The Blinding Knife(267)

Orholam have mercy. They didn’t stand a chance.





Chapter 109




“Five minutes until sunrise,” the orange drafter announced. He was nervously, noisily sucking his spit back and forth across the khat he had tucked under his lip.

A dozen orange and yellow drafters were gathered at the base of Ru’s southern wall, waiting for dawn, nervously commanding Liv and her team to be quiet. Liv’s team was made of four drafters and four soldiers. With her, they made the holy number of nine. Liv would have preferred to make the holy number of ninety-nine. She would have preferred to have fighters who could draft and drafters who could fight, but the Blood Robes were years away from having anything remotely as good as the Blackguard.

The Blood Robes’ army was awake and armed, but the closest of them were four and five hundred paces back from the wall. The Atashians surely had guns that could reach that far, but they’d decided to conserve their powder. Liv could only guess that their situation was nearly as dire as the Blood Robes’. The Color Prince’s battery on the south side of the neck had only enough powder for one shot from each gun. His hope was that the Chromeria’s fleet would avoid that shore altogether and instead hug the opposite coast, which they believed their Atashian allies still held.

Liv wouldn’t know how that turned out until it was all over, if ever. Her own mission was the next thing to a suicide mission. Her soldiers were dressed in scored and scarred leather armor and faded blue cloaks of the Blue Bastards, a mercenary company that had been hired by Ru. Mercenary companies rarely took bids volunteering to endure sieges, so Ru must have paid them a fortune.

And as might be expected of men whose primary loyalty was to their purse, they’d been willing to come to an understanding with the Color Prince. They had refused to fight for him, fearing that a reputation as turncloaks would interfere with future contracts. But they did agree to grease the skids for Liv’s team in return for leniency when the Blood Robes took the city.

Like every leader, the Color Prince hated mercenaries and still had to use them. He was convinced that the pirate lord Pash Vecchio had betrayed him. The weedy pirate had sworn that his great ship would hold the south shore, herding the Chromeria’s fleet straight into their trap. They’d had word that his ship had been seen, so maybe he’d show up at the last moment. More likely, he was waiting at the outskirts like some of the other pirates, hoping to swoop in on the wounded ships after the battle and take slaves and plunder.

The sound of distant guns, rumbling over the sea, came before dawn did. Liv wondered if people she knew were dying out there. She turned back to look at the wall, watching the sunlight creep down its face.

“I thought this was impossible,” she said to the orange-eyed khat chewer.

“Chromeria trained, aren’t ya? Chromeria lies, princess.”

Of all the colors, only the Color Prince’s orange drafters were better than the Chromeria’s. Their illusions crafted into the depths of other luxins were as good as Chromeria students’, but they also did something that Liv had heard rumors about, but that the Chromeria denied was possible: they cast feelings. You had to see the object on which they’d cast the hex, and you had to be susceptible to such things—the more emotional you were, the more powerfully you would experience the hex. But this wall was their masterpiece in two parts. First, the Color Prince’s men inside the city had cast hexes on every building and street and on the wall itself for several blocks around here. The hexes could be cast thin enough that the eye wouldn’t even pick them out, especially against backgrounds with lots of colors or patterns. But the effect remained—going right past the mind, straight to the guts, blanching the liver, putting water in the stomach. In one small neighborhood on the opposite side of this wall, everyone felt dread.

It wasn’t an alien feeling for someone to experience in a city under siege, and it accomplished what it had been intended to—people avoided this area. That meant they studied the wall less closely than they would, which meant the illusion held.

Liv asked how they did it. They said they cast their will into the creation, the same way golems were made. It made the magic alive in some sense. Forbidden by the Chromeria, of course. The luxiats thought that tearing part of your will off to make magic tore part of your soul off, and that such lost parts of your soul were never regained.

The Blood Robes knew better. So they said.

The trebuchet on the Red Cliffs above threw its great stones on every quarter hour, and it threw stones close to this neighborhood. The oranges had reached the wall, and when they set their charges, they timed them to go off when the trebuchet’s stones rocked the earth.