“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 along 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.”
“Sure,” Teia said. I guess.
“Thing that’s special about Lem isn’t that he’s crazy,” Lem said. “We’re all all sorts of crazy. But Lem is crazy in one particularly valuable way.”
“And you’re going to tell me what it is,” Teia said as he glanced at her chest again. She couldn’t tell if he was being creepy or if he just never looked at people’s eyes.
“Lem here believes he can do anything in the service of the Blackguard. Lem here believes rock is like butter, in front of him. He’s a bit slow, which is good, because otherwise he’d probably be dangerous as all hell. That’s what the trainers said. See, Lem can punch grips in the rock for us, no problem. Got a will that’d make Andross Guile weep like a little boy. True name
Will
, you see.”
“Right,” Teia said.
Lem filled himself with blue luxin, then leaned over conspiratorially to Teia. “There’s something in the water,” he said.
How did this freak get into the Blackguard?
He’s a valuable freak. Like me.
Lem extended a hand and waited. He was chanting numbers under his breath. “Forty-one, fifty-three, forty-seven, fifty-nine, no, fifty-three, fifty-nine, sixty-one, seventy-one, no…”
A hammer of blue luxin shot from his hand and pierced the stone. It stuck, a horizontal bar connected to a spike sunk deep into the stone. The bar would make a good hand- or foothold. He checked it, pulling on it to make sure there was no play, then took a deep breath. He swept a hand down and eight more of the spikes leapt from his hands in order. It would make an admirable ladder.
Blue luxin—shot into
rock
. Holy hells. Just when Teia thought she couldn’t get any more impressed with the Blackguards.
Lem smiled at Teia; then, as if noticing he was making eye contact, he looked away. “True name Will, you see.”
Teia saw.
At Commander Ironfist’s gesture, Teia climbed the makeshift ladder. She was almost to the top when she heard the scrape of iron over rock and someone inside barking orders. The window was an open slot above her head. Then she saw a cannon poke out of the window. She clamped her hands over her ears an instant before the cannon fired.
The pressure wave nearly blew her off the makeshift ladder. And that shot was followed by half a dozen others, all around the semicircle of the fort. The cannons all rolled back out of sight from the kick of the shots, but when Teia raised her head to see if she could get a count of the men loading the cannons through the thick smoke—paryl cutting through it easily—she saw that the windows were barred. There was enough space for the cannons to be rolled forward and poke through the bars but not enough for the Blackguards to climb in. Maybe, maybe after a shot, a person could crawl through the wide area in the bars that the cannon occupied when it was forward.
So, crawl in front of a cannon and hope there was enough space, and attack armed men who would all be looking your way.
Teia felt rather than heard another set of handholds shiver into the rock next to her, going around the great windows up to the top of the fort. Looking down, she waved to Commander Ironfist that they wouldn’t be able to get in through the windows. Lem was already firing out another ladder to bracket the other side of the windows.
Above the rock, the fort continued in several floors of wooden towers. Teia was glad she wasn’t afraid of heights, because it was getting dizzying. There was a flat spot wide enough for three people to stand where rock and wood met. The heavy timbers of the fort’s wooden walls were sunk in deep holes drilled directly into the red rock. Teia used her paryl to look through the walls. She couldn’t see through the wood itself, but in the spaces where bark pressed against bark, she could catch glimpses. Even then it was cloudy—but she couldn’t see anyone on the other side.
A Blackguard joined her, and she saw that others were clambering up the ladder on the other side. Teia looked down and saw the soldiers still standing by the little gate below them, looking out at the sea. If those men turned around to watch their guns fire—and it was quite a sight, so it was entirely possible—they would see the Blackguards in full view. But for a moment as the fort’s guns pounded, Teia looked at what the soldiers were watching unfold on the waves. Ships were afire—mostly the Chromeria’s ships that had sailed too close to the fort.