They hauled him away and bound his hands and feet, and blindfolded him.
The great metal legs of a frame had been folded out of the wall itself. A great mirror as tall as a man, like those at the tops of the seven towers, dangled from chains between them, resting for the moment on the platform. But this mirror also had shackles, themselves mirrored, and a head brace.
Fighting weakly, High Luxiat Tawleb was dragged toward the mirror. His palms were pierced briefly with hellstone to make sure he hadn’t packed any luxin—though the man wasn’t a drafter, it was customary.
Teia had been briefed on what would happen, and what to do. And she still didn’t want to think of it.
High Luxiats Selene and Amazzal went to Tawleb, who was held on his knees. Selene spoke quiet words, expelling him from the Magisterium and excommunicating him from the faith. She was followed by an equally sorrowful Amazzal, who offered to shrive him and hear his repentance, if he desired.
Tawleb spat at him.
The tower soldiers bound him to the mirror, his head held immobile, still blindfolded and gagged. Teia helped pull the chains to lift mirror and man into place.
“Orholam is merciful,” High Luxiat Selene announced to the crowd. “And his justice tarries, but it will not be held back forever. May we all walk rightly, that we may stand before the Lord of Light unashamed and unafraid. Let us seek never to deserve the hard light of Orholam’s glare.”
Across the surface of the oceanic crowd, lights winked like the sun on the waves of Sapphire Bay as everyone from the lowest slave cook to the High Luxiats drew forth mirrors. Hand mirrors, cosmetics mirrors, signal mirrors; from expensive glass mirrors with tin-mercury backings crusted with rubies down to pieces of polished copper or bronze. Some Atashian nobles who’d lost lands and children in the war had bought hundreds of mirrors to hand out to those who couldn’t afford them: a voluntary war tax they paid to support the execution of traitors and heretics and murderers and spies.
Above and around the platform, mirrors unfolded like the petals of deadly flowers opening, answering the call of the sun above. In front of a number of the mirrors, white sheets unfurled, covering them, and in front of the condemned, a black sheet unrolled, blocking him from view.
Teia saw other Blackguards donning darkened spectacles. Things were going to get bright around here.
It wasn’t only the noonday sun, or the light reflected from ten thousand mirrors. In moments, the mirrors of each of the thousand star towers around Big Jasper would be focused here. The great banks of mirrors atop each of the seven towers would likewise be uncovered.
The only small mercy here was Orholam’s. It was a clear day. The noon sun blazed with white-hot fury. Tawleb would die far more quickly than on a cloudy day.
Not that burning to death was an option Teia would choose.
She turned, checking her area with paryl light one last time before she would have to narrow her eyes or be blinded. She caught sight of Quentin, still on his knees between tower guards.
He looked more terrified than she had ever seen anyone look in her life. It pierced her like a splinter in her soul.
Quentin had murdered one of the Blackguard’s own, but Teia had nothing of vengeance in her now.
Sadah Superviolet had come forward, and she gave the final invocation: “Orholam, you are not deceived. Darkness is no cover from your eyes. No stain is hidden from you. We follow your gaze, O Father of Lights. Let what has been hidden by man’s darkness be revealed by your light. We, your people, cast our eyes and our light upon this stain.”
Above Sadah, Tawleb was shrouded from the audience and their pinpricks of light by the heavy black cloth. As she finished speaking, she produced her own mirror, and with one hand she turned it toward the man suspended in the air above her.
Everyone else did the same, turning their mirrors either directly toward the figure hidden behind black cloth or—if they didn’t have a direct line of sight—toward one of the mirrors set up to collect their light.
Not everyone in the crowd had perfect aim, of course, so it was suddenly blindingly bright on the platform. But Teia saw Sadah Superviolet’s other hand extend downward.
Not being a superviolet, Teia didn’t know exactly how it worked, but there was a superviolet control node here that connected all the Thousand Stars and the Chromeria’s tower mirrors.
