The Burning White (129 page)

Forward again—ever forward—though now with only five Blackguards.

Three hundred paces out now, not far! They sprinted up a rise, not daring to slow to reload muskets, and suddenly found themselves facing a double line of Blood Robe musketeers. More than twenty of them. The front row kneeling, the back row standing, all muskets leveled.

But their officer, facing the Chromeria, gave no order to fire. His eyes were on the tower.

An instant later, Karris and everyone else saw why.

With the speed and dazzling, eye-burning intensity of a falling star, something streaked in a fiery crimson-and-sapphire line from the top of the Prism’s Tower to the great blue tower at the center of the bane.

It lasted only one blinding moment, and seemed like it had been jerked away from its low, intended target up and to the side.

Karris found herself tackled, thrown to the side out of the way of the firing line, but the blue officer still gave no orders. The other Blackguards were cutting into the musketeers’ ranks with astonishing speed and efficiency.

Blues were slashed, spun, muskets seized, muskets discharged into others, kneeling men knocked down, stabbed on the ground even as the Blackguard attacked the next and the next.

Twenty-four men, killed by six, in
seconds
.

But Karris was looking back up toward the Prism’s Tower, where that incredible magic had come from. Her heart swelled.

Someone was looking out for them. Someone saw, someone cared, someone was trying to save them.

They ran on.

She saw that two great lines now stretched from the top of the Prism’s Tower, one to Ebon’s Hill and the other to Cannon Island. Small figures were zipping down each one.

So her repairs had worked. Good.

But still, those guys must have balls of steel. Zipping down the escape chains into
this
?

With a spear, Grinwoody moved down the line of falling pagans, stabbing and twisting, stabbing and twisting. He said, “Sure didn’t think I’d go out like this.”

The others had been taking advantage of the lull to reload.

“What?” Karris asked. Having mounted this rise, they finally had a good view of what was around them in every direction. Behind them, the Blood Robes had caught on to their incursion, and several hundred were chasing to catch up with them. The sides were open, but led nowhere, and would be closed off in minutes.

Between Karris and her goal of the great blue plinth were hundreds and hundreds of blues—
thousands
—with more coming by the moment, called back from the front lines to stop her attack. Against Karris and her six.

Her heart cratered.

The blues were already between her little force and the bane. And the bane itself was sheer-sided, with no helpful steps for her to charge up like the bane at Ru had had.

But . . . the tower’s perfection was marred, not far from the base.

A single line left by that falling-star strike from the Prism’s Tower cut across it as if it were a bamboo shoot cut with a sword.

Except dropping blue luxin the width of the sword-cut meant dropping an entire tower’s mass onto the crystalline blue luxin beneath it. Luxin that was marvelously strong on one plane but otherwise fragile on others.

A sharp report echoed across the plain of this weird blue island, and Karris saw cracks race up the tower’s face, and slower ones run down from the cut as well.

They shattered into vast crystals the size of whole buildings and fell in many directions, not least toward Karris.

“Oh, shit,” Gill said.

She found herself thrown into a crack and buried under a pile of protective bodies just as chunks of razor-sharp blue luxin rained from the sky. Gill threw the shield above them, only to have it ripped away by some blow or from the vast chalky wind of gritty blue dust blasting over them.

A minute later, they stood, binding cloths over their faces so they wouldn’t breathe the sharp blue dust. Miraculously, none of them had died, though everyone other than Karris had at least small cuts from flying frostglass. The same could not be said for many hundreds of the enemy. A great portion of the tower had fallen into the bulk of the pagan army. Others had been sliced to ribbons by the sideways-flying shrapnel.

Hundreds more, farther out, couldn’t have actually been injured, but they were stunned to immobility, their wills shaken by the cataclysm that had befallen what they’d thought impervious to attack.

Others were slowly recovering, moaning under the blue dust and the rubble.

Karris gave hand signals to advance. The blues might be broken altogether—or they might recover at any moment.

Soon, Gill pointed sharply in one direction and took the lead.

