The Blinding Knife(268)

One Atashian captain had been assassinated, and another bought off, guaranteed safety for himself and his family when the city fell. They’d burrowed a hole in the wall, then covered it with an illusion. Blue luxin, overlaid with red and yellow and orange, twisted into illusions that looked nearly the same as the wall itself. It would fool a quick glimpse from twenty or thirty paces, but not a close inspection.

The drafters and sappers had worked through every night, with thick wool blankets draped over them to hide the light of the mag torches, emerging exhausted and coated in sweat every morning. But in mere days they’d made an unseen gate, with supports drafted to hold up the wall above them, wide enough for five men to pass abreast.

It wouldn’t be wide enough to let in the entire army, and it was too short for horses to pass, but that wasn’t the strategy. An hour after Liv’s team entered the city, the Color Prince would send five hundred of his best drafters and warriors through this tunnel, with instructions to open the city’s south gate and let his armies in.

Ultimately, Liv didn’t see how it could fail. The Color Prince hadn’t been so sure. He’d wanted to deal with the Chromeria’s fleets on one day and Ru the next in case the fleet landed ashore and attacked him from the rear instead of trying to bring supplies directly in to Ru. But he’d made his gamble: to spring his trap, he needed to do both things today.

If things didn’t work out, Liv was going to find herself very, very alone in a hostile city.

“Time!” the orange barked. As the sun drenched them, he and a blue and a yellow all touched the wall in slightly different places, reaching the control nodes that they’d left on the surface. They pulled back the illusion like a curtain.

“Remember what our prince has said,” Liv said. “What we do today, we do for mercy. The price of freedom is always paid in blood. And if the price must be paid, better that it be paid by few. Let us be swift and implacable.”

It wasn’t much of a speech, but Liv had never done this before. Her men nodded, then they went into the wall first. She was second to last. If she died, their entire mission would fail, so they would protect her above all. The price and privilege of being a superviolet.

She ducked in behind them. The wall was eighteen paces thick at its base. Immense. This was the reason they hadn’t bombarded the wall straight on with the trebuchets—it would have taken them months to break through. Cannons could have done it, but they didn’t have the amount of powder necessary, nor easy access to saltpeter mines to make more. But whoever had told the Color Prince that five men could pass abreast had been lying. The space was so short that Liv had to stoop deeply to get through, and five men abreast? She could reach each wall with her outstretched fingers. It was enough for their purposes, and Liv was momentarily glad that she was going into the city first, rather than in the middle of five hundred men straining to get through this tiny hole while under fire and magic.

Grateful to be going alone into an enemy city. I’m mad.

And then they were out. Some of the men were dusty. One, a seven-footer named Phyros, was dabbing his head, which was bleeding freely from smacking it on the roof of the tunnel. They slapped off the dust from their faded blue shirts—the closest thing to a uniform the Blue Bastards had—and bound a bandage quickly around Phyros’s head.

“Follow me,” Phips Navid said. He was a cousin of Payam Navid, the gorgeous magister Liv and every other girl at the Chromeria had half loved. Phips had grown up in Ru, though his father and older brothers and uncles had all been hanged after the Prisms’ War. He’d been twelve years old, and narrowly avoided the noose himself.

They jogged through the streets. Near the wall, because of the dread hex, there was no one at all out. But soon they jogged past some soldiers, who merely nodded at them. They swung one block wide to avoid a troop of the Blue Bastards—only the top few commanders of the mercenaries knew their plan. Any underlings who saw them would ask what they were doing.

Most of the city was untouched as yet by the war. The Color Prince wanted a new power base for his war, not another drain on his resources, so he’d had the trebuchets on the Red Cliffs concentrate their stones on a few neighborhoods, and the artillery batteries. There were whole markets and palaces that remained untouched. The buildings were whitewashed adobe with flat roofs that served as extra rooms, especially on hot nights, just as they did in Tyrea. But here there were far more palaces built around central courtyard gardens. Whatever damage had been inflicted on Ru during the Prisms’ War had long ago been scrubbed away by their wealth.