Teia held up four fingers, five fingers, shrugged. Commander Ironfist was already coming forward, his tall, muscular body somehow weaving around the other Blackguards on the trail as if certain death wasn’t beckoning at the slightest wrong step. He came to the center of the line. In his hand, he held a long green luxin rope. Behind him, struggling more to make it around the Blackguards because she was shorter, came the smallest of their number, a woman named Fell.
Ominous name right now, Teia thought. Ironfist helped Fell wrap the rope tightly around her waist, then threw the ends of the rope down the rest of the line. Everyone grabbed the rope except for the two Blackguards immediately beside Ironfist, who grabbed on to his belt. It was as if they were able to communicate volumes without speaking a word.
Commander Ironfist looked at Teia. “Exact count. Signal when they’re directly above us.”
Teia squared her shoulders, pulled the hat down in front of her eyes, and tried to remember the dead soldier’s gait. She rounded the corner, walking quickly, but making sure her feet were wider apart than usual to minimize the motion of her hips. She kept her head down, held her shoulders tight, as if they were bigger and more muscular than her own, and kept glancing out to sea to make it believable that she didn’t see the soldiers coming toward her.
“Arvad!” one of the men called out. “What are you doing coming up early?”
Teia bobbed her head up toward them. Trick with faking a man’s voice was not to try to become a bass—go for an easy tenor, and keep it short. “Rogue wave! Was knocked off the dock! He’s hurt!” She pointed a hand down toward the dock, standing close enough to the edge that the Blackguards could see her hand. With her fingers and thumb outstretched: five. Then she brought the other fingers in to point with her index finger alone. Plus one. Six.
She gestured for the soldiers to follow her before they could ask more, and turned her back. She got to the corner and pointed again to the dock, her arm outstretched. Then as the soldiers came directly above the Blackguards, Teia dropped her arm.
The descending soldiers weren’t fifteen feet away from the Blackguards. Ironfist turned his back to the wall, his feet pointing out, and Fell stood in front of him, in almost a hug, facing his big chest. His big hands wrapped around her hips.
After a quick count, Ironfist flung Fell up into the air and she landed with her feet in his hands at shoulder level, then he pressed straight above his head. Blue luxin blazed out from her hands, blasting her back against the green rope out over the abyss, but still she shot out more. The stretchiness of the green rope allowed her to push back and back, and Ironfist leaned out and out to be able to continue holding her feet, his body going diagonal to the trail, held only by the tension of the green rope and the two men holding on to his belt.
Fell didn’t try to blast each of the men with luxin spears or missiles. Instead, she shot a blue frame against the wall behind them, and merely made it so thick that there was no space to stand on the trail. It nudged them off. With nothing to hold on to, it didn’t take much.
As one, six men tumbled off the trail above the Blackguards. Only one gave so much as a squawk of surprise as he plunged to his death. But that nearest man hit the green luxin rope as he fell. The man flipped and continued his fall, but Fell was yanked hard to the side. At the same time, she stopped shooting out blue luxin, so she rebounded toward the wall. Ironfist leaned crazily over to one side, but couldn’t run to the right because the Blackguards were crowded thick on the ledge. Instead, he pivoted, put both of her feet in one hand, and extended that hand along the side of the ledge as both of the Blackguards on either side of him had to let go of his belt lest it throw both them and him off the ledge.
Ironfist set Fell down gently, the motion costing him his own balance—and fell off the ledge.
His big fingers slapped on the lip, slipped, and then held. The Blackguards pulled Fell in among them, and before Teia could blink, numerous luxin ropes were already around the commander. With their help, he levered himself up and stood. He didn’t seem fazed in the slightest. “They’re all dead,” he said. “But we need to hurry.”
He’d been calmly inspecting their work while he was dangling off the ledge? Bloody flux!
The sun rose to full light as they jogged up the path. When they neared the top of the path, Teia scouted ahead and saw that around the last bend, there was a stout wooden gate, ten feet tall, with sharpened spikes at the top. In the paryl light, through small gaps, she could see that it was reinforced with iron, and there were four men behind it. The drop-off beside the gate wasn’t sheer like the rest of the cliff they’d just traversed, but it was too steep to climb while armed men were above you. She thought she could make out the shapes of spears and muskets among the men stationed there, too.
She had barely reported back when the cannons above began firing out on the water. During the whole climb, Teia had been so focused on merely staying on the path and watching for booby traps or pitfalls or approaching soldiers that she’d barely looked out to sea. Their view was astounding. Gorgeous: the sun barely up, the bay blue and deeper blue-green, the sails of the ships unfurled, and now thick clouds of smoke rolling out from the broadsides as the Chromerian fleet tried to enter the bay. There were only a few small ships holding the center of the Color Prince’s lines. They fired back a volley.
“Lem,” Commander Ironfist said. “Up front.”
A small, twitchy man came forward. “Hello,” he said to Teia. He glanced at her nonexistent chest, up to her eyes, away. “Name’s Lem. True name Will. You know, Will to Willum, to Lum to Lem.”
“Sure,” Teia said. I guess.
“Thing that’s special about Lem isn’t that he’s crazy,” Lem said. “We’re all all sorts of crazy. But Lem is crazy in one particularly valuable way.”
“And you’re going to tell me what it is,” Teia said as he glanced at her chest again. She couldn’t tell if he was being creepy or if he just never looked at people’s eyes.
“Lem here believes he can do anything in the service of the Blackguard. Lem here believes rock is like butter, in front of him. He’s a bit slow, which is good, because otherwise he’d probably be dangerous as all hell. That’s what the trainers said. See, Lem can punch grips in the rock for us, no problem. Got a will that’d make Andross Guile weep like a little boy. True name Will, you see.”
“Right,” Teia said.
Lem filled himself with blue luxin, then leaned over conspiratorially to Teia. “There’s something in the water,” he said.
How did this freak get into the Blackguard?
He’s a valuable freak. Like me.
Lem extended a hand and waited. He was chanting numbers under his breath. “Forty-one, fifty-three, forty-seven, fifty-nine, no, fifty-three, fifty-nine, sixty-one, seventy-one, no…”
A hammer of blue luxin shot from his hand and pierced the stone. It stuck, a horizontal bar connected to a spike sunk deep into the stone. The bar would make a good hand- or foothold. He checked it, pulling on it to make sure there was no play, then took a deep breath. He swept a hand down and eight more of the spikes leapt from his hands in order. It would make an admirable ladder.
Blue luxin—shot into rock. Holy hells. Just when Teia thought she couldn’t get any more impressed with the Blackguards.