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It was like the world knew Kip needed to take the coward's way, and it conspired together to land him here.

The next thing he knew, there were people on every side of him, kicking, kicking. Some were trying to slam musket butts down on him, but there were so many people packed in so tightly around him that he only felt a few glancing blows on his legs. Back in the old days, he would have rolled over on his stomach and buried his head in his hands, rolled into a ball and waited until Ram had asserted his superiority again and tired of the game and left him. Doing that here would be death.

Do you expect me to take a whipping lying down?

Yes, Kip. It's your way.

You expect me to die lying down?

Face it, Kip, you're not much of a fighter, not when it matters. Why don't you curl up in a ball and quit?

Part of him expected Karris to save him. She was a fighter. A warrior. A drafter. She was quick and decisive, nimble and deadly with magic or blade.

The crowd was like a beast, a seething, teeming, roaring mass that had lost all individuality. And Kip hated it. He ducked his head as someone tried to stomp on him. He saw leering faces. Brief images of snarling mouths. Visages twisted with hatred.

Part of him expected Ironfist to save him. The man had swept in out of nowhere twice before and done that. Ironfist was huge, strong, intimidating. He was as quiet and as unmoving as steel. A guardian.

Part of him expected Liv to save him. Why not? She'd come in at the last minute to save him from the assassin Mistress Helel.

Part of him expected Gavin to save him. What good was a Prism if he couldn't save his own bastard? Gavin was here. Somewhere. He had to be close. He had to know the wall had been breached. He had to be hurrying here even now.

A kick caught Kip in the kidney, sending lances of pain through his whole body. As he lurched, a fist caught him in the face. His head bounced off the stones. Blood shot out of his nose, drenching his mouth and chin.

No one was coming. Like when his mother had locked him in a cupboard when he was eight years old because he'd complained or talked too much or-he didn't even remember what he'd done wrong. He just remembered the look of disgust on her face. She despised him. She threw his soup at him and locked the door and went out to get high. And forgot about him. Because he was worthless.

After a day, the rats had come. He woke to one licking the dried soup off his neck. Its little claws dug into his chest, its weight terrifyingly heavy. He'd screamed, jumped to his feet, thrashed. Screamed and screamed, and no one heard. That rat ran away, but soon, in the darkness, more had come. They dropped into his hair, bit his bare toes, scrambled up his pant legs. They were everywhere. Dozens of them. Hundreds, for all he knew. He'd screamed until his throat was raw, thrashed and hit at them until his hands were bleeding, twisted his ankle on some old boxes crammed into the cupboard. And no one had come.

His mother had found him on the morning of the third day, curled in a ball, head tucked in his arms, whimpering, dehydrated, long bloody wounds all over his head, shoulders, back, and legs, not even trying to dislodge the rats covering him like a cloak. There were a dozen dead rats with him and more live ones. She'd given him water, eyes haze-glazed, begrudgingly cleaned his wounds with the last of her harsh lemon liquor, and then wandered out to find more haze. All without a word. She seemed to have forgotten it all when he next saw her. He still had scars on his shoulders, back, and butt where the rats had bit him.

No one's coming, Kip. Another kick. You always were a disappointment. Another kick. A failure. Kick. You're not good at anything. Kick.

"Enough! Enough!" someone shouted. The officer finally pushed through the crowd, carrying his musket. "Move back!" he shouted.

He hefted the musket, pointing it at Kip's head.

What can I do? Draft little green balls? Fine.

Kip drafted a green ball and threw it up into the yawning barrel, willed it to stay.

The officer pulled the trigger. A moment, then the musket exploded in his hands. The breach of the musket blew out, throwing flaming black powder into the man's face, setting his beard alight. He screamed, fell back.

"Kill him!" someone shouted.

Kip saw steel being drawn on all sides, flashes of the sun on blades. And he started laughing. Because he was good at something.

He was good at taking punishment. He was a turtle. Or maybe a bear. A turtle-bear. Orholam, he was an idiot. He laughed again, slapping his hands to his shoulders as he lay on the ground. Green luxin jetted out, covering him like he'd seen it cover the green wight back in Rekton.

