The Burning White (140 page)

“Right!” Dazen turned back. The gun-sword was still sticking out of the now-white tower.

He yanked it free. Behind his back, he heard Orholam yell, “Now!”

He turned.

Orholam was gone.

Oh no. No, no, no!

Fear grabbed at his legs to hold him in place. It was probably already too late. If the timing was so tight, then he’d surely already—

Dazen kicked Fear in the face.

As he sprinted toward the edge, he shouted, “I can’t believe You’re making me do this!”

And he leapt.

“Can you fight?” Karris asked. Baffled, the crowd was torn between gasping at the dazzling spectacle of lights above them or at the young man silently healing at their feet. Healthy skin was surfacing from beneath his burns, and where he’d been burned bald, hair was growing in speedily—but as if it were natural, as if this were something that happened every day.

But none of them mattered.

“Yes,” Kip said tentatively, then, gaining strength, “Yes! Let’s go kick some ass!”

Big Leo hauled Kip to his feet as easily as Karris might lift a quill.

Kip immediately collapsed again.

“Well, that’s awkward,” Kip said, looking at his limbs like they were purposely embarrassing him.

“ Son—can I call you son?—I’m so glad you’re alive,” Karris said, “but other people are dying. My people. Right now. If we live, we’ ll—”

“We’ll do all sorts of things,” Kip said. “Got it. But you need to go. So go.”

“You showed me how to win,” Karris said, and she felt like the Iron White again as she said it. “We have to kill the White King. And that’s on me. It doesn’t matter that it looks impossible. And our best chance is tonight, right now. Who knows how long this will last,” she said, pointing to the spectacle of many lights dancing above them. “Right now is the only time we’re going to have the advantage. We win now or we lose. Kip, I love you. Can I take Big Leo and the Mighty?”

She knew she sounded scattered, but there were too many things to do all at once.

“Yes,” Kip said at the same time Big Leo said, “Uh-uh. I’m not leaving you again.”

“
Leonidas,
” Kip said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Big Leo, you can’t think I’m in danger now,” Kip said. “Orholam Himself saved me. I’m gonna be fine. You think He did all that to let me get killed two minutes later?”

“I’ll stay,” Tisis said.

“Me, too,” one of the nunks of the Mighty said.

“See?” Karris said.

“Besides, you didn’t help at all with the blue bane,” Karris said. “Think of this as a second chance.”

“Leo didn’t help with the blue?” Kip asked. “I thought—Holy shit, man, the rest of ’em are never gonna let you live that down.”

“Fine. I see how it is,” Big Leo said. He looked at the nunk volunteer. “But not you. Anyone who volunteers might be Order. I’m not sure they’re all dead.” He pointed to two of the other nunks at random. “You and you, but keep ten paces out.”

“Yes, Commander,” they said. The original volunteer looked offended, but kept his mouth shut.

Big Leo loosed his big copper chain. “Wight King’s flotilla’s that way, right?”

“Straight down the main street,” Gill said. “But we’ll have to make it through the Great Market and maybe even past the orange—”

But Big Leo wasn’t paying attention. He swung his great thick chain over his head, and suddenly, it took fire, whooshing with each great circle. “Let’s go kill some pagans! For the Iron White. For the Lightbringer!”

And then as they roared in return, he ran, as if he didn’t care if he had to do it all himself, as if he’d simply take all the glory for himself, and if they missed out, so much the worse for them.

In a moment, everyone followed—not only the Mighty, not only Karris’s remaining Blackguards, but practically every able-bodied civilian in the square, too.

Karris looked at Kip, shrugged, and then hopped off the platform. Gill was holding a horse for her.

“Go on,” Kip said. “That’s your battle cry. That’s your advantage. You shout it every chance you get: ‘The Lightbringer is come.’ ”

But she glanced back, and as he said it, he wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t looking at the battle. He was looking up at Andross Guile, limned in light at the top of the Prism’s Tower.

Gavin had once said, ‘The only thing more dangerous than winning a battle is losing one.’

Now Karris knew what he meant.

