The Blinding Knife (98 page)

“Load the cannons,” Commander Ironfist said. He was looking out over the bay at the new island through the mounted long lens that the battery’s gunners had used to sight targets. His face was as hard as Teia had ever seen. “Hezik! You have some experience?”

A Blackguard with shoulders like a buffalo stepped forward. He had only one ear, a thick scar down the left half of his face testimony
to a sword stroke. “Yessir, mother commanded a pirate hunter in the Narrows.”

“Recommendations. Time’s short.”

“Don’t load all the guns. Only these two can hit that damn thing at all, and only this one with any sort of accuracy.” He gestured to the big bronze culverin. “Six thousand paces, but from this height, and with this powder, nice big grains rather than fine, wrap the first shot in sacking to help me get the range…”

“Your command, Hezik. Take out the big tower.”

Hezik was silent for a second, thinking, then he began pointing to men. “Inventory. I want to know how much of this grain of powder we have, and what shot. Do we have any shells? You, weigh that ball on the scales over there, then measure out four-fifths of that weight. You, there should be some gunners’ notes somewhere. Find ’em!”

Gavin had set fire to the huge yellow sword he’d drafted and was throwing flames with his left hand and slashing green wights with his right, still running toward the spire. Karris was hard on his heels, her ataghan cutting necks and stomachs as wights’ eyes were drawn by Gavin’s figure in front of her. As always, Kip brought up the rear, short of breath, but able to do anything with green empowering him.

Before they could reach the spire, dozens of wights rose up. They’d been kneeling, worshipping before the spire, but seeing these interlopers, they ran to intercept them. The spire was still growing, twisting higher toward the heavens. The wights themselves were growing, too. The green bane was making all of them stronger. Every one of them used the power differently. Some went green golem, wrapping themselves in green armor that made them three times as wide. Others looked like saplings, stripped of bark, a thin green skin replacing their own skin, green over red, skeletal and all the more alien for being so close to human. Others made themselves hugely tall. Others drafted huge claws or great, springy frogs’ legs. Others, less imaginative, drafted thick shields and cudgels and helms.

Kip felt a thump reverberate dimly through the ground at his feet and a second later heard the sound of a cannon. A dim trail of smoke from a crater more than a hundred paces away pointed back toward
the battery up on Ruic Head, where a much larger plume of black smoke was blowing away.

“To me, to me!” Gavin shouted.

After a moment of resistance at being ordered to do something, the green in him rebelling, Kip realized it was what he wanted to do anyway. In seconds, he and five Blackguards joined Gavin.

“They’re making a god. We kill it,” Gavin said. He drafted another yellow sword, handed it to a Blackguard who had lost her weapons. “No matter what. No matter how. Got it?” He made another yellow sword, and another, tossed one to a Blackguard and one to Kip. Then he started running toward the wights. His hands were surrounded with glowing knots of yellows and reds.

As the first green spear came shooting toward Gavin, he dropped under it and rolled on the ground, came up to his knees and threw his hands forward. A fan of yellow missiles blasted out from him, each trailing chains of flame. The missiles stabbed dozens of the wights and the chains whipped around them, wrapping some in flame and scoring the wights behind.

But Gavin barely slowed. He popped back up to his feet and kept running.

A frog wight Kip hadn’t even seen descended, huge claws raking downward. Karris dodged to the side and swept her ataghan under its armpit.

Then, still fifty paces from the base of the spire, they ran into a veritable wall of green wights. Gavin crashed through a few, killing, spinning, killing—and almost got separated from the Blackguards. A Blackguard named Milk had his entire arm and shoulder ripped off by a big claw. A woman named Tisa was knocked aside as she drafted a stream of fire and accidentally shot a gush of pyrejelly down her own stomach and leg. It flamed and she screamed.

But she didn’t forget herself. As a green golem eight feet tall settled between Gavin and the rest of them to cut him off, Tisa hurled herself onto the golem’s back, taking both of them down in a sudden intense wash of fire.

