The Burning White (111 page)

This man wasn’t a red drafter. That red filling the whites of his eyes wasn’t luxin; it was blood.

Kip and he seemed to have the realization at same moment. The commander had been poisoned. That meant—

“Light cannot be chained!” the commander screamed, lunging.

A heavy chain spun out of nowhere and slapped the attacker down to the ground as easily as a man smacks a mosquito on his arm. One instant the man was leaping at Kip with lethal intent, and the next all his momentum had been redirected into the ground at Kip’s feet.

Kip cursed as the man convulsed once, fingers and limbs stiffening as if in instant rigor mortis. He looked up at Big Leo. “It somehow actually slipped my mind that the Order might try to assassinate
me
again.”

Big Leo wrapped the heavy chain back around his chest. “Didn’t slip ours.”

In the few seconds Kip had been distracted by the assassin, pandemonium had broken out. In his own ranks, a dozen men and women had dropped dead, and thousands were reacting to the assassination attempt on Kip and to the dead nearby.

Things were far worse in the square. Nearly a hundred people were dying or lay dead already, hidden weapons spilling from hands that had been tucked away under coats and cloaks, men and women with blood hemorrhaging from their eyes, lurching into the innocent, convulsing to die with limbs crooked tight like spiders’.

Most of the traitors were congregated directly around the gate—and, as if this death were contagious, the people around them were surging back away from them.

Kip heard screams reverberate throughout the island as others were dying in droves in the far corners of Big Jasper, just as suddenly.

Quentin jumped to his feet as the people roared. “Be not afraid!” he shouted. “Orholam fights with us. Orholam fights with us!”

Only Kip knew the truth. My God, he thought, and he wasn’t sure if it was a curse or a holy invocation of the divine mystery: Teia’s just wiped out the Order of the Broken Eye.

All of it.

Today a great warrior like Big Leo might kill twenty of the enemy. Maybe,
maybe
forty. He would be accounted a hero for such valor.

If her estimates were right, in one day, of the empire’s most dedicated, most cunning, most dangerous, and most implacable enemies, Teia had just killed
four hundred
.

And no one would ever know. Despite all Quentin’s talk of Orholam’s mercy, like a mighty man levering apart the pillars of a pagan temple, Teia had killed the enemies in their hundreds only at the cost of killing herself.

Kip climbed up on the wall.

The masses of people were cheering now with new hope, but Kip’s eyes were drawn to the horizon, because among the cacophony of alarms and screams of horror and disgust and shouts of praise and relief, he’d heard the whistle of the lookouts, and he saw the horizon darken with the long shadows of the White King’s approaching armada.

It seemed much, much bigger than Kip remembered.

Then his eyes were drawn to the waves—and, illuminated in the angled rays of dawn—what was swimming in undulating ranks beneath them.

Gasping between his words, Gavin said, “You’re . . . really . . . fucking strong.”

“Annoying, huh?” Lucidonius said, hands on his knees.

They were standing within two steps of each other, not even pretending to be on guard against a sudden move from the other.

Gavin had tried sudden moves when they’d rested briefly before. His moves were no longer at all sudden.

Truthfully, they were hardly even moves now.

And it was getting worse. He’d noticed it immediately, how the ascended man’s eyes mirrored the sun, slowly shrinking in apparent size as the sun rose, but growing in intensity.

Lucidonius obviously wasn’t as tired as Gavin was, nor as bloodied. He had only a split lip while Gavin’s nose had bled and clotted, bled and clotted. His cheek swollen from a collision with the marble, elbows throbbing, knees abraded.

Gavin had noticed that Lucidonius’s body, too, seemed to grow stronger as the sun did. Somehow the godling’s magic was tied to the rising of the light. On realizing that, Gavin had made desperate attempts to end the fight quickly.

Those times had been the times he’d come within a hair’s breadth of losing. Now there was only endurance, not the thought of victory.

They’d reached the sword not once, but several times. It now lay not far from the Great Mirror itself. Gavin counted that as his only victory. If Lucidonius were smarter, he would attempt to throw the Blinding Knife off the tower. As long as it was so close to the Great Mirror, Gavin had a chance.

