Kip turned and found Tallach waiting, snout low and level to the ground. Kip stepped up and grabbed the horns of his platform. One didn’t ride a giant grizzly. Its mass was too great for human legs to straddle. And if you somehow strapped yourself on, the undulations of its great form when it ran would break you. Instead Ben-hadad had designed something halfway between a saddle and a howdah. Kip—sometimes joined by Cruxer—could stand and stabilize himself with one hand on any number of grips while either drafting or firing one of the many muskets attached to the platform’s racks, or he could sit and lock his legs into place, whether Tallach was on all fours or rearing up on his hind legs.
Whether it terrified the enemy or Kip more, he still hadn’t figured out.
“Nightbringers,” Kip commanded. “At a walk. Advance.”
For those beyond the sound of his voice, he threw up a superviolet flare, shielded like the first to radiate light only toward his own lines. A superviolet drafter looking into superviolet might still notice the light on the branches of the trees, but if you have to speak during a stealth attack, it is still better to whisper than to shout.
“Tallach—”
But the bear and the man inside it didn’t wait for the complete order. Kip held on to two horns of his howdah and absorbed each loping impact with the ground with his knees. It was terrifying that something so large could move so quickly and dexterously. He ducked and bobbed and prayed while Tallach wove around the spruces that had branches low enough to sweep Kip off. The giant grizzly was still fast enough to almost close the gap with the night mares before they hit the camp.
The first cries that rose into the air were cries of surprise, not alarm: more yelps of What the hell was that thing that just ran past me? than fear. The wolves went only for the sentries and men with torches.
Where the wolves had slipped easily through the gaps in the sharpened stakes ringing the camp, the mastiffs had to pause to muscle their way in. Two teams of them stopped to clear lanes through the stakes for the horses and men coming up behind them, while the rest of the mastiffs streaked on, hunting anyone with the stench of drafting on him.
The tenor of the cries changed immediately as they began bursting through tents and tearing out throats.
The night mares rolled like distant thunder on the horizon into the camps next, streaming like twin lightning strikes through the two paths the war dogs had cleared, with Kip and Tallach hard behind them. The Nightbringer drafters riding on the night mares splashed green or blue or orange luxin down on every fire to smother it, from the smallest torch to the cookfires, engaging only those Blood Robes who directly stood in their way.
The White King’s camp was plunged into darkness—and blindness for most of the humans, who were so bad at seeing at night. Blood Robes, spinning, startled by the streaking shapes, fired their muskets blindly, hitting nothing or hitting their own comrades.
Tallach simply jumped over the stakes ringing the camp, his gait hardly changing. When they landed, Kip finally had time to grab a flash grenado from his belt. His job was to guard Tallach’s back—which mostly meant to distract and delay anyone who attacked him.
A Blood Robe soldier knelt with flint and steel, trying to light a slow match for his musket, each skritch and flare of sparks an invitation to death. Tallach’s claws answered the call with a quick bloody swat.
Then Kip saw the sudden starburst of mag torches being broken open at the center of the camp, near the wagons.
Tallach saw it, too, and charged straight for it. His path took him over tents and through a dozen men trying to hand out muskets, whom he scattered like chaff. In a bound, he leapt over a picket of whinnying horses.
Then, from the high vantage that only Kip had, the disaster opened in front of him. The central pavilion contained nothing except a great pit. One of the mastiffs must have inadvertently knocked down one of the supports or had already fallen in. A pit that big could only be for Tallach.
A trap.
Kip yelled in alarm, but Tallach had too much momentum to stop. Instead, he tried to leap all the way over the pavilion and the pit.
He wasn’t going to make it. Kip leapt from his platform as Tallach came down, crushing the pavilion and hitting the far edge of the pit. Kip flung the flash grenado toward where he thought the mag torches had been. A fraction of a heartbeat later he hit the ground.
He rolled perfectly—Ironfist would have been proud—but Tallach had been running at terrific speed. Kip flipped and flipped, trying to keep his limbs in. A flash split his vision and he hoped that had been the grenado, and not his head hitting a rock.
Somehow he found himself on his feet, only slightly dizzy. There was a strong stench of tea leaves and tobacco. Someone had drafted a lot of red luxin here.
But he was more worried about the four wights in front of him, each carrying a lit mag torch. Two of them appeared to be blinded and dazed from the flash. One, a blue, bolted.
One of the dazed wights lifted a pistol in Kip’s direction. It pulled the trigger, noticed that nothing happened, and cocked the hammer. Then it disappeared in a blur of fur and saliva and snarling. Coming in from the side, a mastiff had clamped its jaws on the wight’s gun arm and whipped him around. The war dog outweighed the man and had hit with great speed.
The wight was flung aside, and in moments the snarling dog was atop him, this time knocking aside frantic arms and going for the throat.
Kip turned and spiked the other dazed wight before it could recover. He saw another wight he’d missed before as the young woman drew an arm back and threw her burning mag torch toward the hole.
The hole. That was where all that red luxin Kip was smelling must be pooled.
Tallach was half out of the massive hole, recovering from his shock, claws piercing the ground, back legs churning for a grip, fur smeared with pyrejelly.
Kip shot out a dozen fingers of fast superviolet at the arcing mag torch, each streaming a line back to him. One hit, and along that guide line, Kip threw all the last of his orange luxin.
The burning mag torch was blasted safely away from the pyrejelly and into the distance.
Something knocked Kip off his feet as a musket went off, deafening him. From his back, he saw a war dog atop the wight who had thrown the mag torch. A musket lay on the ground beside her. She was limp already; the dog whipped her back and forth, his jaws clamped around her neck.
It must have knocked Kip down to save him.
But Kip was already scanning the distance for the blue wight who had run away—and he found him.