by Brent Weeks
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 crewmate 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 hullwrecker 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.”
Cruxer steered their circle in close to the ship that they’d hit with the hullwrecker, hoping that the other ships would be reticent to fire up on their own comrades.
As they came out of that second circle, though, Winsen shouted a curse. He pointed back in toward the great dragon-ship. “Breaker!”
Kip ignored him.
“Breaker! Kip! For Orholam’s sake, man—”
Kip glanced up, trying to narrow his eyes so that he wouldn’t be blinded. He caught only a terror of skimmers streaming toward them—the White King had skimmers now?—no, they were sea chariots pulled by some kind of sea animals. Sharks? And sharks untethered and great swarms of razor wings clouding the sky.
But Kip said nothing. He jumped toward the rudder and cut so hard that all of them were nearly thrown off their feet and into the water.
Before they could even cry out in protest, the water exploded beside them in a flash of dark skin and immense presence as the black whale breached fully into the air, sharks snapping behind it, some of them launching into the air as well.
It was only the vast discipline ingrained in the Blackguard that kept them on their reeds, kept them moving. Razor wings hit the waves all around them, some exploding, some trying to slash their bodies.
The black whale came down on the stern of the ship Ben-hadad had bombed. Waves and flotsam exploded from the dying ship, a cacophony of screams and water and small explosions from the razor wings and dying men and animals.
Kip slewed the command skimmer back and forth as he nearly lost his feet, not so much in evasive moves as merely trying to regain his own balance, but when he came out of the tight arc, there seemed to be a gap—a trough of clear water.
He aimed the skimmer down into the trough and then up the other side.
The skimmer bottomed out in the trough, sliced into the following wave, then shot into the air, over crushed hull and lumber and dying men.
They didn’t clear it completely, but the garbage they landed on yielded to the skimmer’s foils and weight and speed.
Ahead of them, the black whale breached again, this time with only a single shark after it. Then it dove before it reached the second circle of ships.
It didn’t matter. The outer circle was looser, and the first ship one of them had bombed was half sunk. Kip and the Mighty shot out into the open sea and safety.
He shot flares into the open sky—a retreat, in an old Chromeria code.
The Chromeria’s fleet didn’t heed it. Not that he could see.
There was nothing he could do.
They had tried. But that didn’t make him feel like any less a coward as they fled.
“There were hundreds of drafters on that dragon-ship,” Cruxer said. “We’re good. Maybe we’re each worth ten of them, but…”
“Not a hundred of them, each, not at once,” Winsen said.
“I’ve shit myself before,” Big Leo said. “But I’ve never run away.”
“You didn’t run away,” Ferkudi said. “None of us did. I mean, except Breaker. He was steering. He gave the orders. So I guess he ran away, but the rest of us—”
“Ferk. Shut it,” Cruxer said.
“They’re gonna die back there, aren’t they?” Ferkudi asked. “All those Chromeria drafters and sailors and soldiers. I mean, is there any possible way they might—”
“Ferk!” Cruxer said.
They skimmed in silence, and Kip wondered if at last he was the Breaker in truth. He had broken the Mighty’s streak of victories; he had broken their foundational myth that they were invincible. In so doing had he broken the Mighty itself?
They were no longer heroes of lore, legends in the making, indomitable, unstoppable, unflappable, brave and just and right and true and forever.
Maybe they’d always just been boys who’d had some lucky fights.
Several minutes later, when the Mighty were so distant Kip didn’t think they would know the outcome of this battle one way or the other, a sound like the earth shaking reached them, and mist exploded into the distant skies.
Big Leo said, “I feel like I just got in a fight with my big brother and he grabbed my fists and started hitting me in the face with them, chanting, ‘Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself.’”
Then a tugging sickness hit all of them, and even this far away they lost half their speed all at once. It was the call of a master to his slaves, certain of obedience.
The bane had surfaced.
Kip couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it, couldn’t witness it—and yet he knew that hundreds upon hundreds of their allies had just perished. Maybe their friends had been on those ships. He hadn’t stopped the White King. He hadn’t saved his friends.
He’d failed, and he couldn’t think of any way that he could do anything but fail again when the bane reached the Jaspers.
Chapter 68
“I’m coming to the end of things, Quentin, I can feel it,” Teia said.
