The Burning White

by Brent Weeks

  It might be enough to give the Mighty a chance to kill those things.

  Corvan had made no distractions thus far, but Kip himself could be one. Kip would make himself such an inviting target that even the gods would get war-blind.

  His senses were burning. His skin was burning. Once before, when he’d sunk the great ship the Gargantua, he had been this alive, this focused on everything all at once.

  That polychrome over there needed green and yellow, but was about to need blue when he reached that corner. Kip slaved mirrors in those colors to him.

  Those red wights were low on their source. Kip flooded them with yet more blue.

  Kip put whole neighborhoods under diffuse green.

  He fried a Blood Robe marksman’s hands as he tried to take a shot at Corvan Danavis from a nearby rooftop.

  Kip’s eyes felt like he’d not blinked in many minutes. His bones felt hot from chi. This was ruining him, he knew. Already colors felt dangerous, his halos straining. He checked the position of the sun. It was getting close to sunset.

  He could make it, probably.

  But they had to win this battle today. Because Kip was going to be finished by the time they reached sunset. If the battle stretched into a second day, they’d lose, because Kip wouldn’t be there to fight regardless.

  There was no time for reflection or regret. Nothing was static on the battlefields of Big Jasper. Already the wights were reacting, and the gods themselves were, too. One tried to willjack Kip in paryl, and he barely slipped away.

  Below, Corvan Danavis was moving forces and slipping men through neighborhoods that were disconnected from the battle zones. It was either a mistake based on bad intelligence or a stratagem too subtle for Kip to understand immediately. There were still two major breaches of the walls over—

  Suddenly everything went blank.

  Weird. An aftereffect of widening his eyes to paryl? He hadn’t broken the halo, had he?

  No, no, he was sure he hadn’t. He wasn’t drafting any colors at all now.

  They could do this! By Orholam’s beard, the wights were drawing back in half a dozen places.

  They were going to win this! Or were they being drawn back because the immortals had figured out that the Mighty were attacking them? Kip needed to make sure—

  Everything went blank again, and Kip reeled.

  Another punch knocked his hands off the controls and he was suddenly back to his own body. Strapped in and taking blows.

  He was spun around and walloped in the stomach.

  Kip retched, but he didn’t look at his attacker; instead, drawn by a familiar voice’s yell, he saw a dozen men lock shields and plow into the remaining Mighty nunks on the top of the tower. The injured men tried to push back. They dropped their weapons and pushed, pushed, feet scrambling desperately, but the strength of the Lightguards was too much for them.

  The injured men were bulled off the edge of the tower.

  The next punch hit Kip hard in the jaw and he crumpled. Men released his limbs from the array and he fell to the ground.

  He had trouble focusing his eyes, and his limbs were trembling from the exertions he’d been through, but he looked up and saw the cruel idiot grin on Zymun’s face.

  There were bodies everywhere. While Kip had been sunken into the array, Zymun’s men had taken the tower.

  “Looks like you did some good work here,” Zymun said, looking out over the islands. “Looks like we’re winning!”

  “Winning?” Kip asked. “Maybe for the moment, but I have to consolidate our—”

  “Everyone,” Zymun said to the men around him, “when you’re asked, I did all this. I’m the savior of the Jaspers. You’ll be rewarded for your little white lie. Or you can be skinned alive. Your choice.”

  “What are you even talking about?” Kip asked. “The Jaspers aren’t even close to being saved yet. I need—”

  Zymun kicked him in the stomach. “As for this trash,” Zymun said. “He attacked me, the Prism.”

  “Zymun, this is not the time for this! Are you insane?! You’re doing this now?”

  “That makes him a traitor. We’ve got enough sun left. Hot day. But we’ll have to move fast. Don’t want anyone to get ideas about saving him.”

  “You have to listen to me,” Kip said. “Zymun, you can’t do this.”

  “I can’t? Brother, I already am. I’m gonna burn you, Kip, as I’ve been trying to burn you since I lit the fires at Rekton.”

