by Brent Weeks
“Quickly, my lady, they’re almost upon us!” one of the men cried.
“Working!” she shouted.
With the superviolet controls, Liv pulled another lever, and a green filter bubbled to the mirror’s surface. From there, it was a simple matter of pushing and pulling the first two levers. She caught the sun’s rising light in the huge mirror and shot it out over the bay. She turned it left and right and up and down, wondering if she would have any idea when she finally got it right, or if she was already getting it right. She felt something when the beam was aimed far out to sea, over Ruic Head, but that must have been her trying too hard. That wasn’t even remotely the right direction. She turned it over the bay, up and down, searching.
Then something vibrated-she lost it. She reached again and turned the beam back, the tiniest bit. It caught, and hummed. In a moment, the mirror went from a mirror to something else entirely.
The mirror collected all the sun and was sending a vibrant emerald beam out to the bane. It was visible in the very air, burning bright green. That wasn’t right; it wasn’t even possible. Mirrors never shone so bright that you could see the beam during the day. Maybe in fog, or smoke, or at night, the light might be visible, but not an hour after dawn.
And yet it was.
But as it vibrated on that perfect frequency, humming like music, Liv’s perception was pulled through the great lens itself-and suddenly, she could see the tower shivering up out of the sea, growing, right in front of her, as if it were only a hundred paces away, not thousands.
As she saw, she knew that Koios White Oak had been wrong. She’d passed the test of competency easily. This was a test of loyalty. For she saw Kip, and Karris, and Gavin Guile himself on the bane, and she knew that if she obeyed the Color Prince, she would doom them all.
If she was to have the power to change the world, if she was to save ten thousand naive young women in the future from the sharks and sea demons, she must let her friends die. She had begged the Color Prince to save Kip and Karris before-had traded Blood Robes’ lives for theirs in Garriston. Not half a year ago, her friends had been worth her oath and the lives of a few strangers. Was saving them now worth the dream of a new, changed, pure world?
“Do you know what Atirat needs, Aliviana?” the Color Prince had asked her last night.
“Sacrifices?” she hazarded.
“Light. Every god is birthed in light.”
And, weeping, light she brought.
Chapter 110
The first great wave came from behind the skimmer.
Gavin shouted something, but it was lost in the roar of water falling and crushing and sweeping over the back of the skimmer. His body language was unmistakable, though. He threw himself at the reeds and threw luxin down them as hard as he could. The Blackguards followed his example, and the skimmer jumped forward.
But they weren’t as fast as the great swell that swept Kip off his feet. He grabbed on to the rail with both hands, and as it flipped him around, he saw the spire rising out of the sea behind them. Already, it was hundreds of feet high. It was the origin of the great wave and the pounding water falling from the sky both.
Then Kip was crushed down against the deck. He heard the sound of luxin snapping and ripping loose and he saw Gavin flying off the front of the skimmer. He’d shot luxin so hard, he’d torn the reeds off. They were all suddenly airborne. Kip lost the railing-or maybe it disintegrated. He could see nothing except water. Whatever had hurled the sea upward had stopped, and now the seas dropped again with all the chaos of a waterfall. Kip fell and fell and fought for one deep breath. When he landed in the water, it was into a current that blasted him sideways. He hit something, scraped something else. It was no use trying to fight, he was being tumbled head over heels. He had no idea which way was up.
Feeling something beneath him, he grabbed it, missed, slipped. The current was forming swift rivers, and he knew that he needed to avoid the deeper current. He grabbed again, catching what felt like a tree branch, and walked himself hand over hand toward the weaker current. His lungs were burning, and the water was so fouled that he couldn’t see anything but green. He fought down his panic, fought down the wildness. Hand over hand, Kip. He grabbed root after root and kept going, going.
Moments later, he felt the temperature change on his back. Air. Wedging his feet in among the roots, he lifted his head and breathed.
The current almost pulled him into the depths and he staggered, but caught himself. He was standing on a new island, and everywhere, water was sluicing off in great rivers back into the sea. The land, if land it was, wasn’t uniform. In some places the water had no way to seek lower ground, and it stood in ponds and lakes.