That was right, Gill was almost a blue drafter; he’d barely failed his testing in it, and hadn’t tried again, afraid he would be named a polychrome and become too valuable for Blackguard service. He must be feeling something.

They climbed over the rubble of blue luxin shards, sharp enough to cut through a careless boot and the foot inside it. Not a few times, Karris felt more yielding ground beneath her foot, only to find a body, bleeding an all-too-human red into the dust.

But many, many of the wights and drafters were recovering. Far more of them than she would have imagined still seemed to be alive, even here.

Then, suddenly, they were upon
her
.

The Mot was still alive. Crippled and broken, she’d tried to draft luxin wings to glide from the top of her collapsing tower, but she’d been too slow.

Under the ice-blue skin, shimmering in a million facets so that it could move, Karris recognized the woman: Samila Sayeh, one of the legends from the Prisms’ War. She’d fought for Gavin at Garriston. She and her longtime lover Usef Tep, the Purple Bear, Karris thought. Or had they fought on opposite sides?

That was right. Opposite sides during the war, then lovers afterward.

But Samila had fought
for
Gavin.

“Samila?” Karris asked. “You’re with them?”

The woman wore a black luxin collar. She tapped it. “Slave,” she said with difficulty. And Karris understood. Somehow, Samila had been given the choice to serve Koios or die.

“Red light and blue,” Samila said, wincing. Something was wrong with the woman’s spine, for sure. But Karris wasn’t sure what Samila was talking about. The red and blue stroke from the Prism’s Tower that had doomed her?

“He died, you know. My Purple Bear,” Samila said. “Usef, left me alone. Not his fault. Irrational to blame him. Irrational to be so angry. But Usef helped me feel passion. Made it acceptable for a lady of my stature and intellect.”

She grinned, and suddenly there was something young and mischievous and fierce in her old, cold eyes.

“He loved a big show. Going out with a bang. Iron White, listen!” She suddenly clamped her eyes tightly shut. Then she hissed, “The djinn are real. When they find a powerful drafter who pleases them, like me, like the nine kings of old, they may possess her, trading power for power. Then at the moment of death they
take
—but she doesn’t want this broken body. She wants to flee! But she’s vulnerable now. You can bar them from this realm forever, maybe from all the Thousand Realms together. But only if you can strike fast, before she escapes my will. Do you have the Blinding Knife? Quickly now, before—”

Her face contorted as if something had just caused her tremendous pain.

“Quickly!” Samila grunted. She gritted her teeth. “The Knife!”

But Karris didn’t have it.

And then Samila Sayeh died. And Karris had the terrible feeling that somehow she’d focused all her energies the wrong direction.

Just then a huge young man with a flaming chain in his hands and black armor with the sigil of Kip’s Mighty on it came running up. Karris’s Blackguards nearly panicked until they recognized him; it was their old compatriot, Big Leo. One of Kip’s men now. Behind him came thirty more of Kip’s elite drafters.

Big Leo’s gear was bloodied, with some of the black lacquer rubbed off his armor from luxin bolts, showing the mirroring beneath it. “Wait,” he said. He looked down at Samila Sayeh. His war chain went out, and drooped. “You’re all done? You did it without me?”

“Gimme that,” Gill Greyling said off to one side. “C’mon!” He snatched a glowing blue stone that Grinwoody was trying to tuck away.

Big Leo looked bereft. “ But—but do you know what we had to do to get all the way out here? . . . And—and I came all this way to . . .”

“Thanks,” Gill said, throwing the blue seed crystal on the ground. He drew a musket and shot it. The glowing crystal blasted apart as if it were just a globe of glass.

“I don’t know if you should have done that just—” Grinwoody started to say.

But Karris cut him off, her eyes locked on the horizon between Big and Little Jasper. “What the hell is
that
?”

They all looked. Two fans of flame like wings were jetting into the air at the northern tip of Big Jasper.

“Forget it!” Karris barked. “This island’s coming apart! Run! Unless you wanna swim, run!”

This can’t be happening.

