Lem smiled at Teia; then, as if noticing he was making eye contact, he looked away. “True name Will, you see.”

Teia saw.

At Commander Ironfist’s gesture, Teia climbed the makeshift ladder. She was almost to the top when she heard the scrape of iron over rock and someone inside barking orders. The window was an open slot above her head. Then she saw a cannon poke out of the window. She clamped her hands over her ears an instant before the cannon fired.

The pressure wave nearly blew her off the makeshift ladder. And that shot was followed by half a dozen others, all around the semicircle of the fort. The cannons all rolled back out of sight from the kick of the shots, but when Teia raised her head to see if she could get a count of the men loading the cannons through the thick smoke—paryl cutting through it easily—she saw that the windows were barred. There was enough space for the cannons to be rolled forward and poke through the bars but not enough for the Blackguards to climb in. Maybe, maybe after a shot, a person could crawl through the wide area in the bars that the cannon occupied when it was forward.

So, crawl in front of a cannon and hope there was enough space, and attack armed men who would all be looking your way.

Teia felt rather than heard another set of handholds shiver into the rock next to her, going around the great windows up to the top of the fort. Looking down, she waved to Commander Ironfist that they wouldn’t be able to get in through the windows. Lem was already firing out another ladder to bracket the other side of the windows.

Above the rock, the fort continued in several floors of wooden towers. Teia was glad she wasn’t afraid of heights, because it was getting dizzying. There was a flat spot wide enough for three people to stand where rock and wood met. The heavy timbers of the fort’s wooden walls were sunk in deep holes drilled directly into the red rock. Teia used her paryl to look through the walls. She couldn’t see through the wood itself, but in the spaces where bark pressed against bark, she could catch glimpses. Even then it was cloudy—but she couldn’t see anyone on the other side.

A Blackguard joined her, and she saw that others were clambering up the ladder on the other side. Teia looked down and saw the soldiers still standing by the little gate below them, looking out at the sea. If those men turned around to watch their guns fire—and it was quite a sight, so it was entirely possible—they would see the Blackguards in full view. But for a moment as the fort’s guns pounded, Teia looked at what the soldiers were watching unfold on the waves. Ships were afire—mostly the Chromeria’s ships that had sailed too close to the fort.

The rest of the fleet was heading for a gap at the middle of the neck. The Color Prince’s small ships—Teia didn’t know enough about ships to identify them—were fleeing from that area. But most of the Chromerian fleet wasn’t going to make it. Teia had seen how far the fort’s guns reached, and with some of the fleet only turning now, they’d be in range of the guns for ten or fifteen more minutes. The fort would manage hundreds of shots in that time. Orholam have mercy. Teia turned away and, far to the west, thought she could see the whisper of two skimmers crossing the waves, coming back to join the battle. Had they not found the green bane?

“How many soldiers?” the Blackguard asked Teia. He meant inside. She shook herself. She could do nothing about the crises and stupidity out there except help stop the guns up here.

“I don’t see any,” she whispered.

“Maybe we have a chance then.” The man gestured over to the other team, and Teia saw that there were eight people lined up on that ladder, and six more below her. The Blackguard—Teia didn’t know his name—was drafting a charge against the wooden wall, placed off to the side as far as he dared.

The other team was drafting another ladder, this one merely propped against the wood like a traditional ladder. They climbed it rapidly and Commander Ironfist gave the go-ahead.

Pushing Teia to the side, the Blackguard ignited the charge. It blew, and for a moment, Teia was surprised that no one cried out in alarm from within the fort.

Of course. They’re firing cannons of every size. An explosion wouldn’t alarm them.

With prybars of luxin, the Blackguards quickly tore out the remaining wood and poured into the fort. There were dead bodies everywhere. Atashians, mainly, but also scruffy men with no uniforms at all, and drafters, even a few color wights. There’d been a battle here yesterday.

The fort was huge, covering Ruic Head in a spiky wooden crown and sunk deep into the rock. But there was hardly anyone in sight. There were two men standing watch at the gate, looking out the opposite side of the fort. Blackguard archers killed them, arrows punching through their mailed backs. The Blackguards who’d climbed the other side found a cannon crew on top of the fence and killed them in seconds.

Teia ran with them, going down a staircase into the fort proper, down a wide hallway to a wooden doorway. It was dark and smoky, but Teia had no trouble seeing in sub-red.

“Four on the left, five on the right. Looks like a wight giving orders in the middle,” she whispered. Then she ran down the hallway on tiptoe even as the cannons roared to where another team stood outside the door to another battery. “Three right, six left.”

Ironfist gestured that she should stay where she was. He quietly drew a long, gorgeous scimitar that she’d never seen before. The grip was inlaid with turquoise and abalone, and there was something that looked like burned wood inset along the spine of the blade. Ironfist didn’t look at the blade, as if he couldn’t stand the sight of it, but he presented it to Buskin, who reached a hand out from his spot in the stack and touched the wood on both sides of the scimitar.

As the atasifusta wood burst into flame, both teams burst into action. The Blackguards stormed the rooms simultaneously, Ironfist visible through the thick gunsmoke as a giant wielding a bar of flame. Teia heard shouts, anger, terror—and pistol fire. Her own pistol was drawn in her sweaty hand, cocked and ready.

A door opened on the opposite side of the hall, and a drafter poked his head out into the hallway, looking confused. He saw Teia.

The pistol rose of its own volition, the flint snapping down, sparks flaring, the shockingly hard kick and the hot smoke. Teia blinked and saw the drafter on the ground at her feet, his left eye and a quarter of his skull blown off.

He wasn’t dead.

“Reload,” Commander Ironfist said in her ear. Somehow back already. She flinched and found her hands doing what she’d been told: swabbing, popping her powder horn open, tamping the wadding. The commander peeked into the room from which the drafter had come, then, finding no one, jabbed his flaming scimitar down into the man’s back, into his heart, pulled it out, and jogged down the hall.

She ran after him, barely having charged her musket, but suddenly not wanting to be left behind. They stumbled straight into ten enemy drafters. Teia lurched to a stop, but Commander Ironfist was already flowing through the steps that looked like the yeshan ka, scimitar in one hand, luxin in the other, killing men left and right. The other Blackguards joined him a moment later, blasts of light painting the walls.

Teia waded in at the same time as the Blackguard who’d blown open the fence for them. Zero. His name was Zero, she remembered now. They faced two drafters who were already gathering light. “You take the green, I got the red!” Zero shouted. He moved before Teia could say anything.