A splash of blood answered Ferkudi’s descending mace.
Then he turned and looked back at them, unseeing for a moment.
Ferkudi must have been gritting his teeth when he brained the soldier, because blood had shot across his face, and across his white teeth. There was nothing young or dopey in Ferkudi’s expression now. Two images were superimposed on his face. In rapid succession, it flickered between a scary, blooded warrior, the veteran he would be; and a big child, covered in wet mortality and scared of what he had done. That young Ferkudi looked like a child caught stealing candy, his face saying this is wrong, and I’ve done it, and I’ve been caught doing it, and nothing can fix this.
But it wasn’t filched candy, it was the crushed skull of a man, and being caught red-handed here was literal. Ferkudi closed his mouth as he looked at them, and his pink tongue darted out to clear his mouth, and then he blanched as he realized he was clearing his mouth of another man’s blood.
“Tsst!” Kip hissed, waving.
It saved Ferkudi. He shook himself and got control. He looked around, signaled—no one else was standing on the decks of either barge.
“Perimeter,” Kip told Winsen, as all of them refilled themselves with luxins. “But finish any wounded first. I can’t believe we got this lucky. There may be more.” He nodded to Big Leo, who was the other sub-red/red drafter. “You take the far barge with Ferk. I’ll get the near one.” To Cruxer, he said, “You collect Winsen’s arrows and our weapons as well as you can, I want this to be a clean raid, no hints. As soon as the White King knows who he’s fighting, we lose an advantage. Then you come help me.”
“That puts you alone on that barge,” Cruxer said. He had already collected the point that had snapped off his spear. Drafting blue luxin even as he spoke, he locked it back into place with a twist. “We agreed that you would have an—”
“Then collect our weapons quick,” Kip said. “No time.”
Kip ran out down the walkways. He heard the distant rattle of muskets as another engagement started down in the valley. Good. He made it to the barge with no trouble. Everything seemed to be going perfectly. Maybe they had plenty of time. Maybe he should wait for Cruxer.
The Mighty was too small. They simply didn’t have enough bodies to do a raid like this. They were getting lucky here. More people meant more noise, more trouble with communication, more problems, but it also meant someone to watch your back.
Hell with it. You worked with what you had. Kip threw open the door to head below. A muffled explosion from the other barge was the only warning he had that the ships were defended.
He threw himself to the side as a scared young woman in front of him fumbled a linstock and fired a small cannon toward the door Kip had just opened.
Kip was deafened and saw black spots swimming in front of his eyes. The door was shredded, but somehow he rolled to his feet.
In a bit of idiosyncratic military doctrine, the Blackguards were taught to attack an ambush. They were taught that the only way to regain initiative, having lost it to the enemy, was to attack. Immediately. Ferociously. This meant you didn’t give yourself time to regroup or time to think—but you didn’t give it to the enemy, either. They didn’t get a chance to enact phase two of their plan, because they were suddenly busy getting killed.
And Kip’s training took. He charged the young woman just as she had turned her back and was trying to light another fuse. He chopped across her arms as she reached out, but given his dazed state, cut deeply across only one forearm.
It was enough to make her drop the linstock. She turned, baffled that he was still alive, bleeding, and tried to draw the pistol tucked into her sash. He rammed his yellow luxin sword through her belly, but immediately dropped it to grab her pistol as it cleared her sash.
He trapped it in his left hand and wrenched it aside. She wasn’t strong enough to stop him. And with her left arm wounded, she didn’t have a chance to stop his right uppercut to her jaw.
She fell to the ground, insensate, doing little more than groaning as she fell on the hilt of Kip’s yellow luxin sword, driving it deeper into her gut.
Kip rolled her over and pulled his sword free. No small amount of blood followed it. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, if that. Atashian dark hair and eyes, poor clothes. Just a girl taking orders.
