The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  “This is the first time they’ve done this,” Kip said. “With the bane all separated from each other, not able to share drafters and crews, it’s a lot harder than when they were on the open sea.”

  Kip thought about their problems. The sheer complexity of separating your navy—not even just your army!—with many of them out of sight behind the mass of Big Jasper, trying to coordinate any attack, with no way to fix the little problems, meant that little problems could get big. Fearful subordinates waiting to make decisions, commanders unreachable who would have been easily found if they’d been on land—an amphibious mundane and magical assault by an inexperienced navy?

  But Koios’s main problem was that he wanted to attack today, and he was so certain that the bane would make all the difference that he didn’t care about the losses he would incur.

  “With as heavy as orange is, it may be harder to raise,” Kip said. “And if they want orange to join them in their first assault, they have to wait until it’s ready. And, you know, stuff goes wrong. I think we can take a glimmer of hope at seeing that though the Blood Robes are monstrous, they aren’t diabolically perfect. If they were…”

  “If they were…?” Tisis asked.

  If they were, they’d have hit us right after dawn with a first attack on the bay as the Order attacked. They’d have hit us with a fear hex.

  It was still a good plan, but now the main problem for the Blood Robes was all the Chromeria’s gun emplacements, especially on the towers, which due to their height could lob shells and cannonballs farther than any of the Blood Robes’ ships could return them.

  He cursed. “Orange isn’t going to join the attack; it’s going to lead it. A fear hex. Something like that. They’re gonna try to sneak it up on us somehow.” He squinted against the blinding orange light of the sun rising in the east.

  “The rising sun,” he said. “They’re using…”

  And then it was nearly upon them.

  Thin, mysterious fingerling clouds had been streaking along the tops of the waves, hidden by the dazzling sun and to-and-fro of the sea chariots throwing water high into the air, burning torches that hissed smoke out in a dozen colors to confuse the eye.

  A great flock of birds rose suddenly from the Blood Robes’ every ship, black against the rising sun. Another distraction, mostly.

  “Blue spectacles, now!” Kip shouted. “Those’ll be razor wings.” He threw a signal flare into the sky to tell the gun crews on every tower to ready the nets they’d prepared to string up on poles above them to catch the deadly bombardment coming.

  But Kip’s eyes were again down: those misty fingers hit East Bay’s seawall, and sidled over it, slipping past the ships sheltering in the bay.

  Kip turned his back to address his people. He didn’t want to see whatever hex was coming. “Remember,” he called out to them, “you cannot trust what you feel; trust what you know to be real. The bane will lie to you, so hold to what you know is true. Your brothers and sisters will fight and they’ll die for you. Be not afraid. Be not afraid! Though hell itself march against us, be not afraid in what you do!”

  What the hell? Speaking in rhyme?

  Shit! Liv. Somewhere, the superviolet bane was out there, too!

  Kip turned and roared, all turtle-bear.

  The wave hit the city’s walls at every tower hard enough to make them shake, gushing water, dropping all the moisture it had picked up from the sea in a sudden rain. But the physical force of the attack was purely ancillary—the attack itself was the wave of fear blasted over Kip with the force of a tsunami, leaving him breathless and panicked, frozen.

  His heart was lodged in his throat. They were doomed. This was like nothing they’d prepared for.

  They were all going to die. It was all his fault. He didn’t know the first thing about anything. He was just a child, a child in the face of gods. Literal gods.

  Everything he’d mocked, everything he’d sneered at was suddenly here and more real than he could have imagined.

  “Hey,” a distant voice said.

  Kip could hear the war dogs whining.

  He was going to get them all killed. Everyone. It was too late already. They were already dead. Kip’s heart was seizing in his chest with grief and dread as he was enveloped in the soft orangey cloud.

  He was losing everyone he loved, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  He heard the clatter of a sword falling from someone’s hand.

  “Hey! The hell is wrong is with you all?” Winsen said.

