The Burning White (72 page)

His memory hadn’t abandoned him after all. Who else could recall such, so perfectly?

“She adjudged you well,” the old man said. “No wonder she wanted nothing to do with you.”

It was a misstep. “Was Ninharissi your lady, then?” Andross asked.

“No. But I see why the Third Eye gave me those words to say. They were for both of us.”

Of course. Now it made sense.

The message wasn’t from Ninharissi herself, but merely from a Seer who had stolen them from the ether. A little magical eavesdropper, spying on a couple’s intimate moments. Disgusting.

Andross had hoped the message was some word from beyond the grave, a treasure a dead woman had wished delivered to him while he was in these straits.

It was all very disappointing, but it made sense. Of course, only the Third Eye could see where she had never been, and into the past as well as into the future. She was an ally more dangerous than even Janus Borig, but couldn’t be taken from the game, for she would be a foe far more dangerous still.

Thus, Andross had made no move against her, but he was glad she’d chosen to stay far away.

“How is Polyhymnia?” he asked. He wasn’t supposed to know that name. No one was. But swive her for pretending to speak for one he loved. “Has she some guidance for the war?” He felt some hope. After all, Orholam’s Seers might choose not to join sides in any normal war, but in a war against heretics and pagans? Surely this visit meant she was answering Andross’s letters at last.

“I don’t know who that is,” the old man said, “but the Third Eye told me she’d be dead by the time I reached you. Murdered by the Order of the Broken Eye. She said anything she did to stop her assassination would only forestall it, wouldn’t affect the course of the war, and would have other costs too great for her to countenance.”

“Worthless to me, then. Figures. You know, I’ve met dozens of prophets and Seers through the years. Charlatans and half-wits, most of them. But at least those could be used against the kind of people who believe them. Yet the real ones were never any use at all.”

The near-blasphemy spurred no anger from the old Parian. He only stared at Andross calmly.

“What are you here for, old man?” Andross asked.

The old man smiled, finally. “I overestimated you. I thought surely you would place me in an instant. The Third Eye said that for a man who’d had the light restored to his eyes, you were remarkably blind, for you hardly ever look at other people, except to see how you might use them.”

Andross looked now. The age. The vocabulary. The diction. The red-gold buttons on his satchel, such as librarians use to carry their scrolls in Azûlay.

His heart suddenly clenched.

But the old man was already speaking: “You seduced my daughter. You convinced her to betray her oaths to her city and tribe and family. You turned her into a thief, and you left her banished, destitute, and pregnant.”

Aha. He’d arrived at it only a moment too late. “Asafa ar Veyda de Lauria del Luccia verd’Avonte. A pleasure to meet a Keeper of the Word, Chief Librarian.” This was Katalina Delauria’s father; this was Kip’s maternal grandfather.

Asafa’s eyes were burning embers in a face like coal ready to take the flame. He said, “Before you took her from me, Lina and I were very close. She was my joy, my everything. For a time, she wrote me letters even after she fled in disgrace,” Asafa said. “Long letters, unsparing of herself or others. She told me everything. And I’ve come, Andross Guile, to upend all you know and break your glacial heart.”

As the first cannons began firing at them, the command skimmer broke apart.

But the enemy had no Gunner directing their fire. The shots—twenty of them at least—all sailed wide, short, or long. Few of them were even close.

Still, there was the familiar jolt of excitement at being shot at with no effect. That bracing, ‘Holy shit! I’m alive and I could have been dead and someone just wanted me dead and did all they could to make me dead, but I’m alive, hell yeah, you bastards!’

The Mighty were near enough the wall of galleys and galleons under the flying flags of broken chains on a black background that the roar of the guns was nearly simultaneous with the gushers of the smoke and the splash of the cannonballs, jetting water into the air.

Kip’s eyes were dragged below the line of the cannons, though, in front of the ripples that spread around each as the shock waves left their imprint on the waters beside the ships.

In a unison not possible for wild animals, dozens—no,
hundreds
—of sharks rose, dorsal fins in ranks, heading straight for the Mighty.