Green. Every possible shade from the slate green of lichen to the red-tinged green of a ruby leaf. Radiant emerald greens that glowed from within and the dull, earthen greens of roots; spruce and sage and seaweed and olive and sea foam and mint green. The entire island was an amalgam of living vegetation and green luxin. Kip was standing on roots pulsing with life. He saw an entire galleon, mysteriously unbroken, wedged between the branches of what looked like a fallen tree, fifty feet in the air. But even as Kip stared in wonder, he saw branches climbing up the galleon’s hull like an ivy shoot. They wrapped over the galleon’s waist, thickened, and crushed the decks, spilling sailors everywhere.
The entire island was living vegetation, and it was waking.
Searching for the Blackguards, Kip saw the black-garbed figures rising, spread over five hundred paces. He only saw eight of them, but there were more in the water, swimming, fighting. Gavin stood a hundred paces away, waving, and pointing toward the spire. He looked urgent.
Kip ran toward him.
Coming to a channel of swiftly flowing water that was too wide to jump across, Kip threw green luxin down at his feet, making a plank to run on like he’d seen Commander Ironfist do before. It was easier than any drafting he’d ever done. The green light seemed to press itself physically into his eyes; he barely had to open the tap, and it flowed out just as easily. He felt the wild joy and freedom of green, a joy without terror, a joy without anchor Kip didn’t think it was his own joy he was feeling.
Gavin wasn’t waiting for Kip; he was sprinting for the spire. That he didn’t wait first hurt Kip’s feelings, then terrified him. Gavin would wait, if he could. If there wasn’t some absolutely desperate need, if seconds weren’t absolutely crucial, he would gather up his forces. Not only Kip, but everyone. Gavin would want to have his whole team together for both humane and tactical reasons. That he thought there was no time for either A sound like a thousand sighs swept across the bane-air being released, the hollow echo of bubbles opening. Kip ran straight over a rising cocoon yawning open, its membrane tearing as a jade green hand clawed the air. Commander Ironfist had been right. Green wights had flocked here by the hundreds or thousands to be perfected by the bane itself. And now they were rising. Kip hurdled over the color wight rising from its gooey cocoon and ran faster than he’d run in his entire life.
“Load the cannons,” Commander Ironfist said. He was looking out over the bay at the new island through the mounted long lens that the battery’s gunners had used to sight targets. His face was as hard as Teia had ever seen. “Hezik! You have some experience?”
A Blackguard with shoulders like a buffalo stepped forward. He had only one ear, a thick scar down the left half of his face testimony to a sword stroke. “Yessir, mother commanded a pirate hunter in the Narrows.”
“Recommendations. Time’s short.”
“Don’t load all the guns. Only these two can hit that damn thing at all, and only this one with any sort of accuracy.” He gestured to the big bronze culverin. “Six thousand paces, but from this height, and with this powder, nice big grains rather than fine, wrap the first shot in sacking to help me get the range…”
“Your command, Hezik. Take out the big tower.”
Hezik was silent for a second, thinking, then he began pointing to m
en. “Inventory. I want to know how much of this grain of powder we have, and what shot. Do we have any shells? You, weigh that ball on the scales over there, then measure out four-fifths of that weight. You, there should be some gunners’ notes somewhere. Find ’em!”
Gavin had set fire to the huge yellow sword he’d drafted and was throwing flames with his left hand and slashing green wights with his right, still running toward the spire. Karris was hard on his heels, her ataghan cutting necks and stomachs as wights’ eyes were drawn by Gavin’s figure in front of her. As always, Kip brought up the rear, short of breath, but able to do anything with green empowering him.
