Oh, shit. Quentin had gone way past what Kip had told him to say. Quentin had been supposed to go out and say, ‘Hey, don’t be afraid if some people get ill. Orholam’s in charge. Those loyal to Him are going to be fine.’ But no, Quentin had thrown it all in, like a first-time gambler with no sense of responsibility.
If Kip and Teia had led him astray, Quentin wasn’t merely going to be ruined; he was going to get lynched.
“But when it does happen,” Quentin said, “be not afraid. Orholam sees. Orholam hears. Orholam cares. Orholam saves. He will slay these traitors who are intent on betraying us to the King of Wights. Orholam will slay them, not to cause your hearts to fear but to save your very lives and your souls.
“This day is not a battle of brother on brother. Nor even between men and those wights who once were men themselves. Today, Orholam Himself fights beside us against the legions of the damned. When you grow faint, His immortals shall uphold you. When you grow weary, they shall bear you up. Though ye fall, O beloved of Orholam, ye shall rise again. And if any part of this doesn’t happen, slay me as a false prophet!”
Quentin paused. The crowd had fallen utterly silent. They seemed caught between hope and despair, with disbelief overall. When did any luxiat speak so plainly?
Some knew him or knew of him, and those who did whispered about Quentin to their neighbors, and the sound of the whispers ebbed and flowed.
The sun, still below the horizon for those here at the waterline, was casting its light on the tallest towers of the Chromeria now, its light descending slowly and surely.
The people turned and looked. Some looked ill. Was that the lacrimae sanguinis affecting them, or just people scared to death?
Quentin said, “I close now with a few final words from Doni’el Machos:
“ ‘Orholam stands ready to pity you; this is a day not only of judgment but also of mercy; you may cry now with some encouragement of obtaining mercy: but once the time of mercy is past, your most dolorous cries and shrieks will be in vain; weep now in repentance, or weep in the very throes of your damnation.’ ”
Atop the gate, limned in the rising light, Quentin fell to his knees and lifted his arms in supplication, or perhaps greeting.
Kip felt sudden, intense anxiety for his friend.
What if the poison took too long to take effect?
The sunlight filled the square, its hand touching all the people who’d been listening so intently to Quentin—and, as far as Kip could tell, word of Quentin’s sermon must have spread like wildfire, because it seemed like the whole island held its breath.
And now we find out if Karris’s luxiat corps is any good.
Kip nodded to a standard-bearer, who waved a signal flag.
In obedience to Karris’s luxiats, mirror slaves and the star-tower slaves around the Jaspers reacted instantly, spinning the towers’ mirrors, sending great beams of sunlight across the crowd. Not only here but also working light over every wall, every gate, every sector of the city: if the lacrimae sanguinis was released by a sharp constriction of the pupils, Kip wanted to make certain that no one had a chance for their eyes to gradually get accustomed to the light of the day.
But what if even that didn’t make things go fast enough?
People were blinking against the sudden rays that had just bathed them, wondering if that was Quentin’s miracle. Then many seemed angry.
What was this? Flashing light over the crowd? Was that supposed to impress them?
“Lieutenant Commander,” Kip said. The man was General Antonius’s right-hand man, and he stood at Kip’s elbow, ready to take orders, hand nervously on his dagger, no doubt because of the restive crowds. “I think we have about two minutes to rescue Quentin before this crowd turns. Lead your men quietly into place right now, then grab him before they do.”
“I’ll stay with you, my lord. I’ll send a detachment.”
Kip turned, irritated. The crowd was starting to buzz. Someone cried out angrily. “False prophet! Kill him!”
Kip snarled, “Lieutenant, was there something unclear about my orders?”
The lieutenant commander had drawn his dagger, but Kip barely noticed it. He’d fought alongside this man many times. All Kip could see now was that the whites of the lieutenant commander’s eyes were suddenly flooded with bright crimson, as if the irises had cracked on every side and a dam had broken.
This man wasn’t a red drafter. That red filling the whites of his eyes wasn’t luxin; it was blood.
Kip and he seemed to have the realization at same moment. The commander had been poisoned. That meant—
“Light cannot be chained!” the commander screamed, lunging.
A heavy chain spun out of nowhere and slapped the attacker down to the ground as easily as a man smacks a mosquito on his arm. One instant the man was leaping at Kip with lethal intent, and the next all his momentum had been redirected into the ground at Kip’s feet.
Kip cursed as the man convulsed once, fingers and limbs stiffening as if in instant rigor mortis. He looked up at Big Leo. “It somehow actually slipped my mind that the Order might try to assassinate me again.”
Big Leo wrapped the heavy chain back around his chest. “Didn’t slip ours.”
In the few seconds Kip had been distracted by the assassin, pandemonium had broken out. In his own ranks, a dozen men and women had dropped dead, and thousands were reacting to the assassination attempt on Kip and to the dead nearby.
Things were far worse in the square. Nearly a hundred people were dying or lay dead already, hidden weapons spilling from hands that had been tucked away under coats and cloaks, men and women with blood hemorrhaging from their eyes, lurching into the innocent, convulsing to die with limbs crooked tight like spiders’.
Most of the traitors were congregated directly around the gate—and, as if this death were contagious, the people around them were surging back away from them.
Kip heard screams reverberate throughout the island as others were dying in droves in the far corners of Big Jasper, just as suddenly.
Quentin jumped to his feet as the people roared. “Be not afraid!” he shouted. “Orholam fights with us. Orholam fights with us!”
Only Kip knew the truth. My God, he thought, and he wasn’t sure if it was a curse or a holy invocation of the divine mystery: Teia’s just wiped out the Order of the Broken Eye.
All of it.
Today a great warrior like Big Leo might kill twenty of the enemy. Maybe, maybe forty. He would be accounted a hero for such valor.
If her estimates were right, in one day, of the empire’s most dedicated, most cunning, most dangerous, and most implacable enemies, Teia had just killed four hundred.
And no one would ever know. Despite all Quentin’s talk of Orholam’s mercy, like a mighty man levering apart the pillars of a pagan temple, Teia had killed the enemies in their hundreds only at the cost of killing herself.
Kip climbed up on the wall.
The masses of people were cheering now with new hope, but Kip’s eyes were drawn to the horizon, because among the cacophony of alarms and screams of horror and disgust and shouts of praise and relief, he’d heard the whistle of the lookouts, and he saw the horizon darken with the long shadows of the White King’s approaching armada.
It seemed much, much bigger than Kip remembered.
Then his eyes were drawn to the waves—and, illuminated in the angled rays of dawn—what was swimming in undulating ranks beneath them.