A primal fear struck him then, thalassophobia, a dread that man was not made for the depths, that the water was not his home, that this vast sea was itself hostile to him, hateful. If the foils of his skimmer hit a shark, Kip might kill the shark, but the collision would certainly pitch him into the water.

He would be helpless. Torn apart by those alien, unforgiving teeth.

The skimmer shivering as a musket ball ricocheted off the deck broke Kip’s brief paralysis. He aimed it down lower into the waves. The increased drag slowed him considerably.

Then, as he closed in on the sharks, he aimed skyward.

He shot into the air, and felt a jarring bump from beneath propelling him even higher.

It turned him off axis, but Ben-hadad—Orholam bless him for being such a damned genius—had built the skimmers well. The foils weren’t edged but round, so when Kip hit the waves again, there was little danger of catching an edge and flipping over. Instead, Kip skipped over the waves a couple of times, then the foils dug into the waves and he was off again.

Directly toward dozens more sharks.

But before any of them could attack, on some unseen cue, the majority of them turned away and dove.

Kip had no time to figure out why they’d turned away, or what that dark immensity was far beneath the waves.

He also had lost track of what was happening with any of the rest of the Mighty. He could only keep himself alive now, and that took everything in him.

He was within forty paces of the first ships now, and though the teams were still reloading cannons and swivel guns, men on the galleons’ decks were firing muskets toward him.

Splashes pocked the water as he juked one way and then the next.

At the last moment before he crashed into a galleon’s hull, Kip veered his skimmer hard sideways and accelerated as quickly as he could.

The Mighty’s lack of training as a squad on the skimmers nearly got him killed. He veered directly into Winsen’s path, surprising the young man as much as the musketeers on the galley’s deck.

Winsen popped his skimmer up into the air, and Kip ducked, taking a faceful of water even as he blasted luxin skyward. Winsen’s skimmer was flung high into the air, and by the time Kip was able to clear his eyes, he heard a splash on the other side of the galleon.

Then he saw the stern of the next ship, looming directly before him, and he cut hard to port and inside the first circle of ships.

Kip glanced back just in time to see Big Leo follow his path, but this time a red wight was ready for him. The young woman with burn-scarred skin oozing pyrejelly set herself aflame and leapt through the air into Big Leo’s path.

His immense chain swung in a quick arc and batted her aside as if she were an overexcited puppy jumping toward her master with muddy paws. She plunged into the waves, hissing and sizzling, and he swung that flaming chain once more above his head to regain his balance, slapped it into the waves to extinguish the last red luxin-fed flames, and came after Kip as they darted inside the outer circle of ships.

The second circle was entirely slave-rowed galleys without sails, their decks lower to the waves and packed with warriors, most of them only lightly armored.

Kip saw Cruxer speeding past an entire ship broadside, his skimmer shearing through slaves’ oars while he himself needled the massed warriors on deck, shooting a storm of short blue luxin arrows from his hands, unguided and small but fiercely sharp. Whether hit themselves or just cowering before this terror, the warriors went down like sheaves of grain as a scythe passed across the deck. They folded in blood and screams.

Taking advantage of the chaos Cruxer was creating, Einin angled in to the ship and slapped a hullwrecker down near the waterline, then zipped away.

Winsen fought like a madman on a spring. He bounced his skimmer up to the height of a deck, loosed two arrows while he was in the air, put his hands back on the reeds, and bounced again as if the sea were made of boiled rubber. He killed the captain, the first mate at the wheel, he killed a bo’s’n, he killed every officer and fighting man who looked important—and then he turned back around and kept killing until someone panicked and shouted the order to fire a broadside.

The young archer heard the order, though, and instead of popping back up from the waves, angled his skimmer downward and stayed underwater.

The broadside of twenty cannons boomed with a fury—raking death across the decks of its allied galleon in the outer circle.

Winsen popped up out of the waves, water sluicing off the skimmer as he barely held on, blinded and cursing, and no longer holding his favorite bow—but alive. Three sailors, muskets now reloaded, ran to the rail and aimed down at the temporarily immobilized young man.

