Brent Weeks - The black prism

The king's eyes focused on Kip's face within the green armor. "You?" he said. "Lina's brat? She's not worthy of vengeance and you know it."

"Kip!" Someone was shouting, but Kip barely heard it. The king was trying to draw a bich'hwa from his belt, but he was in too much pain.

"Go to hell!" Kip screamed. "You go to hell!" He lifted the king high and squeezed with all his strength and all his will.

"Kip! Stop! This is just what Lord Omnichrome wants-"

Nothing could penetrate the madness, the sheer fury. Kip wasn't even sure whether it was more at this man for massacring his village or at his mother. He loved her. He hated her.

King Garadul screamed and Kip screamed and together they drowned out Corvan Danavis's scream. Kip's hands clapped together and the king's head popped like a grape, like a watermelon dropped from a great height, splattering juice all over.

"Kip! No! It's just what they want you to do!" Corvan Danavis's voice penetrated Kip's iron skull as he dropped the king's limp corpse onto the platform.

Looking up, stunned, Kip saw Corvan Danavis, mounted at the head of perhaps a hundred men riding into the square. The invaders, already broken and leaderless without King Garadul, scattered at the sight of so many fresh soldiers.

Kip heard a body fall behind him, and turned to see a Mirrorman with an arrow in his heart. Someone had saved him. Again. He hadn't even seen the man. His brain was swimming. He felt like he was shrinking. He was standing on his own feet again, the green luxin was gone. He tottered, and felt someone steady him on his feet. He turned. Karris had come down from the roofs and was taking the bich'hwa from the king's body. Karris? He'd meant to save her, hadn't he?

That turned out well.

He looked at King Garadul's body and felt nothing but emptiness. When he looked up, Corvan Danavis was there, swearing. Kip had never heard Master Danavis swear.

"Do you have any idea what you've just done?" Corvan asked.

"Go to hell," Kip said, empty, dry, lifeless. "He killed our whole town. He deserved worse."

Corvan stopped and looked at Kip with a new respect in his eyes. He didn't say anything for a moment, then said, "Mount up. We have to get out of the city. Now."

"But I killed him. Don't we win?" Kip asked. His head felt so thick and fuzzy. And the light was hurting his eyes. He wanted nothing so much as a blanket and a dark room. They had won, hadn't they? "Why do we have to go?"

"Look at that," Karris said, coming close. She was already mounted. She was pointing toward the wall.

Lord Omnichrome stood on top of the Mother's Gate, perhaps four hundred paces distant, and when he spoke, through some trick of magic, they could hear him perfectly. "They've killed King Garadul! Avenge the king! Drive out the foreigners!"

The gate opened, revealing hundreds of drafters-hundreds-and dozens of color wights. They were followed by thousands more soldiers.

"That's why," Karris said.

Gavin's intuition was wrong.

On arriving at the Hag's Gate, he'd become like a man trying to plug a leaky hull with his fingers and toes. He could only reach so far. He and the Blackguards had held the Hag's Gate alone, with no other support, against thousands of soldiers, for ten minutes now. At this point he could hold it by simply standing here behind the bullet shield his Blackguards had drafted in front of him.

They weren't fighting him. Everywhere he went, the army facing him withdrew. If the city had only had one gate, that might have been helpful. But with three gates and a crumbling three-quarters circle for a wall, it was hopeless. No one would face him. They simply sent men around the sides and waited. If he held these men up for long, the armies would simply enter through the other gates. By this time surely all the gates had fallen.

So his enemy was canny. He wasn't wasting his men throwing them against Gavin. Time would deliver the victory into his hands, so he was preserving his strength. No need to rush the victory. Send the men around Gavin and advance everywhere but where Gavin was. Then Gavin would either be rendered totally ineffectual, dashing from one place to another fighting men who melted away, or he would become separated from the main body of his army-at which point Lord Omnichrome would throw away as many lives as he needed to to kill him. Or capture him.

The campaigner in Gavin was furious. During the war, he would have gone for the throat. They wanted to melt in front of him? He would have gone for the king and killed him and let the chips fall where they may. Doing such a thing would put him in the most peril possible, but he wouldn't have cared. Which is why fortune favors the young. He snorted. If he got killed, the refugees wouldn't make it two leagues out of the harbor.

Cursing, Gavin drafted the retreat flares and shot them high into the sky.

"Any news from the docks?" he asked.

"No, sir."

Gavin hadn't expected any messengers to be able to find him, but it still would have been nice. "Let's go."

A red Blackguard laid down a thick carpet of red luxin across the broken opening of the gate and set fire to it as Gavin turned and started jogging. They'd lost their horses earlier, and hadn't grabbed any replacements. Horses that weren't trained to musket fire and magic were often as dangerous to their riders as they were useful. Being mounted also made you a nicer target for muskets and drafters. The city wasn't that big, they'd run.

Odd, running through an empty city. Almost everyone was simply gone, and there wasn't yet that air of abandonment and layer of dust that settled over cities soon after their inhabitants had left. Garriston was the kind of empty that happened when people left food burning on the fire and simply ran. The burnt smell hadn't even dissipated yet. In fact, they were lucky no one had burned the city down. Empty alleys. Empty homes. Little potted flowers abandoned in windowsills and not yet withered.

Death will come for you too, little flower.

They made it to one of the bridges when the ambush was sprung. Two dozen drafters and several color wights popped up from the roofs and began hurling magic. No hesitation, no warning. Of course. They'd circled Gavin to cut off the most obvious route out. The flat roofs gave them an excellent platform from which to attack, and the open area of the bridge made a perfect killing field.

But the Blackguards were Blackguards. Every one of them knew his task and how the tasks would shift depending on which of them were killed. They practiced for this. This is what they were. Shields of green luxin, blue luxin, and more green luxin, three layers thick, enfolded Gavin. He knew exactly where they would land, and each shield had holes in it, so that he could fight too.

He stuck a hand outside of his shield and pointed at every one of the attackers he could see. He shot narrow tendrils of superviolet luxin at them, sticking it to each drafter, leaving dangling ropes of superviolet. Two of the Blackguards were superviolet/blue bichromes. Their first action was to shield Gavin, second to shield themselves, and third-if possible-this. They could see Gavin's superviolet threads, and they drafted blue along those shining paths as they pulled grenadoes from their bandoliers. They hurled the grenadoes, which followed the arcing superviolet tracks unerringly. One, two, three, four, five, six. They had even bolstered the arcs of luxin so they followed a natural throwing path.

But the ambushers were moving too. Three Blackguards went down in the first wave of fire missiles. In defending Gavin first, they couldn't fix their own shields in time. A gout of red luxin jetted in from four sides, trying to drench the entire bridge so they could set it alight. Blue and green Blackguards threw up shields to divert the flows off the sides of the bridge while a yellow threw light-burst grenadoes at everyone she could see.