“Corvan. The question.”
Corvan rubbed his neck. Hesitated. “We can’t win. The old stone wall around the city couldn’t keep out a determined mule. Rask took most of our gunpowder when he took the wall, and all of our cannons. Half our muskets were left on the field as men dropped them when they fled. We’d be lucky to kill a few thousand before they took the inner wall, and once we start fighting street to street, we could kill quite a few at some choke points, but eventually their numbers guarantee it will be a slaughter. With their numbers and our lack of matériel, this city is indefensible. There’s no strategy I can imagine in which we win. We can hurt them badly while we lose, but that’s not the same.” He grimaced. “I was preparing a retreat.”
“A retreat.” Corvan Danavis had never lost a battle—well, if one didn’t count Sundered Rock as a loss, which Gavin didn’t. If you mean to lose, and you do, in exactly the way you intended, it’s not really a loss, is it?
“Even a retreat is beset with unforeseen difficulties, Lord Prism. The presence of the ‘monsters’ that put everyone in the city on our side also means everyone in the city wants out. They think they’ll be slaughtered and eaten if they stay, and there’s no way we can evacuate so many people with the ships and the time we have.”
Gavin rubbed his forehead. Threw on his ceremonial white cloak. Stalled, basically. “Have our spies reported anything about Karris?” he asked, trying to sound disinterested. Not that Corvan would be fooled.
“Still alive as of yesterday. I imagine he was planning to use her to barter with, if he needed to.” Which now, of course, he wouldn’t. Meaning Karris had become expendable. Corvan didn’t have to say it aloud.
“Kip or Liv or Ironfist?” If Gavin had been thinking, or a little less self-centered, he’d have asked about Corvan’s daughter first.
“No word,” Corvan said. His jaw was tight.
“Which could be good news, right? If they’d done anything disastrous, our spies would be more likely to hear about it, right?”
Corvan didn’t say anything for a while, refusing to take such weak solace. He wasn’t a man to grasp after straws or to believe that tragedy couldn’t befall him. The deaths of two wives had cured him of idealism. “Our spies did report that there’s some kind of king of the color wights, a polychrome wight. They’re calling him Lord Omnichrome. No word on who he was before breaking the Pact—unless he’s a true wild polychrome.”
Gavin shrugged. Just another problem among hundreds, but he knew Corvan was laying all the potential problems on the table so Gavin could make his own choices about what was and was not important.
“What do you want to do, Lord Prism?”
He meant about the battle or the evacuation, of course.
“I want to kill Rask Garadul.”
Corvan said nothing, didn’t move to order an assassination or something similarly stupid.
Damn him, but Gavin’s father had predicted even this. If you lose the city, kill Rask Garadul, Andross Guile had said. Gavin had been sure he could save the city—and hadn’t arranged assassins to kill Rask. He should have done both. Too late now, unless Rask charged him tomorrow as foolishly as he had done yesterday.
Gavin moved to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. He cleared his throat, trying to remove the taste of failure. “I’ll help as much as I can while performing my religious duties, but…” He cleared his throat again. Seven years, seven great purposes. Here I was trying to do something good for once. “I’ve failed, Corvan. Order the evacuation.”
Chapter 76
Judging from the cold air licking his skin, it was well after midnight when Kip was escorted through some kind of gate. He had to judge from the temperature because he was wearing a blindfold, along with a black sack over his head, a noose around his neck, hands bound behind his back.
One of the guards who was accompanying him was cursing, quietly but constantly, awed by something apparently called Brightwater Wall. They passed through slowly, stopping and starting, some military sounding voice barking, “Don’t stand there and pick your butts. Move deeper into camp. You’re blocking everyone else.” Kip heard the crack of a whip like a pistol shot, and the line started moving again.
The last couple of days had been like this. Kip had woken in darkness—darkness that turned out to be a blindfold, his hands bound at his sides. When he struggled to get it off, men had come. They removed the blindfold, one stared at his eyes, pulling them wide open with rough fingers, then they blindfolded him again. His left hand was agony. That first day—if it was just a day—they had dosed his wine with something foul that dulled his pain and his senses.