Before they could reach the spire, dozens of wights rose up. They’d been kneeling, worshipping before the spire, but seeing these interlopers, they ran to intercept them. The spire was still growing, twisting higher toward the heavens. The wights themselves were growing, too. The green bane was making all of them stronger. Every one of them used the power differently. Some went green golem, wrapping themselves in green armor that made them three times as wide. Others looked like saplings, stripped of bark, a thin green skin replacing their own skin, green over red, skeletal and all the more alien for being so close to human. Others made themselves hugely tall. Others drafted huge claws or great, springy frogs’ legs. Others, less imaginative, drafted thick shields and cudgels and helms.
Kip felt a thump reverberate dimly through the ground at his feet and a second later heard the sound of a cannon. A dim trail of smoke from a crater more than a hundred paces away pointed back toward the battery up on Ruic Head, where a much larger plume of black smoke was blowing away.
“To me, to me!” Gavin shouted.
After a moment of resistance at being ordered to do something, the green in him rebelling, Kip realized it was what he wanted to do anyway. In seconds, he and five Blackguards joined Gavin.
“They’re making a god. We kill it,” Gavin said. He drafted another yellow sword, handed it to a Blackguard who had lost her weapons. “No matter what. No matter how. Got it?” He made another yellow sword, and another, tossed one to a Blackguard and one to Kip. Then he started running toward the wights. His hands were surrounded with glowing knots of yellows and reds.
As the first green spear came shooting toward Gavin, he dropped under it and rolled on the ground, came up to his knees and threw his hands forward. A fan of yellow missiles blasted out from him, each trailing chains of flame. The missiles stabbed dozens of the wights and the chains whipped around them, wrapping some in flame and scoring the wights behind.
But Gavin barely slowed. He popped back up to his feet and kept running.
A frog wight Kip hadn’t even seen descended, huge claws raking downward. Karris dodged to the side and swept her ataghan under its armpit.
Then, still fifty paces from the base of the spire, they ran into a veritable wall of green wights. Gavin crashed through a few, killing, spinning, killing-and almost got separated from the Blackguards. A Blackguard named Milk had his entire arm and shoulder ripped off by a big claw. A woman named Tisa was knocked aside as she drafted a stream of fire and accidentally shot a gush of pyrejelly down her own stomach and leg. It flamed and she screamed.
But she didn’t forget herself. As a green golem eight feet tall settled between Gavin and the rest of them to cut him off, Tisa hurled herself onto the golem’s back, taking both of them down in a sudden intense wash of fire.
Kip slashed back and forth, trying to keep up with the others. Something twisted his yellow luxin sword and he lost it.
The three remaining Blackguards reunited with Gavin, who fought with the flaming sword in one hand and luxin of alternating colors in the other. They were stuck, surrounded by dozens of wights, stopped.
A shell rocked the ground, exploding with a deafening roar. Kip felt the pressure wave and almost fell. A smoking hole cratered the green island, thirty paces away. The wights around it had been vaporized, those farther out torn to pieces.
The Blackguards and Gavin recovered first. The crater and the hole in the wights’ lines wasn’t directly between the Blackguards and the tower, but it offered movement. Freedom.
Even then, they never would have made if it the greens could tolerate order-if they’d organized their defenses. But with the help of the chaos, Gavin and his people cut through the staggered creatures and ran into the gap created by the shell, stepping on bodies and slipping on released green luxin that was evaporating as the once-men holding it died. Kip almost tripped over a woman’s bare torso-nothing else of her remained. Red and green ran in rivers next to each other, filling the crater with blood soup.
Crashing into the still-recovering lines on the opposite side of the crater with Karris, Gavin, and the remaining three Blackguards, Kip remembered his knife, still strapped to his calf, and pulled it out, stumbling. He lashed out at a big wight who was holding his bleeding eyes, weeping. Kip’s knife cut through the wight’s shell and kidneys with ease.
He felt instantly, stupidly guilty. The man hadn’t been able to defend himself, and Kip had cut him like a “Incoming!” Gavin shouted. He knocked Kip down.
They heard the thump and the explosion, but it was a good seventy paces away this time-no good to them, but no danger either.
By the time they stood, a man with a green bull’s head on his shoulders was charging them. Gavin leapt aside and cut the man’s back as he passed. The wight went down, but his horn caught Karris, who hadn’t jumped far enough. It spun her hard and slammed her into the ground.
