The Burning White (126 page)

“What’s that?” Ben-hadad asked, drawing his sea-demon-bone crossbow easily. With will, he tightened the string until one dial for each string showed the appropriate tension. He fitted bolts into each channel. Toward the door, he yelled, “That’s better! At this rate, you’ll be through this door by Sun Day next year. Nicely done!” He poked his head briefly in front of the hole again.

It splintered instantly.

“Someone’s onto me,” Ben-hadad said appreciatively. He rubbed at a streak of blood a flying splinter had left on his forehead. “Wait, what were you saying, Ferk? What do I win?”

“Stupidest Smart Guy in the Mighty. Are you joking with this? What are you trying to prove, Ben?”

“C’mon, Ferk. It’s all part of my cunning plan.”

“Cunning plan? To get your head shot off?”

“Nah. The hole wasn’t big enough. Didn’t want to risk my life to widen it myself. Besides, if they keep shooting at the door, we’re not going to have anything to defend here.”

“Hole? What?”

“Cover on three?”

Ferkudi nodded, lifting up his blunderbuss. “Two,” he said.

Ben-hadad pulled a fist-sized grenado from a pouch, all swirling with red and yellow luxin. He pulled the string to allow the two ingredients to mix.

On one, Ferkudi poked the bell-shaped muzzle of the blunderbuss against one of the holes he’d shot through before. Everyone on the other side took cover as his shot rang out, spraying hot metal into the hallway and their faces.

A moment later, Ben-hadad’s large grenado sailed through. He instantly dropped to the ground, not because he was injured but to look through a hole that had been shot low in the door.

There was a shattering as of glass, then a whoosh of fire, then screams. The discharge of a musket.

“Damn, I’m good,” Ben-hadad said. He stood up—easily, due to Finer’s braces, which he wore on each knee now, though not without pain—and poked his crossbow up the hole. Each string twanged in turn. He rested his back against the doorframe once more and looked over at Ferkudi with a waggle of his eyebrows. “Mmm?” Ben-hadad prompted.

“Let me guess. Two headshots?” Ferkudi said.

“Ooh! Can I play?” Winsen shouted from behind them.

“No!” Commander Big Leo boomed from his position by Breaker.

“How many is that now?” Ben-hadad asked as they both reloaded their weapons.

“I dunno,” Ferkudi said.

“What do you mean you don’t know? I’ve been calling them—” Ben-hadad asked.

“No reputable witnesses,” Ferkudi said.

“Are you—”

But then they both cut off at a sudden distortion in the air. It passed through both of them as if an enormous wave had passed, bending all reality. For a moment, it was as if they’d been color-blind for all their lives and were suddenly seeing—seeing not just the world but into realms beyond the world.

And then the shock wave passed like a ripple in the pond of time, heading rapidly west.

“Anyone know what that was?” Ferkudi asked.

“No!” Big Leo barked. “Hold the door!”

The red bane was in disarray. The Dagnu had been intending to attack with Anat, Red with its brother color Sub-red, but with Anat dead, Dagnu now was scattered and stupid with rage. It would take him several more minutes before he could attack.

In the meantime, the orange was launching a storm of pure horror at the island. Shapes congealed and morphed in the very clouds, dropping from the sky toward Big Jasper like the shot from a trebuchet.

Kip drafted a bit of orange to get ready for the combat, forgetting to take his hand from the mirror array first.

In an instant, a burning like brandy gives your throat and gut flashed through his entire body. He’d tried for just a taste of orange; he’d just quaffed a full tankard.

He’d surely burned through a third of his halo.

It left him gasping, nearly gagging.

His hands dropped from the array as he grunted and struggled to breathe. There was musket fire here, the sound of the Mighty, talking, tense but not panicked. He could understand no more than that, so dazed was he from the amount of luxin he’d just burnt himself with. He gasped, huffing. Then, shaking himself like a turtle-bear who’d just taken a blow to the snout and was shocked that anyone would dare such a thing, Kip grabbed the array again and launched himself at the orange bane.

Where are you, Molokh?

