“We wait!” Karris said. “Out of my line!”
She braced her feet and brought the flaming luxin in her left hand up as if she were sighting down a musket.
“Kill them!” a familiar voice shouted. Orholam damn her, it was the Nuqaba herself.
Karris shot a thin, continuous ribbon of red luxin through the air. It ignited in a huge fan. She dragged it back and forth in front of the wall and the soldiers there. All the luxin burned away before it hit the men standing there, but a roiling wall of flame wasn’t something anyone wanted to approach. The heat itself would be a slap in their faces.
“She can’t throw it far enough to hit you!” the Nuqaba shouted as soon as Karris let the first wash of flames die.
Fool doesn’t know the difference between mercy and a lack of will.
But the truth was, Karris killing one soldier could be overlooked, called an accident. Killing a dozen was a diplomatic incident, war. War in the middle of war. Against Paria, their ally; Paria, which the Chromeria needed.
But they needed Gavin more.
Karris stopped, indecisive for the first time.
“The commander said to go!” Essel shouted. “We don’t even know if he’s leaving this way!”
“Get on the reeds, and turn us,” Karris ordered Essel and Ben-hadad, “but wait for my word. I’ll defend. We wait for Ironfist!”
Then a fireball arced through the air toward the skimmer and plopped into the water with a hiss and a kick of steam. Drafters. The Nuqaba’s Amagez drafters were on their way through the crowd.
One arm near useless, drafters and soldiers closing in, muskets being fired at them, and all Karris could think was that her real problem was that she was no longer a watch captain of the Blackguard and therefore was in no position to give orders at all, and that as soon as Essel realized it, the woman would take charge.
Karris threw another narrow stream of flame, hard. It was difficult to gauge the force needed as the distance changed, but luck smiled on her. Most of the red burned off in the air in a frightening display, but some little hit the massed musketeers across their muskets and chests.
The screams were immediate, but they were screams of surprise and fear, not of agony. With most of the flammability of the red exhausted, the men weren’t consumed. Hands were burnt, muskets thrown away, tunics hurriedly stripped off, men fell over each other as even those in the second and third rows threw themselves backward, away from the billows of flame.
“We have to go, now!” Essel said.
Karris hesitated again.
“He’s coming,” Gavin mumbled, from the deck where he was lying. He sounded delirious. “Don’t you see him? His angel’s fighting through the crowd.”
Essel said, “He’s not in his right mind. Karris, we have to—”
“We stay!” Karris snarled, but even as the words crossed her lips, she knew they had more to do with the red she was still drafting to keep the flame alive in her left hand, and the green she was drawing in that refused to be told what to do, and her own fear at what she’d seen in Gavin’s good eye.
His blue, unprismatic eye.
Before the smoke cleared in the gap where the musketeers had been, Karris saw a glow like a torch, lighting the dissipating smoke from within. An instant later, four of the Nuqaba’s Tafok Amagez appeared. Warrior-drafters. One had hands encased in red luxin, already aflame. He threw fireballs, right and left.
The right-hand shot was wide. A lefty then, or a feint. It gave Karris time to hurl a green projectile out to intercept the other fireball, batting it aside.
“Go, go, go!” Karris shouted. It was one thing to wait for Ironfist; it was another to commit suicide.
Three of the four Tafok Amagez attacked, throwing blue missiles that exploded in shrapnel, and green spears, and red fire. The fourth tried to fire a long musket, but it misfired and he was working to clear it. The Tafok Amagez were brute force drafters: if something didn’t yield when they hit it, they hit it harder.
Unable to use their physical strength against her except to throw their luxin really hard and fast, and unable to use their numbers to surround her, they kept doing more of the same. But Karris didn’t merely have to protect herself, she had to protect everyone on the skimmer and the skimmer itself. With a weak left arm.
She dodged through the lux forms—the modified martial arts moves that compensated for the balance shifts of throwing the weight of luxin—always giving herself an anchor to throw shields left and projectiles right and absorb and divert.
Not having used luxin for so long gave her an unusual edge. Like drinking several cups of kopi when you haven’t had any for a while, the luxin hit her hard. The wild energy of green roared past her injury, and the heat of red burned out the voice of her pain. But her long experience took that energy and passion, and made it a blade.