The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  Knowing it might be the last chance he had to draft at all, Kip used the mirror to hurl a spear of sub-red and red interlaced into solid flame at her and the blue bane’s central tower.

  It felt like he’d walked past a catapult’s release lever and nudged it; instead of throwing a stone, it threw every bit of red and sub-red luxin Kip might have been able to draft in forty years, all at once.

  But he felt like he’d been kicked just as he released the burning spear.

  He was spinning in the array.

  For a long moment, Kip held still, gasping. His eyes throbbed. He could tell he’d gone from the occasional drafter of fire to suddenly now straining his halos in both sub-red and red.

  “Who grabbed the array!” Kip yelled. “Who spun me?! Who the hell spun me?!”

  As his eyes cleared, he looked at the Mighty. They appeared as baffled as he was.

  If he hadn’t physically been spun, and he hadn’t willed himself to spin, then only superviolet hijacking the controls could have done that.

  At that moment, something like a shock wave passed over them. Like an immense ocean swell, bending vision, Kip suddenly could see realities overlaid as they’d overlaid the world when he’d been at death’s door before.

  Without spectacles, he could see superviolet tentacles reaching down from above, withdrawing by the moment, as if caught out. He spun within the array and saw her there: in the air, high above him, floating on an invisible bane, was the woman who’d once been Aliviana Danavis.

  Liv.

  But she wasn’t alone. With her was a creature of immense proportions, masquerading as a small, unctuous thing. It held the superviolet seed crystal.

  And now, everywhere Kip looked, he saw them, with every bane. Immortals. This was why the colors were locking down. Koios’s most important wights knew some of the bane’s powers, but the old gods—the immortals behind the old gods—they knew all of their powers.

  Now those immortals had come to join the fight.

  Kip saw at least one for each color, all of them exposed, momentarily, by the great wave passing over Big Jasper, all of them with alarm etched over their once-beautiful faces, looking east to the source of that wave.

  If the superviolet could take control of the mirrors as it had just tried to do, this battle was finished.

  Kip brought his will and all the light collected by several thousand mirrors upon the superviolet thing reaching down for him.

  The superviolet bane was as subtle and fragile as a shameful secret. It blasted apart under the sledge of Kip’s attack like fine porcelain.

  But Kip didn’t withdraw after one attack. His attention focused hard on that entire floating island of beautiful, breakable crystals. It was like letting the Turtle-Bear off its leash in a crockery shop.

  His will burrowed through the superviolet island, leaving trenches of shattered luxin all the way down to the waves, shearing off huge sections that dropped toward the waters. The immortal was recovering from its shock, but seemed leashed to stay within some certain distance of Liv. So it leapt this way and that like a mad dog on a chain.

  Until Kip found it, seized it, and with his will like one big paw, he seized the sharp, spiny seed crystal and squeezed it as it twisted snakelike in his grasp.

  All the mirrors of the island focused to that one point the size of Turtle-Bear’s fist, and the seed crystal blew apart.

  The reaction was instantaneous. The entire superviolet island fell to dust.

  Liv fell from the sky, and Kip lost her.

  That’s the goal. That’s how we win.

  We can do that.

  With a mere thought, Kip triggered the escape chains out to Big Jasper and Cannon Island, then he dropped the handles of the array.

  “Listen to me,” he said to the Mighty as the chains spooled out flawlessly. Karris’s repairs were perfect.

  They all looked at him. With the door to the roof seemingly impregnable, there was for the moment nothing at all for them to do.

  “‘Avoid battle, seek victory,’ remember?” Kip asked. He knew they did. “I was doing this all backward. I’m not my father. I’m no Gavin Guile, the Promachos who goes ahead of everyone else and fights alone. I’m Kip Guile, and the only way we can win is if we fight together. I’ve been raised here for one reason. I don’t know if I’m the Lightbringer, but I know I can bring you light.” Kip looked every one of them in the eye in turn. “You’re going to hate my next orders, but if you don’t follow them, everyone on this island is going to die.”

