The sea chariots and the skimmer closed on all of them.
Something enormous moved beneath the waves and Kip saw a tangled, coiled mass rising toward the surface with terrible speed.
And then the entire sea exploded into the sky.
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 alo
ng 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.”