“Did any of the people act… um, oddly before they went?” a Blackguard named Pots asked. He turned to Commander Ironfist. “Your pardon, Commander.”
“We’re good people here,” the conn said. “Decent. Devout.”
“People do strange things when they’re not in their right mind. Things that aren’t truly their fault,” Pots said.
The conn grimaced. Spat again. “Seemed like folk lost all sense of dec… of decoration, if you take my meaning. I saw… I saw.” He spat again. Avoided eye contact. “Folks were rutting like animals. Folks walking about nekked. Folks grunting and howling and barking.
Barking. You heard people called barking mad? I thought it was jus’ something people say. I saw men I’ve known forty years barking at each other. Scared me half to death. Like they was made animals in all but body.”
“Whatever it is, it’s driving the animals mad, too,” Commander Ironfist said.
“You feel it?” Pots asked.
Most of the Blackguards mumbled agreement.
“I think we better leave,” Commander Ironfist said.
“Kip, you feel it?” Pots asked.
“Absolutely,” Kip said.
“Nerra, you?” Pots asked.
“No.”
“Commander?” Pots asked.
“Maybe a little.”
“Wil, you?” Pots asked.
Wil swallowed. “I feel half mad, to tell you the truth.”
“It’s the greens,” Pots said to Commander Ironfist. “It’s something wrong in green. Lust, loss of self-control, rebellion against authority. The Color Prince has poisoned green.”
“Atirat,” someone mumbled ominously.
“Whatever it is, it’s not only affecting drafters; it’s hitting munds and even animals,” Pots said.
“Mossbeard!” Commander Ironfist called out. “We’re doing what we can to stop it. Your folk may come back yet. All may be restored to you yet.”
Conn Mossbeard looked at them with steel eyes. “Restored? I caught my wife with another man, and when she saw me, she just laughed and kept on. I looked into her eyes and couldn’t tell if it was madness plain and simple or if the madness was letting her do what she’d always wanted.”
Ironfist said nothing.
“Go play at your wars. Go visit your plagues on someone else. It’s always the little man as pays the piper. I killed my wife, sir, the woman who stayed with me through drought and blight and fire and the death of four daughters for twenty-four years. There’s no restoration here.”
They rowed away and Mossbeard went right back to slaughtering the whale he stood on without giving them another look.
“Greens,” Commander Ironfist said without looking at any of them, “you tell me if it gets too bad. If you feel like you’re going to turn on us, tell us. I’m not going to lose anyone today, through madness or death. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Kip said with the rest of them.
They went all the way up the Atashian coast that day, almost as far as Ruic Head, and they sank half a dozen ships. On many of them, the sailors were in disarray, unwilling or unable to follow orders and act as coherent units. It made them easy targets, and they sank them without any trouble.
It was, frankly, frightening how easy it was. With the combination of their speed and the explosive power of the hullwreckers and the fact that the ships they were preying on were distracted and had never seen anything like the sea chariots—much less prepared for them—they sank ship after ship. But their feeling of invincibility was broken when Pots took a ball in the shoulder. They bound him up, and made it all the way to Ruic Head, where a fort towered on top of the red cliffs there, bristling with artillery that could reach far out into the narrow neck of the Ruic Bay. They approached only close enough to look at the fort’s flags—it was still flying the Atashian colors.
Commander Ironfist turned them back toward the fleet, and they made it back an hour before dusk, which was a good thing, because it took them another hour of consulting the sextant and compass and skimming and guessing and consulting the sextant and compass again to find the fleet, which was making good progress toward Ruic Head. Three days out now. Kip and the other greens were relieved to get away from the Atashian coast, though, and he could feel the madness receding as they got farther away.
They talked, and they couldn’t be certain, because measuring feelings of growing dread wasn’t exactly as simple as sliding beads, but they thought that whatever was causing the madness had to be coming from the Color Prince’s camp itself. Or from one of his ships nearby. No one seemed to want to talk about the prospect of fighting a battle when men were as likely to jump off their ships as they were to obey an order. It seemed an invitation to chaos and slaughter.
