The Burning White (112 page)

But she was out of the battle. She would help no one. Just like that, before Kip had even fired a musket, Teia’s battle was done.

Beside Kip, Winsen’s bowstring thrummed, but Winsen didn’t even watch his arrow arc through the morning air. He was gazing enrapt at his bow the way another man might gaze at his lover disrobing for the first time.

Kip watched the arrow fly—which would usually be impossible, but here he could actually watch it fly, because this arrow streamed yellow-and-blue magic, burning and sizzling in the air. Two hundred fifty paces away, a caoránach jumped up to clear a spiked palisade, and was met—
in the air!
—with the glittering arrow. Its limbs jerked every direction as the arrow hit its chest with a small flash. It dropped flat on its back to the ground.

“Not bad,” Winsen admitted.

He didn’t mean the shot. He meant the Andross-gifted bow and arrows.

“Remind me never to piss you off,” Ben-hadad said.

“Hey, Ben,” Winsen said.

“Not right now, asshole,” Ben said. He was rubbing his knees as if uncomfortable with the new fit and with wearing a brace on both legs.

Kip cursed. He’d gotten frozen with the spectacle and the anticipation and the battle juice pumping in his veins.

“Son!” Corvan said again, louder.

Kip looked.

Corvan said, “This battle’s gonna have surprises for all of us—but that means them, too. You’re doing fine. We’re going to win here. Your friend probably bought us a few hours and a whole lot of confidence.” He gave a wolfish smile. “Now, get the hell out of here. I have a feeling the bane attack is coming soon.”

The superviolet bane was not much to Aliviana’s liking. It had been largely finished before she arrived at Azuria Bay, of course. The unskilled drafter she’d replaced as the Ferrilux had no imagination, nor sense of aesthetics, nor even the realization that the bane could be shaped as it grew.

So it had grown as it would, many-faceted crystals growing up many-faceted crystals. A floating island of large crystals, growing in spirals upon spirals, the greater echoing the smaller.

A cannon shell exploded fifty-two paces from her bane. Some small amount of shrapnel tore through her left port bow.

Aliviana Ferrilux fixed it, found a drafter who’d been injured, and dumped her out into the water.

Changing the bane, she’d decided, would be too massive an expenditure of her time and effort, so she was stuck with it. Her hatred of it was illogical. She could have made the bane invisible. Even with the vast amount of water the structure displaced, she could have crafted illusions such that the water here looked like the water elsewhere. Instead, this mess of crystals with every possible polarity made the floating island actually somewhat visible, even if one missed the giant bowl of missing water in the waves.

She hated a lot about things that she couldn’t quite figure out these days.

For the two hours before dawn, she’d been picking the superviolet crystals off her face and hands, elbows, knees, neck, groin. You’d think this would be a simple thing: superviolet luxin was so fragile that a vigorous shake ought to do it.

But she’d learned in the last year that what the Chromeria’s drafters did with superviolet exploited only a fraction of its potential. With what Aliviana now did? The body had to learn how to deal with so much magic, and it simply didn’t handle all of it well. Her mortal body failed her immortal will. She would figure out fixes later. Work-arounds. Eternity would be a long time.

For now these crystals grew on her skin like barnacles on the hull of a boat, slowing her down. If she tore them off, they too often tore her delicate human skin—which seemed to be thinning all the time. This was especially bad on her face. The tears left her with scars to which the crystals accreted even more quickly. It was slowly immobilizing her face from showing even the few emotions she now betrayed. But she didn’t want to lose function, not in anything, not because of magic she didn’t control. That reeked of failure.

Another cannon shell exploded, closer. She fixed the damage with an irritated thought. Soon it would be time to rise.

All this power, yet I’m losing control over my own body.

Perhaps this was what it was like for humans to grow old? She would have to think on that.

Beliol had offered to help her with this, of course, groveling as he did, the little spirit. She rejected him this time, as she usually did. And as usual when rejected, Beliol quickly went on his way. He treated his time on this world as if it were precious. Any chance he might have of worming his way further into Liv’s thoughts, he took, but when rejected, he acted as if he had other places to be.

