The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “Fuck you,” Gavin said.

  “People think Andross got all the temper, too,” Lucidonius said wryly.

  Gavin leapt for him, swinging a fist for the godling’s throat. Most men will duck their head at an incoming blow, so a low shot could catch the chin or the nose, and no one fights well either unconscious or blinded by involuntary tears.

  But he missed. Of course.

  He was too slow, and so they began slugging it out again, absorbing blows but too exhausted to do much damage.

  From the first moment Gavin had noticed Lucidonius’s strength was tied to the sun, he’d thought of a terrible strategy. It was still a terrible strategy, but it was slowly becoming the only one left to him.

  If Lucidonius got stronger as the sun rose, then would he not also weaken as it sank?

  Gavin would have to last through the entire day to find out.

  It was still two hours until noon. Of Sun Day. Gavin had chosen to fight a creature whose strength was tied to the intensity of the sunlight… on the longest fucking day of the year.

  Chapter 108

  The Blood Robes came down like wolves on the fold, their forerunners bedecked in the white and the gold. For the sons of Orholam they bore the scourge and the flail, and to hell they would ride before they would fail.

  —Gorgias Gordi

  It had a certain beauty to a battlefield commander, seeing an attack so exquisitely timed, a surprise played at the perfect moment. Sea chariots pulled at great speed by sharks or dolphins, impossible to see at this distance, came roaring forward by the score. With battle standards whipping in the wind, showing the golden broken chains of the pagans and the colors of the new nine kingdoms, and scoops in the hulls designed purely to throw water into the sky to make great rooster tails as they pulled, everything about the sea chariots was designed to be a scintillating spectacle. Wights piloted each craft, and rank by rank they roared into cannonball range.

  The boom of the cannons began immediately, but the craft were tiny, fast, and well spaced. The cannons would only catch a few of them.

  But the forerunners made far too small a strike force to have any hope of success, which is why they had to be a distraction.

  Kip looked beneath the waves, and there he saw them, already penetrating the bay, rounding in behind the seawall, simply swimming under the great chains meant to keep ships out. He’d heard the rumors of them in Blood Forest: even as Gavin had turned his gifts to making a craft that could move faster over water than any others ever had, some of Koios’s wights had turned their own gifts to remaking their bodies so that they could move swiftly and silently under the water.

  “Wights!” Kip shouted. “Beneath the waves! Coming in fast!”

  They called themselves the Daughters of Caoránach, who would snatch off his boat anyone who dared go out on a moonlit night too close to the waters, and they wailed whenever they took blood. Their cries echoed in the dark over foggy lakes and rivers, chilling men and women to the bone. Others called them river demons or lake demons.

  They would still just be men, wights encumbered on land by bodies designed for water.

  “Caoránaigh!” someone shouted. “It’s the caoránaigh!”

  Kip cursed. “No! They’re only men! River wights! Arms, to arms!” The last thing his people needed was the psychic shock of seeing their childhood nightmares come alive.

  He hated this part of a battle, when you suddenly see the whole of the enemy’s strategy and you need everyone to hear you at once. There were too many orders to give, too many people shouting for everyone to hear them.

  “Protect the gates and cannons! Look to the bases of the towers and walls,” someone shouted beside him. “Get me my signal banners, now! Aleph Company, in reserve! After we repulse the first attack, you’re going to reinforce the secondary attack on the seawall!”

  Corvan Danavis had just arrived, with his booming voice stomping through everyone else’s shouts.

  Kip looked down into the courtyard and saw a massive influx of the high general’s soldiers, come to reinforce the gates.

  “You!” Corvan shouted at Kip. “I’m here now. That means you can’t be.”

  They’d discussed this. Corvan wouldn’t allow for the possibility of one lucky shell taking out so much of the Chromeria’s command and control. (Incidentally, it also put him in charge without having anyone else around to second-guess him—‘slow him down,’ as he put it.)

  “I got this,” Kip said. “Until the bane rise, I can—”

  “This could be a—” The boom of cannon took out Corvan’s last word, but he didn’t even flinch. He repeated, “Trap. You get to Tower Twelve—”

  “I know it’s a trap. The river wights—”

  “No, I mean all of it! They could be using the entire attack to raise the bane. You draft chi, so you can throw your will out farther than anyone. Get to Tower Twelve, and send me a signal if they’re raising the bane. We have to know when to tell our drafters to stop drafting.”

  Shit. Corvan was right. And Kip was doing exactly what he shouldn’t do—arguing with the man he’d put in control. “Yessir!” Kip said. “My apologies. Right away.”

  “Marksmen to the fore!” Corvan shouted back at his men. Signal flags were hoisted, orders were repeated in shouts to warriors back in the lines. “Aim especially for any of these river dogs who look like they’re trying to throw up a flare or any sort of signal.”

  He was in his element, juggling the big picture and the small with ease.

  The caoránaigh had burst from the waters and were scaling the towers. Others were attacking the gates directly, throwing great streams of fire and missiles in every hue, leaping over spiked fortifications with baffling ease. They were not at all encumbered by their amphibious form.

  The rattle of musket fire deafened Kip. He wanted nothing more than to watch the battle unfold, to see the spectacle of gouts of water leaping into the sky as the cannons’ explosive shells hit ships or waves, throwing death into the chariots’ ranks. He wanted to marvel at the sinuous forms of these river demons, that made even his heart twist with fear.

  He wanted to fight.

  But he had orders.

  “I know the fastest way to get us to that tower,” Big Leo said, his copper chain held in his big hands over his shoulders. He wanted to fight, too.

  “Son,” Corvan said.

  Kip glanced into the courtyard. Corvan’s men had somehow already moved all the Order of the Broken Eye’s dead aside to make room for their own ranks.

  If those Order traitors had been alive to mount even a halfway-decent assault on even this one gate from within, the caoránaigh would have made it to the walls unnoticed, and breached the gates if they’d not been opened from within. Then they’d have gone for the cannons, but even if they hadn’t gotten that far, the White King would have rushed in and immediately had a foothold on the island itself.

  If the White King took the wall at any point, that would be the beginning of the end for the Chromeria.

  And he would have had that already this morning, if not for Teia.

  If not for Teia’s sacrifice.

  Kip wondered if she was still alive, cocooned as she was in a pitch-black room, her eyes bandaged, everyone hoping that maybe, maybe her eyes could be kept from dilating or contracting and that that might save her. That maybe her body would process the poison slowly, and she might live.

  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.”

  Chapter 109

  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.

  Chapter 110

  “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. Movement.

  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.