Not once, but
twice
as she and her people fought across Big Jasper, Karris saw jubilant Chromeria forces rush around corners and blunder into each other—and go blasting away at one another with muskets and magic before they realized they were killing their allies.

She’d only been saved from the same by the great beam of white light that followed her everywhere she went—Andross tagging her somehow, which had not only saved her from friendly fire but also drew enemies.

Not that she should really complain.

Nor was there was any way to do so, if she’d wanted to.

But it did make what she’d hoped would be a simple jog across Big Jasper into a running battle that took the entire night.

Her forces had torn into the weakened northern flank of the White King’s drafters encircling the Great Fountain, and demolished them. A young general named Lorenço was commanding in Corvan Danavis’s stead. He was relieved to see them, and delighted to give over command.

But Karris didn’t want to command, and it took valuable time to get the strike force she wanted out of him. She also reclaimed her own Blackguards that she’d sent on before her to help High General Danavis. Lorenço believed the grievously injured high general was dying, and had put him in the care of physickers nearby. Karris would have liked to thank the man or at least say goodbye, but there was no time.

Once she had her force, she didn’t go out of her way to save others or even to attack shaken Blood Robes—not much, anyway. And yet, for every company they encountered that simply melted at the sight of them, others fought tooth and nail. Clearly, many had no idea of what had happened out of their own sight, and most of the Blood Robes thought they were still winning and that the Jaspers would soon be theirs.

Nor was fighting in the middle of beams of light an unqualified advantage—for some of the Blood Robes were canny enough to use the darkness to spring traps, especially with will-cast animals: Karris’s people were attacked by wolves, a tiger, a giant javelina, and even a bear once.

But everywhere they went, they shouted, “The Lightbringer has come!” and with their ever-burning coruscation of every color and the heavens alight with untimely scintillance, the Blood Robes believed them and were sore afraid.

The idea spread through their battlefields like a slow, stubborn fire.

Karris’s people forced the Blood Robes in their sector all the way back to the wall they’d climbed on their way in and smashed them against it, men and women suddenly panicking that they would be left inside the city they had worked so hard to enter.

As she crossed the wall itself, from that higher perch, she could see her brother’s own dragon-ship out beyond the orange bane—but first her eye was drawn to the yellow bane, which cracked open like an egg and blazed brightwater skyward in great fountains shooting up into the night.

A lone figure was running along the shattering shell, dodging enemies and splinters and shards of yellow glass. He ran to one yawning edge of a sudden abyss, much too far, and
bounced
, ludicrously high and far to the other side.

Landing, he split a yellow wight nearly in half with a spearlike thing—a tygre striper?—who in the world knew to how fight with one of those these days?

But it could be nothing else. It bent and straightened—now plastic, now rigid—as the warrior cut through half a dozen yellows in turn, all fleeing him or fleeing to get off the crumbling yellow bane. The young man sprinted with great long strides, impossibly long and fast, and Karris realized his very legs must be fitted with the same kind of sea demon bone that made the tygre striper directly susceptible to the Will.

“Shit, I don’t see Einin,” Big Leo muttered. Then he shouted, “ Ben-hadad! Ben!”

And then Big Leo was gone, taking the Mighty with him to rescue his comrade, who, truth be told, didn’t look like he needed rescuing.

In minutes, though, they all re-formed on the orange bane.

It was the last place Karris wanted to be. You couldn’t trust your very eyes here. The orange bane was virtually paved with uncured lumber and flat stones—anything the Blood Robes had been able to find to make themselves pathways on the oleaginous surface. To step off the paths and streets was to risk sinking to the waist in orange goo.

Karris immediately feared traps, but nothing happened as they charged across the surface. There were few oranges, and they’d not been expecting a counterattack, so perhaps for once, Karris and the Chromeria’s defenders would get lucky.

And then the surface of the bane shifted as if in an earthquake, and behind them an orange hill rose and rose.

They ran, faster, and faster. Ben-hadad blitzed on ahead of them all, with his great inhuman loping strides, looking for traps or ambushes or even safe havens.

But then they were plunged into darkness as the hill rose so high that the mirrored light from the Thousand Stars could no longer reach them.