  Suddenly a hand was rubbing Kip’s face, scrubbing it as if to brush away water—or luxin. Winsen’s face appeared in Kip’s sight.

  Winsen, the broken man who’d never really understood danger or avoiding it. Winsen, the literally fearless, was standing in front of Kip looking puzzled. He had a hand drawn back, preparing to slap Kip.

  “I’m good,” Kip said, coming back to himself. “Get the rest of us. Cwn y Wawr!”

  He turned to them, some on the tower, more below. The handlers were almost as bad off as everyone else on the towers and walls, catatonic. Some had wet themselves. Their war dog partners were whining, alarmed, not understanding. Some of the dogs licked their humans, and a few of those had been roused by the fearless love of their canine friends.

  “Eyes!” Kip shouted to them. “Their eyes!”

  The dogs, preternaturally intelligent, understood immediately. Through growling or tugging or even bracing on their partners’ shoulders and licking their faces, the dogs dragged their masters’ attention to themselves and cleared away the hex. Most people snapped out of the hex immediately, but some seemed broken by the terrors they’d just suffered.

  “Here they come. Everyone!” Kip shouted. “You know what to do!”

  The White King’s armada was rapidly resolving from a black mass of ships into individual ranks as the sun rose and as they sailed closer.

  But all the Chromeria’s ships sheltered by the seawall sat as if dead, crews paralyzed.

  The gun emplacements were the target, not anyone inland. The first attack was going to come not from the bane but from the armada. The armada was going to try to land, and if the Chromeria’s cannons didn’t do something soon, they would land unopposed.

  That couldn’t happen.

  Kip shouted, “Winsen, you get to High General Danavis! Wake him if he needs it, tell him how we are! Cruxer, go—shit!” Cruxer was dead. “Big Leo, you run out to the ships with the Cwn y Wawr. Wake them up, get them fighting. We need those cannons now. Meet me above East Bay. Messengers, you wake all the rest of the gun towers—no one goes alone, though. Terrified people might get violent. You, you, and you, take your regiments and rally the rest of the island. Let them know we just got hit with magic, and it’s already dissipating. It’s not real. We can stand! Gun crews, start firing rounds—I know they’re out of range, just do it! It might wake some people. We got this! Go!”

  Chapter 111

  When Karris burst into the Spectrum’s council chamber, none of the damned Colors was there except Klytos Blue, slumped in a chair at the great windows, watching the battle beginning to unfold.

  “You stupid sack of shit!” she said. “What have you done!”

  In a low voice, nearly catatonic, he said, “We were all gathered already, dividing last-minute responsibilities for the day and the battle, trying to decide what to do to calm the pilgrims. Where to have them take shelter—”

  “We agreed not twelve hours ago to cancel this parade—and now I hear Zymun pulled drafters off the wall and soldiers from their posts in order to have it anyway. And with the Spectrum’s blessing! What the hell were you thinking?”

  Klytos wouldn’t meet her eyes, still watching the dawn and the approaching armada and the eerily silent cannons below. Woodenly, he said, “He came to us directly from the Freeing. He hadn’t washed. He—he was covered in their blood. There was a manic gleam in his eyes. He called it his due. He’s not wrong.”

  “You know
he was never to be declared Prism. Andross is going to be furious—”

  “It was his second Sun Day as Prism-elect! And—and if Kip is right and the tower array can be used as a weapon, only a Prism can keep using it for any length of time! How long can anyone else live drafting that much power?” Klytos asked. The little weasel.

  Karris grabbed his shoulder and hauled him around, forcing him to face her. “But the Spectrum doesn’t make a Prism just by saying a few words!”

  A little smile suddenly played over Klytos Blue’s lips, though the mad, hopeless gleam never left his eyes. “Oh, I know that,” he said. “Andross managed to root out most of the Spectrum who know how Prisms are made, but some of us figured it out. We can’t make a Prism anymore, which means we’re all going to die in this battle. But you Guiles always survive the calamities they bring on the rest of us. Not this time.”