Kip slashed back and forth, trying to keep up with the others. Something twisted his yellow luxin sword and he lost it.

The three remaining Blackguards reunited with Gavin, who fought with the flaming sword in one hand and luxin of alternating
colors in the other. They were stuck, surrounded by dozens of wights, stopped.

A shell rocked the ground, exploding with a deafening roar. Kip felt the pressure wave and almost fell. A smoking hole cratered the green island, thirty paces away. The wights around it had been vaporized, those farther out torn to pieces.

The Blackguards and Gavin recovered first. The crater and the hole in the wights’ lines wasn’t directly between the Blackguards and the tower, but it offered movement. Freedom.

Even then, they never would have made if it the greens could tolerate order—if they’d organized their defenses. But with the help of the chaos, Gavin and his people cut through the staggered creatures and ran into the gap created by the shell, stepping on bodies and slipping on released green luxin that was evaporating as the once-men holding it died. Kip almost tripped over a woman’s bare torso—nothing else of her remained. Red and green ran in rivers next to each other, filling the crater with blood soup.

Crashing into the still-recovering lines on the opposite side of the crater with Karris, Gavin, and the remaining three Blackguards, Kip remembered his knife, still strapped to his calf, and pulled it out, stumbling. He lashed out at a big wight who was holding his bleeding eyes, weeping. Kip’s knife cut through the wight’s shell and kidneys with ease.

He felt instantly, stupidly guilty. The man hadn’t been able to defend himself, and Kip had cut him like a—

“Incoming!” Gavin shouted. He knocked Kip down.

They heard the thump and the explosion, but it was a good seventy paces away this time—no good to them, but no danger either.

By the time they stood, a man with a green bull’s head on his shoulders was charging them. Gavin leapt aside and cut the man’s back as he passed. The wight went down, but his horn caught Karris, who hadn’t jumped far enough. It spun her hard and slammed her into the ground.

Kip jumped on the bull and stabbed in through the top of its head, twisting his dagger in its brain and ripping it out. He grabbed Karris and pulled her to her feet. There was blood on her arm and chest, but instead of skewering her, the horn had passed under her armpit. She was winded, gasping for air, but not wounded. Lucky.

Gavin threw his sword into the chest of a woman who had the form of a harpy and spun, pulling his dagger-pistols from his belt. The guns spun in his hands as he pointed at Kip. Both pistols cracked and Kip ran on, certain that two wights behind him and Karris were dead.

A Blackguard was hamstringing two giants at the base of the stairs when one caught him with a war hammer in the shoulder. He staggered sideways, trying to catch himself, and met the other’s battle axe. It cut all the way through his chest.

Gavin shot yellow spears into their brains, one-two-three, in rapid succession, but it was too late for the Blackguard.

“Up,” Gavin shouted, “up!”

They ran up the stairs as if hell was on their heels. Kip was at the back. The tower was growing even as they mounted the stairs, twisting higher like a growing tree.

“What was that?” Gavin asked.

What? Kip hadn’t seen anything. He was exhausted, and they were only halfway up the tower. He looked down and saw that the wights had decided to follow them. He didn’t slow.

A clash of arms up ahead told Kip that they had encountered defense. It was all that allowed him to catch up. But Gavin had barely slowed. Kip heard screams descending, and when he passed the same spot of the winding stair, he saw wights far below, their bodies broken.

A great beam of green light hit the top of the tower, and the whole thing bucked and shivered. It nearly hurled them off the stairs.

“What the hell is that?” Commander Ironfist asked.

No one answered. No one knew. The green itself felt different suddenly, not affecting all of them so much as being gathered elsewhere. Teia was holding a pair of binocles. Through them, she could see more than most. “It’s coming from the Great Pyramid,” she said. “Or going to it, I can’t tell.”

“Is it a weapon?”

“I don’t know!”

