He follows her gaze out to the vast dust cloud now disappearing into the horizon’s shadow. “Um. Oh. Um, I see.” His nervy voice, finally, has gone calm and quiet. For the first time, he sounds like a grown-up. “I understand. That cloud-that’s not a storm.”
She nods, still staring at her future. She doesn’t seem to like the looks of it.
Yeah, well, me neither.
Tizarre’s got that wild look around her eyes again. “Where the hell are the horses? Where’s Kess and the grooms?”
I wave toward another trail of rising dust, upland toward the sinking sun.
“Bastard,” she breathes. “That ratsucking bastard-”
“Leave the language to me,” I mutter. “You don’t have the touch.”
That wild look of hers takes on a dangerous calculation. Even money says she’s running through all the magicks she knows that can hit them from here. “They haven’t gotten very far-”
“They’re plenty far. But they won’t get a lot farther; that dust isn’t theirs. It’s from Black Knives on their trail.”
Stalton’s at my shoulder again. “More Black Knives?” he breathes, blinking. Yeah: weak eyes. “Are you pulling my dick? How many?”
A sign that can’t unclench the fist in my gut. A shrug that can’t shift the weight on my shoulders. That’s all the answer he should need.
“Come on, Caine. You had the glass. How many are out there?”
So I tell him. “All of them.”
››scanning fwd››
I stick out a hand to stop the two thaumaturges in the stair shaft to the escarpment’s top. “What d’you got left for Fireballs?”
Tizarre looks at Rababal. He makes a face. “A, well, a dozen. Or so.”
“A dozen. Fuck my ass.”
“Had I known how splendidly your master plan would work,” he says through his teeth, “I would have been more conservative-”
“Yeah, whatever.” Don’t panic. Do not panic.
Panic-
Huh. Funny.
What panic?
Y’know, all I’m really getting right now is that hot dark tingle just above my balls. Maybe I really am one stone batshit son of a bitch.
I’m looking forward to this. .
“Okay. Okay, look, can you Reach from mindview?”
“Telekinesis?” He frowns. “Well, yes, a little. I’m not strong.”
“Won’t have to be. Collect canteens from the porters. Dump the water and fill ’em half full of lamp oil. Drop a buckeye in each, you follow?”
His frown turns appreciative. “I believe I do.”
“Tizarre: you can Nightsee, can’t you? Can you Whisper?”
She starts to nod, stops. Her feathery brows draw together. “I should be able to. Should. Something’s weird in the Flow here. No promises.”
“No excuses either. Make it work.”
She looks dubious. “The moon’s barely past first quarter, and it won’t rise till after midnight. Even if I can tell you where they are, you can’t fight in the dark.”
I nod toward Rababal. “You’ll be with him.”
“I don’t get it.”
“The oil canteens,” Rababal murmurs.
“Yup.” She’s recon. He’s artillery. “We’ll fight by the light of burning ogrilloi.”
The stubby necromancer stares at me like he’s never seen me before. Like I’m some kind of weird-ass animal and he’s trying to calculate how dangerous I might be.
He has no fucking idea. “What else you got?”
“For combat?”
“No, shithead. For a bad attack of drizzledick.”
“I, uh-Minor Shields. Some. Er, five. Just-y’know. For protection.”
“And?”
He glances away. Rising color warms the bottom folds of his jowls. “And, well, I suppose. .” he says diffidently. Offhand, as if it only just occurred to him. “I mean, y’know, there’s my bladewand. .”
“A bladewand?” I ratchet my dropped jaw back into place and lean so close that when he licks his lips I can smell his spit. “You have a bladewand? And you let me walk out that gate with nothing but a motherfucking knife up my sleeve?”
“Well, I, ah-it’s magick, you see-”
“You don’t want to know what I see.” I open a hand. “Give it.”
“But-but-”
“Give it, or my hand to fucking God I will take it off your body.”
Behind me, Stalton takes a step back up the crest passage. “Caine, you can’t just push him around like-”
I stop him with a look over my shoulder. “Ever see a move like the one I pulled on that fucker outside?”
His answer is a measuring squint.
“You’re about to bet your life I don’t have another.”
Color rises in his face. “That’s not-”
I shove my open hand at Rababal. “Now.”
He fumbles the bladewand out from inside his vest. It’s all I can do not to snatch it. I’ve never seen one in person. Not even secondhand, not in maybe fifteen years. . not since I was a kid, playing bootleg cubes of the Light-weaver. . then he holds it out to me, and I take it.
And I’m holding it. In my very own hand. I really am.
It’s heavy, and warm with the damp heat of his sweat. Almost as long as my forearm, its wine-colored wood is dense as steel, inlaid with an impossibly intricate lattice of fine platinum wire. The butt end swells to an ovoid the size of a hen’s egg, rounded and smooth, and it nestles into the hollow of my palm like it grew there. The balance point is a bare fingerbreadth from the butt; the griffinstone inside must be a monster.
A bladewand. I can’t fucking believe it.
A breath is all it takes to summon the limpid passionless clarity of the Control Disciplines. They’re not so different from mindview. My palm tingles with energy.
Hmm. The Lightweaver used to do it kinda like-
I point the wand at the passage gap and reach into myself, summoning pure concentration, feeling for the trigger point with my mind. Nothing happens.
Shit.
Rababal’s still sputtering. “But-but-but it’s magickal, don’t you understand?”
I do understand. I did a year of Battle Magick at the Conservatory-but if I’d been worth a wet fart at it, I wouldn’t be here now. .
“You’re no thaumaturge, Caine. How can you expect to-”
“Shut up.”
“Maybe I should take it,” Tizarre says uncertainly. “I mean, I’m good with a blade, and-”
“Shut up.”
Less effort. Just an intention. A feel. .
A surge inside my right arm: not a tingle, not the electric sizzle that Telukhai always felt, but an actual surge like a tide of hot oil pulsing from my spine to my fingertips-
“Really, Caine, you’re only embarrassing yourself. Years of training-”
Translucently shimmering blue-white energy licks along the platinum lattice and stretches out from the wand’s tip: a plane as wide as my hand and about three meters long that enters the millennial stone of the crest passage wall without resistance. It lasts for only one heart-thumping second, but that’s plenty of time for me to give the wand a twitch and carve off a hunk of rock bigger than my head.
Ohhh, yeah.
The hunk slides sideways and crashes down the ramp. The cut is smooth as glass. The bladewand’s butt is hot in my hand.
Now Tizarre and Stalton both have that what-the-fuck-kind-of-animal-is-this look on their faces too. Rababal breathes: “Who are you?”
I hold up the wand to catch the last rays of sunset. Platinum traceries shine like smears of blood.
I am really looking forward to this.
››scanning fwd››
“You know what we’re up against now.”
They stare at me from their huddles and clusters in the deep vaulted shadows of the immense passage hall, faces pinched and green with dread. Moonrise drips ghost-milk down the crest passage behind me.