She didn’t have anything else to go on.
“Blue! Let’s go!” she said.
“High Lady! Wait one moment!” a voice called out behind her.
She spied a man carrying a large satchel, running from the Chromeria toward her. Andross’s slave Grinwoody?
“High Lady, please, let me accompany you. Please. I made a promise that I wouldn’t leave your side today.”
“What? No,” Karris said. “What’s the promachos doing?”
“He’s in the infirmary, High Lady. Deathly ill. I’m afraid he’s been poisoned. Before he lost consciousness, he was angry with me for not stopping it. Ordered me to get out of his sight. Demanded I go serve you and get myself killed if I could. I dare not disobey him. I dare not be there when he wakes . . . if he wakes, Mistress.”
Grinwoody looked utterly miserable.
The Order! Karris swore. They were everywhere. Dammit!
Andross wasn’t easy to work with, but today was a day when the Chromeria needed all hands to work defending it.
“I trained with the Blackguard,” Grinwoody said. “And yes, it was long ago, but I’m not useless in a fight.” He opened a satchel and handed out a fortune’s worth of lux torches in every color to the Blackguards, and the finest Ilytian pistols. “Please. I owe Gavin a debt. He did me a, a great favor once. Let me fight beside you.”
Well, Karris had just been thinking how she needed every hand possible to defend the Chromeria. She nodded sharply, not turning from studying the blue bane where it lay in the water. She looked hard at the topography of the thing, its bristling porcupine shards sticking into the air and confusing the eye about the underlying structure, but she could see that it rippled and folded as the structure slowly crawled up and down the hills and valleys of the seabed beneath it.
Blue drafters were already attacking the walls, being answered with small arms and small cannon fire, and being mostly repulsed, though the enemy drafters were less concentrating on the attack and more simply building a series of interlocking ramps for those behind them to follow. When the main attack came, there would be no scaling ladders—the soldiers, drafters, and wights would attack at speed.
The defenders were trying to blow apart that blue luxin as fast as it was drafted, and all the drafters they could hit, too.
And she suddenly had a plan. She was no blue drafter, but she’d always had an affinity for the blue virtues. She knew how blues thought: rational, logical, straight lines.
So she’d be circuitous.
They ran together through Big Jasper at the speed Blackguards run, but she decided to make a stop before they reached the wall. It took two stops instead, and two baffled shopkeepers who initially thought they were looters. Grinwoody, who’d fallen behind on the run, caught back up in the second shop. And though winded, he wasn’t exhausted, nor did he complain. Pretty good for an old man.
Then they made it to the walls, to the side of where the main attack was coming. The nearest commander looked delighted at getting Blackguards to reinforce his line, then baffled.
“High Lady?” he asked, stunned to see her here herself.
“I’m not here to help. Not directly,” she said. She was already sliding a knife down her tunic, splitting the silk, then tearing it off to expose the mirror armor beneath. The Blackguards had it easier, merely shucking off their tunics and trousers, exposing their own mirror armor beneath.
“Maybe now’s a good time to tell us the plan?” Commander Fisk asked.
“We’ve got Blackguards posted on Cannon Island. We go save them.”
“What are the blue cloaks and dresses for?” he asked.
“The blue bane will be our bridge to charge over to Cannon Island.”
“They’ll see us coming as soon as we cross over the wall,” Fisk said.
“Yep.”
“They’ll know exactly what we’re doing.”
“Almost,” Karris said. “Cannon Island’s citadel and guns are a huge prize for whoever holds her. But here’s the key: that hill right there makes a valley right behind it where they’ll lose sight of us before we climb back up to Cannon Island. When we get into that valley, six of us don the blue clothes as camouflage, and we skirt around the back of the blue bane out of sight. The rest of you go on and save Cannon Island. We go in the opposite direction and stab them in the back.”
They immediately froze up. There was one impossibility to her plan. It involved them leaving the White. They were Blackguards.
“No, she’s right,” Gill Greyling said, speaking up for the first time. “Sometimes the best way to protect your ward is to leave her.”
Commander Fisk rapidly picked out six Blackguards—all fast, and rather than picking massive, wide-bodied men, he picked only those with more slender body types, who’d be harder to spot among the forest of blue crystal trees. He made himself the seventh choice.
“Seven?” she asked.
“Lucky number,” he said.
As for that, she herself and Grinwoody would actually make it a pagan nine, which might well be the wights’ lucky number—but now wasn’t the time to quibble.
“Our goal is the seed crystal,” Karris told her people in case she died before the job was finished. “Killing the Mot is secondary. When we kill the seed crystal, the entire bane-island will turn to dust. So when you feel that blue crystal go, get ready to swim.”
‘When,’ she’d said, not ‘if.’
Chapter 127
“We don’t defend,” Kip said. “We attack.” He was already back in the mirror array. “I’ll slave a light to each of you with superviolet. They might not check until too late. You’ll maybe get one chance to draft—just one. You reach up with your will, and you’ll get lit up with your color, as much as you can use, and all the wights around you will be drowned in the worst colors for them. The bane will react. They’ll shut you down within seconds, so only use this as a last resort, and then empty yourself with black or you will die, got it?”
They didn’t ask stupid questions.
Kip looked around at them quickly. Dammit, but Kip could really use Teia’s skills now. He really could use Cruxer’s, too—but there was no time to think about that. You use what you’ve got.
“Ferkudi,” Kip said. Ferkudi was a blue/green bichrome and thus susceptible to control from either of those colors. “Go kill the red bane. The Dagnu wears the seed crystal on a necklace. You kill the god, smash the crystal. The bane will fall apart and everyone’ll be able to draft red again.”
Big Leo was a sub-red and red. “Big Leo, you go to the blue. There’s a squad there that’s about to need help badly. Smash the blue seed crystal.
“Winsen, green is yours. Try stealth. The seed crystal’s hidden at the top of the highest tree-thing. The Atirat’s important, but it’s a distant second.”
Ben-hadad was a blue/green/yellow polychrome. “Ben, I killed the Molokh, but a new one’s stepping up. Destroy the orange seed crystal. Wait—on second thought, orange and sub-red both have new masters. It’ll take a few minutes for us to figure out how adept they are with their new powers. You make your own call once you get down to Big Jasper.”