But it wasn’t filched candy, it was the crushed skull of a man, and being caught red-handed here was literal. Ferkudi closed his mouth as he looked at them, and his pink tongue darted out to clear his mouth, and then he blanched as he realized he was clearing his mouth of another man’s blood.
“Tsst!” Kip hissed, waving.
It saved Ferkudi. He shook himself and got control. He looked around, signaled—no one else was standing on the decks of either barge.
“Perimeter,” Kip told Winsen, as all of them refilled themselves with luxins. “But finish any wounded first. I can’t believe we got this lucky. There may be more.” He nodded to Big Leo, who was the other sub-red/red drafter. “You take the far barge with Ferk. I’ll get the near one.” To Cruxer, he said, “You collect Winsen’s arrows and our weapons as well as you can, I want this to be a clean raid, no hints. As soon as the White King knows who he’s fighting, we lose an advantage. Then you come help me.”
“That puts you alone on that barge,” Cruxer said. He had already collected the point that had snapped off his spear. Drafting blue luxin even as he spoke, he locked it back into place with a twist. “We agreed that you would have an—”
“Then collect our weapons quick,” Kip said. “No time.”
Kip ran out down the walkways. He heard the distant rattle of muskets as another engagement started down in the valley. Good. He made it to the barge with no trouble. Everything seemed to be going perfectly. Maybe they had plenty of time. Maybe he should wait for Cruxer.
The Mighty was too small. They simply didn’t have enough bodies to do a raid like this. They were getting lucky here. More people meant more noise, more trouble with communication, more problems, but it also meant someone to watch your back.
Hell with it. You worked with what you had. Kip threw open the door to head below. A muffled explosion from the other barge was the only warning he had that the ships were defended.
He threw himself to the side as a scared young woman in front of him fumbled a linstock and fired a small cannon toward the door Kip had just opened.
Kip was deafened and saw black spots swimming in front of his eyes. The door was shredded, but somehow he rolled to his feet.
In a bit of idiosyncratic military doctrine, the Blackguards were taught to attack an ambush. They were taught that the only way to regain initiative, having lost it to the enemy, was to attack. Immediately. Ferociously. This meant you didn’t give yourself time to regroup or time to think—but you didn’t give it to the enemy, either. They didn’t get a chance to enact phase two of their plan, because they were suddenly busy getting killed.
And Kip’s training took. He charged the young woman just as she had turned her back and was trying to light another fuse. He chopped across her arms as she reached out, but given his dazed state, cut deeply across only one forearm.
It was enough to make her drop the linstock. She turned, baffled that he was still alive, bleeding, and tried to draw the pistol tucked into her sash. He rammed his yellow luxin sword through her belly, but immediately dropped it to grab her pistol as it cleared her sash.
He trapped it in his left hand and wrenched it aside. She wasn’t strong enough to stop him. And with her left arm wounded, she didn’t have a chance to stop his right uppercut to her jaw.
She fell to the ground, insensate, doing little more than groaning as she fell on the hilt of Kip’s yellow luxin sword, driving it deeper into her gut.
Kip rolled her over and pulled his sword free. No small amount of blood followed it. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, if that. Atashian dark hair and eyes, poor clothes. Just a girl taking orders.
He should have felt something. She was unconscious, bleeding, certain to die slowly if not quickly. But he only heard Trainer Fisk’s voice: ‘Never trust the dead. Men will faint from fear at the first charge and lie at your feet, but find their courage again when you show them your back. The mortally wounded will rise to play hero one last time. You can’t always pause to make sure a dying man’s incapacitated, but when you can, you damn well better!’
After Kip’s sword came free of her body, he slapped it back into the side of her neck with all the emotion he’d summon to sink a hatchet into a stump after he was finished cutting firewood.
Satisfied from the sword’s recoil in his hand that he had cut deep enough, he didn’t even look down; he was already peering deeper into the gloom of the barge’s hold.
He followed the fuse the young soldier had been trying to light. It went to a charge against the hull, and then another, and another.
What the—?
A boom shook the ship. Not an explosion here, but on the other barge. Dammit! It must have been rigged identically to this one.
But it wasn’t a trap. If it had been, there would have been more than one guard.
Kip moved farther into the hold. There was nothing here except all the slaves at their oars on overcrowded benches and plenty of slaves in reserve.
Slaves, while the White King railed against the Chromeria for practicing slavery. Asshole.
There was no grain.
But if there was nothing here, why set charges so you could scuttle the boat?
For that matter, why were these barges up here at all? Kip had barely noticed in Cruxer’s report, but this foraging party had already sent two barges directly to Deora Neamh… but had left these here.
Charges and separation had to mean a cargo. But what cargo?
Kip had been flickering his vision between sub-red and normal vision to pierce the darkness for any violent moves toward him, but now he held up a green orb, drafted to shimmer back to light.
Despite the darkness, all the slaves wore blindfolds.
Kip ran back to the dead girl in her spreading pool of blood, and found a key around her neck. He ran to a tall man on the first bench, his pale Blood Forester arms permanently stained blue and green and yellow with luxin. Kip pulled off his blindfold.
“Who are you?” Kip demanded. He pointedly didn’t unlock the man’s manacles.
“I’m Derwyn. I’m Aleph of the Cwn y Wawr,” the man said quietly. “Repaid for our faithlessness here.”
“What faithlessness? Quick!” The Cwn y Wawr, the Dogs of Dawn, were Blood Forest’s hidden society of warrior-drafters.
The man’s stony sorrow said that he knew he was speaking his own death and he didn’t care. “We saw no path to victory, so to save our villages and families we tried to make a separate peace with the White King. He ambushed us instead. Captured us. We’re being taken to him. We either give him our fealty or he takes our eyes.”