  Kip almost went blank with fury, but he came back to himself. “I don’t mean killing me. I mean you can’t handle the mirrors how I can. You can kill me an hour from now, for Orholam’s sake. Just wait that long! Let me save the city!”

  “I know you’re afraid to die. Beg me. Beg me, little Guile.”

  “Of course I’m afraid, you sheep-swiving shit-for-brains! If you take me off these mirrors, you’ll doom us all! How long would it take you to blow your halos? Oh, no. You already have! Zymun, mine are intact, and I’m still working. I’m better at this than you are. I’m the only one who can do this.”

  The Lightguards were shifting uneasily. But they’d already killed men for Zymun, injured men. They were in too deep to risk disobeying him now.

  “If you can do it, I can do it better,” Zymun said. “And look, we’re already winning. They’ll withdraw for sunset.”

  “Sir,” one of the Lightguards said nervously, “maybe we should…”

  “Maybe we what?!” Zymun roared, grabbing the man by his lapels. The man was too shocked to do anything, too scared to attack his commander until he realized Zymun was running him toward the edge of the tower. Too late.

  Zymun flung the man off the edge and turned immediately, not even watching him fall.

  Pointing at Kip, he said, “We do not leave an enemy like this holding the biggest weapon in the goddam world. Do you morons understand?”

  They understood.

  “I, the Prism, will save us personally,” Zymun said. “Aram, can you handle a small task for me, or are you going to louse it up like you did the last one?”

  “Anything, High Lord Prism. To the death.”

  “Good. Send our people to seize the towers’ Mirror Rooms. Send the rest with us. I want no rescue. And find his wife while you’re at it. I’m going to put my brother up on Orholam’s Glare. We’re gonna watch him burn.”

  “Yes, my Lord Prism,” Aram said, and Kip could feel all the cripple’s bitterness seething and bubbling with joy. “Gladly, sir.”

  Chapter 128

  “Why are they being so slow?” Gill Greyling asked. “They can’t have missed us, can they?”

  Still in the first phase of their plan, they’d crashed into the rear of the blue pagan drafters assaulting Cannon Island—and they were demolishing them. A few of these blue drafters had begun to transition their bodies, making themselves wights by degrees as they incorporated luxin into their skin, over their eyes as lenses to give themselves plentiful blue source, and along their arms or elbows to make spears or scythes or whatever other weapons they could dream up. But none of them seemed like they’d fought against any force tougher than terrified civilians before.

  Slow, predictable, and amateurish, they didn’t even realize how much danger they were in until Karris’s Blackguards had cut through half of them.

  Karris wasn’t sure if her small force in mirror armor had been assumed to be mere soldiers (not drafters, and thus inconsequentially weak, to the Blood Robes’ way of thinking) or if the blues were simply so inflexible. But what she did know was that the fact that the Blood Robes weren’t quick to turn around to fight them meant that the Blackguards holding Cannon Island were still alive and holding it.

  “Feels like there was some kind of war within blue itself, sir,” Tamerah said. She was a blue drafter herself. “But… it’s over now. I think we can expect an attack from the center of the island any moment.”

  “We got this,” Commander Fisk said to Karris, though they were still outnumbered
by more than two to one—even without the reinforcements coming. “What are you going to do if the seed crystal is at the top of that?” He nodded toward the vast spire in the center of the blue bane reaching toward the sky, higher by the moment.

  “Signal us when you take the guns,” Karris said. “We might need you to knock it down for us.”

  “I’ll make sure we save enough powder,” Commander Fisk said. “Orholam go with you.”

  It killed them to let her go without them, and it killed her to abandon them just as they were about to be attacked, but Karris and her strike force peeled away, heading into the deepest part of the valley and out of sight. Then they donned blue robes or cloaks or dresses, or whatever they’d taken from the stores to camouflage themselves, securing these around their bodies with whatever was available so that the clothes wouldn’t interfere with their fighting. Karris produced the jar of boot black she’d grabbed from the store, and they each dulled their mirror armor in the places where it might flash and give them away through the gaps in their clothing, at their shins, and elsewhere.