“Shouldn’t you be . . . you know, on your way elsewhere?” Gavin asked.

“Where’s that?”

“It’s Sun Day. Don’t you go visit the poor assholes giving their lives for you over at the Chromeria?”

“I wish I could go help them in their hour of need. I’m needed here.”

“Hour of need?” Gavin asked. He wouldn’t call the Freeing that.

“The Jaspers are under siege. The White King has floated seven bane and tens of thousands of soldiers and drafters for the attack. And there are traitors within the walls.”

“And yet you’re
here
. While they worship you.”

“They don’t worship me.”

“You know what I mean. Whatever you want to call yourself, Lucidonius, it doesn’t change that they’re dying because they believe your words.”

Lucidonius stood and dusted himself off. “You seem to have recovered your strength, if not your sense of irony. Ready?”

“How’d you do it?” Gavin said, not least because he most certainly was
not
ready.

“Are you hoping I’ll get distracted now, or that I’ll give you instructions?” Lucidonius asked.

“You give me too much credit. I’m just buying time to rest. But seriously, you ascended to
godhood
. How?” Not that Gavin wouldn’t take any opening if the creature offered it, but he didn’t expect that. Lucidonius was too sharp for simpler ploys to work.

“Oh, you’re hoping I’ll wear myself out a little bit, just by me using my breath to talk while you rest?”

Gavin didn’t deny that had been his thought, but he pressed in. “You’re not nearly as tired as I am. What’s the harm? I’m the only one in the world who could possibly understand you. Even if only partially.”

“And people think Andross got all the cleverness in the Guile family.”

“People think wrong. My mother was more clever by half,” Gavin shot back. He was defensive of Felia now, and he wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he’d only recognized her particular genius after she was already gone. Maybe because she’d always championed him, even against his father.

“Brilliant people, Andross and Felia, each in their own way. Complementary in their gifts, but twins in their arrogance.”

“Fuck you,” Gavin said.

“People think Andross got all the temper, too,” Lucidonius said wryly.

Gavin leapt for him, swinging a fist for the godling’s throat. Most men will duck their head at an incoming blow, so a low shot could catch the chin or the nose, and no one fights well either unconscious or blinded by involuntary tears.

But he missed. Of course.

He was too slow, and so they began slugging it out again, absorbing blows but too exhausted to do much damage.

From the first moment Gavin had noticed Lucidonius’s strength was tied to the sun, he’d thought of a terrible strategy. It was still a terrible strategy, but it was slowly becoming the only one left to him.

If Lucidonius got stronger as the sun rose, then would he not also weaken as it sank?

Gavin would have to last through the entire day to find out.

It was still two hours until noon. Of Sun Day. Gavin had chosen to fight a creature whose strength was tied to the intensity of the sunlight . . . on the longest fucking day of the year.

It had a certain beauty to a battlefield commander, seeing an attack so exquisitely timed, a surprise played at the perfect moment. Sea chariots pulled at great speed by sharks or dolphins, impossible to see at this distance, came roaring forward by the score. With battle standards whipping in the wind, showing the golden broken chains of the pagans and the colors of the new nine kingdoms, and scoops in the hulls designed purely to throw water into the sky to make great rooster tails as they pulled, everything about the sea chariots was designed to be a scintillating spectacle. Wights piloted each craft, and rank by rank they roared into cannonball range.

The boom of the cannons began immediately, but the craft were tiny, fast, and well spaced. The cannons would only catch a few of them.

But the forerunners made far too small a strike force to have any hope of success, which is why they had to be a distraction.

Kip looked beneath the waves, and there he saw them, already penetrating the bay, rounding in behind the seawall, simply swimming under the great chains meant to keep ships out. He’d heard the rumors of them in Blood Forest: even as Gavin had turned his gifts to making a craft that could move faster over water than any others ever had, some of Koios’s wights had turned their own gifts to remaking their bodies so that they could move swiftly and silently under the water.

“Wights!” Kip shouted. “Beneath the waves! Coming in fast!”