Gavin didn’t come back that night. Kip wondered if he’d died somewhere, far away and alone.
The next morning, Commander Ironfist headed out again, but this time he wouldn’t let anyone who could draft green come with him.
Kip was left alone. He waved to Cruxer and grimaced at his own ill fortune. When he turned to go inside, he found himself staring at Grinwoody.
“Young master,” the slave said. “Luxlord Guile finds himself with a spare hour. He wishes to play Nine Kings with you. Attend me, please.”
It wasn’t, of course, a request.
“And if I won’t come?” Kip asked.
Grinwoody smiled his unpleasant smile. “Long swim home.”
Gavin barely made it to the Chromeria before nightfall, the skimmer going slower and slower as his eyes strained for light. At least the waters were still enough that he was able to land directly on the back side of Little Jasper, where there was a tiny dock, rather than having to draft an entire dory by starlight and row in to Big Jasper and walk.
Stepping onto the creaking wood, he disintegrated the yellow skimmer. He rubbed his arms and shoulders, hoping they didn’t cramp. The muscles were trembling and weak from his journey even though the last two hours had been slow going. He was starting to feel a sick foreboding that yellow was getting harder to draft. He hoped it was simply the gathering night, and not that he would wake tomorrow unable to draft yellow at all. If so, he was going to have a hard time getting back to the fleet before the battle was over.
He tried to smile over the rising terror. At least he was going to spend tonight in Karris’s arms. To the evernight with everything else. What had the Third Eye said? “Bruised and broken as you are, it might be your only chance”? Gavin was sore and fatigued, but he was neither bruised nor broken, so either she had meant the “you” to mean Karris or she was simply wrong. Regardless, he wasn’t going to solve the mysteries of prophecy and he didn’t care to. He just wanted to see his wife. His
wife
. How odd that phrase seemed. And yet how he’d missed her. He felt it keenly now, now that she was so close and his mind wasn’t crowded with fighting, plotting, doing, doing, doing.
Some part of him thought that she was going to be snatched away if he didn’t hurry. He opened the lock on the stout oak door. The hinges were rusty. Pulling the door open made him aware again of how tired his arms were. He tried to lift a hand over his head and couldn’t.
The door opened to a long, claustrophobia-inducing tunnel, barely wide enough for one man to pass with his shoulders turned. Gavin touched his hand to one of the ingenious sub-red switches, and from the heat of his hand, it triggered a reaction that opened panels of yellow down the length of the tunnel. Sometimes it was the simple, elegant things that could be done with magic that impressed him far more than his own brute-force behemoths.
Five minutes down the tunnel deposited him at an iron gate with a different lock. He opened that and took a narrow staircase up into the front yard of the Chromeria. By the time he reached the lifts, two Blackguards had fallen in step beside him. He grinned at them. “Gentlemen.”
“Lord Prism,” they said.
He took the lift up, and then the second lift to his own floor, walked past the Blackguards, who didn’t look surprised in the least to see him—how did they do that, anyway? He walked to his own door, then, thinking he heard something, he looked down the hall. The White’s door was closing, very slowly.
She must be asleep. Her guards are being careful not to wake her.
But still Gavin hesitated. You should go check that out. For a second he was aware of himself, poised between going in to a beautiful woman and going to an old crone. What kind of an idiot even thinks that’s a choice?
Cursing himself for a fool, he left his door and strode quickly down the hall. It was rude to enter anyone’s room filled with luxin; it was treated like coming in with a pistol leveled at your host’s head, and if Gavin could get away with many things, that wasn’t one of them. Not with the White. So he drew in superviolet. What they couldn’t see couldn’t be rude, could it?
He opened her door as stealthily as it had just been shut. A crack, and then more. Bodies wearing Blackguard garb lay on the floor and a figure was treading slowly toward the White’s bed, clad all in black.
