The Burning White (134 page)

“More darkness,” Dazen gasped as he dropped the luxin. He pulled his hand angrily out of Orholam’s. “I need more black! More black!”

The sky above was dotted now with thousands of stars, shining, brilliant. The descending darkness should have given him more source, but it only made those points of defiant light shine all the brighter.

Orholam said, “Even eagles must sometimes dive into a lake to hunt, no matter that it momentarily destroys the lake’s reflection of the sky.”

“What are You even talking about? Reflection of the—”

Dazen looked at the sword stuck into the black crust covering the tower.

When he’d stepped through to the other side of the mirror, the tower in that other world had been white. It had been as it ought to be, maybe as it had been on this side of the mirror before Vician’s Sin, before the relentless tide of the Chromeria’s murders.

Surely now every bit of the black tower was covered in a great cascade of blood flowing from the Mirror of Waking.

There was an entire tower’s worth of unadulterated black luxin at Dazen’s feet. Pure, concentrated darkness, and the blood of martyrs connected him with all of it.

Dazen plunged his hands again into the flowing blood, smeared it up the blade until it made an unbroken line to his hand.

He gazed at the bloody thing that would be the instrument of his own execution. He had lived by the blade, wrongly sacrificing the innocent. It was only right he himself should be its final sacrifice.

This is for you, Vell Parsham, my first murder. You tried to warn me.

She’d said, ‘End me now, Lord Prism, but someday, may you end it all or
be ended
. Know that Orholam is just, and tremble.’

This is for you, Edna, who thought your sins so black you couldn’t speak them. I understand you now as I couldn’t then.

This is for you, Titrit, whom I despised. I came to despise myself more.

This is for Dulcina Dulceana . . . He couldn’t think of her, but he remembered her words and his own disbelief at her quiet, her peace. She’d said, ‘You’ve been doing Orholam’s work all day, and will do so all night and through the morrow. Let me give you a gift. The only gift I have. The gift of my five minutes. You may speak or we can be silent. You can Free me first if you prefer solitude, or at the end if you prefer company. As you will.’ She’d believed in him so much—she’d been so generous of spirit that she’d given him her last five minutes: a poor woman giving her last mite to a man whose treasury overflowed.

Her grace had broken him.

Going in to his first Freeing, Gavin had believed in two gods, and with her had died his faith in the wrong one.

This is for you Aheyyad Brightwater, that flower I plucked too soon.

This is for . . . this is for all of you.

Standing beside him, Orholam extended His hand again. Even though He’d just been holding Dazen’s bloody hand moments ago, His own hand was clean. “You want to do this with Me, or alone?”

Dazen slapped his hand into the old man’s. He didn’t know what, if anything, Orholam was going to do, but he’d been a fool trying to do everything on his own for long enough. If a bit of help would help him help those he loved, he wasn’t gonna turn it down.

He braced his feet wide, and taking a deep breath, he put his right hand on the blade before him. His source was a perfect black, unpolluted, deeper than the darkest night, but even with such a source, drafting from a color’s luxin was never efficient; it always generated heat and discomfort, even if you only drafted a little.

Dazen didn’t plan to draft a little.

Dazen never did anything
little
.

He threw his will down into the whole tower. Everywhere the blood touched, his will connected with the old black luxin.

It shot up into him like an erupting geyser, and filled him, impossibly fast. Beside him, he saw omnichromatic fire erupting from Orholam’s other hand, as if He were scraping the dross from all the black and venting it, allowing Dazen to be filled with purest black alone.

Dazen became the lens focusing a vast well of black light onto a point hundreds of leagues distant.

Then Dazen was filled beyond bursting, and with one last, mighty shout, he threw all his will into one final burst toward that dimly flickering light on the horizon, his beloved White . . .

* * *

With a foot kicking hard against the wight’s chest, Gill Greyling cleared his spear from the still-standing body of his foe, and in the same motion, lengthened his body out as if he were a striking serpent, smashing the spear’s butt directly into the throat of a red wight swinging a war hammer wreathed in flames at Karris’s back. Before the wight even hit the ground, Gill’s spear had spun an arc to slash through his crushed throat.