  Then, after everyone reloaded their discharged muskets, they were off again.

  They circled the back of the bane without even seeing anyone, and then charged the center, flitting from great crystalline outcroppings and sapphire forests to empty, gleaming villages of static topaz laid out with straight boulevards of arithmetic precision. It was as if the wights both reviled the natural world and longed for it at the same time, mimicking it in these weird facsimiles.

  “Here we go!” Gill said.

  Karris hadn’t even seen anyone up ahead, but moments later, missiles of blue glass streaked for her head. They shattered and sheared apart on Gill’s mirror shield, though she’d ducked, maybe even enough to evade them.

  More missiles streaked in, and all life became dodging and deflecting and slicing with her own shield edge and, once, stabbing the shield far off to one side to catch a missile that Gill had turned his back to as he threw a wight to the ground for the kill.

  The shock of the missile was greater than she’d expected, and she left her guard open for too long. A blue drafter appeared from nowhere with an ash lance, coming up for her guts.

  His head flew half apart as Grinwoody’s blunderbuss discharged, but the dead man still completed his step blindly thrusting. But Grinwoody’s old training of never assuming a dead man knew he was dead had him already moving in toward the threat. He smashed the butt of the blunderbuss against the lance, sending it safely away, and the dead man took no second step.

  There was no thanks. No time for it. Tamerah had been mortally wounded in the clash, blood shooting from her neck, then slowing, slowing, even as her breath did, and the nearest Blackguard took her in his arms, that her last sight would be of one who loved her.

  They pressed on. A thousand paces left, and no chance to look to see how many wights and drafters were between them and that great tower.

  In the next clash, she raked her scorpion across a blue drafter’s belly, opening it with all four claws. She dove under a musket blast.

  The man who’d shot at her was dead before she regained her feet. Gill’s spinning spear flung blood in a wide circle.

  Glancing back, she saw Grinwoody parry too slowly and take a blue spear in his guts—though a formidable warrior, the old man was no longer in his prime. But the luxin spear tip shattered on Grinwoody’s mirror armor and merely jabbed the old man with its wood shaft. It was still a blow that drove the wind from the old man’s lungs.

  Karris lunged with her ataghan, but the wight attacking Grinwoody was a hair too far away. The point of her ataghan barely poked the back of its head, knocking it off-step, but not piercing its skull.

  It was enough. Grinwoody stepped into its arms and drove a blade up under its ribs, wrenching the blade around before twisting it away.

  Behind him, Rivvyn Shmuel dodged into the path of a monstrously huge blue wight and ran him through with a slender spear, but the wight threw great arms around him, and lifted, then threw layer upon layer of luxin around his waist and legs. Shmuel drew twin daggers and stabbed in a frenzy, over and over, trying to kill it before it could immobilize his arms. Then, as the huge wight fell to its knees, Shmuel calmed and buried one dagger in the base of its skull.

  The dying wight went boneless, but Shmuel was bound to it with blue luxin and was dragged to the ground. He disappeared under a half-dozen wights.

  Gill and Karris killed the wights atop the Blackguard as he fought them from beneath, but by the time they got them all, Shmuel’s throat had already been ripped open. With one hand, he was holding his life’s blood in while the other held a dagger drenched in his enemies’ blood. But now his grip relaxed, and blood poured out. His eyes dimmed.

  Forward again—ever forward—though now with only five Blackguards.

  Three hundred paces out now, not far! They sprinted up a rise, not daring to slow to reload muskets, and suddenly found themselves facing a double line of Blood Robe musketeers. More than twenty of them. The front row kneeling, the back row standing, all muskets leveled.

  But their officer, facing the Chromeria, gave no order to fire. His eyes were on the tower.

  An instant later, Karris and everyone else saw why.

  With the speed and dazzling, eye-burning intensity of a falling star, something streaked in a fiery crimson-and-sapphire line from the top of the Prism’s Tower to the great blue tower at the center of the bane.