They called themselves the Daughters of Caoránach, who would snatch off his boat anyone who dared go out on a moonlit night too close to the waters, and they wailed whenever they took blood. Their cries echoed in the dark over foggy lakes and rivers, chilling men and women to the bone. Others called them river demons or lake demons.

They would still just be men, wights encumbered on land by bodies designed for water.

“
Caoránaigh!
” someone shouted. “It’s the caoránaigh!”

Kip cursed. “No! They’re only men! River wights! Arms, to arms!” The last thing his people needed was the psychic shock of seeing their childhood nightmares come alive.

He hated this part of a battle, when you suddenly see the whole of the enemy’s strategy and you need everyone to hear you at once. There were too many orders to give, too many people shouting for everyone to hear them.

“Protect the gates and cannons! Look to the bases of the towers and walls,” someone shouted beside him. “Get me my signal banners, now! Aleph Company, in reserve! After we repulse the first attack, you’re going to reinforce the secondary attack on the seawall!”

Corvan Danavis had just arrived, with his booming voice stomping through everyone else’s shouts.

Kip looked down into the courtyard and saw a massive influx of the high general’s soldiers, come to reinforce the gates.

“You!” Corvan shouted at Kip. “I’m here now. That means you can’t be.”

They’d discussed this. Corvan wouldn’t allow for the possibility of one lucky shell taking out so much of the Chromeria’s command and control. (Incidentally, it also put him in charge without having anyone else around to second-guess him—‘slow him down,’ as he put it.)

“I got this,” Kip said. “Until the bane rise, I can—”

“This could be a—” The boom of cannon took out Corvan’s last word, but he didn’t even flinch. He repeated, “Trap. You get to Tower Twelve—”

“I know it’s a trap. The river wights—”

“No, I mean all of it! They could be using the
entire attack
to raise the bane. You draft chi, so you can throw your will out farther than anyone. Get to Tower Twelve, and send me a signal if they’re raising the bane. We have to know when to tell our drafters to stop drafting.”

Shit
. Corvan was right. And Kip was doing exactly what he shouldn’t do—arguing with the man he’d put in control. “Yessir!” Kip said. “My apologies. Right away.”

“Marksmen to the fore!” Corvan shouted back at his men. Signal flags were hoisted, orders were repeated in shouts to warriors back in the lines. “Aim especially for any of these river dogs who look like they’re trying to throw up a flare or any sort of signal.”

He was in his element, juggling the big picture and the small with ease.

The caoránaigh had burst from the waters and were scaling the towers. Others were attacking the gates directly, throwing great streams of fire and missiles in every hue, leaping over spiked fortifications with baffling ease. They were not at all encumbered by their amphibious form.

The rattle of musket fire deafened Kip. He wanted nothing more than to watch the battle unfold, to see the spectacle of gouts of water leaping into the sky as the cannons’ explosive shells hit ships or waves, throwing death into the chariots’ ranks. He wanted to marvel at the sinuous forms of these river demons, that made even his heart twist with fear.

He wanted to fight.

But he had orders.

“I know the fastest way to get us to that tower,” Big Leo said, his copper chain held in his big hands over his shoulders. He wanted to fight, too.

“Son,” Corvan said.

Kip glanced into the courtyard. Corvan’s men had somehow already moved all the Order of the Broken Eye’s dead aside to make room for their own ranks.

If those Order traitors had been alive to mount even a halfway-decent assault on even this one gate from within, the caoránaigh would have made it to the walls unnoticed, and breached the gates if they’d not been opened from within. Then they’d have gone for the cannons, but even if they hadn’t gotten that far, the White King would have rushed in and immediately had a foothold on the island itself.

If the White King took the wall at any point, that would be the beginning of the end for the Chromeria.

And he would have had that already this morning, if not for Teia.

If not for Teia’s sacrifice.

Kip wondered if she was still alive, cocooned as she was in a pitch-black room, her eyes bandaged, everyone hoping that maybe, maybe her eyes could be kept from dilating or contracting and that that might save her. That maybe her body would process the poison slowly, and she might live.