  Chapter 126

  “We don’t defend,” Karris said, taking weapons from Commander Fisk. “We attack.”

  No one looked at her like she was insane. Orholam have mercy, but they trusted her.

  She thought again about the Lightguards they’d left behind, tied up in a storeroom, guarded by nervous civilians who probably would lose their courage as soon as they lost their Iron White’s presence. Part of her had wanted to execute them on the spot, especially their greasy commander, Aram.

  The Iron White, murdering a crippled captive?

  Forget it, it was done.

  As she led her people to the Lily’s Stem, she unsealed the adhesive to the eye caps she hadn’t worn in a long time and applied them around her eyes. She dispatched messengers to Corvan Danavis, which forced her to go with her gut. She couldn’t wait for messages to go back and forth; she had to make a choice now, and let Corvan know what she was going to do.

  Her luxiats had dug up everything they could find about the seed crystals and the bane. It hadn’t been much, but some ancient writer had taken care to preserve a line revealing that shattering the seed crystals could break the bane when they were small. He or she had guessed that it would work even when they were large.

  Karris herself was a red/green bichrome, and she didn’t know how much those bane might mess with her if she attacked them—but the blue bane was right here, floating jammed in the strait between Cannon Island and Big Jasper, grinding slowly through as if it had will. It looked like it was trying to move directly onto Little Jasper.

  She didn’t have anything else to go on.

  “Blue! Let’s go!” she said.

  “High Lady! Wait one moment!” a voice called out behind her.

  She spied a man carrying a large satchel, running from the Chromeria toward her. Andross’s slave Grinwoody?

  “High Lady, please, let me accompany you. Please. I made a promise that I wouldn’t leave your side today.”

  “What? No,” Karris said. “What’s the promachos doing?”

  “He’s in the infirmary, High Lady. Deathly ill. I’m afraid he’s been poisoned. Before he lost consciousness, he was angry with me for not stopping it. Ordered me to get out of his sight. Demanded I go serve you and get myself killed if I could. I dare not disobey him. I dare not be there when he wakes… if he wakes, Mistress.”

  Grinwoody looked utterly miserable.

  The Order! Karris swore. They were everywhere. Dammit!

  Andross wasn’t easy to work with, but today was a day when the Chromeria needed all hands to work defending it.

  “I trained with the Blackguard,” Grinwoody said. “And yes, it was long ago, but I’m not useless in a fight.” He opened a satchel and handed out a fortune’s worth of lux torches in every color to the Blackguards, and the finest Ilytian pistols. “Please. I owe Gavin a debt. He did me a, a great favor once. Let me fight beside you.”

  Well, Karris had just been thinking how she needed every hand possible to defend the Chromeria. She nodded sharply, not turning from studying the blue bane where it lay in the water. She looked hard at the topography of the thing, its bristling porcupine shards sticking into the air and confusing the eye about the underlying structure, but she could see that it rippled and folded as the structure slowly crawled up and down the hills and valleys of the seabed beneath it.

  Blue drafters were already attacking the walls, being answered with small arms and small cannon fire, and bein
g mostly repulsed, though the enemy drafters were less concentrating on the attack and more simply building a series of interlocking ramps for those behind them to follow. When the main attack came, there would be no scaling ladders—the soldiers, drafters, and wights would attack at speed.

  The defenders were trying to blow apart that blue luxin as fast as it was drafted, and all the drafters they could hit, too.

  And she suddenly had a plan. She was no blue drafter, but she’d always had an affinity for the blue virtues. She knew how blues thought: rational, logical, straight lines.

  So she’d be circuitous.

  They ran together through Big Jasper at the speed Blackguards run, but she decided to make a stop before they reached the wall. It took two stops instead, and two baffled shopkeepers who initially thought they were looters. Grinwoody, who’d fallen behind on the run, caught back up in the second shop. And though winded, he wasn’t exhausted, nor did he complain. Pretty good for an old man.