Suddenly all the hundreds of huge, perfectly polished mirrors around the island and the Chromeria flared as one, shooting beams of light in every direction before swiveling into place with a sound like heaven’s gates slamming shut. At the last moment, a blade sheared the blindfold over Tawleb’s eyes, though the black drop cloth was left in place.
Teia had thought the light was blinding before. It had been a candle next to the sun.
When she was a child, her parents had once taken her to the Eshed Notzetz, the tallest waterfall in the Seven Satrapies. Standing on the execution platform so near the focal point of every mirror here was like standing beside a very cataract of light. She’d never heard of light’s having a sound, but the intensity of it seemed to make her heart stop, ears stop, skin register nothing.
A small whoosh as of something catching fire, and then a scream, and all Teia’s senses came rushing back. It was unbearably hot, the instant sweat evaporating off her skin and leaving it hotter than before. Heat so hot she actually didn’t want to tear off her blacks, because she thought her skin would melt in the onslaught.
There was nothing but heat and screaming, and the screaming was worse as Tawleb roasted to death.
Teia peeked through one scrunched eye and saw the man in outline against white, dancing like an egg on a hot buttered skillet, skin popping open, juices hissing across the mirror he was bound to, turning to steam.
And then it was done.
It couldn’t have been ten seconds.
It had been the longest ten seconds of Teia’s life.
Sadah Superviolet stopped first, the great mirrors swinging out and away, and the intensity of the light falling off dramatically. Then the people, squinting, dazzled, turned their own mirrors away.
Above them, chained to his mirror, Tawleb had been turned into a blackened husk, half the size he had been before, burnt nearly beyond recognition even as a man.
For one moment, there was total silence.
Then, then the people—Orholam forgive them—the people suddenly cheered. Teia would have thought their horror would be greater. Not standing in the light’s path themselves, they would have been able to see the whole thing, if not hear it. They had watched a man cook in moments, skin splitting like that of a sausage accidentally dropped onto the coals.
And they cheered.
Karris White strode to the front of the stage. The new White held up her hands, quieting the crowd. The noon hour was slipping, and there was yet work to be done.
“Quentin Naheed,” Karris White called, “stand forth and face Orholam’s judgment.”
If she lived to be a hundred years old, Teia would never forget the nauseous terror in Quentin’s eyes. He looked at her, and she did nothing.
Chapter 29
Kip had been a very young man once.
That young fool had died in the fires of his wife’s wrath when he tried to deny her something. Specifically, he’d tried to forbid her from coming along to fight.
‘You don’t fight,’ he’d said, quite sensibly, he thought.
‘I don’t want to fight.’
That flashbomb of scintillating non sequitur had left him momentarily dazed. She’d thrown her things aboard the skimmer, along with another woman Kip didn’t recognize.
‘But… we’re going in order to fight. We are going so that we can fight. We’re going with the sole intention of fighting. Ergo, if one doesn’t want to fight, where we—the Mighty—are going, is not where you, who are not the Mighty, should go.’
That seemed to set a kettle of rage boiling. So he kept talking.
He’d been a young man.
<
br /> ‘You see,’ he said. ‘If I were not going specifically to fight, I would probably choose someplace safer to be than, you know, the middle of a battle. And since your place—’
‘My place? My place?!’ And a more rapid boil than Kip had expected. Here he’d kept his eye on the pot the whole time and everything. ‘First things first, Lord Guile! I am too a part of the Mighty. I’m one of you now, and don’t you dare take that away from me.’
‘The Mighty obey my orders. I’m their—’
‘You do not give orders to your wife!’
‘If they’re in the Mighty I do!’
He knew he shouldn’t have said that.
He’d said it. He’d been young.
Thing had gone downhill from there.
Tisis had come along. With a healer. As a noblewoman, Tisis had already had a basic education in battlefield medicine—or, as it was otherwise known, how to stop your child’s bleeding if no slaves are around to help.
She’d agreed to stay with Evie Cairn, the healer.
Kip counted it a win.
He was no longer a young man.
The skimmer cut up the broad river in the moist evening air. As they’d slowly gained elevation over the past days, the jungles had yielded to evergreen forests.
