A gentle head shake. “Most were, and all those who remain are, but the magic is possible for others.”
It was all suddenly too much.
Too much explanation. A prophet might know many hidden things, sure, but all of this? So clearly? Plain answers and not a god-damned rhyme in the whole thing?
Gavin took a step back. His throat suddenly felt like a fist had clamped around it.
As if retreating from a snarling dog, pretending his heart wasn’t laboring, he staggered to his feet, and stepped back and back.
The old prophet watched him, amused. He didn’t pursue him.
That didn’t make Gavin feel any better.
There was something sinister in that amusement, wasn’t there? Gavin’s heart clenched with the old feeling like he was going to die.
He reached the spot he wanted at the edge and craned his neck to look over to the level below him.
Gavin was standing directly above that gap he’d had to leap across before he could climb the final stairs to the tower’s top—the gap where he’d left Orholam.
An old man was still down there, directly below Dazen, on his knees, scowling at all the blood. He looked up suddenly. “Gavin?! You’re still alive! Hey, is there someone up there with you? I thought I saw someone’s back a few—hey, Gavin!”
But Dazen had whipped his head around, startled back from the edge. The doppelgänger was still up here, now standing mere feet away from him, though Dazen hadn’t heard him move. It was holding the gun-sword.
A chill shot down Dazen’s spine. His breath caught. He took a step backward and felt his heel shift on the empty air beyond the tower’s edge.
The doppelgänger poked the gun-sword into the bloody ground and folded his hands atop it as if it were a walking stick and he simply a kindly old man.
Looking between the two copies of the same man, one before him and one below him, Dazen addressed the deceiver on the tower’s top with him. “You tricked me! You’re not Orholam!”
The old man leaned on the gun-sword. He smiled. “Oh, but I Am.”
Chapter 121
“Where the hell’d they go?” Kip said.
He and his men had been bracing for battle with the forty or fifty Lightguards that had been guarding the lift. He’d even come up with a plan to get the jump on them, but it hadn’t been a good one. He’d expected to spill blood.
But the thugs were simply gone.
“We, uh, detained them,” a soft-looking young nobleman said. He appeared to be the last person who could have done such a thing.
Kip and his men looked at each other. Someone triggered the lift to summon it. They weren’t going to slow too much to investigate a mystery right now; they needed to get to the roof.
“The Iron White came. She showed us how,” a woman volunteered.
“And Commander Fisk,” the first man said. “The stones on that guy! I’m surprised he doesn’t have to travel with a wheelbarrow.”
Kip lifted an eyebrow and the man fell silent. “They left? Just now?”
He got nods all around.
“They were going to kill her! They were taking her to execute her!” someone said.
“We’ve got those bastards disarmed and locked in a storage room. Do you want to—”
Kip shook his head as the lift arrived. He didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth: not having to have a battle with the Lightguards here was a huge boon, but Andross had assumed Commander Fisk would stay at his post upstairs with Zymun. Fisk was supposed to be using those giant stones of his to lead the Blackguard in killing Zymun after he went wight.
I can’t exactly be mad that Fisk is saving Karris instead . . . but as a general, I’m furious.
Of course, Andross surely hadn’t told Fisk his plan. Andross never told anyone his plans for fear they’d screw them up. So it was Andross’s fault. In a battle, there were too many moving parts to manage every detail, too many players acting in extreme ways for even an Andross Guile to predict everything.
There was no one for whom Fisk would leave his post—except for Karris, and only if her life were in danger.
The lift took them up to the penultimate level, where they had to switch lifts to get to the highest level.
Kip’s chest felt tight. “You feel it?” he asked as they set the weights.
Nods all around. The dull thrum of the bane could be felt in all of their bones, but that was the next fight. This one was enough for now.
The Mighty were checking their weapons, never mind they’d checked them minutes before.
The lift opened to the Prism’s and White’s level of the tower. The Mighty and the best of their compatriots presented a hedgehog of muskets, drawn arrows, spears, and crossbow bolts—to an empty foyer.
No one stood at the checkpoint here, or farther down the hallway. It made things infinitely easier for Kip and his people—this hall could be held at the checkpoints by a dozen men with muskets for hours.
Good luck? Kip was so unfamiliar with the creature he didn’t dare trust it.
“Superviolets, sub-reds, out!” Big Leo said, suddenly every bit the commander.
Kip, with nothing to do until others finished their work, thought idly, ‘Commander Big Leo’?
Huh. That did sound a bit awkward. ‘Commander Leonidas’?
Hmm. Maybe so.
If we live.
The superviolets and sub-reds streamed out of the lift, checking for traps. Kip thought again of Teia. Orholam, but it would have been nice to have Teia here. She was so fast, so sharp.
And so absent. Curled up in her darkened room, shivering against the lacrimae sanguinis in her very eyes, hoping it might wear off before it killed her.
They all wanted to be with her, to give her all the comfort and companionship she deserved. Kip had a million things to say, a thousand apologies—but war silenced all.
They motioned an all clear, and Big Leo motioned everyone forward. Kip wasn’t allowed to lead, not into what could be an ambush.
They made it all the way to the doors to the roof. What was wrong with the Lightguards? Not even a lookout out here? It was odd to be reminded that the enemy could be poorly led, too. Even at the top, it wasn’t always geniuses and masterminds. Sometimes it was just thugs willing to work with the worst kinds of masters. Sometimes it was the amoral, selected primarily for their skills at bootlicking.
Still, no soldiers here didn’t mean Kip wasn’t going to barge into the middle of a hundred on the other side of these doors.
So the Mighty stacked up at the doors to the roof, forty men. Ferkudi—with no sign of the silly, dopey, spacey Ferkudi he so often lapsed into—was giving rapid hand signals to the warriors in the stack.
For the space of a few heartbeats, Kip saw the young man blurred with the boy he had been. Big, soft, dopey Ferkudi, the butt of all the jokes, the oblivious knucklehead who could oddly do long calculations in his head had turned into this lethal warrior, this leader of men.
And yet he was Ferkudi still. He wasn’t one or the other; he was one or the other as the situation demanded.
Kip loved them both.
And he was terrified that he was going to get his friend killed.
But not terrified to inaction.
Kip checked his pistols’ load and action and flint and frizzen. No luxin, not now.
Big Leo looked to him. Kip nodded.