The Blinding Knife(265)

The other team was drafting another ladder, this one merely propped against the wood like a traditional ladder. They climbed it rapidly and Commander Ironfist gave the go-ahead.

Pushing Teia to the side, the Blackguard ignited the charge. It blew, and for a moment, Teia was surprised that no one cried out in alarm from within the fort.

Of course. They’re firing cannons of every size. An explosion wouldn’t alarm them.

With prybars of luxin, the Blackguards quickly tore out the remaining wood and poured into the fort. There were dead bodies everywhere. Atashians, mainly, but also scruffy men with no uniforms at all, and drafters, even a few color wights. There’d been a battle here yesterday.

The fort was huge, covering Ruic Head in a spiky wooden crown and sunk deep into the rock. But there was hardly anyone in sight. There were two men standing watch at the gate, looking out the opposite side of the fort. Blackguard archers killed them, arrows punching through their mailed backs. The Blackguards who’d climbed the other side found a cannon crew on top of the fence and killed them in seconds.

Teia ran with them, going down a staircase into the fort proper, down a wide hallway to a wooden doorway. It was dark and smoky, but Teia had no trouble seeing in sub-red.

“Four on the left, five on the right. Looks like a wight giving orders in the middle,” she whispered. Then she ran down the hallway on tiptoe even as the cannons roared to where another team stood outside the door to another battery. “Three right, six left.”

Ironfist gestured that she should stay where she was. He quietly drew a long, gorgeous scimitar that she’d never seen before. The grip was inlaid with turquoise and abalone, and there was something that looked like burned wood inset along the spine of the blade. Ironfist didn’t look at the blade, as if he couldn’t stand the sight of it, but he presented it to Buskin, who reached a hand out from his spot in the stack and touched the wood on both sides of the scimitar.

As the atasifusta wood burst into flame, both teams burst into action. The Blackguards stormed the rooms simultaneously, Ironfist visible through the thick gunsmoke as a giant wielding a bar of flame. Teia heard shouts, anger, terror—and pistol fire. Her own pistol was drawn in her sweaty hand, cocked and ready.

A door opened on the opposite side of the hall, and a drafter poked his head out into the hallway, looking confused. He saw Teia.

The pistol rose of its own volition, the flint snapping down, sparks flaring, the shockingly hard kick and the hot smoke. Teia blinked and saw the drafter on the ground at her feet, his left eye and a quarter of his skull blown off.

He wasn’t dead.

“Reload,” Commander Ironfist said in her ear. Somehow back already. She flinched and found her hands doing what she’d been told: swabbing, popping her powder horn open, tamping the wadding. The commander peeked into the room from which the drafter had come, then, finding no one, jabbed his flaming scimitar down into the man’s back, into his heart, pulled it out, and jogged down the hall.

She ran after him, barely having charged her musket, but suddenly not wanting to be left behind. They stumbled straight into ten enemy drafters. Teia lurched to a stop, but Commander Ironfist was already flowing through the steps that looked like the yeshan ka, scimitar in one hand, luxin in the other, killing men left and right. The other Blackguards joined him a moment later, blasts of light painting the walls.

Teia waded in at the same time as the Blackguard who’d blown open the fence for them. Zero. His name was Zero, she remembered now. They faced two drafters who were already gathering light. “You take the green, I got the red!” Zero shouted. He moved before Teia could say anything.

Teia attacked the drafter on her side—the same man Zero attacked. The drafter on the other side shot a blade of luxin into Zero’s torso. He stumbled and fell and looked at Teia as if he couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid.

I’m color-blind, damn it!

Zero fell, but then both enemy drafters were down, killed by the other Blackguards.

A snarling red wight lit himself on fire, and Commander Ironfist roared, shouting for Teia to go after—someone—she couldn’t understand the words over the shouting and the fires.

Then she saw a young man running away, and she went after him. He was dressed in a white shirt and cloak, both with thick bands of many colors on it: one of the Color Prince’s polychromes. He ran down the halls and disappeared. Teia followed as fast as she could.

Rounding a corner, she ran right across his extended foot and into his shoulder and went flying. Ambushed! She slid across the smooth stone floor and saw that he had her pistol in his hand. She thought he’d broken her finger from tearing it out of the trigger guard. The boy was perhaps seventeen years old, his face bloody where his spectacles had been shattered, the glass cutting his cheeks and his hawkish nose. He pointed the pistol at her, and she froze.