The tower grew saplings with spear points at the edge. They stabbed at Gavin. He dodged one, took another into the meat of his shoulder, and grabbed another. When it pulled back, it pulled Gavin back, too.
He rolled on the ground, slashed the spears off near the ground, and ran.
Karris was still rooted in her spot, reloading her pistol. The last Blackguard, Baya Niel, was similarly rooted to his spot-he, too, was green, and thereby susceptible to Atirat’s control, though mercifully he’d lost his pistols. The tower was trying to grab Gavin, even anticipating where he was going to run and sprouting thorns. The remaining three giants were all standing sentinel, content to watch until ordered otherwise. Across the tower, Kip was staring wide-eyed by a dead woman. Gavin could only pray that the boy had the sense to play dead. Kip could draft green, too.
Another tree trunk swept toward Gavin’s feet and he leapt over it. He threw streams of fire toward Atirat, but couldn’t see whether they’d had any effect. He landed, jumped as two more thorn-spears tried to impale him. He tried to remember anything useful about Dervani Malargos.
There was no hint that Gavin’s fire had done anything. A throne was rising behind Dervani, and his hands were raised. Gavin slashed at the thorn spears, burned the vines that tried to entangle him. Rolled, dove, staggered left and stutter-stepped right, throwing missiles and fire and blasts of pure heat, trying ever to work his way toward the god.
Then the god cheated. The floor disappeared. The green luxin holding Gavin up simply disappeared at his next step, and then reformed on every side of him. It pulled him back to the surface, locking every limb in an iron embrace.
But Gavin wasn’t helpless. Most drafters grew accustomed to drafting from their hands, the outlets forming at their wrists or fingertips. But you didn’t have to do things the way drafters usually did.
Gavin split the skin all along his shoulders and arms and threw reds and sub-reds into the luxin holding him captive. It hissed and smoked and burned and for one second he pulled free, and then the green reformed. Gavin threw everything into it, screaming and splitting skin along his arms, down the sides of his chest, down his legs, and poured fire into his bonds.
He staggered free and raised his hands toward the god to draft a yellow spike through Atirat’s brain. He threw all the vast power of his will-into nothing.
He stared down at his hands. No luxin. What the hell?
No yellow.
The green shot up his legs and imprisoned him in a moment. Only then did Gavin see his mistake. Atirat had drafted a bubble all the way around the top of the tower. A thin, green, translucent bubble. A lens that blocked out every color Gavin could use.
But no lens was perfect, and Gavin wasn’t about to give up and die. He drew in sub-red, but that only made the green around his hands smoke, and the luxin grew back as fast as he could burn it. Drafting through that lens was like breathing through a reed that was too long, too thin.
Gavin was too weak.
“How does it feel, Gavin Guile? To be mortal, I mean. Surrounded by light, and yet helpless?”
Gavin Guile. Not that it mattered now, but Dervani didn’t recognize him. Felia Guile had tried to murder a man who actually wasn’t a threat-and because she had failed, he now actually was a threat.
Gavin’s wry smirk seemed to irritate the new god. “I thought you died,” Gavin said. He’d seen Kip back there. Maybe the boy could make something happen if Gavin kept Atirat’s attention.
“I very nearly did. There was a small conclave of us. Drafters who survived the war but were so damaged that you would force us to suicide. You’d taken enough from us. We weren’t willing to die on your command. So some of us learned to remake ourselves with light. The burned, the scarred, the amputees. We became new. Because light cannot be chained, Gavin Guile.”
“How did you-” Gavin started to ask. Kip was creeping on his hands and knees directly behind the throne that had blossomed for Atirat.
“There is only one question, Gavin Guile,” Atirat said. “Do you want to be killed by the woman, or the boy?”
Kip froze. “Father,” he said. “I can’t move.”
“Gavin,” Karris said. Her teeth were gritted and there were tears in her eyes as she fought the green luxin that suffused her body. “I can’t-I can’t…”
“I can make the shot,” Hezik said, tense, eager.
“Making the shot means killing them all, you idiot!” Buskin shouted.
Hezik said, “We can’t save them! This is our only chance. It’s a god!”
Commander Ironfist ignored both; words he thought he’d forgotten came unbidden to his lips: “Mighty Orholam, giver of light, see me now, hear my cry. In the hour of my darkness, I approach your throne.” The commander watched himself say the words as if he were a bystander. He’d not prayed the prayer of supplication since he was thirteen years old. His chest felt hollow. He could see his mother bleeding out her life in front of him as the words spilled forth. “Lord of Light, see-” A sudden thought interrupted his prayer.
“One slot up, two slots right,” he told Hezik.
“Sir, I’ve got it right-”
“Now!” he shouted.
Three clicks, instantly, as Hezik moved the cannon to the slots commanded. Ironfist took the smoking linstock and lit the fuse himself.
The roar filled the battery, and Ironfist swore every man counted the seconds.
“I wish you could know what it’s like, Gavin,” the god said. “I can feel every living, growing thing in the world. And my senses are only expanding, second by second.”
Atirat sounded drunk, but regardless, Kip couldn’t move. His muscles flexed and tightened at his command, but his bones themselves were locked in place. He’d almost made it. He’d almost saved them all. Kip Almost.
Gavin said something, but Kip couldn’t hear it. He saw Atirat tense, warned by some sixth sense. He turned, and Kip saw the blast of smoke from the cannon from the fort on Ruic Head.
One thousand one.
Atirat rolled his shoulders. Laughed. “Friends of yours?” he asked. “Don’t they know cannonballs are more likely to kill you than me? I should almost let it land, just to see.” He raised his hands, aiming, as if he could track a ball through the air itself.
One thousand five.
“Almost,” he said. Something shot out of Atirat’s hands and intercepted the ball in midair, not twenty paces above them.
He hadn’t expected a shell.
The shell exploded with a thunderous roar and concussion that shook the tower. The green bubble covering the tower shattered. The giants were thrown off their feet. Kip was bowled over.
Kip scrambled as he landed on his face, reaching for the dagger. Everyone else reacted instantly. Kip heard the snap of Karris’s pistol going off, saw Gavin throw yellow spikes into each of the giants and straight at Atirat. Flames billowed off Gavin’s hands — and were quenched.
Even as his giants died, Atirat batted aside the attacks directed at him as if they were smoke. Hands left, right. Gavin was locked down, the bubble reformed, snapping in place. Gavin overwhelmed, buried in green sludge, Karris falling, Baya Niel fallen.
Kip could feel the steel in his joints re-forming. He leapt toward Atirat’s back, extending the dagger, and felt his bones lock in place in midair.
Fat kids know all about momentum.
Kip’s dagger punched straight into the back of Atirat’s head.
The luxin freezing Kip’s bones blew apart like mist. He tackled Atirat, landed on top of him. He twisted the dagger in the god’s head, hearing bones crunch and squish.
Still on his knees, Kip looked at the dagger in his hand. The green and blue jewels on the blade were glowing hot, bright for one instant. Kip heard bodies falling: the giants, robbed of form and life.