She was fast, faster than she’d ever been. She was instinctive, shooting missiles out of the air with missiles of her own, impossible shots, impossible speeds. Left left left—as they realized her weakness—and right and high, and diverting a huge curtain of flame that the red tried to drop on them from above.
It was only seconds, but the fury of the attacks made it seem an eternity. Essel and Ben-hadad were throwing luxin down the reeds, but the skimmer’s inertia was significant: its own weight, and the weight of four people on its decks, and neither Essel or Ben-hadad were particularly strong, physically or as drafters.
All it would take was one slip.
More Tafok Amagez joined the first ones, pausing only a moment to see what was happening. Half a dozen more.
Too many, and the skimmer was still too close.
And then the fourth stood, his musket cleared and reloaded. Karris saw him, and dread filled her. A premonition that cut off air like drinking tar.
She couldn’t counterattack: the missiles and fire were coming in too thick. He leveled the musket, took aim.
But Karris heard a familiar roar, a man bellowing.
A blue wedge, a V of shields as tall as a man, appeared behind the four Tafok Amagez. They didn’t even see it coming. And then a huge figure appeared, holding that V like a battering ram, running full speed. The wedge split as Ironfist rammed through the Tafok Amagez.
Sweeping his massive arms wide, bellowing that legendary shout that had melted the knees of enemies throughout the Seven Satrapies, holding the blue luxin shields to either side as he came through the middle of a dozen Tafok Amagez, Ironfist leapt off the wall, blasting the shields out into the Amagez and back, sending him flying with incredible speed.
He flipped in the air, and it looked for a moment like he was going to make it all the way to the water, but instead he dropped from that great height onto the end of the dock. Ironfist threw a gush of unfocused blue down as he landed, but the shock was still enough to stagger him and splinter wood.
His tunic had been torn half off, and blood was streaming from a cut on the side of his head, but he gathered himself and refilled with blue.
Karris had seen Ironfist run across the waves before. He drafted a narrow platform of blue, half floating on the water. He could make it fifty feet or more, and the skimmer wasn’t that far out yet. Her heart soared.
The Tafok Amagez were in chaos behind him. Several had been pushed off the wall. But as Ironfist drafted, his chest heaving from the exertion of Orholam-knew-what fighting he’d done to get through the crowd, Karris saw the Amagez with the long musket. He’d been at the far end, and he recovered first, lifting the musket with an ease and precision that told Karris this would be an easy shot for him.
He was too far away for Karris to hit with a drafted projectile. Karris was fast. Karris was accurate. But she wasn’t that fast or that accurate. She heard the shot, saw the sudden jerk and the smoke blossom from his musket—but he’d twitched off-aim at the last moment.
Karris realized that the musket she’d heard was behind her. Almost beneath her. The young marksman on the wall dropped his musket and tumbled down to the dock, dead.
And then the skimmer was picking up speed and Ironfist leapt aboard, and in less than a minute they were safely skimming down to the river, outrunning any order that could arrive to tell anyone to stop them.
Karris looked at Gavin, lying bloody on the deck, still holding the smoking musket he’d fired to save Ironfist’s life.
Gavin was grinning fiercely. Blood from his ruined left eye had trickled into his mouth, and it painted his teeth red. “Not quite useless. Not yet,” he said.
Then he passed out.
Chapter 87
A knock, and a familiar woman’s voice: “Kip?”
Kip didn’t know how long he stood in the darkness of his room. Did time even have meaning anymore? He thought perhaps that the darkness would bring back the black luxin card. He hadn’t seen the entirety of it.
But it didn’t come back. And he knew no way to call it forth consciously. There were so many things that he needed to think about and decide right now, this instant, immediately, that he was paralyzed. He couldn’t think about anything. His life was about to turn irrevocably, and he wanted to look at some card?
Granted, if he was right, and viewing—or living or remembering or whatever the hell it was that he did with the cards—was nearly instantaneous, then theoretically, he could live as many of them as he wanted, and not lose any time. But somehow he was pretty certain it didn’t work that way. If he could even figure out how to call one up, he felt like it might roast that tiny, underused pea between his ears.
The thought only served to remind him of his headache.