The shock of the missile was greater than she’d expected, and she left her guard open for too long. A blue drafter appeared from nowhere with an ash lance, coming up for her guts.
His head flew half apart as Grinwoody’s blunderbuss discharged, but the dead man still completed his step blindly thrusting. But Grinwoody’s old training of never assuming a dead man knew he was dead had him already moving in toward the threat. He smashed the butt of the blunderbuss against the lance, sending it safely away, and the dead man took no second step.
There was no thanks. No time for it. Tamerah had been mortally wounded in the clash, blood shooting from her neck, then slowing, slowing, even as her breath did, and the nearest Blackguard took her in his arms, that her last sight would be of one who loved her.
They pressed on. A thousand paces left, and no chance to look to see how many wights and drafters were between them and that great tower.
In the next clash, she raked her scorpion across a blue drafter’s belly, opening it with all four claws. She dove under a musket blast.
The man who’d shot at her was dead before she regained her feet. Gill’s spinning spear flung blood in a wide circle.
Glancing back, she saw Grinwoody parry too slowly and take a blue spear in his guts—though a formidable warrior, the old man was no longer in his prime. But the luxin spear tip shattered on Grinwoody’s mirror armor and merely jabbed the old man with its wood shaft. It was still a blow that drove the wind from the old man’s lungs.
Karris lunged with her ataghan, but the wight attacking Grinwoody was a hair too far away. The point of her ataghan barely poked the back of its head, knocking it off-step, but not piercing its skull.
It was enough. Grinwoody stepped into its arms and drove a blade up under its ribs, wrenching the blade around before twisting it away.
Behind him, Rivvyn Shmuel dodged into the path of a monstrously huge blue wight and ran him through with a slender spear, but the wight threw great arms around him, and lifted, then threw layer upon layer of luxin around his waist and legs. Shmuel drew twin daggers and stabbed in a frenzy, over and over, trying to kill it before it could immobilize his arms. Then, as the huge wight fell to its knees, Shmuel calmed and buried one dagger in the base of its skull.
The dying wight went boneless, but Shmuel was bound to it with blue luxin and was dragged to the ground. He disappeared under a half-dozen wights.
Gill and Karris killed the wights atop the Blackguard as he fought them from beneath, but by the time they got them all, Shmuel’s throat had already been ripped open. With one hand, he was holding his life’s blood in while the other held a dagger drenched in his enemies’ blood. But now his grip relaxed, and blood poured out. His eyes dimmed.
Forward again—ever forward—though now with only five Blackguards.
Three hundred paces out now, not far! They sprinted up a rise, not daring to slow to reload muskets, and suddenly found themselves facing a double line of Blood Robe musketeers. More than twenty of them. The front row kneeling, the back row standing, all muskets leveled.
But their officer, facing the Chromeria, gave no order to fire. His eyes were on the tower.
An instant later, Karris and everyone else saw why.
With the speed and dazzling, eye-burning intensity of a falling star, something streaked in a fiery crimson-and-sapphire line from the top of the Prism’s Tower to the great blue tower at the center of the bane.
It lasted only one blinding moment, and seemed like it had been jerked away from its low, intended target up and to the side.
Karris found herself tackled, thrown to the side out of the way of the firing line, but the blue officer still gave no orders. The other Blackguards were cutting into the musketeers’ ranks with astonishing speed and efficiency.
Blues were slashed, spun, muskets seized, muskets discharged into others, kneeling men knocked down, stabbed on the ground even as the Blackguard attacked the next and the next.
Twenty-four men, killed by six, in seconds.
But Karris was looking back up toward the Prism’s Tower, where that incredible magic had come from. Her heart swelled.
Someone was looking out for them. Someone saw, someone cared, someone was trying to save them.
They ran on.
She saw that two great lines now stretched from the top of the Prism’s Tower, one to Ebon’s Hill and the other to Cannon Island. Small figures were zipping down each one.
So her repairs had worked. Good.
But still, those guys must have balls of steel. Zipping down the escape chains into this?
With a spear, Grinwoody moved down the line of falling pagans, stabbing and twisting, stabbing and twisting. He said, “Sure didn’t think I’d go out like this.”
The others had been taking advantage of the lull to reload.
“What?” Karris asked. Having mounted this rise, they finally had a good view of what was around them in every direction. Behind them, the Blood Robes had caught on to their incursion, and several hundred were chasing to catch up with them. The sides were open, but led nowhere, and would be closed off in minutes.
Between Karris and her goal of the great blue plinth were hundreds and hundreds of blues—thousands—with more coming by the moment, called back from the front lines to stop her attack. Against Karris and her six.
Her heart cratered.
The blues were already between her little force and the bane. And the bane itself was sheer-sided, with no helpful steps for her to charge up like the bane at Ru had had.
But . . . the tower’s perfection was marred, not far from the base.
A single line left by that falling-star strike from the Prism’s Tower cut across it as if it were a bamboo shoot cut with a sword.
Except dropping blue luxin the width of the sword-cut meant dropping an entire tower’s mass onto the crystalline blue luxin beneath it. Luxin that was marvelously strong on one plane but otherwise fragile on others.
A sharp report echoed across the plain of this weird blue island, and Karris saw cracks race up the tower’s face, and slower ones run down from the cut as well.
They shattered into vast crystals the size of whole buildings and fell in many directions, not least toward Karris.
“Oh, shit,” Gill said.
She found herself thrown into a crack and buried under a pile of protective bodies just as chunks of razor-sharp blue luxin rained from the sky. Gill threw the shield above them, only to have it ripped away by some blow or from the vast chalky wind of gritty blue dust blasting over them.
A minute later, they stood, binding cloths over their faces so they wouldn’t breathe the sharp blue dust. Miraculously, none of them had died, though everyone other than Karris had at least small cuts from flying frostglass. The same could not be said for many hundreds of the enemy. A great portion of the tower had fallen into the bulk of the pagan army. Others had been sliced to ribbons by the sideways-flying shrapnel.
Hundreds more, farther out, couldn’t have actually been injured, but they were stunned to immobility, their wills shaken by the cataclysm that had befallen what they’d thought impervious to attack.
Others were slowly recovering, moaning under the blue dust and the rubble.
Karris gave hand signals to advance. The blues might be broken altogether—or they might recover at any moment.
Soon, Gill pointed sharply in one direction and took the lead.
That was right, Gill was almost a blue drafter; he’d barely failed his testing in it, and hadn’t tried again, afraid he would be named a polychrome and become too valuable for Blackguard service. He must be feeling something.