He should have felt something. She was unconscious, bleeding, certain to die slowly if not quickly. But he only heard Trainer Fisk’s voice: ‘Never trust the dead. Men will faint from fear at the first charge and lie at your feet, but find their courage again when you show them your back. The mortally wounded will rise to play hero one last time. You can’t always pause to make sure a dying man’s incapacitated, but when you can, you damn well better!’
After Kip’s sword came free of her body, he slapped it back into the side of her neck with all the emotion he’d summon to sink a hatchet into a stump after he was finished cutting firewood.
Satisfied from the sword’s recoil in his hand that he had cut deep enough, he didn’t even look down; he was already peering deeper into the gloom of the barge’s hold.
He followed the fuse the young soldier had been trying to light. It went to a charge against the hull, and then another, and another.
What the—?
A boom shook the ship. Not an explosion here, but on the other barge. Dammit! It must have been rigged identically to this one.
But it wasn’t a trap. If it had been, there would have been more than one guard.
Kip moved farther into the hold. There was nothing here except all the slaves at their oars on overcrowded benches and plenty of slaves in reserve.
Slaves, while the White King railed against the Chromeria for practicing slavery. Asshole.
There was no grain.
But if there was nothing here, why set charges so you could scuttle the boat?
For that matter, why were these barges up here at all? Kip had barely noticed in Cruxer’s report, but this foraging party had already sent two barges directly to Deora Neamh… but had left these here.
Charges and separation had to mean a cargo. But what cargo?
Kip had been flickering his vision between sub-red and normal vision to pierce the darkness for any violent moves toward him, but now he held up a green orb, drafted to shimmer back to light.
Despite the darkness, all the slaves wore blindfolds.
Kip ran back to the dead girl in her spreading pool of blood, and found a key around her neck. He ran to a tall man on the first bench, his pale Blood Forester arms permanently stained blue and green and yellow with luxin. Kip pulled off his blindfold.
“Who are you?” Kip demanded. He pointedly didn’t unlock the man’s manacles.
“I’m Derwyn. I’m Aleph of the Cwn y Wawr,” the man said quietly. “Repaid for our faithlessness here.”
“What faithlessness? Quick!” The Cwn y Wawr, the Dogs of Dawn, were Blood Forest’s hidden society of warrior-drafters.
The man’s stony sorrow said that he knew he was speaking his own death and he didn’t care. “We saw no path to victory, so to save our villages and families we tried to make a separate peace with the White King. He ambushed us instead. Captured us. We’re being taken to him. We either give him our fealty or he takes our eyes.”
“Same on the next barge?” Kip asked.
“Yes. There’s—there were two hundred thirty of us.”
“You fucking traitors!” Kip exclaimed. He paused for only one moment more. He couldn’t tarry here; his friends might be dying outside at the other barge even now. He said, “Meet me at Fechín Island if you want to find your honor again. Otherwise, fuck off and at least don’t fight for him.” He slammed the key against the man’s chest. “Scuttle the barge when you leave.”
No wonder the Blood Robes had set charges. A resource like two hundred thirty neutral warrior-drafters wasn’t to be scoffed at—and it certainly wasn’t something you wanted to fall into the hands of your enemies
.
Kip ran onto the deck in time to see the other barge list to one side, great gaping holes in the hull from the charges. Ferkudi and Big Leo were on the shore, bloodied. Kip couldn’t tell how badly they were injured. But there were no slaves with them. That barge was going down with more than a hundred semi-innocent men chained belowdecks.
Cruxer was shouting at Kip, telling him that the bridges connecting shore and ship were about to collapse—that it was too dangerous, too late. He was right. Those men were going to die because of their own choices. Their own cowardice had led them to their chains. It made no sense for Kip to risk himself and everything he could accomplish to try a hopeless rescue. A man who can’t swim shouldn’t attempt to save the drowning.
But Kip surged forward anyway and ran for the widening gap between the sinking barge and the sloping planks.
Ah fuck me, he thought as the gap yawned wide. Why do I have to be so dumb?