“With the Order?” he asked, his voice low. He never forgot to be circumspect, even here in his own room. His room, it turned out, even had a secret exit into a seldom-used hallway. There were, Teia’d found, several old, dusty, and baggy cloaks of various colors and qualities hanging near the exit. Some White long ago had used this room probably not only for assignations but also as a staging area to go out incognito, probably to meet spies.
“No,” she said. “I mean, sort of. With them, but not only with them. I feel like—I think maybe Orholam’s letting me know that I’m going to die.”
“It has been known to happen,” he said, contemplative. “If so it’s either a mercy, to tell one to repent, or it’s a grace, to allow one to take care of unfinished business. Do you feel you have unfinished business?”
She shrugged. Funny that he didn’t think she needed to repent. “I mean, taking down the bad guys and finding my father, but not really like spiritually or whatnot.”
She wasn’t sure if that was true, but Quentin was a luxiat, and sometimes he went full-on luxiat on her. It was all right. She was glad he had something that worked for him, and he wasn’t obnoxious about it.
He didn’t say anything else. He was getting good at waiting silently. He’d joked once that the wisest luxiat is a silent luxiat. Finally, he said, “No one touches you, do they?”
It was heading toward night, and the sunset through the windows gave the wood in this chamber a ruddy glow. She’d always liked the light in Quentin’s room. In this orangey, warm chamber, with his many books and the simple, well-burnished beauty of his hardwood shelves (and, perhaps, Quentin’s company), there was no loneliness, only solitude.
“Hadn’t thought about it,” she said.
“I avoided touch for the longest time,” he said. “I told myself I was just that way. Naturally averse to touch. It wasn’t that. It was shame. It was worse after I murdered Lucia, of course, but I’d had it even before then. I’m trying to unlearn some things, Adrasteia, things that stand in the way of my mission. No one touches the destitute, the broken poor. It’s been part of my work now to give them that connection, as valuable as the food and clothes I give them, I think. Of course, you minister to the body first, then the heart, and last, if you can, the soul. I think in this I’ve served you very poorly. Because you have enough to eat and are dressed well, and because you ask me smart questions, I’ve somehow missed your poverty.”
“‘Poverty’? Ha. I’ve seen poverty. This ain’t that.” She motioned around herself vaguely: as if to say, ‘Look at this room, these good clothes, all the privileges of my new station, the very nice meal a slave brought to Quentin’s chamber only minutes ago.’
“You’re a soldier with no brothers in arms, and you do heartbreaking work that no one can understand—not even those few you can tell about it. I don’t understand; not even Karris can. You endure a poverty of heart. But poverty’s lie to you is the same. Poverty tells you that you don’t matter.”
Teia felt suddenly naked. “Well, shit, Quentin.”
/> “It wasn’t a condemnation of you. The opposite, in fact.”
“I do so think I matter,” she said, but even she could hear the defensiveness in her voice. She wouldn’t sound defensive if he were simply mistaken, would she?
“Adrasteia, you think that what you do matters. The mission matters. But outside of your mission, you believe you have no importance. That’s a lie. A lie that’s made you very good, very focused. Now the thing that you believed gave you your only significance is drawing to a close, so you’re terrified. Of course you are. It’s understandable, but it’s not a premonition of death.”
“I could die at any moment,” she said. Sharp was hunting her, even now.
“That’s true, but it’s true of us all,” he said.
“A little more true for me,” she said.
“A point I’ll concede,” he said. “Though if Sharp catches you, they’ll kill me, too.”
“They what?” She’d never even thought of it.
“They’ll kill anyone you spent much time with, trying to find your handler.”
“How did I not think of that?” She felt a sudden nausea, but it was too late now. Even if she cut off all contact with Quentin today, they’d kill him regardless. She’d been seen with him and the Mighty before. It was how the Order worked. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I swear I’ll do my best not to let that happen.”
“You’d do your best regardless, and I’ll die when Orholam allows it, and no sooner. I’m glad to aid you, and honored to call you friend.”
“Friend?” she asked.
“Is it such a high bar to clear?” he asked.
“No, it’s not that. I suppose… I mean, you have been a friend to me, far better than I deserve.”
“Oh, I disagree,” he said.
“And I’ve been no friend to you,” Teia said. “Our entire relationship is based on me taking.”
He shrugged. “I don’t see it that way.”
“I didn’t tell you what happened,” she said. “With Aglaia.”
Ah. Maybe she did have unfinished business.
“I took the lack of an answer as an answer.”