Screaming, he turned to his fellows. Panicked, one of them lashed out with the already raised butt of his musket. The man on fire plunged off the wall, where he almost landed on a child.

“We’ve orders to go!” Essel said. She threw a line from the cleat back onto the dock and pushed off.

“We wait!” Karris said. “Out of my line!”

She braced her feet and brought the flaming luxin in her left hand up as if she were sighting down a musket.

“Kill them!” a familiar voice shouted. Orholam damn her, it was the Nuqaba herself.

Karris shot a thin, continuous ribbon of red luxin through the air. It ignited in a huge fan. She dragged it back and forth in front of the wall and the soldiers there. All the luxin burned away before it hit the men standing there, but a roiling wall of flame wasn’t something anyone wanted to approach. The heat itself would be a slap in their faces.

“She can’t throw it far enough to hit you!” the Nuqaba shouted as soon as Karris let the first wash of flames die.

Fool doesn’t know the difference between mercy and a lack of will.

But the truth was, Karris killing one soldier could be overlooked, called an accident. Killing a dozen was a diplomatic incident, war. War in the middle of war. Against Paria, their ally; Paria, which the Chromeria needed.

But they needed Gavin more.

Karris stopped, indecisive for the first time.

“The commander said to go!” Essel shouted. “We don’t even know if he’s leaving this way!”

“Get on the reeds, and turn us,” Karris ordered Essel and Ben-hadad, “but wait for my word. I’ll defend. We wait for Ironfist!”

Then a fireball arced through the air toward the skimmer and plopped into the water with a hiss and a kick of steam. Drafters. The Nuqaba’s Amagez drafters were on their way through the crowd.

One arm near useless, drafters and soldiers closing in, muskets being fired at them, and all Karris could think was that her real problem was that she was no longer a watch captain of the Blackguard and therefore was in no position to give orders at all, and that as soon as Essel realized it, the woman would take charge.

Karris threw another narrow stream of flame, hard. It was difficult to gauge the force needed as the distance changed, but luck smiled on her. Most of the red burned off in the air in a frightening display, but some little hit the massed musketeers across their muskets and chests.

The screams were immediate, but they were screams of surprise and fear, not of agony. With most of the flammability of the red exhausted, the men weren’t consumed. Hands were burnt, muskets thrown away, tunics hurriedly stripped off, men fell over each other as even those in the second and third rows threw themselves backward, away from the billows of flame.

“We have to go, now!” Essel said.

Karris hesitated again.

“He’s coming,” Gavin mumbled, from the deck where he was lying. He sounded delirious. “Don’t you see him? His angel’s fighting through the crowd.”

Essel said, “He’s not in his right mind. Karris, we have to—”

“We stay!” Karris snarled, but even as the words crossed her lips, she knew they had more to do with the red she was still drafting to keep the flame alive in her left hand, and the green she was drawing in that refused to be told what to do, and her own fear at what she’d seen in Gavin’s good eye.

His blue, unprismatic eye.

Before the smoke cleared in the gap where the musketeers had been, Karris saw a glow like a torch, lighting the dissipating smoke from within. An instant later, four of the Nuqaba’s Tafok Amagez appeared. Warrior-drafters. One had hands encased in red luxin, already aflame. He threw fireballs, right and left.

The right-hand shot was wide. A lefty then, or a feint. It gave Karris time to hurl a green projectile out to intercept the other fireball, batting it aside.

“Go, go, go!” Karris shouted. It was one thing to wait for Ironfist; it was another to commit suicide.

Three of the four Tafok Amagez attacked, throwing blue missiles that exploded in shrapnel, and green spears, and red fire. The fourth tried to fire a long musket, but it misfired and he was working to clear it. The Tafok Amagez were brute force drafters: if something didn’t yield when they hit it, they hit it harder.

Unable to use their physical strength against her except to throw their luxin really hard and fast, and unable to use their numbers to surround her, they kept doing more of the same. But Karris didn’t merely have to protect herself, she had to protect everyone on the skimmer and the skimmer itself. With a weak left arm.

She dodged through the lux forms—the modified martial arts moves that compensated for the balance shifts of throwing the weight of luxin—always giving herself an anchor to throw shields left and projectiles right and absorb and divert.

Not having used luxin for so long gave her an unusual edge. Like drinking several cups of kopi when you haven’t had any for a while, the luxin hit her hard. The wild energy of green roared past her injury, and the heat of red burned out the voice of her pain. But her long experience took that energy and passion, and made it a blade.

She was fast, faster than she’d ever been. She was instinctive, shooting missiles out of the air with missiles of her own, impossible shots, impossible speeds. Left left left—as they realized her weakness—and right and high, and diverting a huge curtain of flame that the red tried to drop on them from above.

It was only seconds, but the fury of the attacks made it seem an eternity. Essel and Ben-hadad were throwing luxin down the reeds, but the skimmer’s inertia was significant: its own weight, and the weight of four people on its decks, and neither Essel or Ben-hadad were particularly strong, physically or as drafters.

All it would take was one slip.

More Tafok Amagez joined the first ones, pausing only a moment to see what was happening. Half a dozen more.

Too many, and the skimmer was still too close.

And then the fourth stood, his musket cleared and reloaded. Karris saw him, and dread filled her. A premonition that cut off air like drinking tar.

She couldn’t counterattack: the missiles and fire were coming in too thick. He leveled the musket, took aim.

But Karris heard a familiar roar, a man bellowing.

A blue wedge, a V of shields as tall as a man, appeared behind the four Tafok Amagez. They didn’t even see it coming. And then a huge figure appeared, holding that V like a battering ram, running full speed. The wedge split as Ironfist rammed through the Tafok Amagez.

Sweeping his massive arms wide, bellowing that legendary shout that had melted the knees of enemies throughout the Seven Satrapies, holding the blue luxin shields to either side as he came through the middle of a dozen Tafok Amagez, Ironfist leapt off the wall, blasting the shields out into the Amagez and back, sending him flying with incredible speed.

He flipped in the air, and it looked for a moment like he was going to make it all the way to the water, but instead he dropped from that great height onto the end of the dock. Ironfist threw a gush of unfocused blue down as he landed, but the shock was still enough to stagger him and splinter wood.

His tunic had been torn half off, and blood was streaming from a cut on the side of his head, but he gathered himself and refilled with blue.

Karris had seen Ironfist run across the waves before. He drafted a narrow platform of blue, half floating on the water. He could make it fifty feet or more, and the skimmer wasn’t that far out yet. Her heart soared.