As Kip watched, a sword descended and hacked into the green luxin over his arm. It cut in two finger's breadths, but the luxin was thicker. It stopped, quivering like an ax in wood. Kip flipped over, pulling in more green from every light surface, not even knowing how he did it, pulling and pulling, drafting light from Orholam's endless tap.

It filled him with that same wildness. Wildness chained, hemmed in, trapped. The luxin covering him grew thicker. Kip gathered his feet beneath himself and stood, roaring.

He was crazy. He was crazy, and he felt great. He smashed a green forearm into a wide-eyed man holding a sword. It flung the man back. Kip paused for a second, and spikes sprouted from his green armor everywhere. He threw his weight back and forth, crashing into the crowd like they were rats to smash against cupboard walls.

Blood was flying in red ropes. Kip wasn't human anymore. He was an animal, unwilling to be caged. He was a mad dog. Some dim, thinking part of him thought that he shouldn't have been able to move so well with such a heavy suit on him. He was strong, but not this strong.

He had no sense of the battle beyond the little circle around him. Even that was a blur-sharp motions to the left and right, gleams of light off blades and rising muskets to be crushed before they could fire. He slashed and hacked and pounded with unreasoning fury. He could hold only one thought: I will not be stopped.

In moments, or hours, Kip had no notion of time-he saw fear in every eye. A continual flood of men spilled in through the gap, thrust forth hard by the mass of bodies behind them, all pushing them forward and into Kip, but his very presence was slowing the flood, men pushing back as soon as they saw him, others leaping to the sides, hoping to avoid his fury.

Their weakness inflamed him further. Like rats willing to bite in the darkness but scattering in the light, they were cowards. He clubbed them, smashing heads, ripping open bellies. He charged the gap where they couldn't flee, impaled them, flung gore left and right.

A thought won through his brain. Among all the shouting and screams and fear and mist and musket fire and clash of arms, someone was screaming a word: "Kip! Kip! King Garadul! That way!"

Kip couldn't see who was shouting. He stretched, found himself taller, the luxin swirling under his feet, boosting him several hand's breadths. Looking into the city, he saw Karris, skin red and green entwined, holding a sword, pointing it deeper into the city still.

King Garadul was rallying his Mirrormen around him there, pulling them together after they'd been separated coming through the gap. He was screaming orders. Seemed furious about something. Hadn't seen Kip.

Before he even knew what he was doing, Kip was charging, all his will focused, intent, implacable. This one thing remained: King Garadul had to pay for what he'd done. He had to die.

Chapter 86

When Gavin heard the explosion, he knew immediately what it was. He was almost back to the wall on his way from the docks, where he'd been using the first light to help draft boats for the refugees. The evacuation was entirely possible if people would be reasonable. Gavin had told the city's elders that nobles could bring three chests, armorers and apothecaries could bring three as well, rich merchants could bring two, and everyone else could only bring what they could carry.

It was a simple rationale, if a hard one. The fleeing Tyreans would need medicine, and they didn't want to leave any arms that King Garadul could use to arm his troops and spread his aggression. And though it stuck in Gavin's throat to help the rich more than the poor, the rich would bring their riches out of the city. Those riches, if left, would again be used by King Garadul and would help him kill others. If people did everything according to orders, there would still be room for everyone to escape who wanted to.

Except, of course, everyone cheated. Everyone. Nobles brought six chests. Rich merchants brought five. Others lied and claimed to be armorers or apothecaries who were not.

Gavin put a local guild head in charge, went to draft on the barges, and when he came back found the man letting his own guild members bring extra baggage. Gavin drafted a scaffold off the side of the pier in five seconds, and had the man strangling on it in ten. He put someone else in charge before the first man was dead.

"Make decisions fast and as justly as you can," Gavin told the deeply frowning, pockmarked cooper he was putting in charge. "And my whole authority is behind you, even if you make mistakes. Take one bribe, and I'll take my time making your death as much worse than this as I can imagine." Then he left. He didn't have time for this.