Ending threats forcefully and with finality, Karris thought dimly. It was what they were trained to do.

But she was a ghost. Already dead inside, she walked the battlefield with the other spirits of the dead lingering only shortly on this side of the veil. The air had shifted. The black-luxin fingers that had reached from beyond the horizon were gone.

Gavin’s will had let go. He was gone. Finally gone.

She had given up on him. She’d failed him. She had thought she wouldn’t know when he died, that such thoughts were the nonsense of young fools in love. But she knew now.

She knew.

And then the air shifted again. Something to do with the black luxin. As if its withdrawal hadn’t been the withdrawal of an attack abandoned but the temporary withdrawal of ocean after an earthquake.

Even the wights seemed suddenly discomfited. Men and wights both paused in their fighting, backing away from their enemies.

“What is it?” Gill asked. “What’s happening?”

Karris was looking out to sea toward her lost love, so she saw it first.

Far out beyond East Bay, the lights of a ship winked out. Then another’s, far to one side. A burning ship’s fires simply disappeared. Then she noticed that the stars on the horizon were gone.

Her breath caught in her throat as she saw it for what it was. Like a sandstorm thundering across the desert, towering into the night, an immense black wave broke over the horizon, wider than the Jaspers themselves, and as high as the clouds.

In the distance, she heard screams at its onslaught.

As if the sea were swelling and devouring all before it in a massive wave, every light on every ship was extinguished in turn, into the bay, and then over the towers, over the walls, and then—in the time it takes to suck in a startled breath—over the Jaspers entire.

All went utterly, utterly black. Blacker than mere night. This was the black of blindness, after a life spent working light. It penetrated everything, soaking everything as water does—then scouring it away with all the strength of an earthquake’s wave.

Eerily, it was silent.

And it was, unmistakably, unquestionably, Gavin.

Then, just as the wails of alarm and despair were rising up from women and men struck blind and dismayed at their sudden loss—the wave was gone.

As light returned to their eyes, Karris could feel the wave dissipating. It had been held together this far, but it wouldn’t last even another league. Gavin had . . .

“
promachos,
” Gill whispered, awed. “That was
him
. That was Gavin, wasn’t it? I could
feel
—How could he draft so much? What did he do?”

A snap and hiss popped next to them, illuminating the merely natural dark of the night with glorious green light. Samite grinned in that wild light.

“The bane,” she said. “Their power’s broken. We can draft!”

Numerous bane-islands were still out there, so at first no one believed her, but then there were slowly the snaps and hisses of glorious colors coming alive from burning mag torches. First a few, then dozens of them drenched the Blackguards and their allies in heady, potent light.

The twenty remaining wights turned and fled.

It was still night. Their position was still precarious. They had only whatever magic they could draft off of their mag torches. But now—now they had a chance!

Gavin had reached from beyond the grave to give them one chance.

He had died to bring them light.

“To the Glare!” Karris shouted.

She would mourn her husband. Later. She was a warrior.

Warriors know how to honor a hero’s sacrifice: first you finish the fucking fight.

If there was one thing Corvan Danavis excelled at, it was being able to ignore a little personal danger (say, a battle raging around him) in order to focus on more important things. It was part of what made him an excellent commander, and in truth, he’d never understood how other people couldn’t do it.

Which was why right now he was cursing in the face of a shaking messenger, spit flying as he bellowed, “How old is this message?! And don’t tell me you don’t fucking know!”

“Maybe, maybe half an hour, sir? Less?” the messenger said. “I came straight here, but the others—”

“An hour?” Corvan demanded.

“Uh, maybe? Maybe, sir. Yes. There was so much fighting, and I wanted to make sure I got through safely so I didn’ t—”

“Get out of my face!”

Two of Corvan’s bodyguards, one from either side, suddenly threw their shields up in front of him as a fireball the size of a woman’s head arced toward him. It bounced off their shields and rolled into the crowd behind him.