And then the bane settled behind them—and split open ahead, yielding to the wood decks of the White King’s own dragon-ship flotilla of a dozen galleys lashed together.

Its eerie white wooden skin bristled with ivory, metal, and luxin spikes, and its mouth gushed fire from spouts out its draconic mouth.

Karris and her people were out of range of that fire, but she saw hundreds of his warriors leaping out onto the orange bane.

She recognized their standards: these were Koios’s personal guard, maddened, screaming, carrying their own colors forward into the night.

Karris had fewer than three hundred elite warriors with her, many of them better drafters than fighters, now trapped in the darkness with no mag torches left. Dawn was achingly close, but too far off to make a difference—and suddenly, alone, her three hundred were facing thousands of the White King’s best and freshest troops.

For the moment, the Chromeria was winning this battle. Hell, they might win the battle outright, regardless of what happened in the next few minutes to Karris.

But that didn’t make a whole lot of difference right here, did it?

As Gavin had said, ‘Dead winners and dead losers have only one thing in common. Unfortunately, it’s the most important thing.’

The great, winged machina must have flown directly at the tower, nosed up hard to vertical at the last moment to avoid a collision, and stalled just in time to catch Orholam gently.

In jumping late, Dazen was going to get nothing
gentle
. He plunged after the falling condor, seeing Orholam nonchalantly pulling Himself into a finely carved wooden seat and tying a rope around His waist, even as the machina fell sideways, slowly spinning.

Dazen fell only slightly faster, head angled down like a boy diving into the water, sword flopping about hazardously in the air.

He realized that the principles of flight, which he’d only been starting to master when he’d made the first condor, also applied to his body. There was probably something smart and dextrous he should be doing right now.

Orholam have mercy, it was as if they were two horses racing each other, and he’d taken the outside track to doom. He started to pass the condor, too far away to grab on to the tail or the seats, coming equal to its nose before the condor, now headed straight down, began falling as fast as Dazen was.

But then the condor swooped, raising its nose and swerving into him. He bounced off its nose, the machina smacking his head and knocking the wind from his lungs, and the sword almost out of his grasp. He slid down its back. Or, more appropriately,
up
its back, as it was inverted, still falling. As Dazen slid, he grabbed for Orholam’s chair, or his legs—anything. But his three-fingered left-hand grip failed him again. He slid up to the tail, and there clung with his hands and knees gripping the winged machine like a bad rider clamped helplessly to the back of a spooked horse, feet braced against some small protrusions of the tail that hadn’t been there in his version of the machina.

The wind tore at him as if he were as welcome as a tick, but he held on. He wasn’t going to die. Not yet.

“Hey!” a baritone voice shouted at him. “Can you move your feet, please?”

“I’m not back here for fun!” he shouted back.

“Get your feet off the elevator flaps or we’re gonna hit the trees.”

Dazen looked up, not at the speaker, but at the horizon. The condor was leveling out slowly, but it needed to climb
rapidly
, or it was going to smash into the hills ringing the plain around the mountain tower’s base.

He scooted forward and pulled his feet off the nubs where he’d braced them and instantly felt gears shift and the tail flex. He tucked his head tight against the condor’s back as it shot up into the air.

He didn’t move again until it leveled out. Then he scooted slowly, slowly forward, until he reached the windbreak on the condor’s back. He took the only other chair. Chairs? That was a nice innovation.

No one had even offered to help him.

“Thanks for the help!” he said. “No, I kept the sword, too. No problem.”

Orholam and the captain of the air machine glanced at him as if he’d only just boarded.

“Oh, did you hit your head?” the captain asked. “Sorry about that.”

He didn’t sound sorry at all. “Not your fault,” Dazen said, though Orholam could have given him warning.

“I know,” the captain said. “I meant I’m sorry you hurt yourself. I was being polite.”

Real polite.

Dazen returned the favor by staring at the man. The man had apparently also hit his head recently, as there was an ugly lump and abrasions across his forehead. But that wasn’t the main thing that made Dazen stare. This man was ethnically unlike anyone Dazen had ever seen: fine, straight black hair, broad cheekbones, and skin folded across his upper eyelids.