He was at the base of the wall when he heard the explosion. It was exactly what he'd been afraid of. It had been why he'd drafted Brightwater Wall in the first place. With all the homes and shops built directly against the city wall, it was hard to defend from enemies outside, but impossible to defend from enemies within. Anyone who owned a shop could be given barrels of black powder, tunnel under the wall a little bit, and set a charge. They could work in full privacy, uninterrupted-could, and had.

Blackguards in tow, Gavin dug his heels into his horse's flanks. But he didn't head for the gap. A hole in the wall was a prize, of course, but it would immediately attract defenders, and it might not be big enough for the army to come through. It might become a choke point, a killing zone. Better to use the distraction of a breach in the walls to open a gate elsewhere.

Gavin dispatched messengers to the Hag's Gate and the Lover's Gate and headed toward the Mother's Gate. At the top of the wall, he ran into General Corvan Danavis with his entourage. Doubtless, Corvan was going to direct the defense at the breach in the wall personally.

Corvan paused only to say, "They're holding back their drafters and color wights. I don't know why. But if we lose a gate in the next twenty minutes, we won't make it until noon." That was Corvan, condensing the information to the absolutely vital.

"If it falls," Gavin said, "be at the ships an hour before noon."

Corvan nodded his head. No fighting to the death. Gavin clapped Corvan's shoulder. Then the general was gone.

At the top of the gate, Gavin looked over the teeming mass on the other side. Hardly anyone was firing at the invaders from the wall anymore, but the army pushed forward like a blind beast, black fingertips reaching up to grab the wall.

Many of the homes outside the wall had been demolished in just a few hours, but of those that remained, the army had found which places were easiest to scale. At half a dozen places, a slow trickle of men were clambering up onto the wall itself and engaging the few defenders.

Farther out, King Garadul's men were setting up their mortars. Too late, really. There was no point in them bombarding the city at all, and doing so now would probably kill as many of their own as it would kill defenders. Nonetheless, they were already loading the mortars. Gavin had found that lots of men liked to be safe from the fighting, but they wanted to be able to say they'd taken part. Those idiots would fire some rounds and later brag how they'd turned the battle.

Good to see that King Garadul's got discipline problems too.

And where was the king?

From the gate's highest point, looking back into the city, Gavin spied him despite the mists. King Garadul had pressed into the city himself. Idiot! Sure, Gavin had done the same more than once, but he was armed like few others. Gavin's presence on a battlefield wasn't simple morale-boosting. King Garadul was leading the attack, surrounded by perhaps a hundred Mirrormen. As Gavin caught sight of him, he saw the king yelling at some messenger, gesticulating angrily.

He wants his drafters.

And why isn't he getting them?

Gavin moved to the front of the Mother's spear, stared out to the hill, some five hundred paces away. On the crown of the hill there were banners and a crowd. He drafted lenses, adjusted the distance necessary between the two to get the focus right, and studied the image above the low-hanging mists. A multicolored man was lifting a musket, pointing it right at him. Insanity. No musket could fire so-

The musket fired-a huge charge from the cloud of black smoke. Gavin couldn't hear it over the rest of the sounds of battle, of course. One of the mortars fired. Gavin continued to study the man. He drafted the two lenses together to keep the focus steady. A polychrome wight. Probably a full polychrome, or at least pretending to be one, from all the colors he'd drafted into his own body. Curious. The man was studying him too.

Around Lord Omnichrome, there were not just the usual complement of generals and lackeys, but dozens of drafters. They were clearly not going anywhere.

Someone handed the musket back to Lord Omnichrome. Lord Omnichrome took the musket, aimed quickly, and fired. A second later, something hit the Mother's spear two paces above Gavin's head and exploded, taking a chunk out of the rock. Luxin projectiles? From five hundred paces? Gavin was still thinking about it as the Blackguards pulled him away and to the back of the spear.

Lord Omnichrome wanted King Garadul dead. So simple, so bold. He probably had even egged on King Garadul at Brightwater Wall, daring him to be a promachos, getting the young king to lead from the front, hoping he'd get killed.

If your enemy wants it, deny it.