  Then they made it to the walls, to the side of where the main attack was coming. The nearest commander looked delighted at getting Blackguards to reinforce his line, then baffled.

  “High Lady?” he asked, stunned to see her here herself.

  “I’m not here to help. Not directly,” she said. She was already sliding a knife down her tunic, splitting the silk, then tearing it off to expose the mirror armor beneath. The Blackguards had it easier, merely shucking off their tunics and trousers, exposing their own mirror armor beneath.

  “Maybe now’s a good time to tell us the plan?” Commander Fisk asked.

  “We’ve got Blackguards posted on Cannon Island. We go save them.”

  “What are the blue cloaks and dresses for?” he asked.

  “The blue bane will be our bridge to charge over to Cannon Island.”

  “They’ll see us coming as soon as we cross over the wall,” Fisk said.

  “Yep.”

  “They’ll know exactly what we’re doing.”

  “Almost,” Karris said. “Cannon Island’s citadel and guns are a huge prize for whoever holds her. But here’s the key: that hill right there makes a valley right behind it where they’ll lose sight of us before we climb back up to Cannon Island. When we get into that valley, six of us don the blue clothes as camouflage, and we skirt around the back of the blue bane out of sight. The rest of you go on and save Cannon Island. We go in the opposite direction and stab them in the back.”

  They immediately froze up. There was one impossibility to her plan. It involved them leaving the White. They were Blackguards.

  “No, she’s right,” Gill Greyling said, speaking up for the first time. “Sometimes the best way to protect your ward is to leave her.”

  Commander Fisk rapidly picked out six Blackguards—all fast, and rather than picking massive, wide-bodied men, he picked only those with more slender body types, who’d be harder to spot among the forest of blue crystal trees. He made himself the seventh choice.

  “Seven?” she asked.

  “Lucky number,” he said.

  As for that, she herself and Grinwoody would actually make it a pagan nine, which might well be the wights’ lucky number—but now wasn’t the time to quibble.

  “Our goal is the seed crystal,” Karris told her people in case she died before the job was finished. “Killing the Mot is secondary. When we kill the seed crystal, the entire bane-island will turn to dust. So when you feel that blue crystal go, get ready to swim.”

  ‘When,’ she’d said, not ‘if.’

  Chapter 127

  “We don’t defend,” Kip said. “We attack.” He was already back in the mirror array. “I’ll slave a light to each of you with superviolet. They might not check until too late. You’ll maybe get one chance to draft—just one. You reach up with your will, and you’ll get lit up with your color, as much as you can use, and all the wights around you will be drowned in the worst colors for them. The bane will react. They’ll shut you down within seconds, so only use this as a last resort, and then empty yourself with black or you will die, got it?”

  They didn’t ask stupid questions.

  Kip looked around at them quickly. Dammit, but Kip could really use Teia’s skills now. He really could use Cruxer’s, too—but there was no time to think about that. You use what you’ve got.

  “Ferkudi,” Kip said. Ferkudi was a blue/green bichrome and thus susceptible to control from either of those colors. “Go kill the red bane. The Dagnu wears the seed crystal on a necklace. You kill the god, smash the crystal. The bane will fall apart and everyone’ll be able to draft red again.”

  Big Leo was a sub-red and red. “Big Leo, you go to the blue. There’s a squad there that’s about to need help badly. Smash the blue seed crystal.

  “Winsen, green is yours. Try stealth. The seed crystal’s hidden at the top of the highest tree-thing. The Atirat’s important, but it’s a distant second.”

  Ben-hadad was a blue/green/yellow polychrome. “Ben, I killed the Molokh, but a new one’s stepping up. Destroy the orange seed crystal. Wait—on second thought, orange and sub-red both have new masters. It’ll take a few minutes for us to figure out how adept they are with their new powers. You make your own call once you get down to Big Jasper.”

  “Got it,” Ben-hadad said. Of all the Mighty, Kip knew he could trust Ben to figure out the best strategy while weighing his own and the others’ capabilities.