“Kip, you know, I can learn,” she said.
“Learn to what?” he asked.
“To fight.”
“Of course you can. And we’ll brush up on your shooting and some basic attacks with green. But you’ll never be a match for any of these guys. Even if you could, we don’t have ten years for you to train to get there. It doesn’t make sense to even try—”
Ben-hadad cleared his throat and said under his breath, “I think you’re missing the point, brother.”
Kip charged ahead. Fucking fuck. This was so simple. It wasn’t a matter of feelings. It was a matter of facts. “Look! I’ve been training with the best for more than a year now. Every day we worked for hours to learn how to fight this way. Every day. We’ve been in numerous battles, and I’m still the weakest of us. I’m still a liability to the Mighty, Tisis, so—”
“That’s really not correct,” Ferkudi said.
“Ferk,” Cruxer said. He was working one of the reeds.
“Sure, in a fistfight any of us could take him,” Ferkudi went on, “but battle’s not a fistfight. Breaker, you don’t need to be modest. I don’t think any of us would want to face you one-on-one on the field of battle.”
“Orholam’s chapped nutsack, Ferkudi,” Big Leo said from the other reed. “You’re not wrong, but your timing is.”
“My timing is what?” Ferkudi asked.
“Wrong.”
“Oh, I thought you were leaving me hanging there, like, ‘You’re not wrong, but your timing is…’”
“Ferk,” Cruxer said in a tone of command that was a twin of Commander Ironfist’s.
“Ah. Right, sir.”
“You see?” Tisis said. “I need to do my part.”
“I thought we’d already agreed what your part is!” Kip said, starting to get hot again.
Ben-hadad cleared his throat again, looking blithely at the sky and trees. “Missing the point,” he whispered again.
“Fine!” Kip said, too loudly, turning to the young man. “What’s the point, Ben?”
Ben-hadad abandoned his quiet tone, matching Kip’s frustration with his own. “She wants your respect, dumbass. You treat her like dead weight and it robs her of purpose. I understand how she feels.”
He gestured to his knee. Ben-hadad did little stretches every day to reclaim what movement he could, but the kneecap had been shattered, and every move caused him terrible pain. He used one crutch most of the time, and two when he had to move at any decent speed. “But hell, add the cripple and the neophyte together, and you might get one warrior between us.” Bitterness roiled beneath the surface of his words like cream first poured into kopi, awaiting a single slight stir to stain every part.
“We need two drafters on the reeds to keep the skimmer mobile if we have to retreat,” Cruxer interjected. “It’s a necessary function. Plus Ben-hadad’s a helluva shot if it comes to it. Tisis, you stay with Ben.”
Tisis swallowed and nodded. “Okay.”
“That’s ‘Yes, sir,’” Cruxer said, with a little smirk. “You’re one of the Mighty now.”
Tisis lit up. “Yes, sir!” she said. “And sorry for being a jackass, everyone.”
“Common malady ’round here,” Big Leo muttered.
Ferkudi stared over at him.
“Universal malady?” Big Leo asked.
“Huh?” Ferkudi asked. “I was just—you’ve got a booger.”
Big Leo trailed off into cursing Ferkudi under his breath and trying to dig at his nostril discreetly while the others grinned.
“Universal,” Kip said. “Definitely universal.” He turned to Cruxer with gratitude welling up in him. Sometimes you just needed a guy to step in and assert some authority. Cruxer was so good at that. Many in power liked to assert their dominance. Cruxer liked to let people figure things out for themselves, intervening only if there was a problem he could fix that they couldn’t fix on their own. It was one of many traits that made him a good man to follow. “Thank you… Commander Cruxer.”
“Commander?” Cruxer asked.
“If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right, right?” Kip asked.
Cruxer stood up straight, as if donning a new cloak and feeling the weight of it settle on his shoulder. “Commander Cruxer,” he said. A big smile spread over his face.
“Commander Cruxer,” Winsen said, nodding to him, not even a hint of sarcasm in his tone.