Men were scrambling around the room, the gunners swabbing out the smoking hot bronze barrel, cooling it and making sure no bits of burning powder remained in the breech that would ignite the charge. Others were weighing the powder for the next shot. The Blackguards
who were tasked with muscling the great thing back into place were taking a well-deserved rest. Though the carriage was wheeled, the culverin was still massive. Hezik was staring alternately at a list of numbers he’d scribbled on a piece of parchment someone had passed him and down at the green island, lips moving silently, doing mental sums.

Everything was chaos, happening all at once.

“There’s a green man on top of the tower,” the spotter on the long lens called out.

Whatever was happening between the Great Pyramid and the bane was definitely helping the invaders. The tower was getting more massive by the second. “Why would the Atashians be helping the bane?” Teia asked.

“Sir,” the spotter said, “if I didn’t know better—Sir, that thing is Atirat.”

“Because the city has fallen,” Commander Ironfist said grimly. He walked over to the spotter, who moved aside for him.

“What?!” Hezik shouted to a Blackguard reporting to him. Not asking about the city.

“We didn’t see it before. It was at the bottom of the pile.” The Blackguard turned one of the shells over. The side was stove in, spilling all its powder out, and making it as effective in flight as a one-winged bird.

“Commander,” Hezik said. “We’ve only got two shots left. One shell, and one ball. Which do you want us to load?”

They’d been shooting the shells, and Hezik had honed his accuracy through practice. He was now hitting within forty paces of where he aimed, and he had done much better than that twice. But Gavin and the others were almost to the top of the tower. An exploding shell, that close? It would kill all of them.

On the other hand, the balls weighed more and flew differently. They’d shot a few of those earlier to get range before they started shooting the shells into the wights, but they hadn’t had as much practice.

Commander Ironfist said, “Use the ball.”

Hezik hesitated. “Sir, I’m only accurate within maybe twenty paces with the ball. It’s not a matter of skill at this distance, sir. We’d have to get very lucky.”

Teia had seen him shoot. He was being wildly optimistic.

Commander Ironfist’s face didn’t shift. “I trust you. Use the ball. Kill that god.”

By the time Kip reached the top of the tower, wheezing and so exhausted he thought he was going to vomit, the others were already fighting. The top of the green spire was something between a tower and a tree. Twelve smaller towers ringed it, like merlons on a crenellated wall. From each of those merlons, a giant was emerging. Four of them were already out, fighting Gavin, Karris, and the last Blackguard, Baya Niel.

The others were waking. Kip felt a shiver in the merlon next to him. The giants within the merlons were still men, but men who’d descended so deep into green that they’d rebuilt themselves, and the blasting green light from Ru seemed to be helping. Even as Kip looked, he saw green skin covered with tiny scales shimmer over the giant’s naked muscle on his arms. His chest was thickening, legs elongating.

In a paroxysm of revulsion, Kip stabbed his dagger into the creature. The dagger punched through the cocoon like it was wet paper. The giant’s green, green eyes shot open, its mouth opened on the other side of the glass, and then it slumped and its eyes dimmed.

Six of the giants were now out, fighting Gavin and Karris. One died as Kip watched, its head wrapped in flames by Gavin and then taken off by Baya Niel. But the others were still emerging. It seemed that those who were full in the green light from Ru had already awakened, but those who were shaded from it by their merlons were slower.

For one second, Kip considered joining the fight in the middle. Gavin and Karris were doing their best to get to the middle of the tower, where the green light was focused and reflecting so brightly it hurt Kip’s eyes. The other giants were blocking Gavin and Karris from getting there. Gavin and Karris had their hands full. Kip would barely be a help to them—but he could keep them from facing even worse odds.

So he ran around the edge of the tower instead, circling to the great cocoons. He rammed his dagger into another giant’s chest. As before, its eyes opened, bulged, dimmed. Kip ran on. He stabbed a third. This one punched its fist through the cocoon and groped for
Kip, but Kip pulled the dagger out and ducked. The giant crumpled, tearing through the cocoon and falling on the ground in a splash of goo.