Kip threw blue spikes as hard as he could from his awkward angle far beyond the ship himself. The first wasn’t even close. The second shattered against the railing under the sailors’ hands, barely a miss. The third flew low but passed underneath the railing and blasted the nearest sailor’s legs out from under him.

Between the blue shrapnel exploding in their faces and their crew-mate going down, the two unharmed sailors panicked. One froze. The other stepped backward, tripped, and accidentally discharged his musket into the air.

Seeing Winsen regain his balance and his velocity, Kip cut under the beakhead of the next ship and in.

The directed explosion of the hullwrecker snapped out behind them, and Kip saw a billow of smoke and showers of wood from the ship behind them.

At the Battle of Ru, the Blood Robes had used a single rowboat filled with superviolet drafters to raise the bane.

Kip had expected the same here, but perhaps with nine rowboats.

There were no rowboats.

This was a fucking dragon-ship.

A dozen galleys had been lashed together, the disparate parts melded into a whole with wood and burnt red luxin. Cut in the brutal style of early pagan art, this floating castle had the look of something crafted by a master artist equipped only with an ax. Brushed white pine skin yielded to spikes carved from ivory tusks. The open maw, equipped with great spouts for shooting out burning red luxin, showed lips of burnt red luxin, like blackened, cracked skin. It had claws and eyes of atasifusta wood, ever-burning.

In a carven saddle, high on the dragon’s back and raised high above the waves, was a black throne. Empty.

But that didn’t mean the rest of the dragon-ship was empty. Like fire ants rushing up your trouser leg when you stepped full into their anthill, the Blood Robes on it were in a violent panic, frothing forth onto every surface Kip could see.

And all of them—red-robed though they were—were drafters or wights. There were hundreds.

But that wasn’t what frightened Kip.

Behind the immense throne was a tower of chains and gears. Six great crank wheels were being turned by a dozen slaves each, and six taut chains with links as large as a man raised pulleys at their apex at the foot of the throne itself.

A great deal of chain had already accumulated around each of those crank wheels, and as Kip took a moment, he could feel a burgeoning tension in every color—like he’d felt in green before the Battle of Ru.

The bane were rising in a circle around the dragon-ship. All of them.

The Mighty were too late.

Kip’s heart jumped, but then he felt something immense nearby. He blinked furiously and felt as if between blinks something happened to his eyes—had he been hit?

He glanced down, but in chi’s spectrum, and his gaze saw something beyond his ken, a single slice of ocean down to the depths, being crossed by a monstrous shape.

A flutter of the eyes, as if clearing blood away. Blink. Nothing. Blink. Another slice, half a degree departed. A curve of pectoral fin. Blink. Gone. A fluke. Gone.

A whale?

She was turning, deep under the waves, even as dozens of sharks bit at her flanks and flukes.

It broke Kip out of his paralysis.

He hurled the retreat signal flares skyward for the Mighty and banked sharply away himself.

An explosion shook the distant waters out where the Mighty had penetrated the first ring of ships. Ah, Ben-hadad had put a hull-wrecker on another of the galleons.

But the inner ring that they had just penetrated had closed tight behind the Mighty.

Gunports were rattling open on this side of the ships as the cannon crews slowly reacted to the threat that was the Mighty. Had the Mighty proceeded to attack the center island dragon, the cannons wouldn’t have been able to fire without endangering their own. But now the Mighty were turning back into range of safe and accurate fire.

A second explosion rocked the seas, this time on another of the ships in the inner circle, even as they sped toward it. Though the ship immediately sagged in the water, and all the cannon crews had been killed or stunned on that one ship, it did nothing to the others, who started opening up.

Nor was that ship going to sink in time. The bane was rising behind them, and if Kip and the Mighty didn’t make it several leagues away within the next few minutes, they would all be paralyzed.

Throwing another signal flare, Kip sliced out a wide, fast circle, and each of the rest of the Mighty slotted in seamlessly, re-forming the command ship one at a time.

“Bane rising!” Kip gasped out as they finally locked in all together. He threw over the steering to Cruxer as he peered into the sea.

“Can’t dive together!” Ben-hadad said. “Too much drag.”