“This is the first time they’ve done this,” Kip said. “With the bane all separated from each other, not able to share drafters and crews, it’s a lot harder than when they were on the open sea.”
Kip thought about their problems. The sheer complexity of separating your navy—not even just your army!—with many of them out of sight behind the mass of Big Jasper, trying to coordinate any attack, with no way to fix the little problems, meant that little problems could get big. Fearful subordinates waiting to make decisions, commanders unreachable who would have been easily found if they’d been on land—an amphibious mundane and magical assault by an inexperienced navy?
But Koios’s main problem was that he wanted to attack today, and he was so certain that the bane would make all the difference that he didn’t care about the losses he would incur.
“With as heavy as orange is, it may be harder to raise,” Kip said. “And if they want orange to join them in their first assault, they have to wait until it’s ready. And, you know, stuff goes wrong. I think we can take a glimmer of hope at seeing that though the Blood Robes are monstrous, they aren’t diabolically perfect. If they were . . .”
“If they were . . . ?” Tisis asked.
If they were, they’d have hit us right after dawn with a first attack on the bay as the Order attacked. They’d have hit us with a fear hex.
It was still a good plan, but now the main problem for the Blood Robes was all the Chromeria’s gun emplacements, especially on the towers, which due to their height could lob shells and cannonballs farther than any of the Blood Robes’ ships could return them.
He cursed. “Orange isn’t going to join the attack; it’s going to lead it. A fear hex. Something like that. They’re gonna try to sneak it up on us somehow.” He squinted against the blinding orange light of the sun rising in the east.
“The rising sun,” he said. “They’re using . . .”
And then it was nearly upon them.
Thin, mysterious fingerling clouds had been streaking along the tops of the waves, hidden by the dazzling sun and to-and-fro of the sea chariots throwing water high into the air, burning torches that hissed smoke out in a dozen colors to confuse the eye.
A great flock of birds rose suddenly from the Blood Robes’ every ship, black against the rising sun. Another distraction, mostly.
“Blue spectacles, now!” Kip shouted. “Those’ll be razor wings.” He threw a signal flare into the sky to tell the gun crews on every tower to ready the nets they’d prepared to string up on poles above them to catch the deadly bombardment coming.
But Kip’s eyes were again down: those misty fingers hit East Bay’s seawall, and sidled over it, slipping past the ships sheltering in the bay.
Kip turned his back to address his people. He didn’t want to see whatever hex was coming. “Remember,” he called out to them, “you cannot trust what you feel; trust what you know to be real. The bane will lie to you, so hold to what you know is true. Your brothers and sisters will fight and they’ll die for you. Be not afraid. Be not afraid! Though hell itself march against us, be not afraid in what you do!”
What the hell? Speaking in rhyme?
Shit! Liv. Somewhere, the superviolet bane was out there, too!
Kip turned and roared, all turtle-bear.
The wave hit the city’s walls at every tower hard enough to make them shake, gushing water, dropping all the moisture it had picked up from the sea in a sudden rain. But the physical force of the attack was purely ancillary—the attack itself was the wave of fear blasted over Kip with the force of a tsunami, leaving him breathless and panicked, frozen.
His heart was lodged in his throat. They were doomed. This was like nothing they’d prepared for.
They were all going to die. It was all his fault. He didn’t know the first thing about anything. He was just a child, a child in the face of gods. Literal gods.
Everything he’d mocked, everything he’d sneered at was suddenly here and more real than he could have imagined.
“Hey,” a distant voice said.
Kip could hear the war dogs whining.
He was going to get them all killed. Everyone. It was too late already. They were already dead. Kip’s heart was seizing in his chest with grief and dread as he was enveloped in the soft orangey cloud.
He was losing everyone he loved, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He heard the clatter of a sword falling from someone’s hand.
“Hey! The hell is wrong is with you all?” Winsen said.
Suddenly a hand was rubbing Kip’s face, scrubbing it as if to brush away water—or luxin. Winsen’s face appeared in Kip’s sight.
Winsen, the broken man who’d never really understood danger or avoiding it. Winsen, the literally fearless, was standing in front of Kip looking puzzled. He had a hand drawn back, preparing to slap Kip.
“I’m good,” Kip said, coming back to himself. “Get the rest of us. Cwn y Wawr!”
He turned to them, some on the tower, more below. The handlers were almost as bad off as everyone else on the towers and walls, catatonic. Some had wet themselves. Their war dog partners were whining, alarmed, not understanding. Some of the dogs licked their humans, and a few of those had been roused by the fearless love of their canine friends.
“Eyes!” Kip shouted to them. “Their eyes!”
The dogs, preternaturally intelligent, understood immediately. Through growling or tugging or even bracing on their partners’ shoulders and licking their faces, the dogs dragged their masters’ attention to themselves and cleared away the hex. Most people snapped out of the hex immediately, but some seemed broken by the terrors they’d just suffered.
“Here they come. Everyone!” Kip shouted. “You know what to do!”
The White King’s armada was rapidly resolving from a black mass of ships into individual ranks as the sun rose and as they sailed closer.
But all the Chromeria’s ships sheltered by the seawall sat as if dead, crews paralyzed.
The gun emplacements were the target, not anyone inland. The first attack was going to come not from the bane but from the armada. The armada was going to try to land, and if the Chromeria’s cannons didn’t do something soon, they would land unopposed.
That couldn’t happen.
Kip shouted, “Winsen, you get to High General Danavis! Wake him if he needs it, tell him how we are! Cruxer, go—shit!” Cruxer was dead. “Big Leo, you run out to the ships with the Cwn y Wawr. Wake them up, get them fighting. We need those cannons now. Meet me above East Bay. Messengers, you wake all the rest of the gun towers—no one goes alone, though. Terrified people might get violent. You, you, and you, take your regiments and rally the rest of the island. Let them know we just got hit with magic, and it’s already dissipating. It’s not real. We can stand! Gun crews, start firing rounds—I know they’re out of range, just do it! It might wake some people. We got this! Go!”
Chapter 111
When Karris burst into the Spectrum’s council chamber, none of the damned Colors was there except Klytos Blue, slumped in a chair at the great windows, watching the battle beginning to unfold.
“You stupid sack of shit!” she said. “What have you done!”