Kip felt a thump reverberate dimly through the ground at his feet and a second later heard the sound of a cannon. A dim trail of smoke from a crater more than a hundred paces away pointed back toward the battery up on Ruic Head, where a much larger plume of black smoke was blowing away.
“To me, to me!” Gavin shouted.
After a moment of resistance at being ordered to do something, the green in him rebelling, Kip realized it was what he wanted to do anyway. In seconds, he and five Blackguards joined Gavin.
“They’re making a god. We kill it,” Gavin said. He drafted another yellow sword, handed it to a Blackguard who had lost her weapons. “No matter what. No matter how. Got it?” He made another yellow sword, and another, tossed one to a Blackguard and one to Kip. Then he started running toward the wights. His hands were surrounded with glowing knots of yellows and reds.
As the first green spear came shooting toward Gavin, he dropped under it and rolled on the ground, came up to his knees and threw his hands forward. A fan of yellow missiles blasted out from him, each trailing chains of flame. The missiles stabbed dozens of the wights and the chains whipped around them, wrapping some in flame and scoring the wights behind.
But Gavin barely slowed. He popped back up to his feet and kept running.
A frog wight Kip hadn’t even seen descended, huge claws raking downward. Karris dodged to the side and swept her ataghan under its armpit.
Then, still fifty paces from the base of the spire, they ran into a veritable wall of green wights. Gavin crashed through a few, killing, spinning, killing—and almost got separated from the Blackguards. A Blackguard named Milk had his entire arm and shoulder ripped off by a big claw. A woman named Tisa was knocked aside as she drafted a stream of fire and accidentally shot a gush of pyrejelly down her own stomach and leg. It flamed and she screamed.
But she didn’t forget herself. As a green golem eight feet tall settled between Gavin and the rest of them to cut him off, Tisa hurled herself onto the golem’s back, taking both of them down in a sudden intense wash of fire.
Kip slashed back and forth, trying to keep up with the others. Something twisted his yellow luxin sword and he lost it.
The three remaining Blackguards reunited with Gavin, who fought with the flaming sword in one hand and luxin of alternating colors in the other. They were stuck, surrounded by dozens of wights, stopped.
A shell rocked the ground, exploding with a deafening roar. Kip felt the pressure wave and almost fell. A smoking hole cratered the green island, thirty paces away. The wights around it had been vaporized, those farther out torn to pieces.
The Blackguards and Gavin recovered first. The crater and the hole in the wights’ lines wasn’t directly between the Blackguards and the tower, but it offered movement. Freedom.
Even then, they never would have made if it the greens could tolerate order—if they’d organized their defenses. But with the help of the chaos, Gavin and his people cut through the staggered creatures and ran into the gap created by the shell, stepping on bodies and slipping on released green luxin that was evaporating as the once-men holding it died. Kip almost tripped over a woman’s bare torso—nothing else of her remained. Red and green ran in rivers next to each other, filling the crater with blood soup.
Crashing into the still-recovering lines on the opposite side of the crater with Karris, Gavin, and the remaining three Blackguards, Kip remembered his knife, still strapped to his calf, and pulled it out, stumbling. He lashed out at a big wight who was holding his bleeding eyes, weeping. Kip’s knife cut through the wight’s shell and kidneys with ease.
He felt instantly, stupidly guilty. The man hadn’t been able to defend himself, and Kip had cut him like a—
“Incoming!” Gavin shouted. He knocked Kip down.
They heard the thump and the explosion, but it was a good seventy paces away this time—no good to them, but no danger either.
By the time they stood, a man with a green bull’s head on his shoulders was charging them. Gavin leapt aside and cut the man’s back as he passed. The wight went down, but his horn caught Karris, who hadn’t jumped far enough. It spun her hard and slammed her into the ground.
Kip jumped on the bull and stabbed in through the top of its head, twisting his dagger in its brain and ripping it out. He grabbed Karris and pulled her to her feet. There was blood on her arm and chest, but instead of skewering her, the horn had passed under her armpit. She was winded, gasping for air, but not wounded. Lucky.
Gavin threw his sword into the chest of a woman who had the form of a harpy and spun, pulling his dagger-pistols from his belt. The guns spun in his hands as he pointed at Kip. Both pistols cracked and Kip ran on, certain that two wights behind him and Karris were dead.
A Blackguard was hamstringing two giants at the base of the stairs when one caught him with a war hammer in the shoulder. He staggered sideways, trying to catch himself, and met the other’s battle axe. It cut all the way through his chest.
Gavin shot yellow spears into their brains, one-two-three, in rapid succession, but it was too late for the Blackguard.
“Up,” Gavin shouted, “up!”
They ran up the stairs as if hell was on their heels. Kip was at the back. The tower was growing even as they mounted the stairs, twisting higher like a growing tree.
“What was that?” Gavin asked.
What? Kip hadn’t seen anything. He was exhausted, and they were only halfway up the tower. He looked down and saw that the wights had decided to follow them. He didn’t slow.
A clash of arms up ahead told Kip that they had encountered defense. It was all that allowed him to catch up. But Gavin had barely slowed. Kip heard screams descending, and when he passed the same spot of the winding stair, he saw wights far below, their bodies broken.
A great beam of green light hit the top of the tower, and the whole thing bucked and shivered. It nearly hurled them off the stairs.
“What the hell is that?” Commander Ironfist asked.
No one answered. No one knew. The green itself felt different suddenly, not affecting all of them so much as being gathered elsewhere. Teia was holding a pair of binocles. Through them, she could see more than most. “It’s coming from the Great Pyramid,” she said. “Or going to it, I can’t tell.”
“Is it a weapon?”
“I don’t know!”
Men were scrambling around the room, the gunners swabbing out the smoking hot bronze barrel, cooling it and making sure no bits of burning powder remained in the breech that would ignite the charge. Others were weighing the powder for the next shot. The Blackguards who were tasked with muscling the great thing back into place were taking a well-deserved rest. Though the carriage was wheeled, the culverin was still massive. Hezik was staring alternately at a list of numbers he’d scribbled on a piece of parchment someone had passed him and down at the green island, lips moving silently, doing mental sums.
Everything was chaos, happening all at once.
“There’s a green man on top of the tower,” the spotter on the long lens called out.
Whatever was happening between the Great Pyramid and the bane was definitely helping the invaders. The tower was getting more massive by the second. “Why would the Atashians be helping the bane?” Teia asked.
“Sir,” the spotter said, “if I didn’t know better—Sir, that thing is Atirat.”