He grew more powerful the more Aliviana depended on him. She’d figured that out almost immediately, though she hadn’t let on, she hoped. Theirs would be a game played over centuries, she thought. He was, likely, malevolent. But he had limitations, too. She would be careful not to put herself under his power. The groveling might stop at the most inconvenient time.

She saw the signal from her partner, her god of gods, Koios. She couldn’t help but roll her eyes as she thought of him and his overly intricate battle plans.

Battles. It was so hard to concentrate on them.

Just tell me who wins and who’s left alive at the end, please. I have things I need to do once we get to that point.

When everyone lets down their guard in victory, that’s when things get really interesting. Aliviana was looking forward to that.

Oh, right. The signal.

The Chromeria was funny like this: for all that their powers came from sunlight, for all that they worshipped a god they believed to exist literally above them, the cretins so rarely looked
up
.

Aliviana gathered her powers and lifted the bane up, out of the waves and into the sky.

“Put on the wraparound blue spectacles,” Kip told the messenger. “Ride as fast as you can. Tell High General Danavis the orange bane rises. Go now!”

Blue was the best color to use to sharpen the mind against orange. He didn’t know how well it would work, though. The Chromeria’s damnable fear of teaching hex-casting left them ignorant of how best to defend against it. After all, ‘Don’t look at the hex’ isn’t very useful advice during a battle, when the hex might be painted on your enemies’ very shields and helms. How are you supposed to fight without looking at your enemy?

For more than an hour now, Kip had been carefully scanning the horizon with chi, as instructed. He’d toyed with melting open the silvery globe of gallium he wore on his neck to access the chi bane, but he had no idea what he’d
do
with it. He’d drafted chi only a handful of times in his entire life, and none of them had been pleasant. He hadn’t jumped on any opportunity since then to practice with it.

It was just another mistake he’d made. He should’ve practiced to find out what he could do with chi instead of vaguely thinking that it could be used for signaling, and that it was better in his own hands than in someone else’s. No, he should have brought the Keeper with him.
She
should be doing this.

But bringing the Keeper with him would have been a death sentence for her and her sect, and maybe for Kip, too. Consorting with heretics? Bringing a bane to the Jaspers, at the very time the White King was? With her masks and gaudy armor and tumors, the Keeper wasn’t exactly concealable, either.

“Breaker, sir? Should we go?” Big Leo asked.

“Not yet,” Kip said. “I’ve got my orders.” He wasn’t supposed to come back until he saw a signal, Andross had said.

What signal?

‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ Andross had said.

Which drove Kip crazy.

Quit that. Too much thinking. And the wrong kind.

Kip had thought he understood the old soldier’s maxim that the waiting is the worst part of war. He’d waited before. He’d waited to spring traps. He’d waited to order men to fire. He’d waited for the rush of the battle’s beginning.

But once it began, he’d always been
right there
, in the thick of it. Now the battle was about to begin—but not for him.

He was going to watch. Once the bane rose, he’d make his way up to the top of the Prism’s Tower to do what he could from up there. Which might not be much of anything at all.

He might be stuck watching all day, depending on what the Wight King did. Watching, while others died.

With the bane still submerged, and with the great number of the Blood Robes’ ships and sea chariots, all of them in constant motion, the bane were initially hard to find, but Kip had finally discerned their locations with chi and had sent word to Corvan. The high general had rearranged his defenses appropriately—and without any help asked or needed from Kip on where to put them.

At regular intervals, Kip had shielded his eyes and gazed in chi toward each arc encircling the island, then in paryl, then he put on each of the colored spectacles he carried at his hip in turn, hoping to see something. He kept it up now so that he didn’t get caught unawares by the others rising. It was easy to get war-blind and focus all your attention on only the one threat in front of you.

But he’d spent his time debating with himself about what he should do: Use the chi bane? Don’t use it? View Andross’s card? Don’t View it?

That was what he wanted: a magical salvation, a solution from out of nowhere to solve all his problems for him, because he was so goddam special.