Gavin drafted a small yellow tablet, making it read, "Capture Garadul, not kill. At all costs." He covered it in blue and liquid yellow luxin and shot it into the path where he believed Corvan was going.

But Gavin's intuition told him the main strike was going to happen elsewhere, while the defenders focused their efforts here. "To the Hag's Gate," he told his Blackguards. "We run!"

Chapter 87

Karris snatched a second sword from a man lying on the ground, bleeding from a stomach wound. She didn't know what side he was fighting for; she didn't care. The city smelled of gunpowder, sewage, and men's sweat, the kind of stench that gets into leather armor and never comes out. As she ran, she drafted a thin sheen of green luxin down the swords, sealed it, then ran red luxin on top of that and sealed that too.

This entire area was a tangle of alleys. The buildings were thrown down haphazardly with seeming intent to vex one's neighbors and make straight lines of sight impossible. The good news was that it made it impossible for King Garadul to rally his men in any numbers here.

The bad news was that-oh shit! Karris rounded a corner and almost ran into three Mirrormen, lost, peering down different alleys and looking like they were about to start arguing which way to go. Karris careened into them before any of them could react. She threw her weight into the smallest one and, catching him flat-footed, managed both to stop herself and to fling him off his feet. She spun, left sword swinging in a red arc.

The second Mirrorman was moving his sword into guard position, but too slowly, with no leverage. Her blade beat right through his and cut into his neck above his gorget. Not a deep cut, but deep enough, right there. Red luxin splattered on the outside of his armor, and as she yanked the blade back, red blood splattered the inside to match. He was still standing for the moment, but to Karris he was already dead.

Between colliding with the first Mirrorman and cutting the second, Karris had lost sight of the last one. She spun around, ducking, blocking with both swords, left down, right up in a reversed grip. The cut would have beaten right through her weak right-hand guard if she hadn't ducked too. Instead, her own blade slapped into her shoulder. She couldn't tell if it cut-what kind of moron went into battle without armor?

She came up cutting, but the Mirrorman blocked her strike. Then his eyes went wide. A low red flush of light washed them both. His sword had struck sparks off of hers, setting the red luxin aflame-and not only on her sword. Where the two blades had met, his sword had scraped off red luxin too, and the same sparks had set his alight. She'd intended the flames for later, but it worked as well for now.

Karris swung her right-hand, flaming sword in a quick arc and stabbed the Mirrorman in the face with her left.

If you're going to wear heavy armor, never open the visor while you're in battle.

She kicked him off her blade in a spray of broken teeth and exhaled blood, spun again, and saw the Mirrorman she'd collided with and sent sprawling crawling for his blade. She stomped on his hand as he lunged for it, and punched her blade through the mirror armor. It took a strong, direct strike to push through plate, but she'd practiced it a hundred times with the Blackguard, who trained assuming assassins would bear every advantage, including mirror armor.

Pulling the blade free again, she quickly wiped the last of the flaming red luxin off the sword with one of the men's cloaks and reapplied the red luxin. She'd set herself alight if she wasn't careful. She lifted a sturdy bow and a half-empty quiver from one of the dead.

Now where the hell was she? And where was Kip?

Karris had taken a shortcut, she thought. She knew there was a market on the south side of the city, and she'd thought she remembered roughly where it was. She'd pointed Kip after King Garadul hoping he would wreak some havoc by following, which would allow her to circle behind the king and kill him.

Maybe it had been a bad choice. Orholam, she'd abandoned Kip. A baby drafter.

Not that she could have done much to help him. At the Chromeria, they called what Kip had done going green golem. At one time, they had taught it as a war magic. No longer.

There were three problems with going green golem. First, you couldn't seal the green luxin. If you did, you couldn't move. Some drafters got around that by making big sealed plates and just holding the joints in open green. What Kip was doing was much harder. He was holding all the magic at once. It took enormous focus, and the armor was only as hard as his will. If someone broke his focus, he'd lose his armor instantly. Second, using that much green luxin burned out drafters fast. In the False Prism's War, Karris had heard of green drafters breaking the halo after going green golem only three or four times. Third, you had to be strong as a bull. The suit-the armor, the golem, whatever it was-had weight. For the drafter, it was less because their will took part of the weight, but they still had to move an enormous hunk of luxin. That said, using open green in the legs did mean that a skilled user could make enormous bounds, and once they got moving, they were nearly impossible to stop.

