“And take care of the Gav thing.”
Teia winced. “Right away.”
Chapter 35
The goddam cards. Kip had absorbed scores of the damned things—and not a one was triggered by a wall of fire or a sinking ship?
The Cwn y Wawr on the second, sinking barge weren’t taking their impending deaths passively. It was the only reason they hadn’t already died of smoke inhalation. They were chained, so they couldn’t reach their own blindfolds, but they’d torn off each other’s.
The initial explosion had blown holes in the barge’s hull, but through those holes, enough light had poured to give a few of them a source for magic. Even as Kip had leapt through the air, they’d blown the upper deck off the barge, leaving most of the hold open to the evening sky.
But there was no key. It wasn’t on the big man who’d triggered the explosions, so it had probably been carried by one of the sentries now dead at the bottom of the river. Nor could most of the drafters actually help. There was a source for sub-red and red from the fire, some oranges, and a bit of weak green from the trees illuminated by the fire, but the sky was too dark for the blues to draft more than a trickle.
The oranges were warding off the fire with walls of their luxin, and the sub-reds were redirecting the heat as well as they could, but it was a losing effort. The barge was on fire in every place not in their direct lines of sight—and it was sinking.
The main lock holding the chains to the deck was already submerged. It was one thing to try to pick a lock with luxin when you could see it, but holding your breath, trying to feel the lock through foul water and keep drafting long enough to work the tumblers of a well-made, huge lock?
Kip had already failed thrice.
He surfaced with a gasp.
Two rows of men chained closest to the lock had already been pulled beneath the water and fought no longer. A third row were still holding their breath, eyes squeezed tight shut or rolling with terror. The men of the fourth row were submerged to their throats. They tilted their chins up, sucking air, no longer screaming.
One drafter, three rows back, had drafted a large cone around his own neck. He was shouting at the others telling them to do the same, but between the cone muffling his voice and everyone else screaming, no one noticed. Except Kip.
The cone would buy the man time when he was pulled under the waves. Until the water reached above the top of his cone, he could still breathe. Almost every one of the men chained here could have done the same, but they hadn’t thought of it.
Kip could do it for them.
But that was a distraction, wasn’t it? He could save ten or twenty men so they could have another minute or three of life—but only if he abandoned the main problem: the damned sinking barge.
If ten more men had to die while he solved the problem, that was the price he had to pay.
Well, that they had to pay.
Come on! Not one of the damned cards was going to help him?
“Breaker!” Cruxer shouted from above, standing on a nonburning remnant of the upper deck. “Not much time!”
So he’d caught up. Kip looked at him and saw Cruxer had a coil of rope in his hand. The other end stretched out beyond him toward the shore.
Immediately, dozens of voices cried out for him to save them. As if he weren’t trying. As if he could.
Kip looked through the water. It was up to his neck, too. The next row went under.
He couldn’t save them.
He nodded his failure to Cruxer. He had to leave. They couldn’t be saved.
Cruxer threw the rope toward Kip, but immediately dozens of hands reached up to catch it.
A man grabbed it and tore the ends away from his neighbors. “Save me! For the love of Orholam, please!”
Kip waded up the main aisle between the rowers’ benches, feeling a panic build in him. He was going to be trapped here. He not only wasn’t going to save them, he was going to die himself.
Bubbles came up in the water as a submerged man despaired of holding his breath any longer.
“Breaker!” Cruxer shouted. “I believe!”
Cruxer cracked open a mag torch, and it flared shocking green.
Kip couldn’t leave them. He had to do this. He was the only one who could.
He made it to the man holding the rope. “Give me the rope. I can save you.”
But the man was fear-frozen, desperate, beyond reason.
Kip clobbered him and took the rope. He pushed back into the deeper water, took several deep breaths, and pushed under water.
He found the lock again. But the lock didn’t matter. The chain was too strong to break. But the chain was just a bond, and a bond wasn’t evil. A chain could be a lifeline. What mattered was what you were bound to.
By touch in the cool, murky water, Kip found the enormous metal loop that bolted the chain to the deck. He wound green luxin thick around the chain, pushing his will into that space until the green luxin filled it.
He called to mind then that boy he had been so long ago, trapped in that closet with the rats, biting, scratching. It came back all too readily. But he pushed past the remembered terror—that wasn’t what he needed now—and there it was: the unspeakable thirst for freedom, the longing to break something, to get out.
Every muscle in his body flexed and he roared, bubbles erupting from his mouth, and he felt something crack.
Kip surfaced, gasped, and went down again, even as another row disappeared under the waves.
The big loop was torn loose of the decking, but only one huge nail had pulled fully free. The bolt hadn’t broken; one of the clinch nails that had been pounded through the deck and then bent aside had been pulled through.
Kip pushed the chain beneath the freed side, and then moved up the submerged rows by feel.
There were identical, much smaller loops holding the chains bolted to the floor at every row.
But Kip had the process now. Attacking the clinch nails rather than the bolts, almost as quickly as he could push through the water, he tore out one after another with an explosion of luxin and wood and breath.
He surfaced again, and waded forward. The men were shouting. They didn’t understand because they couldn’t feel the slack in the chains until their own loops were broken.
Finally Kip pulled the last one free, directly beneath Cruxer. He looped the rope Cruxer had given him through the chain. “Pull!” he shouted.
And suddenly help arrived as the Cwn y Wawr from the first boat freed themselves one at a time. First a single man helped Cruxer lift men out of the hold, pulling the chain in like a fishing line, the enslaved flopping about like fish.