The light streaming in from the well-lit hallway betrayed Gavin. The figure spun, drawing a pistol from his belt in a smooth, fast motion.
Gavin blasted the door open with his shoulder and dove into the White’s room, shouting, “Assassin!”
The pistol roared. Its ball shattered wood and whined, ricocheting off the stone behind it.
A gray ball nearly two feet across shot out of the man’s hands, catching Gavin’s first Blackguard as he was jumping into the room and drawing his pistol. It knocked him horizontal and back into the other Blackguard.
The assassin had dropped his first pistol and drew another, turning to kill the White, who was awake and scrambling to get off her bed.
From the floor, Gavin shot the tiniest spotlight beam of superviolet out, and as the assassin turned, Gavin’s superviolet played over the man’s hand. Then Gavin shot the rest of his superviolet.
Superviolet is delicate. All the superviolet Gavin held probably weighed only as much as a hairpin, and it wasn’t strong, but even a hairpin flung at great speed can have some effect. The superviolet burned the air and slammed into the back of the assassin’s hand, cracking bones and flinging the pistol out of the man’s grip.
Gray-white light flooded the chamber from a dozen sources. Gavin popped up off the floor, instinctively drawing in light to hurl blue spears at the assassin.
He was all the way up and throwing his body forward to ready itself for the massive recoil of the magic he was about to throw when he realized he hadn’t drafted anything.
The assassin’s counter of another ball of gray light caught Gavin full in the chest. It launched him backward and he slammed into a wall, the impact driving his breath from him.
Green, his brain told him helpfully. He’s not drafting gray, that’s
green
. I just can’t see it anymore.
The assassin pulled out another pistol and leveled it at Gavin. From this range, with Gavin still trying to suck in his first breath, the man couldn’t miss.
A sunburst of white-gray light lit the man, and Gavin saw the White standing in her bedrobe, a cloud of tiny glowing particles floating in front of her, like motes of dust. Her hands snapped forward, and so did the entire cloud. The sound of the tiny flechettes hitting the assassin was like the sound of Blackguards at archery practice, when an entire volley studded the targets.
The assassin froze, and a moment later, tiny droplets of blood formed on his skin, everywhere. His back had been turned to the White, and the tiny glassine flechettes had gone all the way through him. The assassin blinked bloody eyes, confused, knowing only that something was terribly wrong, and then he collapsed on the floor and began convulsing.
The world didn’t stop. Even as the man was falling, Blackguards were bursting into the room, whistles were shrilling. A sword descended on the assassin’s convulsing wrist, separating his still-loaded gun and gun hand from his body.
The sudden press of bodies was almost a relief. The Blackguards had their priorities. Subdue the threat, secure the area, check the health of the guarded, check the health of the downed guards, notify the chain of command, and so forth. Gavin let it roll over him. He’d taken a good shot, and he’d be lucky if it turned out he hadn’t cracked a rib, but he was alive, and so was the White.
Oddly enough, it seemed that both of the Blackguards who’d been guarding Orea Pullawr were alive, too. One was still unconscious, and the other could only remember being grabbed from behind and having a foul-smelling rag pressed over his face. Apparently whoever had sent the assassin was trying to make some point about the vulnerability of the entire Chromeria by making the assassination as clean as possible. The guns and magic had only come out when the assassination was threatened with failure.
They found the White’s balcony door cracked open, and climbing ropes hanging past it. The ropes were hanging from the roof. The assassin must have tied the rope above and, finding the White’s balcony deadbolted, decided to go to the roof and enter through the door. It was a bold plan that would allow the assassin to escape after the murder by opening the balcony door from the inside and sliding down the rope without alerting anyone. It would have given the assassin valuable minutes to escape alive. This had been no suicide mission. The Blackguard immediately began going down the tower to check every room that had a window or balcony on the north side, looking for accomplices.