It wasn’t hard to find. Though shielded from a mirror strike behind the bulk of a castle-like superstructure, Kip could follow the djinn’s hold on its lux storm.

Kip hit the Molokh with such righteous fury he could feel the man bowled off his feet. The last thing a slippery orange ever wanted was a direct confrontation—and Kip brought it, screaming all his psychic fury at what the Blood Robes were attempting. His will hit the Molokh with such force, he felt the man’s will simply snap. The petty god collapsed, unconscious, broken.

And again, Kip seized a lux storm and threw it down.

Kip split the cloud of nightmare, with the first half of it hitting the reds—who were defenseless against it, especially scattered and emotional as they were. The other half he threw at the yellows.

They liked to believe themselves perfectly balanced between emotion and reason. Now they found out how many of them were only deluding themselves.

This is why the old gods of the nine kingdoms kept to their own lands, Kip thought. They were always the greatest threat to one another. With the orange coursing through him, he could feel the connections between the bane and all their magic, not just the logical ones but the emotional ones as well. He could also hear through the array now.

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.

Of course. His time with the cards had prepared him for this: Blue gave sight in the array, just as it did with tapping the cards. Superviolet gave the structure and logic of the array and of the world itself. Orange had given him smell and a sense of the others in the world. So green would give touch, the sense of embodiment. Yellow would let him hear. Red would be taste; and sub-red pure emotion.

Kip sought Corvan Danavis’s command structure at the Great Fountain, and found it immediately. He looked for the figure of the general himself and found his awareness covered three-quarters of the distance between them, and then all of it. He could see Corvan barking directions rapid-fire to one man and then another. He could see the lines on the man’s face. But he couldn’t hear him.

Opening his awareness the smallest quantum to yellow—which translated to two of the smaller mirrors automatically dropping a yellow lens into their light streams—Kip could suddenly hear Danavis shouting, “—two hours until dark. You have to hold the walls until then. No drafting!”

Touching a bit of every other color brought all his senses together, just as the cards had taught him. He could cast some semblance of his self to any part of the Jaspers almost instantaneously.

Oh, he was going to kick ass now!

Even as he gathered his next attack, he could see that the Wight King must have sent urgent messages out. The bane were changing tack. The great, devastating lightstorms were being dissipated or hurled back out into the seas by the very gods who’d generated them.

They’d finally figured out that Kip would use their greatest weapon against themselves.

He cursed. Maybe he could get one last bane before the lux storms got away.

But as his will jumped through the array once more, he noticed something unexpected. Samila Sayeh was back in the blue bane. She was so damned resilient, she’d returned to the battle immediately, and this time she wouldn’t be taken unawares.

Worse, the Sub-red was moving again. What?! The Anat was dead!

Kip had definitely killed the man. His will jumped across the gap, and he could still see the body, but hidden from his line of sight—deliberately, no doubt—there was another will here, taking control. Another Anat. A woman had simply stepped forward into the old one’s place, taking up the mantle as easily as one would pick up a crown and settle it on one’s head.

There was no telling which of its powers she could use, but at least she could make it move. It seemed that as long as there was a sub-red wight with the will for it, there would be no end to the Anats. Kip would have to kill every last wight here.

No!

What had seemed so easy moments ago suddenly felt impossible. There was no way Kip could kill every single wight attacking Big Jasper. Even Gavin couldn’t have done that!

Kip stopped altogether, watching with growing tightness in his throat.

Each bane was an island unto itself, an eighth the size of Big Jasper. They had surrounded Big Jasper and they covered much of its shoreline, the blue bane pressing from Cannon Island to the seawall, sealing West Bay. It glittered like cut sapphires in the sun and crept forward on a million crystalline teeth, each sprouting off its leading edge, being smashed forward by the weight of the bane behind it, and digging in, devouring territory like a hungry mouth. Around a great central tower, great faceted stalagmites sprouted everywhere. At the island’s edge, those shards shattered ships and docks, soon to roll over homes and bodies.

