The Broken Eye
Page 207

“Huh?” Kip asked.
“You know,” she said, nodding her head.
“No. What?”
“I pulled a thing. You know?”
“A thing?”
“Off your—”
“This is getting intriguing,” Winsen said.
“Skin, Winsen! Off his skin!”
“Oh!” Kip said. The cards. She was asking if he’d seen anything in the cards that showed an escape route. Given that the cards were of the most powerful people in the world, it made sense that any number of them would have known about an escape route. “I don’t … I don’t remember anything helpful.”
He hadn’t been having the flashbacks—flash-sidewayses? flash-cardwises?—for the last half hour. Not that he missed them. He still had the headache, though it was less acute now. It had seemed the cards had been triggered by words, right?
Escape, he thought. Tower. Prism’s Tower. Cannon Island. Flee. Run Away.
Nothing.
Cruxer said, “Check the other doors on this level. Maybe we can go around to the stairs down or to the outside. Now, go! Not you, Breaker. You think.”
They ran off in all directions except through the double doors. Kip tried to think. He’d absorbed those cards. All those cards. Something should come to him. One of them surely must have known this secret. Any of the Blackguards would know, right?
But none came to mind. No matter what he thought. He couldn’t just call them up.
What the hell?! What use were the bloody cards if they didn’t come to mind when he needed them? Right after he’d come out of the Great Library, the cards had been leaping into his brain so fast he couldn’t stop them. They’d been triggered by every little thing.
I’m a Guile, I’m supposed to remember everything!
But he couldn’t remember any of the cards. Except the one he hadn’t lived yet. The White’s card. The puzzle card. Which was perfect. As if Kip needed puzzles now, with every passing second bringing the Lightguard closer. What had she said? ‘Not only Prisms fly’? Right. That was it. But what the hell did that mean? That she’d known about Gavin’s flying machine, his condor? Karris had flown in the condor, too. Maybe Karris had reported it. But even if the White had known about it, so what? Gavin was the only person in the world who knew the proper design of the condor or could draft enough to make it work, and after a full year of work and practice, he’d still found it incredibly difficult and dangerous. Someone could give Kip a condor, and it still wouldn’t do him any good.
‘Not only Prisms fly.’ What could it—
Oh, not fly fly. Fly like flee.
Dumbass! The White knows the secret exit! Of course she does!
It’s got to be in her card!
“Barricaded!” Big Leo shouted as he ran back to them.
“My way, too!” Teia said.
“Men coming down the stairs. Fast!” Ferkudi said.
“All of them are locked,” Cruxer said. “Kip, what you got?”
“I need light, full-spectrum light!” Kip said.
“Stairs are no good,” Ferkudi said. “Only way to get natural light is to get out.”
“Surely we’ve got a white mag torch,” Leo said. “That’d work, right?”
“Teia?”
She was already looking in the bag, as if looking would change things. “Gone. They’re all gone,” she said.
“We could go up the stairs one floor and get full light from one of the balconies there,” Big Leo said.
“There is no way I’m going up the tower,” Cruxer said. “We’re trying to get out, and the exits are all down. We go up and we have to fight through the Lightguards twice more.”
Ben-hadad came back at last. He was huffing. “I got, I got, far as the lift. Should be able to, to squeeze through. But saw out front. Out the main gate at the Lily’s Stem, there’s, there’s an ambush. Forty, fifty Lightguards. Musketeers.”
“We go up,” Kip said.
They looked at him like he was mad. And he was. Even if they got to the lift, they’d be exposed to fire from the main hall until they could go up.
“Breaker. Up?” Cruxer said.
Winsen drew his arrow and let fly. A man forty paces back stumbled and fell as he burst through the door to the slaves’ stairs. Winsen already had another arrow nocked, and released.
“Let’s go!” Cruxer said.
Winsen sent four more arrows down the hall in rapid succession while they ran, then reached into his quiver and found no more.
Ben-hadad led them through a small door where he’d knocked a huge bureau over to be able to get in. “Not by strength,” he said. “Application of a lever.”
They pushed through tiny, connected rooms, all empty. Past another narrow hall. Ben-hadad pointed. “Leads back to the barricaded door you tried, Captain.” Another: “Leads to the kitchens, there’s a door to the outside, but it’s a wall this time of day. Problems of a rotating tower,” Ben-hadad said. “Designing doors in the island mantle—which doesn’t rotate—that can be used all day long. The designer solved the problem a few years later, but the Prism’s Tower had already had its base constructed by then. Inefficient, I agree.” Kip knew what he meant—he’d experienced the same thing down in the baths—but he could tell no else did. Not that now was the time to ask questions about things that didn’t pertain to their immediate survival.
Ben-hadad said, “That hall leads to more slaves’ housing and then to a door off to the side of the ambush. We’d have some surprise. If we want to try our luck?”
“I say we do it,” Teia said. “I’ll use my little trick and cause a distraction. They’re musketeers. If I can get them to fire a volley wildly, they’ll be vulnerable. They attack me on the opposite side and then, you all fall on them from behind.”
“Twenty men? The seven of us?” Ben-hadad asked. “We’re good, Teia, but I don’t know if we’re that good.”
“Why are we discussing this?” Winsen said. “We’ve got a command structure.”
“Do we?” asked Big Leo. “We’re out of the Blackguard, Win. Maybe we should all have a voice.”
“Enough,” Cruxer said. “Breaker, you sure?”
“If we have to wait until we’re sure to decide, we’re fucked.”
“Damn it, Kip!” Teia said. “Now is not the time to be un—”
“Breaker,” Cruxer corrected.
“Breaker,” Teia said. “I saw what those things did to you. It might kill you to look at another card. Or it might take half an hour. And up? Goss died to get us down this tower. You want us to go back up?”
“The White would have an escape. It has to be near her apartments.”
“You want us to go all the way up?” Ferkudi asked.
“I’m telling you, get me light, and—” Kip started.
“Enough!” Cruxer said. “Enough! Kip, Breaker, we’re with you because we believe in you. Anyone who doesn’t, get the hell out. Make your choice.”
“I’m with you,” Teia said, but it was softly. It was surrender. To death. She would die to prove her loyalty, but she knew Kip was wrong. Everyone else was in.