  Einin was an orange/red/sub-red polychrome, which meant Kip couldn’t send his newest Mighty against either of the softer targets. “Einin, you’re on yellow. That one might be the most likely to be a one-way trip. You up for that?”

  “With all due respect, milord, fuck off. I pull my weight,” she said. She didn’t raise her voice; she was just done with being the new kid.

  Kip said, “Glad to hear it. I’m signaling High General Danavis to give all of you a distraction as soon as possible. May help, may not. I’ve already signaled for backup from the Cwn y Wawr. They may come, may not. Things are hot down there.”

  He slaved mirrors to each of them, and a red one to Danavis, too, for good measure.

  “This is what we need to do? You’re sure?” Big Leo asked. He wanted to fight Kip, wanted to say he should stay by his side, but he also trusted him to lead.

  Cruxer would’ve never left, no matter what. But Cruxer was a pain in the ass.

  “It is,” Kip said. “Mighty… This is it. We aren’t all coming back from this one.” They all looked back, unflinching. “I love you bastards. Now, go make Cruxer proud.”

  They didn’t linger. They were warriors. They were veterans. They’d already said everything they’d been able to say to each other, and understood all those things they couldn’t say. So now they nodded to one another one last time. Saluted Big Leo. Saluted Kip.

  Ferkudi gave hugs, because—well, Ferkudi.

  Then they loaded up in turn, and whooshed off the tower toward their targets. Winsen went alone, but the rest of them were followed by whichever of the probationary Mighty were of the appropriate colors and were physically able to go. That left Kip only the nunks and some soldiers who were too wounded to go join the fight.

  Kip sent his messages, several times, and then tried to dazzle the enemy wherever he could. He was confined now to using the mirrors for a fraction of their power, but he could still burn wights one at a time, still signal, and still bathe whole groups of wights coming over the walls in their opposite colors to make things difficult for them.

  It didn’t always stop them even from drafting, but it did confuse them, and it gave Danavis’s defenders a small edge, one neighborhood at a time.

  Twenty green wights were climbing the wall over at Weasel Rock, climbing, dropping down to the ground, and bouncing up ever higher until they reached the very edge. Kip turned fifty mirrors to send bursts of white light straight into their faces as they pulled over the wall. Blinded, they gave the defenders atop the wall a chance to cut them down.

  At East Bay, dozens of
red wights with burning hands were hurling fireball after fireball. Kip turned mirrors to flood them with blue.

  Fists went up and defenders turned toward the sources—blue drafters. Danavis had stationed blue drafters opposite the red bane, superviolets across from sub-red, red across from the blue, and so forth to minimize the proximity and hopefully the impact of the bane on the drafters.

  As those blue drafters started drafting—why were they drafting?! They’d been ordered not to touch blue! But maybe they were just that desperate. Maybe there was something in that neighborhood worth their lives to save.

  Kip felt more than saw something emanate from the blue bane toward them—a thousand tendrils of paryl. Those were the strings through which the blue drafters could be paralyzed.

  How did the bane do that? What was the mechanism? If Kip could see how the bane reached out to control the drafters of their color. He could stop it.

  Orholam’s balls. Paryl, the master color. Of course. The immortals could use paryl, at least when in conjunction with the bane. He didn’t know how it worked, but he didn’t have to exactly.

  Maybe there was still hope here.

  Kip slapped that wave back, ripped it apart with paryl himself.

  Then he blinked, blinded from having opened his pupils so wide.

  If paryl was half of the answer…

  With chi, he could see written in the very bodies of the drafters what colors they used and how much they were holding. He could see through walls.

  He sank into the fight.

  The situation was desperate—wights and Blood Robe drafters were pouring over the walls in half a dozen areas, but now Kip had a tool. The blue drafters in East Bay could, for the first time in the battle, actually draft. And they did.

  The control began sliding back out of Kip’s grasp immediately, and he shot messages in brief flashes of light to the blue drafters—but he knew now that he could do this, at least once, with each of the colors in turn.

  It might be enough to make it until sundown.