  It lasted only one blinding moment, and seemed like it had been jerked away from its low, intended target up and to the side.

  Karris found herself tackled, thrown to the side out of the way of the firing line, but the blue officer still gave no orders. The other Blackguards were cutting into the musketeers’ ranks with astonishing speed and efficiency.

  Blues were slashed, spun, muskets seized, muskets discharged into others, kneeling men knocked down, stabbed on the ground even as the Blackguard attacked the next and the next.

  Twenty-four men, killed by six, in seconds.

  But Karris was looking back up toward the Prism’s Tower, where that incredible magic had come from. Her heart swelled.

  Someone was looking out for them. Someone saw, someone cared, someone was trying to save them.

  They ran on.

  She saw that two great lines now stretched from the top of the Prism’s Tower, one to Ebon’s Hill and the other to Cannon Island. Small figures were zipping down each one.

  So her repairs had worked. Good.

  But still, those guys must have balls of steel. Zipping down the escape chains into this?

  With a spear, Grinwoody moved down the line of falling pagans, stabbing and twisting, stabbing and twisting. He said, “Sure didn’t think I’d go out like this.”

  The others had been taking advantage of the lull to reload.

  “What?” Karris asked. Having mounted this rise, they finally had a good view of what was around them in every direction. Behind them, the Blood Robes had caught on to their incursion, and several hundred were chasing to catch up with them. The sides were open, but led nowhere, and would be closed off in minutes.

  Between Karris and her goal of the great blue plinth were hundreds and hundreds of blues—thousands—with more coming by the moment, called back from the front lines to stop her attack. Against Karris and her six.

  Her heart cratered.

  The blues were already between her little force and the bane. And the bane itself was sheer-sided, with no helpful steps for her to charge up like the bane at Ru had had.

  But… the tower’s perfection was marred, not far from the base.

  A single line left by that falling-star strike from the Prism’s Tower cut across it as if it were a bamboo shoot cut with a sword.

  Except dropping blue luxin the width of the sword-cut meant dropping an entire tower’s mass onto the crystalline blue luxin beneath it. Luxin that was marvelously strong on one plane but otherwise fragile on others.

 
; A sharp report echoed across the plain of this weird blue island, and Karris saw cracks race up the tower’s face, and slower ones run down from the cut as well.

  They shattered into vast crystals the size of whole buildings and fell in many directions, not least toward Karris.

  “Oh, shit,” Gill said.

  She found herself thrown into a crack and buried under a pile of protective bodies just as chunks of razor-sharp blue luxin rained from the sky. Gill threw the shield above them, only to have it ripped away by some blow or from the vast chalky wind of gritty blue dust blasting over them.

  A minute later, they stood, binding cloths over their faces so they wouldn’t breathe the sharp blue dust. Miraculously, none of them had died, though everyone other than Karris had at least small cuts from flying frostglass. The same could not be said for many hundreds of the enemy. A great portion of the tower had fallen into the bulk of the pagan army. Others had been sliced to ribbons by the sideways-flying shrapnel.

  Hundreds more, farther out, couldn’t have actually been injured, but they were stunned to immobility, their wills shaken by the cataclysm that had befallen what they’d thought impervious to attack.

  Others were slowly recovering, moaning under the blue dust and the rubble.

  Karris gave hand signals to advance. The blues might be broken altogether—or they might recover at any moment.

  Soon, Gill pointed sharply in one direction and took the lead.

  That was right, Gill was almost a blue drafter; he’d barely failed his testing in it, and hadn’t tried again, afraid he would be named a polychrome and become too valuable for Blackguard service. He must be feeling something.

  They climbed over the rubble of blue luxin shards, sharp enough to cut through a careless boot and the foot inside it. Not a few times, Karris felt more yielding ground beneath her foot, only to find a body, bleeding an all-too-human red into the dust.

  But many, many of the wights and drafters were recovering. Far more of them than she would have imagined still seemed to be alive, even here.

  Then, suddenly, they were upon her.