He felt probing against his mind, as if yellow were reaching out for him, too, with glee.
Launching himself backward, cutting off green and yellow, Kip snapped back to his own body. He dropped his hands from the array’s grips as if they were hot coals.
“What was that?!” Big Leo asked.
“Did you feel it, too?” Kip asked. “Same thing as at Ru, wasn’t it?”
“Breaker, there’s blood coming from your ears.”
Kip touched his ears and looked at the wetness on his fingers. “Just blood,” he said. “Not spinal fluid.”
Not that bleeding from your ears is good.
“Zymun’s here with his drafters!” Ben-hadad called from where he stood beside the door to the roof. The door itself was mere splinters now, held together with every color of luxin, put into some honeycombed pattern Ben-hadad must have made up.
“Stop all your drafting now,” Kip commanded. “Something’s changed. Their influence is spreading over the islands even now. And move.”
In moments, he was going to lose the ability to draft any color at all. So he threw everything he had into doubling and tripling the strength of the barricade Ben-hadad and the others had drafted in front of the door.
Then he turned his will back to Big Jasper. Samila Sayeh was charging up her own tower, halfway to the top, and somehow seemed at war with some unseen figure for control of her own bane-island. She had the blue seed crystal in her hand.
Knowing it might be the last chance he had to draft at all, Kip used the mirror to hurl a spear of sub-red and red interlaced into solid flame at her and the blue bane’s central tower.
It felt like he’d walked past a catapult’s release lever and nudged it; instead of throwing a stone, it threw every bit of red and sub-red luxin Kip might have been able to draft in forty years, all at once.
But he felt like he’d been kicked just as he released the burning spear.
He was spinning in the array.
For a long moment, Kip held still, gasping. His eyes throbbed. He could tell he’d gone from the occasional drafter of fire to suddenly now straining his halos in both sub-red and red.
“Who grabbed the array!” Kip yelled. “Who spun me?! Who the hell spun me?!”
As his eyes cleared, he looked at the Mighty. They appeared as baffled as he was.
If he hadn’t physically been spun, and he hadn’t willed himself to spin, then only superviolet hijacking the controls could have done that.
At that moment, something like a shock wave passed over them. Like an immense ocean swell, bending vision, Kip suddenly could see realities overlaid as they’d overlaid the world when he’d been at death’s door before.
Without spectacles, he could see superviolet tentacles reaching down from above, withdrawing by the moment, as if caught out. He spun within the array and saw her there: in the air, high above him, floating on an invisible bane, was the woman who’d once been Aliviana Danavis.
Liv.
But she wasn’t alone. With her was a creature of immense proportions, masquerading as a small, unctuous thing. It held the superviolet seed crystal.
And now, everywhere Kip looked, he saw them, with every bane. Immortals. This was why the colors were locking down. Koios’s most important wights knew some of the bane’s powers, but the old gods—the immortals behind the old gods—they knew all of their powers.
Now those immortals had come to join the fight.
Kip saw at least one for each color, all of them exposed, momentarily, by the great wave passing over Big Jasper, all of them with alarm etched over their once-beautiful faces, looking east to the source of that wave.
If the superviolet could take control of the mirrors as it had just tried to do, this battle was finished.
Kip brought his will and all the light collected by several thousand mirrors upon the superviolet thing reaching down for him.
The superviolet bane was as subtle and fragile as a shameful secret. It blasted apart under the sledge of Kip’s attack like fine porcelain.
But Kip didn’t withdraw after one attack. His attention focused hard on that entire floating island of beautiful, breakable crystals. It was like letting the Turtle-Bear off its leash in a crockery shop.
His will burrowed through the superviolet island, leaving trenches of shattered luxin all the way down to the waves, shearing off huge sections that dropped toward the waters. The immortal was recovering from its shock, but seemed leashed to stay within some certain distance of Liv. So it leapt this way and that like a mad dog on a chain.
Until Kip found it, seized it, and with his will like one big paw, he seized the sharp, spiny seed crystal and squeezed it as it twisted snakelike in his grasp.
All the mirrors of the island focused to that one point the size of Turtle-Bear’s fist, and the seed crystal blew apart.
The reaction was instantaneous. The entire superviolet island fell to dust.
Liv fell from the sky, and Kip lost her.
That’s the goal. That’s how we win.
We can do that.
With a mere thought, Kip triggered the escape chains out to Big Jasper and Cannon Island, then he dropped the handles of the array.
“Listen to me,” he said to the Mighty as the chains spooled out flawlessly. Karris’s repairs were perfect.
They all looked at him. With the door to the roof seemingly impregnable, there was for the moment nothing at all for them to do.
“ ‘Avoid battle, seek victory,’ remember?” Kip asked. He knew they did. “I was doing this all backward. I’m not my father. I’m no Gavin Guile, the Promachos who goes ahead of everyone else and fights alone. I’m Kip Guile, and the only way we can win is if we fight together. I’ve been raised here for one reason. I don’t know if I’m the Lightbringer, but I know I can bring you light.” Kip looked every one of them in the eye in turn. “You’re going to hate my next orders, but if you don’t follow them, everyone on this island is going to die.”
Chapter 126
“We don’t defend,” Karris said, taking weapons from Commander Fisk. “We attack.”
No one looked at her like she was insane. Orholam have mercy, but they trusted her.
She thought again about the Lightguards they’d left behind, tied up in a storeroom, guarded by nervous civilians who probably would lose their courage as soon as they lost their Iron White’s presence. Part of her had wanted to execute them on the spot, especially their greasy commander, Aram.
The Iron White, murdering a crippled captive?
Forget it, it was done.
As she led her people to the Lily’s Stem, she unsealed the adhesive to the eye caps she hadn’t worn in a long time and applied them around her eyes. She dispatched messengers to Corvan Danavis, which forced her to go with her gut. She couldn’t wait for messages to go back and forth; she had to make a choice now, and let Corvan know what she was going to do.
Her luxiats had dug up everything they could find about the seed crystals and the bane. It hadn’t been much, but some ancient writer had taken care to preserve a line revealing that shattering the seed crystals could break the bane when they were small. He or she had guessed that it would work even when they were large.
Karris herself was a red/green bichrome, and she didn’t know how much those bane might mess with her if she attacked them—but the blue bane was right here, floating jammed in the strait between Cannon Island and Big Jasper, grinding slowly through as if it had will. It looked like it was trying to move directly onto Little Jasper.