It all meant that Kip was more likely to get himself killed than anything. And Karris had abandoned him. Damn it. What kind of woman abandons a child?

Karris double-checked the position of the sun from the shadows. The sun was still low in the sky and these alleys were swaddled in shadows and mist. As she looked up, she was struck by it. The rooftops rose from the mists like distant, square mountain peaks reigning over the clouds. Then she saw the retreat flares. It was the color Gavin or the Blackguards were supposed to use, and she was sure that was how he was using them now. But retreat to where?

The docks. They knew they were going to lose the city. They were just trying to make King Garadul pay as heavy a price as possible. Karris didn't have much time to make sure that price was the ultimate price.

She ran into an empty house-she was pretty sure all the houses were empty here. Pushing past the leavings of chickens and several dogs, and one live skinny cow-lots of people brought their animals inside during the night, both for safety and to warm the house-she found the stairs, ran up to the family's quarters, which had been hurriedly emptied, and found the ladder to the roof.

The square, squat houses of Garriston all had these flat roofs. The roof became a third room for most families. A perfect place to cool down on the hot, long summer evenings, the commoners' only chance of catching a breeze off the Cerulean Sea. The buildings were packed tight, but by no means uniform. Not every building was three stories, and even of the many that were, the stories were different heights.

All the same, as Karris reached the roof, for one moment she was struck by the beauty of the scene. The whitewashed roofs, little squares and rectangles, gleaming in the sun, with mist curling up around every edge, churches and a few mansions rising like mountains out of the clouds, and the Travertine Palace dominating everything. Farther south, she could just see Brightwater Wall, like a golden belt around the city. Nearer, there was black smoking rising from the city wall, flashes of magic from the gates.

She shut it out. Found the market she'd been heading for. With the mist, she couldn't see enough to tell if her guess had been correct.

You've already bet Kip's life on this course, might as well see if it pays off.

Cursing herself for a fool, Karris drafted a green weapon harness, sheathed both blades on her back, messed with the harness for a second to get it to set right with the quiver and bow, cursed the torn, tight sleeves on her dress, cursed her muscular shoulders, and tore the sleeves off. She breathed. Then she sprinted to the edge of the roof and leapt.

The houses here were so close, it was an easy jump. Some homes even had planks between them so neighbors could visit each other. So long as she didn't want to cross the street, it was easy going. She ran as fast as she could. One street to clear, then another block of houses, then the market. Her eyes bounced back and forth as she approached the larger gap of crossing the street.

There! One of the houses on the other side had a significantly lower roof. Karris veered left and leapt, passing over the heads of thirty or forty Mirrormen. She hit the lower roof, rolled, popped to her feet just in time to have to leap again-to a higher roof. She hit the next roof with one foot extended. She pushed up, trying to push herself just a little higher but not stop her forward momentum.

Her body popped up, but not forward enough. She landed with half of her torso on flat, whitewashed stucco, then slid down, scrambling, trying to find purchase.

She dropped to her fingertips, on dirty, cracked, crumbling stucco. She swung sideways, lost one handhold for a second as the stucco ripped away. She latched her hand back onto the roof, a clean grip this time, and swung back the other way. Her foot reached the edge, tearing the slit of her dress up even higher. She pulled herself up quickly, not trusting that the rest of the stucco wouldn't crumble at any moment.

No time to be elated at being alive. Karris checked her swords and bow, glanced once down at the twenty-foot drop onto an uneven surface below-a broken leg there if she'd fallen, at least. Then she ran again.

She reached a roof overlooking the market and stopped. King Garadul was coming, with hundreds of Mirrormen and a few drafters-and Kip was hot on their heels. Literally.

This was going to get messy.

Karris smiled.

Chapter 88

Kip was on fire. Someone had doused him in red luxin and lit him up.