  “Why declare him Prism?” Karris demanded.

  His smile dripped poison. “Without being made a Prism by the Blinding Knife, anyone who gets up on that array is gonna die. Kip already promised to, so there’s one dead Guile. But why take only one when we can get two?”

  Karris slapped him.

  He crumpled against the wall and cowered.

  She rubbed her temples, thinking what to do next.

  Wild-eyed, Klytos was looking around at the Blackguards. “You all saw that! I’m the Blue. She’s assaulted me! Take her into custody immediately!”

  From where he stood at Karris’s left hand, Gill Greyling drawled, “Apologies, High Lord, I must’ve been distracted. I saw nothing.” He looked around at the seven other Blackguards in the room. “Anyone?”

  Around the room, lips pursed in chagrin. Heads shook.

  “I heard something,” one of the new kids volunteered. “Sounded like a shit plopping on the floor.”

  Twenty-year-olds, Karris thought.

  Klytos snarled from where he was on the floor, but he was too much of a coward to physically attack a Blackguard. “You should be thanking me! You know what Zymun is!”

  Karris shook her head. She knew what she had to do now. She was gonna have to go find Zymun and try to make him do what had to be done. There was no way it was going to end well. She had no authority over him now, and nothing to bribe him with. “Klytos, you fool, you’ve given Zymun almost unlimited power. What’s he ever done to make you believe he’ll use it for good?”

  Chapter 112

  The sounds of cannons roaring to life from various towers around the great walls announced the progress of the Cwn y Wawr to Kip’s ears. Those gun crews began their bombardment immediately, their elevation giving them significantly greater range than the armada.

  The first shots splashed harmlessly wide or short, but soon the gun crews fell back into their training. They’d zeroed their shots on buoys at set distances, and now, even though the Blood Robes had sunk those, the gun crews’ captains had them memorized.

  Odd, Kip thought, how when you were far enough away, the sights of distant timbers exploding and fires billowing from a ship were satisfying. But when up close, one felt only awe at the destructive power of humanity, and horror at the bloody carnage and shrieks of the limbless dying that attended every successful shell, the innocent crews being dragged to their watery rest.

  The men pulling those oars were surely prisoners of war. Allies. Friends. Men whose names had once been posted on Big Jasper’s lists as lost.

  Yet Kip couldn’t hate the gun crews when they shouted with joy after a successful shot. War is the wily orator who gets us cheering horrors.

  It looked like the Chromeria’s forces were being roused from their torpor, but before Kip could descend to the lines to make sure of it, Einin said, “My lord, that’s far enough. Commander Leonidas ordered me to keep you back from the lines.”

  Kip glared at her. “Big Leo?” he asked instead of complaining. He should have known the new commander wouldn’t let him put himself in danger.

  “Yessir. Uh, he hasn’t made it clear to us nunks what we’re allowed to call him.”

  Regardless of what Andross had commanded, Kip should probably go up to the mirrors now, but what if the army messed up again? What if they needed him?

  The razor wings reached the towers. Netting hung above every gun crew, and archers and musketeers armed with blunderbusses were posted with them.

  Some of the will-cast birds were shot out of the sky. Others made it to the nets, tangling in them before exploding or bursting into flame.

  A musketeer drawing a bead skyward on an incoming razor wing stepped backward into a cannon’s line of fire just as the gun crew, looking out to their own distant target, touched the linstock to the breech. Kip cried out, but they were too far away, there was too much noise.

  The woman simply disappeared in the black-powder cloud that bellowed from the cannon’s muzzle. Kip caught a glimpse of her legs flying, launched off the wall.

  The razor wing splashed fiery death amid the gun crew a moment later.

  “I would love it if we went back to the Prism’s Tower now, my lord,” Einin said nervously.

  He shot out chi at all the bane again. He couldn’t see all of them from here. That was a problem, though he thought he’d have felt if any of the others were rising from the depths. Where was Liv?

