It had been another of Tisis’s victories, mollifying her furious sister for turning Antonius and refusing her orders to come home by making promises she and Kip would someday regret if they lived so long. They’d also had to trade intelligence for food—Eirene was a merchant to the core.
On the other hand, the woman wasn’t going to let her only sister and favorite cousin starve or die out here because they lacked supplies.
A further part of Kip’s stratagem was that fire was usually a big part of their attacks, used with only the crudest drafting—first from necessity as the Ghosts learned Chromeria-style drafting, and later to hide how effective the Mighty had been at training their new compatriots. The Cwn y Wawr Kip used everywhere. The Ghosts’ will-casting he used more judiciously, mostly for scouting and for tracking and killing the Blood Robes’ scouts.
But the Nightbringers’ ranks had swelled as their fame grew, and keeping secrets amid a growing army was a losing game—especially when your army included the giant grizzly Tallach that was partnered with Conn Arthur.
Still, Kip’s attempts at secrecy and the lightning-fast relocation that the skimmers allowed had borne fruit. Now it was time to push into the next stage of the war.
Kip hoped that all meant the Blood Robes wouldn’t be ready for a night attack of this magnitude.
He found Sibéal lying under some bushes at a good vantage point, her skin flushed the adrenal war blue of her people. He lay down beside her and clicked his tongue softly. Two mastiffs in heavy armor came up on either side of him. The Cwn y Wawr—the Dogs of Dawn—hadn’t chosen their name at random. They’d kept war dogs for centuries. Getting the dogs’ handlers to agree to let will-casters close to those beloved hounds had been beyond Kip’s persuasive powers.
But somehow, someone in the will-casters’ ranks had convinced the Cwn y Wawr that they cherished the animals they partnered with, and that the dogs would be safer with a human partner than without. Perhaps it had been that simple. Kip didn’t know how it had happened.
That was what it was to be part of a team. Others were out there, doing things you never heard about to try to achieve the same goals you had.
There was a sound low in the bushes, and a hound with droopy ears emerged. Sibéal Siofra woke and the hound shook itself as if it had been wet. Then it licked her as she reported, “Sixty oxen. Somewhere around one hundred men. Sarai’s not good at counting that high and their scents are all on top of each other. Sixty-two horses. A blue drafter. Four red drafters. Red luxin. Two greens. And, um, freshly dug earth?”
“From fortifications, I’d guess. War dogs,” Kip announced, “those are on you. Clear a path for us.”
Kip gave a few moments for the word to filter down his lines. Men were making the sign of the three and the four, praying. Kip looked back at the massive hillock behind him that was Conn Arthur’s giant grizzly Tallach. He really needed to have that talk with the conn about his brother. Not tonight, though.
The giant grizzly was lying down so as not to upset any of the other animals more than necessary. Its head, helmed with blackened steel and yellow luxin over the eyes, bobbed in assent. That and a small breastplate (well, small relative to a mountain) were all the armor the great bear would tolerate.
Kip threw up a superviolet flare to signal the drafters to fill themselves with their colors, sharing lux torches and shielding them under blankets. The lux torches’ flaring made for a lot of night-blind drafters—not all of them had at-will pupil control yet—but it couldn’t be helped.
He studied the trees for reflections of light from the torches and was pleased to see none.
“Wolves,” Kip said quietly. “Go!”
They tore off with the unnerving speed of the predators they were. They were to hit the camp first, silently, and take out as many sentries as possible.
“War dogs. Go.”
The mastiffs were off only slightly slower, all big shoulders and spiky armor, and terrifying mass. If the wolves didn’t raise an alarm, the war dogs definitely would.
“Night mares. Go.”
It had been a joke at first. It wasn’t a joke. Most of the night mares were actual woodland ponies. Some were warhorses. Some were great elk. All were will-cast and carried Cwn y Wawr drafters on their backs. A will-cast horse knew when you needed it to be silent, and the union of its animal dexterity with full human intelligence and discipline—discipline not to bolt despite the pressures of battle and magic and snarling animals on every side—meant every one of them was at least the equal of a well-trained veteran warhorse.
