He hated this part of a battle, when you suddenly see the whole of the enemy’s strategy and you need everyone to hear you at once. There were too many orders to give, too many people shouting for everyone to hear them.
“Protect the gates and cannons! Look to the bases of the towers and walls,” someone shouted beside him. “Get me my signal banners, now! Aleph Company, in reserve! After we repulse the first attack, you’re going to reinforce the secondary attack on the seawall!”
Corvan Danavis had just arrived, with his booming voice stomping through everyone else’s shouts.
Kip looked down into the courtyard and saw a massive influx of the high general’s soldiers, come to reinforce the gates.
“You!” Corvan shouted at Kip. “I’m here now. That means you can’t be.”
They’d discussed this. Corvan wouldn’t allow for the possibility of one lucky shell taking out so much of the Chromeria’s command and control. (Incidentally, it also put him in charge without having anyone else around to second-guess him—‘slow him down,’ as he put it.)
“I got this,” Kip said. “Until the bane rise, I can—”
“This could be a—” The boom of cannon took out Corvan’s last word, but he didn’t even flinch. He repeated, “Trap. You get to Tower Twelve—”
“I know it’s a trap. The river wights—”
“No, I mean all of it! They could be using the entire attack to raise the bane. You draft chi, so you can throw your will out farther than anyone. Get to Tower Twelve, and send me a signal if they’re raising the bane. We have to know when to tell our drafters to stop drafting.”
Shit. Corvan was right. And Kip was doing exactly what he shouldn’t do—arguing with the man he’d put in control. “Yessir!” Kip said. “My apologies. Right away.”
“Marksmen to the fore!” Corvan shouted back at his men. Signal flags were hoisted, orders were repeated in shouts to warriors back in the lines. “Aim especially for any of these river dogs who look like they’re trying to throw up a flare or any sort of signal.”
He was in his element, juggling the big picture and the small with ease.
The caoránaigh had burst from the waters and were scaling the towers. Others were attacking the gates directly, throwing great streams of fire and missiles in every hue, leaping over spiked fortifications with baffling ease. They were not at all encumbered by their amphibious form.
The rattle of musket fire deafened Kip. He wanted nothing more than to watch the battle unfold, to see the spectacle of gouts of water leaping into the sky as the cannons’ explosive shells hit ships or waves, throwing death into the chariots’ ranks. He wanted to marvel at the sinuous forms of these river demons, that made even his heart twist with fear.
He wanted to fight.
But he had orders.
“I know the fastest way to get us to that tower,” Big Leo said, his copper chain held in his big hands over his shoulders. He wanted to fight, too.
“Son,” Corvan said.
Kip glanced into the courtyard. Corvan’s men had somehow already moved all the Order of the Broken Eye’s dead aside to make room for their own ranks.
If those Order traitors had been alive to mount even a halfway-decent assault on even this one gate from within, the caoránaigh would have made it to the walls unnoticed, and breached the gates if they’d not been opened from within. Then they’d have gone for the cannons, but even if they hadn’t gotten that far, the White King would have rushed in and immediately had a foothold on the island itself.
If the White King took the wall at any point, that would be the beginning of the end for the Chromeria.
And he would have had that already this morning, if not for Teia.
If not for Teia’s sacrifice.
Kip wondered if she was still alive, cocooned as she was in a pitch-black room, her eyes bandaged, everyone hoping that maybe, maybe her eyes could be kept from dilating or contracting and that that might save her. That maybe her body would process the poison slowly, and she might live.
But she was out of the battle. She would help no one. Just like that, before Kip had even fired a musket, Teia’s battle was done.
Beside Kip, Winsen’s bowstring thrummed, but Winsen didn’t even watch his arrow arc through the morning air. He was gazing enrapt at his bow the way another man might gaze at his lover disrobing for the first time.
Kip watched the arrow fly—which would usually be impossible, but here he could actually watch it fly, because this arrow streamed yellow-and-blue magic, burning and sizzling in the air. Two hundred fifty paces away, a caoránach jumped up to clear a spiked palisade, and was met—in the air!—with the glittering arrow. Its limbs jerked every direction as the arrow hit its chest with a small flash. It dropped flat on its back to the ground.
“Not bad,” Winsen admitted.
He didn’t mean the shot. He meant the Andross-gifted bow and arrows.
“Remind me never to piss you off,” Ben-hadad said.
“Hey, Ben,” Winsen said.
“Not right now, asshole,” Ben said. He was rubbing his knees as if uncomfortable with the new fit and with wearing a brace on both legs.
Kip cursed. He’d gotten frozen with the spectacle and the anticipation and the battle juice pumping in his veins.
“Son!” Corvan said again, louder.
Kip looked.
Corvan said, “This battle’s gonna have surprises for all of us—but that means them, too. You’re doing fine. We’re going to win here. Your friend probably bought us a few hours and a whole lot of confidence.” He gave a wolfish smile. “Now, get the hell out of here. I have a feeling the bane attack is coming soon.”
Chapter 109
The superviolet bane was not much to Aliviana’s liking. It had been largely finished before she arrived at Azuria Bay, of course. The unskilled drafter she’d replaced as the Ferrilux had no imagination, nor sense of aesthetics, nor even the realization that the bane could be shaped as it grew.
So it had grown as it would, many-faceted crystals growing up many-faceted crystals. A floating island of large crystals, growing in spirals upon spirals, the greater echoing the smaller.
A cannon shell exploded fifty-two paces from her bane. Some small amount of shrapnel tore through her left port bow.
Aliviana Ferrilux fixed it, found a drafter who’d been injured, and dumped her out into the water.
Changing the bane, she’d decided, would be too massive an expenditure of her time and effort, so she was stuck with it. Her hatred of it was illogical. She could have made the bane invisible. Even with the vast amount of water the structure displaced, she could have crafted illusions such that the water here looked like the water elsewhere. Instead, this mess of crystals with every possible polarity made the floating island actually somewhat visible, even if one missed the giant bowl of missing water in the waves.
She hated a lot about things that she couldn’t quite figure out these days.
For the two hours before dawn, she’d been picking the superviolet crystals off her face and hands, elbows, knees, neck, groin. You’d think this would be a simple thing: superviolet luxin was so fragile that a vigorous shake ought to do it.