“Commander Cruxer,” Big Leo said in his basso profundo as if announcing him in a stadium.
And on they went, each adding their own little twist.
“Commander Cruxer?” Ferkudi asked.
“Commander Cruxer,” Ben-hadad said.
Tisis fluttered her eyelashes and clasped her hands like a swooning girl. “Oh, Commander Cruxer.”
He blushed and they laughed together.
Kip suddenly felt far, far away. After all they’d been through, and what he knew he was taking them into, it was a honeyed moment that they could be silly kids together. Like a spark flying upward, their youth was bright and fading fast.
“It’s time,” Ben-hadad said, abruptly professional. He’d made water clocks for them, complaining about it. He’d not had time to make their globes the correct size to correspond to hours or minutes. Instead he’d merely made the two clocks exactly the same size, so although it took about seventy minutes for them to empty rather than an hour, they were still synchronized with each other, which was all that mattered.
Kip drew his superviolet spectacles from his hip case, absorbed light, and shot a flare into the sky. It had taken them a while to figure out how to keep the flare from disintegrating immediately, superviolet was so fragile.
There was no answering flare they could see, but in the river valley, with trees draped over every shore, they hadn’t expected to.
“Quiet from this point on,” Cruxer ordered.
They went silent, leaving only the whupping noise and burble of the reeds as luxin pushed water and trapped air into the water behind the boat. Kip saw Ben-hadad looking annoyed at the noise—already designing a quieter propulusion unit for Blue Falcon III, no doubt.
A few minutes later, they pulled the skimmer into the lee of a downed tree that would conceal it while letting the reeds remain in the water. They loaded the muskets and checked their other weapons.
The Blood Foresters had shown them how to camouflage themselves for the woods, breaking up their silhouettes by binding twigs to their clothing, dulling the bright gleam of metal or luxin, and adding streaks to their black clothes so they looked like shadows dappled with sun rather than man-shaped darknesses.
Stealth was vital for the plan. If they were spotted before the attack at the warehouse pulled away the defende
rs, the whole ruse would be for naught. On the other hand, they still didn’t even know if they were looking for barges or wagons or even both. They didn’t know how many defenders there would be. They were going in blind.
The element of surprise is no advantage if you’re surprised, too.
But the longer they took to attack, the more Ghosts were going to die below.
So, quietly, as they double- and triple-checked everything, Kip reviewed their rendezvous points if they got separated, the likely fallback areas if they had to retreat, and so forth. There were only the seven of them, and Kip wished again that he had Goss, Daelos, and Teia along.
Best not to think about any of them, though. Especially Teia.
Damn, but Teia’s cloak would have made scouting easy.
Then they heard it, a single, distant musket shot.
“Could still be a hunter,” Cruxer said.
“Who hunts with a musket?” Winsen asked, as if every archer in the world could reliably down a stag at two hundred paces with a single arrow the way he could.
There was a rattle of another dozen shots.
“Aha,” Big Leo said, breaking into a huge grin for the first time in several weeks. “That sounds like our song.”
They put on their spectacles and filled themselves with their colors, luxin curling like smoke under their skins.
Kip got ready to lead them out, only to see a reproachful look in Ferkudi’s eyes. “What?” he asked.
“You know, I’m not as smart as you, Breaker, but sometimes you’re just plain dumb.”
“What?” he asked again.
“The hell is wrong with you?” Big Leo said. “We’re going into battle. Vastly outnumbered. May all die… and you’re not gonna give your wife a kiss goodbye?”
“Oh!” Kip said. “Oh.”
They bickered, but in an overarching sense, Kip and Tisis were actually becoming friends. And for all that they’d tried to consummate their marriage any number of frustrating times, they hadn’t really… kissed much.
The Mighty think I’m being dumb because I’m leaving without patching up a fight, but I think I’m actually a lot dumber than that. He’d kissed her neck—she’d liked that a lot. He’d kissed her breasts—they’d both liked that a lot. But the last girl—the only girl—he’d kissed on the lips had been Teia.