Kip turned and found Tallach waiting, snout low and level to the ground. Kip stepped up and grabbed the horns of his platform. One didn’t ride a giant grizzly. Its mass was too great for human legs to straddle. And if you somehow strapped yourself on, the undulations of its great form when it ran would break you. Instead Ben-hadad had designed something halfway between a saddle and a howdah. Kip—sometimes joined by Cruxer—could stand and stabilize himself with one hand on any number of grips while either drafting or firing one of the many muskets attached to the platform’s racks, or he could sit and lock his legs into place, whether Tallach was on all fours or rearing up on his hind legs.
Whether it terrified the enemy or Kip more, he still hadn’t figured out.
“Nightbringers,” Kip commanded. “At a walk. Advance.”
For those beyond the sound of his voice, he threw up a superviolet flare, shielded like the first to radiate light only toward his own lines. A superviolet drafter looking into superviolet might still notice the light on the branches of the trees, but if you have to speak during a stealth attack, it is still better to whisper than to shout.
“Tallach—”
But the bear and the man inside it didn’t wait for the complete order. Kip held on to two horns of his howdah and absorbed each loping impact with the ground with his knees. It was terrifying that something so large could move so quickly and dexterously. He ducked and bobbed and prayed while Tallach wove around the spruces that had branches low enough to sweep Kip off. The giant grizzly was still fast enough to almost close the gap with the night mares before they hit the camp.
The first cries that rose into the air were cries of surprise, not alarm: more yelps of What the hell was that thing that just ran past me? than fear. The wolves went only for the sentries and men with torches.
Where the wolves had slipped easily through the gaps in the sharpened stakes ringing the camp, the mastiffs had to pause to muscle their way in. Two teams of them stopped to clear lanes through the stakes for the horses and men coming up behind them, while the rest of the mastiffs streaked on, hunting anyone with the stench of drafting on him.
The tenor of the cries changed immediately as they began bursting through tents and tearing out throats.
The night mares rolled like distant thunder on the horizon into the camps next, streaming like twin lightning strikes through the two paths the war dogs had cleared, with Kip and Tallach hard behind them. The Nightbringer drafters riding on the night mares splashed green or blue or orange luxin down on every fire to smother it, from the smallest torch to the cookfires, engaging only those Blood Robes who directly stood in their way.
The White King’s camp was plunged into darkness—and blindness for most of the humans, who were so bad at seeing at night. Blood Robes, spinning, startled by the streaking shapes, fired their muskets blindly, hitting nothing or hitting their own comrades.
Tallach simply jumped over the stakes ringing the camp, his gait hardly changing. When they landed, Kip finally had time to grab a flash grenado from his belt. His job was to guard Tallach’s back—which mostly meant to distract and delay anyone who attacked him.
A Blood Robe soldier knelt with flint and steel, trying to light a slow match for his musket, each skritch and flare of sparks an invitation to death. Tallach’s claws answered the call with a quick bloody swat.
Then Kip saw the sudden starburst of mag torches being broken open at t
he center of the camp, near the wagons.
Tallach saw it, too, and charged straight for it. His path took him over tents and through a dozen men trying to hand out muskets, whom he scattered like chaff. In a bound, he leapt over a picket of whinnying horses.
Then, from the high vantage that only Kip had, the disaster opened in front of him. The central pavilion contained nothing except a great pit. One of the mastiffs must have inadvertently knocked down one of the supports or had already fallen in. A pit that big could only be for Tallach.
A trap.
Kip yelled in alarm, but Tallach had too much momentum to stop. Instead, he tried to leap all the way over the pavilion and the pit.
He wasn’t going to make it. Kip leapt from his platform as Tallach came down, crushing the pavilion and hitting the far edge of the pit. Kip flung the flash grenado toward where he thought the mag torches had been. A fraction of a heartbeat later he hit the ground.
