His head shot backward as an arrow punched through his eye and popped his helmet off.
Tlatig dove under the man even as he fell, and caught his helmet before it could clang on the rocks. The dying man fell across her outstretched body, cushioning and muffling his fall.
Rolling the man off of Tlatig carefully, Buskin turned the spasmodically twitching man facedown. He drew a knife and drove it into the guard’s neck at the base of the skull. The twitching stopped immediately. Buskin turned expressionless eyes on Teia and motioned for her to get to work. Still shocked, she returned to the spot and peered south. There were three soldiers standing on the dock, chatting with each other and enjoying the rising dawn. All three had bows, but all were unstrung, as if they expected to have warning.
They’re dead and they don’t even know it yet.
The dock was barely fifteen paces long, and had two small rowboats tied to it, bobbing in the waves and creaking as they rubbed and bumped against the wood of the dock.
Shooting out a beam of paryl light, Teia could see that all three men were wearing full mail and helmets. She wasn’t going to be much help. “All of them have full—”
A bowstring thrummed above her. She rolled over and saw Tlatig drawing another arrow smoothly from her quiver. She’d been looking farther to the right. Teia had been so focused on the dock, she hadn’t even noticed that there was a little shack for the guards. And two men there were down—in full sight of the men on the docks.
Tlatig was already turning toward the docks.
“Three,” Tugertent said. It wasn’t a count of the guards; it was a countdown, and moments later, three arrows jumped into the air as Teia watched.
The guard farthest left took an arrow through the side of his neck. It must have cloven his spine, because he fell instantly, limply, straight into the water. A second guard grabbed the side of his neck, which was spurting blood like a fountain. A dim whine sounded as the third man turned, his helmet deflecting the arrow intended for his neck. It spun his helmet in front of his eyes and he slapped at it, already moving. The archers all loosed another volley. Teia couldn’t see if they’d hit the man or not, but when he dove into the water, his dive looked purposeful.
“Go!” Buskin hissed. The three archers ran down the trail, arrows fitted to their bows.
Teia drew her knife and followed them, not knowing what else to do. She turned the beam of paryl onto the little hut. The paryl light cut through the leather flaps over the windows. She saw a man in mail moving toward the door.
“Hut!” she whispered. “Front door!”
Tlatig was already headed toward the hut, and as the front door opened, Teia saw her loose an arrow from five paces into the darkness beyond. In the paryl light—the leather window flap dimming her vision only as much as silken gauze would—she saw him fall to the floor.
Buskin and Tugertent were out on the dock, searching the water. It was still dark enough that the sun didn’t help them at all. Teia ran out to join them. The archers were moving up and down the length of the dock, peering into the depths as well as they could.
Teia’s paryl beam cut through the water, scattering, but much better than visible-spectrum light.
“There!” She pointed. “Swimming!” The man was swimming—underwater—twenty paces distant. Heading for the shore to the north.
“Balls,” Tugertent said. “Swimming in full mail. Didn’t think you could even do that.” She drew an arrow. “I got this one.” From where she was, standing right next to Tugertent, Teia thought she saw a tiny shimmer around the fletching of her arrow.
The swimming soldier reached the shore seventy paces distant or more and surfaced slowly, silently. Tugertent’s arrow met his bare head, and he slumped back into the water. Teia swore that the arrow had curved slightly in the air. What the hell?
“Brave,” Tugertent said. “And crazy strong.” She cursed in appreciation.
“Double-check he’s dead,” Commander Ironfist said.
Tugertent saw Teia looking at her, the question obvious in her eyes. She put a finger to her lips. Quiet. Teia let it go. There were more important things.
Tlatig gave a signal from the cabin that Teia thought was the all-clear, and Buskin motioned something back to her. Buskin trotted back down the line.
“You can see through walls and water?” he asked. He was old for a Blackguard, one of the ebon-skinned, blue-eyed Parians who usually only came from noble families, but he was almost painfully thin where Commander Ironfist was thick. His halos were red, and streaked out in lines through his irises.
“Only if they’re close enough, and thin enough,” Teia said. “I saw through the leather at the windows.”
Commander Ironfist said, “Teia, you go first up the trail, start now. Look for men and traps. Tugertent will be with you in thirty seconds. Their relief might be coming down at any time. I want to be up before they start coming down.”
The Blackguards were already carrying the bodies toward the dock to throw in the water.
Teia stopped them, found the smallest man, and stripped off his sword belt, floppy hat, and jacket. She pulled the jacket on over her own clothes, strapped on the sword, and pulled the hat over her hair. There was blood on the jacket. She put it out of her mind.
The Blackguards looked at her oddly, but she ignored them. She refilled her hand with imbalanced paryl to make a torch. Her mouth was dry and it was hard to swallow, but all she had to do was jog and look. She could do that. She moved to the head of the trail, and when Tugertent joined her, she felt overwhelmingly grateful.
“Let me go around corners first,” she said.
The rest of the Blackguards gathered behind them. She took the lead and the three archers followed thirty paces behind her. The rest were ten paces behind them. The path itself soon changed from a goat track winding around trees and bushes to one cut into the rock of the head itself. It was barely three feet wide, and Teia saw that some of the men behind her had to turn their shoulders sideways to slide along the wall. The wall itself was worn smooth from decades or centuries of other soldiers doing the same. They ascended sharply in long switchbacks, back and forth across the face of bare rock wall.
Teia kept her paryl beam cutting left and right, expanding her pupils to see, searching for booby traps or alarm wires, then tightening them back to the visible spectrum. Magister Martaens had said that her mistress’s master had navigated completely by paryl light? There was so much noise in that spectrum, Teia could barely believe it. But she found no traps.
She stayed half a switchback ahead of the Blackguards, and when they were all about halfway up the cliffs, Teia heard voices above them.
“—says, ‘She would of if I were rocking her boat!’ ”
At least four men laughed, including the speaker.
Teia glanced back. In contrast to her own panic, the Blackguards behind her looked calm. But the soldiers were behind and above them, and coming down, as if racing them for the corner of the switchback. The archers didn’t have any angle to shoot them, and if they waited until the soldiers rounded the corner, the soldiers would certainly have time to sound an alarm.
Retreating back around the corner, out of sight, Teia looked back for orders.
“Get a count,” Buskin mouthed to her.
Both parties were walking toward the same switchback corner, a hundred paces away, and the two trails got closer and closer as they neared each other. In another forty paces, if the descending soldiers looked down, they’d be able to see the ascending Blackguards.