Chapter 107
Gasping between his words, Gavin said, “You’re . . . really . . . fucking strong.”
“Annoying, huh?” Lucidonius said, hands on his knees.
They were standing within two steps of each other, not even pretending to be on guard against a sudden move from the other.
Gavin had tried sudden moves when they’d rested briefly before. His moves were no longer at all sudden.
Truthfully, they were hardly even moves now.
And it was getting worse. He’d noticed it immediately, how the ascended man’s eyes mirrored the sun, slowly shrinking in apparent size as the sun rose, but growing in intensity.
Lucidonius obviously wasn’t as tired as Gavin was, nor as bloodied. He had only a split lip while Gavin’s nose had bled and clotted, bled and clotted. His cheek swollen from a collision with the marble, elbows throbbing, knees abraded.
Gavin had noticed that Lucidonius’s body, too, seemed to grow stronger as the sun did. Somehow the godling’s magic was tied to the rising of the light. On realizing that, Gavin had made desperate attempts to end the fight quickly.
Those times had been the times he’d come within a hair’s breadth of losing. Now there was only endurance, not the thought of victory.
They’d reached the sword not once, but several times. It now lay not far from the Great Mirror itself. Gavin counted that as his only victory. If Lucidonius were smarter, he would attempt to throw the Blinding Knife off the tower. As long as it was so close to the Great Mirror, Gavin had a chance.
“Shouldn’t you be . . . you know, on your way elsewhere?” Gavin asked.
“Where’s that?”
“It’s Sun Day. Don’t you go visit the poor assholes giving their lives for you over at the Chromeria?”
“I wish I could go help them in their hour of need. I’m needed here.”
“Hour of need?” Gavin asked. He wouldn’t call the Freeing that.
“The Jaspers are under siege. The White King has floated seven bane and tens of thousands of soldiers and drafters for the attack. And there are traitors within the walls.”
“And yet you’re here. While they worship you.”
“They don’t worship me.”
“You know what I mean. Whatever you want to call yourself, Lucidonius, it doesn’t change that they’re dying because they believe your words.”
Lucidonius stood and dusted himself off. “You seem to have recovered your strength, if not your sense of irony. Ready?”
“How’d you do it?” Gavin said, not least because he most certainly was not ready.
“Are you hoping I’ll get distracted now, or that I’ll give you instructions?” Lucidonius asked.
“You give me too much credit. I’m just buying time to rest. But seriously, you ascended to godhood. How?” Not that Gavin wouldn’t take any opening if the creature offered it, but he didn’t expect that. Lucidonius was too sharp for simpler ploys to work.
“Oh, you’re hoping I’ll wear myself out a little bit, just by me using my breath to talk while you rest?”
Gavin didn’t deny that had been his thought, but he pressed in. “You’re not nearly as tired as I am. What’s the harm? I’m the only one in the world who could possibly understand you. Even if only partially.”
“And people think Andross got all the cleverness in the Guile family.”
“People think wrong. My mother was more clever by half,” Gavin shot back. He was defensive of Felia now, and he wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he’d only recognized her particular genius after she was already gone. Maybe because she’d always championed him, even against his father.
“Brilliant people, Andross and Felia, each in their own way. Complementary in their gifts, but twins in their arrogance.”
“Fuck you,” Gavin said.
“People think Andross got all the temper, too,” Lucidonius said wryly.
Gavin leapt for him, swinging a fist for the godling’s throat. Most men will duck their head at an incoming blow, so a low shot could catch the chin or the nose, and no one fights well either unconscious or blinded by involuntary tears.
But he missed. Of course.
He was too slow, and so they began slugging it out again, absorbing blows but too exhausted to do much damage.
From the first moment Gavin had noticed Lucidonius’s strength was tied to the sun, he’d thought of a terrible strategy. It was still a terrible strategy, but it was slowly becoming the only one left to him.
If Lucidonius got stronger as the sun rose, then would he not also weaken as it sank?
Gavin would have to last through the entire day to find out.
It was still two hours until noon. Of Sun Day. Gavin had chosen to fight a creature whose strength was tied to the intensity of the sunlight . . . on the longest fucking day of the year.
Chapter 108
The Blood Robes came down like wolves on the fold,
their forerunners bedecked in the white and the gold.
For the sons of Orholam they bore the scourge and the flail,
and to hell they would ride before they would fail.
—Gorgias Gordi
It had a certain beauty to a battlefield commander, seeing an attack so exquisitely timed, a surprise played at the perfect moment. Sea chariots pulled at great speed by sharks or dolphins, impossible to see at this distance, came roaring forward by the score. With battle standards whipping in the wind, showing the golden broken chains of the pagans and the colors of the new nine kingdoms, and scoops in the hulls designed purely to throw water into the sky to make great rooster tails as they pulled, everything about the sea chariots was designed to be a scintillating spectacle. Wights piloted each craft, and rank by rank they roared into cannonball range.
The boom of the cannons began immediately, but the craft were tiny, fast, and well spaced. The cannons would only catch a few of them.
But the forerunners made far too small a strike force to have any hope of success, which is why they had to be a distraction.
Kip looked beneath the waves, and there he saw them, already penetrating the bay, rounding in behind the seawall, simply swimming under the great chains meant to keep ships out. He’d heard the rumors of them in Blood Forest: even as Gavin had turned his gifts to making a craft that could move faster over water than any others ever had, some of Koios’s wights had turned their own gifts to remaking their bodies so that they could move swiftly and silently under the water.
“Wights!” Kip shouted. “Beneath the waves! Coming in fast!”
They called themselves the Daughters of Caoránach, who would snatch off his boat anyone who dared go out on a moonlit night too close to the waters, and they wailed whenever they took blood. Their cries echoed in the dark over foggy lakes and rivers, chilling men and women to the bone. Others called them river demons or lake demons.
They would still just be men, wights encumbered on land by bodies designed for water.
“Caoránaigh!” someone shouted. “It’s the caoránaigh!”
Kip cursed. “No! They’re only men! River wights! Arms, to arms!” The last thing his people needed was the psychic shock of seeing their childhood nightmares come alive.