He rolled perfectly—Ironfist would have been proud—but Tallach had been running at terrific speed. Kip flipped and flipped, trying to keep his limbs in. A flash split his vision and he hoped that had been the grenado, and not his head hitting a rock.
Somehow he found himself on his feet, only slightly dizzy. There was a strong stench of tea leaves and tobacco. Someone had drafted a lot of red luxin here.
But he was more worried about the four wights in front of him, each carrying a lit mag torch. Two of them appeared to be blinded and dazed from the flash. One, a blue, bolted.
One of the dazed wights lifted a pistol in Kip’s direction. It pulled the trigger, noticed that nothing happened, and cocked the hammer. Then it disappeared in a blur of fur and saliva and snarling. Coming in from the side, a mastiff had clamped its jaws on the wight’s gun arm and whipped him around. The war dog outweighed the man and had hit with great speed.
The wight was flung aside, and in moments the snarling dog was atop him, this time knocking aside frantic arms and going for the throat.
Kip turned and spiked the other dazed wight before it could recover. He saw another wight he’d missed before as the young woman drew an arm back and threw her burning mag torch toward the hole.
The hole. That was where all that red luxin Kip was smelling must be pooled.
Tallach was half out of the massive hole, recovering from his shock, claws piercing the ground, back legs churning for a grip, fur smeared with pyrejelly.
Kip shot out a dozen fingers of fast superviolet at the arcing mag torch, each streaming a line back to him. One hit, and along that guide line, Kip threw all the last of his orange luxin.
The burning mag torch was blasted safely away from the pyrejelly and into the distance.
Something knocked Kip off his feet as a musket went off, deafening him. From his back, he saw a war dog atop the wight who had thrown the mag torch. A musket lay on the ground beside her. She was limp already; the dog whipped her back and forth, his jaws clamped around her neck.
It must have knocked Kip down to save him.
But Kip was already scanning the distance for the blue wight who had run away—and he found him.
He hadn’t run away. He was running toward the wagons laden with black powder, mag torch in hand.
Figures illumined only by that bobbing star flashed and shifted as the two camps fought, shadows in a night made darker by the contrast. The sprinting wight wasn’t thirty paces from the wagons.
Kip had only a little superviolet and yellow left. Still lying on the ground, he shot out the yellow as hard as he could. The molten yellow twisted in the air, connected to Kip’s will by trailing tendrils of superviolet.
In midair, it solidified and curved.
The projectile connected with the blue wight’s head—but it hadn’t totally solidified. A failure. It splashed into light.
But Kip was already up and running after the wight.
The wight had fallen. Being hit from behind while running, even by a fist of water, had been enough to knock him off his stride.
The blue wight staggered to his feet and picked up the burning mag torch, mere steps from the wagon.
A Cwn y Wawr soldier ran in from the darkness and clubbed him with the butt of his blunderbuss.
But it was a glancing blow to a shoulder, and the hit spun the wight between the soldier and the wagon loaded with black powder. The Cwn y Wawr soldier lifted his blunderbuss.
“No! Don’t shoot!” Kip shouted, running. “Oof!” he tripped over a body in the darkness.
The soldier looked back, whether he understood what Kip had said or simply thought it was another attack.
He squinted against the darkness, unable to see Kip, and died as the wight’s blue spikes rammed through his neck.
The wight released the spikes back to dust, and switched the mag torch from his wounded left hand to his right. He lofted the torch—
—and jerked forward several paces as Cruxer’s giant elk rammed its antler through his back. The giant elk lifted the wight high in the air, but even then the wight didn’t drop his torch.
Cruxer’s first stab missed as the giant elk’s animal instincts took over and it tried to shake the wight off its antlers. Then it paused and lowered its head, about to buck the wight up and off the tines of its antlers.
The wight threw the torch.
But Cruxer threw himself backward so he was lying on the giant elk and, upside down, swung his spear, slapping the torch off to one side.
