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.