It didn't stop him. He simply thickened the green that encased him so the red wouldn't burn through. The pyre jelly stuck to the green. He couldn't rub it away from his face, it was glued in place, implacable. But he could move the green luxin itself, so he made it swirl outward, until his eyes were clear and he could see again. Using the same technique, he swirled all of the pyre jelly to his arms and shoulders, then along his sides, so he was outlined in flame. It all took only a few moments. He thought it, and the luxin did it. Or more precisely, he willed it, and it happened.

The wildness within him was so strong that he wanted to break free of the city and run away. But he wouldn't allow it. He harnessed the wildness. The wildness would serve him. It would help him destroy the man who held the lash and the leash, the man who wanted to control him: King Garadul.

He wasn't sure that he was going the right way, but he followed the flow of King Garadul's soldiers. Kip himself was like a beacon, burning as he was in the misty morning. But the light made his vision lousy. It was like holding a torch: if you held it over your head, you might see into the darkness, but if you held it between yourself and the darkness, you weren't going to see anything at all. Kip was the torch. He couldn't see much, and he didn't care. He could see the men streaming away from him, some of them seeing him and just running like hell, but others seemed to be running toward something. A meeting place, a rallying point. Where King Garadul would be.

Kip barreled around a corner into the backs of half a dozen soldiers. They hadn't seen him and he couldn't stop. He ran right over them in a mess of screams and burning flesh and curses and blood and a struggle just to keep from falling as he stepped on body parts. He swung his arms in big sweeping motions, fire and blood and blades unleashed into a crowd.

And it was a crowd. Kip had made it. There were hundreds of soldiers here. He could see dim flashes of the winking armor of the Mirrormen on the other side of the square. Then he was subsumed, folded into the loving arms of battle. There was no morning mist. No counting of his foes. No deciphering the shouts of his enemies into plain language, orders that might help him know what was coming. There was only the roar coming from Kip's own throat, the hammering of his own heart, the pulsing life that was his magic. There was only the burning in his muscles, the resistance his arm felt as a bladed arm cut into a man's torso, and the freedom as he pulled it all the way through.

The world closed in on Kip. He could barely see, barely turn his neck within the green armor. It drove him crazy. He needed freedom. He couldn't be trapped. He was an animal. He crashed through ranks of soldiers as they formed against him. His sweeping arms snapped spears like nothing. He bludgeoned heads with his closed fists. Tore men off his back and snapped their spines in his hands.

Then, abruptly, the ranks parted in front of him. All except one man, who didn't move aside in time, and Kip saw two rows of ten musketeers each. The first row was kneeling, the second row standing, all muskets pointed at him. Someone shouted, his voice a command. And Kip saw the one soldier between him and the musketeers. The man heard too, and understood. Kip saw the panic on his face.

The musketeers loosed a volley. Fire and smoke leaped like a pouncing, snarling lion from their muskets. Kip saw the soldier cut down, even as he steeled himself against the blast.

The musket balls hit him like a fist, many striking at the same time, and a few instants behind the first, carrying him like a punch's follow-through. He was swept off his feet.

A cheer went up. Kip's head swam and he felt the green luxin going soft all around him.

No! I can take punishment. That's my gift. That's my talent.

A musketeer ran over to Kip, pointed a blunderbuss at his head. Something streaked by the man's head-an arrow?-but missed. Kip grabbed the yawning mouth of the blunderbuss and pulled it to himself, stuck it right to his forehead, and pressed green luxin down the barrel. The man pulled the trigger and the breech exploded.

Kip jumped to his feet with inhuman strength. He stomped on the screaming musketeer and looked at himself. He could see the lead musket balls, flattened, inside his green armor. Like they'd shot a tree. The bullets had penetrated, but been stopped. Kip laughed, damn near insane. He was bulletproof.

Ignoring the musketeers, several of whom were running away while the rest were reloading furiously, fumbling with their ramrods and powder horns, trying to ready another shot, Kip looked for King Garadul. These men were no threat. They couldn't bind him. But he couldn't see. So he pulled green luxin around him and made himself taller. Simple.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16