  Out beyond the bay, some of the larger ships of the armada had turned broadside and stopped, apparently within their range now. He extended a hand and someone gave him a long-lens.

  The ships were dropping anchors. Huh. Ah, to give themselves more stable firing platforms. The gun crews on the open decks, many of them bare-chested, were all very dark-skinned.

  Ilytians. Dammit. Best gunners in the world, with the best guns. That meant the pirate kings were indeed working for the Wight King. Karris said she’d tried to bribe them away, but apparently after Gavin and Kip had sunk Pash Vecchio’s great ship, the Gargantua, he’d been beyond the reach of promises—and she hadn’t been willing to send him boatloads of coin merely in the hope that a pirate would act in good faith.

  Kip watched the Ilytians fire their first rounds, the flash of light and the puff of rolling black smoke visible long before the sound could be heard.

  He wanted to give an order to someone to focus on those ships, but it was unnecessary.

  As those ships set up their bombardment, the rest of the fleet charged the East Bay.

  Kip wondered where Corvan was.

  Maybe he was content to lead from some safer, clearer vantage. Maybe there was an emergency somewhere else Kip didn’t even know about.

  The Ilytian gun crews had a lucky early hit. Or Kip hoped it was luck, as a tower top exploded a hundred paces away.

  The Chromeria’s army—here mostly Kip’s people, selected because they were battle-hardened—immediately jumped to the labor of trying to salvage guns from the emplacement that had been blown to pieces, working in the gore and slime of a crew exploded by shell. The teams were all arranged for this, ready to determine what large guns could be salvaged, ready to wheel in and set up smaller cannons or use teams of oxen to lift cannons that had merely fallen when shell demolished tower foundations and the like.

  Backup gun crews waited a safe distance from the front lines, jittery, wanting a chance to fight, but knowing that when their chance came, it would be because that spot they were to step into was a target whose range and position had already been found.

  This was to be a marathon with no end until victory or nightfall or death.

  Falling behind meant that the armada would make landfall, and the Blood Robes making landfall would be the beginning of the end.

  But now, despite all the defenders’ work, it looked like it was about to begin anyway.

  The withering fire had grown sporadic as supply lines were stretched, powder stores exhausted. Ships that should have been easy pickings instead sailed all the way to the mouth of the bay.

  The enormous chains barring the armada’s entry to East Bay were attacked first. As the
armada approached, caoránaigh swarmed out of the water where they’d been swimming unseen, cast luxin ladders up the great links, and climbed up like monkeys.

  Kip had thought they’d be clumsy out of the water. Great.

  A few of Kip’s best marksmen—joined in this by many of the Blackguards’ Archers—picked off dozens, but there were always more of them, and with their swimming abilities, even the charges dropping off into the sea was little more than a setback. Eventually, the wights packed charges against the links of the chain, swinging and swaying dangerously, and set fuses.

  A few wights jumped back into the water too late and were killed by the explosions, but the great chain fell, having slowed the Blood Robes for only minutes.

  Now there were only big guns to demolish the ships.

  Kip sent a message that they should deploy sharpshooters and Archers on the other side of Big Jasper in case the wights did the same there, and then he gathered his army.

  The orders and reports didn’t stop simply because the battle had been joined in earnest.

  Through the fires and flames, the armada limped into the bay, the first ships smoking, half their oars broken, decks awash with blood. But they landed, and the galleons and coccas behind them pushed hard forward, even as wights and drafters disembarked to throw luxin planks down on the water itself, connecting ship to ship in one large floating mass so men could swarm from one to the other without slowing to use boarding nets.

  A messenger said, “Sir, that problem with the sect of luxiats calling for drafters not to touch hellstone to drain their internal luxin has been put down.”

  “Oh?” Kip asked, not really paying attention.

  Kip could only watch the battle plan unfold below him. The people, military and civilian volunteers both, had been briefed on exactly what to do. No orders from the rear were even going to make it to them now.