There was a veil of surreality over the entire walk. Kip thought he was too smart to get sucked into thinking the same things over and over, swirling ’round and ’round like a ship spinning down Charybdis’ maelstrom until it was devoured whole, helpless. Yet here he spun.

He can’t get away with this.

This can’t be happening.

Someone’s gonna step in to stop this any moment now. They’ve got to.

How can he think he’ll get away with this? This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.

Part of Kip knew that Zymun
wouldn’t
get away with this. His congenital lack of fear was also a lack of sense; it
would
get him killed. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow. With the friends Kip had, and the other desperate actors in this city, Zymun certainly wasn’t long for this world.

But he didn’t need to be alive tomorrow in order to kill Kip today. Zymun had the most willing men with guns in the immediate vicinity. Even as one suicidal fanatic with a musket could prevail against the entire Blackguard itself, Zymun was rendering moot all the long-term, careful plans of those more skilled and better trained than he was.

The Chromeria’s drafters were locked down now by the bane. Cowed by the shock of being separated from the power that defined them. None of them were going to step forward against the thugs of the Lightguard, not now.

And thus Kip passed through the gates from the Chromeria.

Footstep followed footstep, dozens of Lightguards walking beside him, before him, behind him. One of them had even had the wit to throw a red cloak around Kip’s shoulders to hide his bound hands behind his back. Many of those they passed now wouldn’t even know Kip was a prisoner.

Everywhere around the walls of the city, the battle continued, even as the sun sank low in the sky. The attention of everyone sane in this city was turned to the walls and to the horrors that lay outside them. Every friend Kip had was off fighting, doing vital work to save the islands.

Zymun, overconfident in victory, wasn’t even manning the mirror array.

Orholam’s Glare came into view, perched as it was at the base of the Lily’s Stem, just on the Big Jasper side of the bridge. There would be no rescue. Kip knew how far away all the people who would come to his aid were now: too far.

I knew this would happen, he thought. I knew I was going to die on this island.

He’d had the temerity to think it would be a heroic death, that he might accomplish something as he died. Hell, he could’ve died on the mirror array ten minutes ago and counted it a good death. A noble death.

This? A traitor’s death on the Glare?

How could anyone find meaning in that?

When the Chromeria used the Glare, they did it at noon. It was a horrible death, burning—but it was done in half a minute. How long would it take Kip to die, with the sun low in the horizon? How much torture would he endure?

And then they arrived. The simple walk was finished without any theatrics, without any attempts at rescue, without anyone even crying out for them to stop—a brisk walk across the Lily’s Stem like Kip had made hundreds of times before.

No one even knew.

The Lightguards had found Tisis somewhere, though she was supposed to be on the far side of the city. Maybe she’d come when she saw him on the array. Kip didn’t think her presence was a mercy.

He felt pulled away from himself, watching himself walk, watching himself look at his wife.

He didn’t know what to say to her. She was going to see him die, like this. She was going to watch him burn to death, rave, shriek. It was not the last view anyone should have of someone they loved.

“You can look away,” he said. “When it gets awful.”

“You did
not
just say that to me,” she said, her voice jagged as hell-stone.

“I wanted to see that fire in you. You know, since you’re going to see fire in me soon.”

She didn’t even smile, her face falling. “Goddammit, Kip.”

“I always prided myself on being able to do hard things,” he said, forcing a little smile. “But you know, I’m not coming to this fresh . . .”

She was right on the verge of tears, and he was afraid he was, too. He looked away. He’d seen men die by fire. There was no stoicism equal to it. Such a death was never less than ugliness itself.

He said, “Please don’t judge me for . . . for how I go.”

“Judge you?” she asked, her voice cracking, and he dared a single glimpse, seeing her tears of loss and rage and impotence streaming down her face. “Never!”

His hands were bound behind his back, so he said, “There’s a, uh, card in my pocket. Can you take that out for me?”

The Lightguards let her. Indeed, a couple of the young men—kids really—among them looked sickened by what they were about to do. If there had only been five or six Lightguards, Kip might’ve been able to turn that to his advantage. But not with forty.

“Can you press it against my forearm?” he asked. “I owe a favor to someone.”