There’s some other way out,” Ferkudi said. “My parents mentioned it once. I overheard. Some way to get to Cannon Island directly. No boats.”
“Where?” Cruxer asked.
“I don’t know,” Ferkudi said. “It’s hidden, that’s all I know.”
“Well that doesn’t help us, does it?” snapped Big Leo. It looked like the pain was starting to come through his initial shock from his messily broken arm. He was rarely irritable.
“Breaker?” Teia prompted.
“I know another way out exists,” Kip said. “My father told me that. He didn’t say where it was. But it’d have to be in one of the lower levels if it goes out under the bay?”
“If we want to go to the lower levels, we’ve still got to cross the great hall,” Cruxer said. “The slaves’ stairs don’t go down there. The only access is on the other side.”
“Well, that’s a stupid design,” Ben-hadad said. “Why don’t the slaves’ stairs go all the way down?”
“It’s for defense,” Cruxer said, “and as you can see, it’s working.”
“Breaker, that wasn’t what I meant,” Teia said, giving him a significant look.
“Huh?” Kip asked.
“You know,” she said, nodding her head.
“No. What?”
“I pulled a thing. You know?”
“A thing?”
“Off your—”
“This is getting intriguing,” Winsen said.
“Skin, Winsen! Off his skin!”
“Oh!” Kip said. The cards. She was asking if he’d seen anything in the cards that showed an escape route. Given that the cards were of the most powerful people in the world, it made sense that any number of them would have known about an escape route. “I don’t… I don’t remember anything helpful.”
He hadn’t been having the flashbacks—flash-sidewayses? flash-cardwises?—for the last half hour. Not that he missed them. He still had the headache, though it was less acute now. It had seemed the cards had been triggered by words, right?
Escape, he thought. Tower. Prism’s Tower. Cannon Island. Flee. Run Away.
Nothing.
Cruxer said, “Check the other doors on this level. Maybe we can go around to the stairs down or to the outside. Now, go! Not you, Breaker. You think.”
They ran off in all directions except through the double doors. Kip tried to think. He’d absorbed those cards. All those cards. Something should come to him. One of them surely must have known this secret. Any of the Blackguards would know, right?
But none came to mind. No matter
what he thought. He couldn’t just call them up.
What the hell?! What use were the bloody cards if they didn’t come to mind when he needed them? Right after he’d come out of the Great Library, the cards had been leaping into his brain so fast he couldn’t stop them. They’d been triggered by every little thing.
I’m a Guile, I’m supposed to remember everything!
But he couldn’t remember any of the cards. Except the one he hadn’t lived yet. The White’s card. The puzzle card. Which was perfect. As if Kip needed puzzles now, with every passing second bringing the Lightguard closer. What had she said? ‘Not only Prisms fly’? Right. That was it. But what the hell did that mean? That she’d known about Gavin’s flying machine, his condor? Karris had flown in the condor, too. Maybe Karris had reported it. But even if the White had known about it, so what? Gavin was the only person in the world who knew the proper design of the condor or could draft enough to make it work, and after a full year of work and practice, he’d still found it incredibly difficult and dangerous. Someone could give Kip a condor, and it still wouldn’t do him any good.
‘Not only Prisms fly.’ What could it—
Oh, not fly fly. Fly like flee.
Dumbass! The White knows the secret exit! Of course she does!
It’s got to be in her card!
“Barricaded!” Big Leo shouted as he ran back to them.
“My way, too!” Teia said.
“Men coming down the stairs. Fast!” Ferkudi said.
“All of them are locked,” Cruxer said. “Kip, what you got?”
“I need light, full-spectrum light!” Kip said.
“Stairs are no good,” Ferkudi said. “Only way to get natural light is to get out.”
“Surely we’ve got a white mag torch,” Leo said. “That’d work, right?”
“Teia?”
She was already looking in the bag, as if looking would change things. “Gone. They’re all gone,” she said.