point he could hold it by simply standing here behind the bullet shield his Blackguards had drafted in front of him.
They weren’t fighting him. Everywhere he went, the army facing him withdrew. If the city had only had one gate, that might have been helpful. But with three gates and a crumbling three-quarters circle for a wall, it was hopeless. No one would face him. They simply sent men around the sides and waited. If he held these men up for long, the armies would simply enter through the other gates. By this time surely all the gates had fallen.
So his enemy was canny. He wasn’t wasting his men throwing them against Gavin. Time would deliver the victory into his hands, so he was preserving his strength. No need to rush the victory. Send the men around Gavin and advance everywhere but where Gavin was. Then Gavin would either be rendered totally ineffectual, dashing from one place to another fighting men who melted away, or he would become separated from the main body of his army—at which point Lord Omnichrome would throw away as many lives as he needed to to kill him. Or capture him.
The campaigner in Gavin was furious. During the war, he would have gone for the throat. They wanted to melt in front of him? He would have gone for the king and killed him and let the chips fall where they may. Doing such a thing would put him in the most peril possible, but he wouldn’t have cared. Which is why fortune favors the young. He snorted. If he got killed, the refugees wouldn’t make it two leagues out of the harbor.
Cursing, Gavin drafted the retreat flares and shot them high into the sky.
“Any news from the docks?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
Gavin hadn’t expected any messengers to be able to find him, but it still would have been nice. “Let’s go.”
A red Blackguard laid down a thick carpet of red luxin across the broken opening of the gate and set fire to it as Gavin turned and started jogging. They’d lost their horses earlier, and hadn’t grabbed any replacements. Horses that weren’t trained to musket fire and magic were often as dangerous to their riders as they were useful. Being mounted also made you a nicer target for muskets and drafters. The city wasn’t that big, they’d run.
Odd, running through an empty city. Almost everyone was simply gone, and there wasn’t yet that air of abandonment and layer of dust that settled over cities soon after their inhabitants had left. Garriston was the kind of empty that happened when people left food burning on the fire and simply ran. The burnt smell hadn’t even dissipated yet. In fact, they were lucky no one had burned the city down. Empty alleys. Empty homes. Little potted flowers abandoned in windowsills and not yet withered.
Death will come for you too, little flower.
They made it to one of the bridges when the ambush was sprung. Two dozen drafters and several color wights popped up from the roofs and began hurling magic. No hesitation, no warning. Of course. They’d circled Gavin to cut off the most obvious route out. The flat roofs gave them an excellent platform from which to attack, and the open area of the bridge made a perfect killing field.
But the Blackguards were Blackguards. Every one of them knew his task and how the tasks would shift depending on which of them were killed. They practiced for this. This is what they were. Shields of green luxin, blue luxin, and more green luxin, three layers thick, enfolded Gavin. He knew exactly where they would land, and each shield had holes in it, so that he could fight too.
He stuck a hand outside of his shield and pointed at every one of the attackers he could see. He shot narrow tendrils of superviolet luxin at them, sticking it to each drafter, leaving dangling ropes of superviolet. Two of the Blackguards were superviolet/blue bichromes. Their first action was to shield Gavin, second to shield themselves, and third—if possible—this. They could see Gavin’s superviolet threads, and they drafted blue along those shining paths as they pulled grenadoes from their bandoliers. They hurled the grenadoes, which followed the arcing superviolet tracks unerringly. One, two, three, four, five, six. They had even bolstered the arcs of luxin so they followed a natural throwing path.
But the ambushers were moving too. Three Blackguards went down in the first wave of fire missiles. In defending