His momentum carried him and he flipped off the giant elk’s back just as the animal flicked its head upward. The wight flew into the air and somehow Cruxer flowed into position, his spear butt planted on the ground.
The wight landed, his momentum impaling him on Cruxer’s spear. Cruxer took his hand out of the way at the last moment, casually releasing the haft of the spear and then taking it back as the wight thudded to the ground. He spun the spear, its blade slashing the wight’s throat, and stepped out of range, eyes already looking for any other threats.
He gave a command to the giant elk, and it charged off.
Kip kicked dirt over the torch and walked to join Cruxer in guarding the wagons.
The Cwn y Wawr soldier was dying nearby, holding his throat, gurgling, his eyes on Kip accusing him of betrayal.
“You were going to shoot a blunderbuss toward a wagon full of black powder,” Kip told him. “You would have killed us all.”
But the soldier was beyond hearing.
Moments later, the rest of the Mighty swept in and surrounded Kip.
“What are you doing?” Big Leo shouted. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
“Why isn’t Tallach with you?” Ben-hadad asked.
“How did we manage to lose him again, Mighty?” Cruxer demanded.
“It’s a trap,” Kip said, over labored breaths, still trying to yawn away his one deafened ear from the musket blast. “Was. Was a trap. Fire. Wagons. Black powder.”
Conn Arthur, animating Tallach, must have realized that coming to help Kip keep the wagons from blowing up when Tallach was utterly soaked in pyrejelly was not the best idea. He’d gone elsewhere.
The other possibility, that he had run away, was simply impossible.
“These are rigged?” Ben-hadad asked from atop his night mare. “Then what the fuck are you doing right next to them?”
But for the next minutes, they kept everyone away from the wagons. Not that any of their foes had any interest. Most of the men had no idea they’d been bait for a trap. The camp had been broken now.
It left Kip with a few minutes. His officers knew their work and didn’t need him interfering, and he was too valuable to risk himself at this stage when the battle had already been won. He looked at the Mighty. They’d sharpened in these last months, and all of them had their halos at least half-full. Ben-hadad had crafted some device to move his crippled knee, and spent hours a day wincing, tears sometimes silently streaming down his face, regaining a range of motion. Big Leo had grown a heavy beard and pick
ed out his hair to a large dark halo. He wore spiked gloves and carried a heavy chain into battle now. He’d joined Conn Arthur in his exercises and tried to eat only what the conn ate, envious of the man’s ridiculously muscular upper body. Ferkudi had picked up a scar exactly where he parted his hair, from the top of his head down to one eyebrow. It was the only goofy scar Kip had ever seen.
Only Winsen seemed unaffected by all the fighting they’d done and death they’d seen. He’d saved countless friendly lives with his marksmanship, but had taken two. He’d reported those himself, but seemed unburdened by it. ‘He dodged left for no reason. Arrow was already in the air.’ His bow had been shattered during an engagement where he’d apparently saved many Cwn y Wawr lives, and they’d given him a new one in thanks. Or, more appropriately, an ancient one. It had a sea demon bone worked into the spine of the bow, and its mammoth tension could be strung only by will-casting. Winsen was able to learn enough of that art for the bow, and his eyes lit with real joy when he tested the draw for the first time. Ben-hadad had, of course, wanted to study it immediately.
Six months, Kip thought. Halfway through our halos in six months.
That meant they had six more months at the most, fighting this way.
Orholam’s balls, just at the time they reach their full capacities as warriors, I’m going to have to take all these guys off the front lines completely.
The other options were of course impossible: tell drafters fighting for their lives not to draft, or let them draft all they wanted and then just kill them when they broke the halo.
Still, what nineteen-year-old was going to take retirement well?
From the screams, the Blood Robes who had fled into the woods were encountering the will-cast jaguars and mountain lions waiting there. In the darkness, those who fled had no chance. As far as the White King was concerned, these wagons would simply disappear.
No. This had been a trap, a sacrifice. That meant the White King would want to know how and if it had worked—or why it hadn’t.