Nope. Not a fireball the size of a woman’s head. A literal flaming woman’s head. Odd.

The messenger blanched. A coward. It was the last trait a messenger could afford—but one didn’t find out which messengers could handle the job until they’d been through a battle or two.

A distraction, Kip said. Kip needed a distraction.

The city was in a bad way. Corvan had just had news that the wall bordering the poor neighborhood of Overhill nearest the red bane was nearly abandoned, most of its defenders lured to the walls elsewhere in the nobles’ neighborhoods, or even worse, lured to guard their houses against the looters they feared during the battle.

If the city survived until tomorrow, Corvan was going to find those damned nobles and put them on the walls as rank infantrymen themselves.

But first came survival.

Corvan had found any plan with too many working parts tended to fall apart in direct relation to how many parts depended on other parts doing what they should, so his battle plan was simple: defend and delay. As islands, the most obvious weakness of the Jaspers was that they were easy to lay under siege.

But anyone laying them under siege was, in effect, under siege themselves. Karris had directed the isles’ fishermen to deliberately overfish the nearby waters, not only to stockpile dried fish but to deprive invaders. Fresh water was an even bigger problem for a besieging armada, so where there were springs that drained into the sea, Corvan had massed defenders in greater numbers than any other general would have. If the fight lasted long enough, the availability of potable water might actually be the key to the victory.

Everywhere, he’d prepared the defenders with how long to hold their walls, and what to do when they lost them, and how to signal everyone else that such loss was imminent.

The defenders would stagger their losses, hopefully containing those to nonessential areas. A few natural ambush choke points could be used if the local commanders dared.

Corvan liked to push certain decisions down the chain of command as much as possible. Men paralyzed waiting for orders that might never come through the chaos of battle were dead men, not defenders.

Today the hope had been to hold the Blood Robes off the walls.

Unsurprisingly, that hadn’t worked out.

The next plan had been to make them pay in rivers of blood for every street they took, delaying them until dark, when the Jaspers’ defenders would no longer be at a disadvantage.

But there were places the Chromeria couldn’t afford to lose, full stop: some of the gun emplacements that could be turned against the city and the Chromeria itself, certain neighborhoods, the Lily’s Stem—and the Great Fountain. Corvan had set up his headquarters here to stress to his people how it was the linchpin to their defense. Not only was it the most abundant source of fresh water in the city with its artesian well, but it sat at one of the five great intersections of the city. That made it hard to defend, but also easy to dispatch reinforcements to anyplace in the city that needed it.

The battle had come here, in surprising force.

The razor wings and bomb wings and the crawling vermin will-cast to burrow into the street barricades before bursting into flame had waited until the assaults by tens of thousands of Blood Robe soldiers. Kip had warned Corvan of this: the use of munds as cannon fodder and auxiliaries.

It had meant a catastrophic loss of life for the attackers, especially as the bane had been so confused, so late in locking down all the Chromeria’s defenders.

The defenders had lost neighborhood after neighborhood, including some sections of wall with their most powerful guns—all spiked before they were abandoned, luckily.

But the Blood Robes hadn’t broken off the attack here, even as full dark was gathering.

Why weren’t they withdrawing?

After all, at night the Blood Robes were deprived of their greatest advantage—their drafters and wights. Why wouldn’t they wait until tomorrow to attack again? Were they hoping to take the city before full dark, and were giving their attack a few more minutes to succeed? Did they think Corvan’s forces so close to breaking?

He thought them wrong, though not by much.

That was when Kip sprang his own gambit: attacking the bane themselves with small squads. Suicidally small squads.

Kip, repulsing unbelievably strong magical attacks, was trying to wrest victory directly from the enemy while their forces were at Corvan’s throat.

It was just the kind of move Corvan would have attempted as a young man, though not, he thought, with such small forces.

His people had fought the Blood Robes to a standstill. Indeed, some of the invading soldiers had even withdrawn to their bane.