And then he leapt.
Chapter 33
The seal sat in his reflection at the height of his forehead. Before he got too exhausted to be amused, it amused him to be scratching out the dead man’s third eye, or his own.
It took two sweaty desperate days of cramping hands and blood to hit the seal.
He barely felt the nub when he finally reached it; his dogtooth skipped across the uneven knot of luxin like a stone across water for only a few strokes, and before he could stop, the seal broke suddenly.
A section of the prison wall as wide as his own spread arms simply disintegrated into chalky blue dust.
Freedom whispered then, but she said, ‘I’m too far away. You’ll never see me.’
“It’s impossible,” the dead man said. “You built these prisons too well. You’ll never get out.”
The sand was draining through the glass now that Gavin had broken the cell. If he’d been more aware of the seal, he would have slept, waited, gathered his strength before he broke through. As it was, there was no time. A small alarum was rigged to ring in the chambers above if the cell’s seal broke.
Gavin hadn’t remade the alarum for this cell since his brother escaped, but he couldn’t be sure that Andross hadn’t found it, hadn’t repaired it, hadn’t heard it. There was no way to tell what time of day it was, so there was no way to guess when he could trigger the alarm without Andross’s being in his room to hear it. If a slave heard it while Andross was out, she likely wouldn’t know what it was. Gavin couldn’t imagine his father’s trusting anyone as much as he had trusted Marissia. Maybe his father trusted Grinwoody that much.
No. Not even him.
But it didn’t matter. Gavin was committed.
The cell filled the entire space Gavin had carved out of the Chromeria’s rocky heart here. He had burnt through lux torch after lux torch for the light necessary. Here there was only a small area to stand in, and then a single tunnel so low it was necessary to crawl through. A fortune’s worth of hellstone was mortared into the floor and the walls.
His father, of course, had simply been able to take the vertical shaft down to the blue cell. Unfortunately, the cell itself lifted into a new place, and the only way to trigger the controls to lift it was from above. There was no way for Gavin to reach the ceiling of his blue cell—much less break through it—to try to escape that way.
He had to go through his own tunnels and cells.
It seemed Andross hadn’t altered the tunnel from Gavin’s original design. It curved one way into darkness, and then would swoop back so that no blue light could leak through. If Gavin could still draft, the hellstone would have been a huge problem: it would drain any blue luxin from him before he got to the next cell.
A moot point now, but the razor-sharp hellstone would still shred skin and bone if he fell against it.
But he remembered the path: crawl like a bear here on hands and feet, rest a knee here, hand there, crawl again over to here. A singular way that had to be recalled from memory once he made it past the first bend and he was fully in darkness. He rested on a knee after the second bend and reached up. It took him several minutes to find the depression overhead, and there, recessed, was another piece of hellstone, loose in its mortar’s grip. Gavin pulled it free and tucked it in his mouth. It was no larger than a dogtooth, small enough to be missed. Small enough to be swallowed if necessary, and maybe still not kill him coming out the other side. Gavin continued on.
The trapdoor was still where he remembered it.
His heart sank. Apparently Andross had found this tunnel, because the trapdoor had been repaired. The latch was designed to break under the pressure of a person’s weight. He’d wanted to be sure that his brother fell in, instead of triggering it and staying in the tunnel—which was a dead end anyway. But since the real Gavin fell in, it had been reset.
Gavin felt nauseated. He’d expected it, of course. His father wasn’t stupid, and he would have searched thoroughly, but Gavin had hoped against reason that his father wouldn’t find the other cells. If Andross had found the other cells, then he’d found his eldest son’s rotting body.
Dear Orholam, forgive me.
Gavin put his full weight on the trapdoor and tumbled down into the green cell.
He stood to find that it, too, had been repaired. His brother had blown a hole in one wall, but there was no sign of that now, just perfect, slightly undulating, woody green luxin. Gray to Gavin’s eye.
He stood, slightly wobbly despite that he’d expected the fall. He was not well.
