The Blood Robes knew better. So they said.
The trebuchet on the Red Cliffs above threw its great stones on every quarter hour, and it threw stones close to this neighborhood. The oranges had reached the wall, and when they set their charges, they timed them to go off when the trebuchet’s stones rocked the earth.
One Atashian captain had been assassinated, and another bought off, guaranteed safety for himself and his family when the city fell. They’d burrowed a hole in the wall, then covered it with an illusion. Blue luxin, overlaid with red and yellow and orange, twisted into illusions that looked nearly the same as the wall itself. It would fool a quick glimpse from twenty or thirty paces, but not a close inspection.
The drafters and sappers had worked through every night, with thick wool blankets draped over them to hide the light of the mag torches, emerging exhausted and coated in sweat every morning. But in mere days they’d made an unseen gate, with supports drafted to hold up the wall above them, wide enough for five men to pass abreast.
It wouldn’t be wide enough to let in the entire army, and it was too short for horses to pass, but that wasn’t the strategy. An hour after Liv’s team entered the city, the Color Prince would send five hundred of his best drafters and warriors through this tunnel, with instructions to open the city’s south gate and let his armies in.
Ultimately, Liv didn’t see how it could fail. The Color Prince hadn’t been so sure. He’d wanted to deal with the Chromeria’s fleets on one day and Ru the next in case the fleet landed ashore and attacked him from the rear instead of trying to bring supplies directly in to Ru. But he’d made his gamble: to spring his trap, he needed to do both things today.
If things didn’t work out, Liv was going to find herself very, very alone in a hostile city.
“Time!” the orange barked. As the sun drenched them, he and a blue and a yellow all touched the wall in slightly different places, reaching the control nodes that they’d left on the surface. They pulled back the illusion like a curtain.
“Remember what our prince has said,” Liv said. “What we do today, we do for mercy. The price of freedom is always paid in blood. And if the price must be paid, better that it be paid by few. Let us be swift and implacable.”
It wasn’t much of a speech, but Liv had never done this before. Her men nodded, then they went into the wall first. She was second to last. If she died, their entire mission would fail, so they would protect her above all. The price and privilege of being a superviolet.
She ducked in behind them. The wall was eighteen paces thick at its base. Immense. This was the reason they hadn’t bombarded the wall straight on with the trebuchets-it would have taken them months to break through. Cannons could have done it, but they didn’t have the amount of powder necessary, nor easy access to saltpeter mines to make more. But whoever had told the Color Prince that five men could pass abreast had been lying. The space was so short that Liv had to stoop deeply to get through, and five men abreast? She could reach each wall with her outstretched fingers. It was enough for their purposes, and Liv was momentarily glad that she was going into the city first, rather than in the middle of five hundred men straining to get through this tiny hole while under fire and magic.
Grateful to be going alone into an enemy city. I’m mad.
And then they were out. Some of the men were dusty. One, a seven-footer named Phyros, was dabbing his head, which was bleeding freely from smacking it on the roof of the tunnel. They slapped off the dust from their faded blue shirts-the closest thing to a uniform the Blue Bastards had-and bound a bandage quickly around Phyros’s head.
“Follow me,” Phips Navid said. He was a cousin of Payam Navid, the gorgeous magister Liv and every other girl at the Chromeria had half loved. Phips had grown up in Ru, though his father and older brothers and uncles had all been hanged after the Prisms’ War. He’d been twelve years old, and narrowly avoided the noose himself.
They jogged through the streets. Near the wall, because of the dread hex, there was no one at all out. But soon they jogged past some soldiers, who merely nodded at them. They swung one block wide to avoid a troop of the Blue Bastards-only the top few commanders of the mercenaries knew their plan. Any underlings who saw them would ask what they were doing.
Most of the city was untouched as yet by the war. The Color Prince wanted a new power base for his war, not another drain on his resources, so he’d had the trebuchets on the Red Cliffs concentrate their stones on a few neighborhoods, and the artillery batteries. There were whole markets and palaces that remained untouched. The buildings were whitewashed adobe with flat roofs that served as extra rooms, especially on hot nights, just as they did in Tyrea. But here there were far more palaces built around central courtyard gardens. Whatever damage had been inflicted on Ru during the Prisms’ War had long ago been scrubbed away by their wealth.
But the people on the streets didn’t look like they felt fortunate. They looked like dread hexes had been painted on every wall. As she passed beneath three- and four-story-tall palaces, Liv spied men with long lenses on not a few of those palaces, peering out toward the sea. The sound of cannons was barely audible down in the maze of streets, though.
They passed unmolested all the way to the temple district. The Great Pyramid of Ru suddenly towered above them. Liv instantly saw both its kinship and its rivalry with the ziggurats of Idoss. The Idossians had gone for height, and their great ziggurat was taller and steeper than the Great Pyramid, but for sheer mass and grandeur, it couldn’t compare to this: whitewashed limestone laid out precisely on the cardinal points of a compass, with great brass braziers burning day and night up each corner, the great steps up the east face sheathed in burnished copper, shining like red gold in the sun, the pinnacle itself sheathed in electrum, the great mirror like a star held high. Every season, the facings of all four sides were changed-though this year, with the army approaching, they hadn’t gone to the expense to change to the autumn trappings. Every summer, the pyramid was made a garden, a veritable mountain of flowers, the design given over to a new director every year, with a noble family underwriting the costs.
This late in the year, the flowers should have been withered and dying, the full splendor long passed. Instead, every plant was still in bloom, an effect of the green bane, the Color Prince had said. This year, the gardens had been designed to evoke a sun resting on the pinnacle of the Great Pyramid, in the jagged, runic old Atashian art style. Lilies and gardenias and white irises and white hydrangeas yielded to daisies and buttercups and marigolds. In zigzag steps, orange roses and lilies and tulips represented the rays of the sun, stabbing through a sky of hyacinth and bluebells. A forest of vibrant greens took up the middle, and the base was a maze of rhododendrons, camellias, and roses of every color. Streams came down every side, even passing over the great steps in whimsical aqueducts. Fountains spat water from heights to land in pools a dozen paces below. And all of this was temporary, to be switched out next season for something equally lavish. The noble families did this to compete with each other.
The sheer scale of the wealth necessary for such a display simultaneously enthralled and sickened Liv. This city was wealthy, but they’d passed their share of beggars and slatterns and cripples and orphans, even in half an hour.
“Staring,” Phips Navid said gently.
Liv pulled her eyes away. No one seemed to have seen her gawking. Idiot. Gawking was a sure way to break their disguise.
But everyone else seemed busy, concerned with their own business and keeping their heads down. In another two minutes, Liv and her men were at the base of the great steps. One of the commanders of the Blue Bastards was there, a bent-nosed blue-eyed old goat with no front teeth named Paz Cavair, talking with one of the city captains who was guarding the base of the pyramid with six men.