The green bane lay in a tentacled mass of vegetation and horror south of the blue, across the wall from the neighborhood of Weasel Rock. The yellow, blinding as it flashed from liquid to solid to light, and the orange bane, dull as an oil slick but just as iridescent and oddly fascinating under the weight of its hexes, were on the south and southeast sides of the island. Red and sub-red together sealed East Bay, making a conflagration that smoked and steamed as it hit the water, bubbling ever forward like lava meeting the sea.

If killing the chief wight of each color didn’t stop the bane, what could?

The seed crystals. They had to shatter the seed crystals. They were what empowered the wights to become nearly gods. They were what spawned and controlled the entire magical islands that were the bane.

Kip threw his will toward the green bane now clambering up the very walls with great wet roots like tentacles, shattering rock and burying defenders. He’d barely made it to the surface of the bane when something there knocked him off his feet with incredible force. It seemed to grab at him, sucking him toward it.

Someone—some
thing
—was trying to willjack him.

Kip hit back instantly, but it was like punching a brick wall. He slammed against it again and again, but he felt it clinging to him, clinging to green, pulling him in, in. His mind felt bloodied from his strikes, dazed, and the green’s grip on him only strengthened.

He felt probing against his mind, as if yellow were reaching out for him, too, with glee.

Launching himself backward, cutting off green and yellow, Kip snapped back to his own body. He dropped his hands from the array’s grips as if they were hot coals.

“What was that?!” Big Leo asked.

“Did you feel it, too?” Kip asked. “Same thing as at Ru, wasn’t it?”

“Breaker, there’s blood coming from your ears.”

Kip touched his ears and looked at the wetness on his fingers. “Just blood,” he said. “Not spinal fluid.”

Not that bleeding from your ears is good.

“Zymun’s here with his drafters!” Ben-hadad called from where he stood beside the door to the roof. The door itself was mere splinters now, held together with every color of luxin, put into some honeycombed pattern Ben-hadad must have made up.

“Stop all your drafting now,” Kip commanded. “Something’s changed. Their influence is spreading over the islands even now. And move.”

In moments, he was going to lose the ability to draft any color at all. So he threw everything he had into doubling and tripling the strength of the barricade Ben-hadad and the others had drafted in front of the door.

Then he turned his will back to Big Jasper. Samila Sayeh was charging up her own tower, halfway to the top, and somehow seemed at war with some unseen figure for control of her own bane-island. She had the blue seed crystal in her hand.

Knowing it might be the last chance he had to draft at all, Kip used the mirror to hurl a spear of sub-red and red interlaced into solid flame at her and the blue bane’s central tower.

It felt like he’d walked past a catapult’s release lever and nudged it; instead of throwing a stone, it threw every bit of red and sub-red luxin Kip might have been able to draft in forty years, all at once.

But he felt like he’d been kicked just as he released the burning spear.

He was spinning in the array.

For a long moment, Kip held still, gasping. His eyes throbbed. He could tell he’d gone from the occasional drafter of fire to suddenly now straining his halos in both sub-red and red.

“Who grabbed the array!” Kip yelled. “Who spun me?! Who the hell spun me?!”

As his eyes cleared, he looked at the Mighty. They appeared as baffled as he was.

If he hadn’t physically been spun, and he hadn’t willed himself to spin, then only superviolet hijacking the controls could have done that.

At that moment, something like a shock wave passed over them. Like an immense ocean swell, bending vision, Kip suddenly could see realities overlaid as they’d overlaid the world when he’d been at death’s door before.

Without spectacles, he could see superviolet tentacles reaching down from above, withdrawing by the moment, as if caught out. He spun within the array and saw her there: in the air, high above him, floating on an invisible bane, was the woman who’d once been Aliviana Danavis.

Liv.

But she wasn’t alone. With her was a creature of immense proportions, masquerading as a small, unctuous thing. It held the superviolet seed crystal.

And now, everywhere Kip looked, he saw them, with every bane. Immortals. This was why the colors were locking down. Koios’s most important wights knew some of the bane’s powers, but the old gods—the immortals behind the old gods—they knew
all
of their powers.

Now those immortals had come to join the fight.

Kip saw at least one for each color, all of them exposed, momentarily, by the great wave passing over Big Jasper, all of them with alarm etched over their once-beautiful faces, looking east to the source of that wave.