A lifetime ago—and only three years ago—Gaspar Elos had asked him, just before Koios White Oak (and Zymun, that asshole) had burned down Rekton, ‘Do you know why you think you’re special?’ And had laughed as Kip’s young heart had welled with hope that he was the prophesied one, the one chosen to do great things—‘Because you’re an arrogant little shit.’

Kip shook his head. Wrong thoughts. Not the time.

Corvan’s books had taught him years ago that a commander should use his quiet hours to obsess over two questions only: what does the enemy know, and what are the enemy’s problems? If you knew those two things, you might guess what he would do. If you knew the enemy himself, you would know.

He felt it more than saw it. A trembling under the waves. Move ment.

Kip squinted against the reflection of the rising sun in its many-colored glory.

“Why has the orange waited so long?” Tisis asked. “Worse leadership? Fewer drafters?” Her spies had said that the orange ‘god’ was considered distinctly inferior to the others, and the orange corps of drafters and wights smaller and poorly trained compared to the others. This last, at least, was one benefit of the Chromeria’s tight strictures on orange—it had made orange drafters less useful. Thus, fewer lords and satraps went to the expense of sponsoring orange drafters, which meant fewer were around to defect to the Wight King.

“This is the first time they’ve done this,” Kip said. “With the bane all separated from each other, not able to share drafters and crews, it’s a lot harder than when they were on the open sea.”

Kip thought about their problems. The sheer complexity of separating your navy—not even just your army!—with many of them out of sight behind the mass of Big Jasper, trying to coordinate any attack, with no way to fix the little problems, meant that little problems could get big. Fearful subordinates waiting to make decisions, commanders unreachable who would have been easily found if they’d been on land—an amphibious mundane and magical assault by an inexperienced navy?

But Koios’s main problem was that he wanted to attack
today
, and he was so certain that the bane would make all the difference that he didn’t care about the losses he would incur.

“With as heavy as orange is, it may be harder to raise,” Kip said. “And if they want orange to join them in their first assault, they have to wait until it’s ready. And, you know, stuff goes wrong. I think we can take a glimmer of hope at seeing that though the Blood Robes are monstrous, they aren’t diabolically perfect. If they were . . .”

“If they were . . . ?” Tisis asked.

If they were, they’d have hit us right after dawn with a first attack on the bay as the Order attacked. They’d have hit us with a fear hex.

It was still a good plan, but now the main problem for the Blood Robes was all the Chromeria’s gun emplacements, especially on the towers, which due to their height could lob shells and cannonballs farther than any of the Blood Robes’ ships could return them.

He cursed. “Orange isn’t going to join the attack; it’s going to lead it. A fear hex. Something like that. They’re gonna try to sneak it up on us somehow.” He squinted against the blinding orange light of the sun rising in the east.

“The rising sun,” he said. “They’re using . . .”

And then it was nearly upon them.

Thin, mysterious fingerling clouds had been streaking along the tops of the waves, hidden by the dazzling sun and to-and-fro of the sea chariots throwing water high into the air, burning torches that hissed smoke out in a dozen colors to confuse the eye.

A great flock of birds rose suddenly from the Blood Robes’ every ship, black against the rising sun. Another distraction, mostly.

“Blue spectacles, now!” Kip shouted. “Those’ll be razor wings.” He threw a signal flare into the sky to tell the gun crews on every tower to ready the nets they’d prepared to string up on poles above them to catch the deadly bombardment coming.

But Kip’s eyes were again down: those misty fingers hit East Bay’s seawall, and sidled over it, slipping past the ships sheltering in the bay.

Kip turned his back to address his people. He didn’t want to see whatever hex was coming. “Remember,” he called out to them, “you cannot trust what you feel; trust what you know to be real. The bane will lie to you, so hold to what you know is true. Your brothers and sisters will fight and they’ll die for you. Be not afraid. Be not afraid! Though hell itself march against us, be not afraid in what you do!”

What the hell? Speaking in rhyme?

Shit!
Liv. Somewhere, the superviolet bane was out there, too!

Kip turned and roared, all turtle-bear.