Kip jumped on the bull and stabbed in through the top of its head, twisting his dagger in its brain and ripping it out. He grabbed Karris and pulled her to her feet. There was blood on her arm and chest, but instead of skewering her, the horn had passed under her armpit. She was winded, gasping for air, but not wounded. Lucky.
Gavin threw his sword into the chest of a woman who had the form of a harpy and spun, pulling his dagger-pistols from his belt. The guns spun in his hands as he pointed at Kip. Both pistols cracked and Kip ran on, certain that two wights behind him and Karris were dead.
A Blackguard was hamstringing two giants at the base of the stairs when one caught him with a war hammer in the shoulder. He staggered sideways, trying to catch himself, and met the other’s battle axe. It cut all the way through his chest.
Gavin shot yellow spears into their brains, one-two-three, in rapid succession, but it was too late for the Blackguard.
“Up,” Gavin shouted, “up!”
They ran up the stairs as if hell was on their heels. Kip was at the back. The tower was growing even as they mounted the stairs, twisting higher like a growing tree.
“What was that?” Gavin asked.
What? Kip hadn’t seen anything. He was exhausted, and they were only halfway up the tower. He looked down and saw that the wights had decided to follow them. He didn’t slow.
A clash of arms up ahead told Kip that they had encountered defense. It was all that allowed him to catch up. But Gavin had barely slowed. Kip heard screams descending, and when he passed the same spot of the winding stair, he saw wights far below, their bodies broken.
A great beam of green light hit the top of the tower, and the whole thing bucked and shivered. It nearly hurled them off the stairs.
“What the hell is that?” Commander Ironfist asked.
No one answered. No one knew. The green itself felt different suddenly, not affecting all of them so much as being gathered elsewhere. Teia was holding a pair of binocles. Through them, she could see more than most. “It’s coming from the Great Pyramid,” she said. “Or going to it, I can’t tell.”
“Is it a weapon?”
“I don’t know!”
Men were scrambling around the room, the gunners swabbing out the smoking hot bronze barrel, cooling it and making sure no bits of burning powder remained in the breech that would ignite the charge. Others were weighing the powder for the next shot. The Blackguards who were tasked with muscling the great thing back into p
lace were taking a well-deserved rest. Though the carriage was wheeled, the culverin was still massive. Hezik was staring alternately at a list of numbers he’d scribbled on a piece of parchment someone had passed him and down at the green island, lips moving silently, doing mental sums.
Everything was chaos, happening all at once.
“There’s a green man on top of the tower,” the spotter on the long lens called out.
Whatever was happening between the Great Pyramid and the bane was definitely helping the invaders. The tower was getting more massive by the second. “Why would the Atashians be helping the bane?” Teia asked.
“Sir,” the spotter said, “if I didn’t know better-Sir, that thing is Atirat.”
“Because the city has fallen,” Commander Ironfist said grimly. He walked over to the spotter, who moved aside for him.
“What?!” Hezik shouted to a Blackguard reporting to him. Not asking about the city.
“We didn’t see it before. It was at the bottom of the pile.” The Blackguard turned one of the shells over. The side was stove in, spilling all its powder out, and making it as effective in flight as a one-winged bird.
“Commander,” Hezik said. “We’ve only got two shots left. One shell, and one ball. Which do you want us to load?”
They’d been shooting the shells, and Hezik had honed his accuracy through practice. He was now hitting within forty paces of where he aimed, and he had done much better than that twice. But Gavin and the others were almost to the top of the tower. An exploding shell, that close? It would kill all of them.
On the other hand, the balls weighed more and flew differently. They’d shot a few of those earlier to get range before they started shooting the shells into the wights, but they hadn’t had as much practice.
Commander Ironfist said, “Use the ball.”
Hezik hesitated. “Sir, I’m only accurate within maybe twenty paces with the ball. It’s not a matter of skill at this distance, sir. We’d have to get very lucky.”
