The Broken Eye(321)

“Where?” Cruxer asked.

“I don’t know,” Ferkudi said. “It’s hidden, that’s all I know.”

“Well that doesn’t help us, does it?” snapped Big Leo. It looked like the pain was starting to come through his initial shock from his messily broken arm. He was rarely irritable.

“Breaker?” Teia prompted.

“I know another way out exists,” Kip said. “My father told me that. He didn’t say where it was. But it’d have to be in one of the lower levels if it goes out under the bay?”

“If we want to go to the lower levels, we’ve still got to cross the great hall,” Cruxer said. “The slaves’ stairs don’t go down there. The only access is on the other side.”

“Well, that’s a stupid design,” Ben-hadad said. “Why don’t the slaves’ stairs go all the way down?”

“It’s for defense,” Cruxer said, “and as you can see, it’s working.”

“Breaker, that wasn’t what I meant,” Teia said, giving him a significant look.

“Huh?” Kip asked.

“You know,” she said, nodding her head.

“No. What?”

“I pulled a thing. You know?”

“A thing?”

“Off your—”

“This is getting intriguing,” Winsen said.

“Skin, Winsen! Off his skin!”

“Oh!” Kip said. The cards. She was asking if he’d seen anything in the cards that showed an escape route. Given that the cards were of the most powerful people in the world, it made sense that any number of them would have known about an escape route. “I don’t … I don’t remember anything helpful.”

He hadn’t been having the flashbacks—flash-sidewayses? flash-cardwises?—for the last half hour. Not that he missed them. He still had the headache, though it was less acute now. It had seemed the cards had been triggered by words, right?

Escape, he thought. Tower. Prism’s Tower. Cannon Island. Flee. Run Away.

Nothing.

Cruxer said, “Check the other doors on this level. Maybe we can go around to the stairs down or to the outside. Now, go! Not you, Breaker. You think.”

They ran off in all directions except through the double doors. Kip tried to think. He’d absorbed those cards. All those cards. Something should come to him. One of them surely must have known this secret. Any of the Blackguards would know, right?

But none came to mind. No matter what he thought. He couldn’t just call them up.

What the hell?! What use were the bloody cards if they didn’t come to mind when he needed them? Right after he’d come out of the Great Library, the cards had been leaping into his brain so fast he couldn’t stop them. They’d been triggered by every little thing.

I’m a Guile, I’m supposed to remember everything!

But he couldn’t remember any of the cards. Except the one he hadn’t lived yet. The White’s card. The puzzle card. Which was perfect. As if Kip needed puzzles now, with every passing second bringing the Lightguard closer. What had she said? ‘Not only Prisms fly’? Right. That was it. But what the hell did that mean? That she’d known about Gavin’s flying machine, his condor? Karris had flown in the condor, too. Maybe Karris had reported it. But even if the White had known about it, so what? Gavin was the only person in the world who knew the proper design of the condor or could draft enough to make it work, and after a full year of work and practice, he’d still found it incredibly difficult and dangerous. Someone could give Kip a condor, and it still wouldn’t do him any good.

‘Not only Prisms fly.’ What could it—

Oh, not fly fly. Fly like flee.

Dumbass! The White knows the secret exit! Of course she does!

It’s got to be in her card!

“Barricaded!” Big Leo shouted as he ran back to them.

“My way, too!” Teia said.

“Men coming down the stairs. Fast!” Ferkudi said.

“All of them are locked,” Cruxer said. “Kip, what you got?”

“I need light, full-spectrum light!” Kip said.

“Stairs are no good,” Ferkudi said. “Only way to get natural light is to get out.”

“Surely we’ve got a white mag torch,” Leo said. “That’d work, right?”

“Teia?”

She was already looking in the bag, as if looking would change things. “Gone. They’re all gone,” she said.

“We could go up the stairs one floor and get full light from one of the balconies there,” Big Leo said.

“There is no way I’m going up the tower,” Cruxer said. “We’re trying to get out, and the exits are all down. We go up and we have to fight through the Lightguards twice more.”