“Long time no see, Guile,” the dead man said. He looked somehow different in the green wall. A worse reflection, of course, but some trick of Gavin’s memory made even his voice different, as if, in a green wall, the dead man must have green characteristics. His voice husky, something wild in his leer.
“Oh, I’ve missed you, too, darling,” Gavin said. He walked to the wall, and pulled out the hellstone shard he’d taken from the tunnel.
“But time is different for us here.”
“Uh-huh,” Gavin said.
“Why don’t we talk about this?” the green dead man said. Was there an edge of fear in that voice?
“I think we’ve talked quite enough,” Gavin said, and he set the hellstone against the dead man’s third eye and began scratching the wall.
“You need your strength. Why don’t you draft some green?” the dead man said.
“Funny,” Gavin said. He was certain now about the dead man’s moving independently: the green reflection didn’t even bother to try to match his movements precisely. He spoke, and his mouth moved when Gavin knew his own wasn’t moving.
Part of the traps he’d laid for his brother had been dependent on his drafting. He’d thought the lure of drafting green would be too powerful for his brother to resist, and thus he would act wildly. Trapped like an animal, he would bite the bars of his cage, but never be able to gather the wits to do it mechanically. He had, unfortunately, underestimated how long the original Gavin would spend in blue, and how the blue would change him, make him more rational and cool despite his baseline hot temper and rebelliousness.
This green cell had held his brother only for a few days.
“So you’ve been lonely, huh?” Gavin asked, still scratching, scratching, scratching.
“You’ll never get out,” the dead man said.
“You really think I’d spend a year building a prison and never once stop to think how I’d get out if I were ever trapped in it myself?”
Of course that was only half-true. He’d planned how to escape—that was why he’d placed the hellstone chip for himself. But he’d not planned how to get out without drafting.
The hellstone would get him out of green. Yellow… yellow was another question.
“How much did Mot tell you?” the dead man asked.
“Mot?” Gavin’s only interaction with the god had been when he’d sunk the blue bane and run his skimmer over all the god’s foul wights, turning the water red. “Not much. I never bothered to chat with him.”
The dead man looked at him for a long while quizzically, then burst out laughing.
“We don’t remember much at all, do we?” the dead man said. “How many times did you—I mean I—use black luxin anyway? Do I remember? Because once shouldn’t have done this much to… me.”
Of course, Gavin was in green. Of course the dead man would try madness here. Try to make Gavin think he was already mad, that he remembered things that weren’t true and didn’t remember things that were. Of course green would try to make Gavin wild and fearful and uncontrollable.
When Dazen had made this prison, he must have figured that his brother would be particularly susceptible to the wildness of green. That questioning his very sanity would be a good way to keep him from formulating logical plans, would infuriate him.
But one thing this creation of his did do was remind him how much the black had taken.
And then the will-casting. It was always dangerous, he knew that. Utterly forbidden for a lot of good reasons that Gavin had naturally decided didn’t apply to him.
He’d been talking to the dead man here as if he were the same dead man in the blue cell. As if he were still Gavin, mocking himself.
The dead man was still a reflection of himself, of course, but Gavin suddenly understood something about his own design. He hadn’t cast his will into the prison as a whole—there was magic-killing hellstone everywhere down here. If he’d made the prison a seamless whole, a failure of part of it would be a failure of all of it.
So instead he’d imbued a bit of his will into each cell. This dead man was utterly separate from the first.
That was why he’d made this dead man ask what the last one had asked Gavin. He would have wanted to know how to torment his brother more successfully. There were two facts he could glean from this: this dead man didn’t remember anything he’d told the last one, and, more importantly, this one might know things the last one hadn’t.
Dazen had made the blue cell in a month. He’d poured everything into that, and he’d known that his brother was there and not making any progress in getting out for a long while. But Dazen had taken much longer creating the other cells, which meant he’d also crafted them later, when he knew more and different things.