“Got it,” Ben-hadad said. Of all the Mighty, Kip knew he could trust Ben to figure out the best strategy while weighing his own and the others’ capabilities.
Einin was an orange/red/sub-red polychrome, which meant Kip couldn’t send his newest Mighty against either of the softer targets. “Einin, you’re on yellow. That one might be the most likely to be a one-way trip. You up for that?”
“With all due respect, milord, fuck off. I pull my weight,” she said. She didn’t raise her voice; she was just done with being the new kid.
Kip said, “Glad to hear it. I’m signaling High General Danavis to give all of you a distraction as soon as possible. May help, may not. I’ve already signaled for backup from the Cwn y Wawr. They may come, may not. Things are hot down there.”
He slaved mirrors to each of them, and a red one to Danavis, too, for good measure.
“This is what we need to do? You’re sure?” Big Leo asked. He wanted to fight Kip, wanted to say he should stay by his side, but he also trusted him to lead.
Cruxer would’ve never left, no matter what. But Cruxer was a pain in the ass.
“It is,” Kip said. “Mighty . . . This is it. We aren’t all coming back from this one.” They all looked back, unflinching. “I love you bastards. Now, go make Cruxer proud.”
They didn’t linger. They were warriors. They were veterans. They’d already said everything they’d been able to say to each other, and understood all those things they couldn’t say. So now they nodded to one another one last time. Saluted Big Leo. Saluted Kip.
Ferkudi gave hugs, because—well, Ferkudi.
Then they loaded up in turn, and whooshed off the tower toward their targets. Winsen went alone, but the rest of them were followed by whichever of the probationary Mighty were of the appropriate colors and were physically able to go. That left Kip only the nunks and some soldiers who were too wounded to go join the fight.
Kip sent his messages, several times, and then tried to dazzle the enemy wherever he could. He was confined now to using the mirrors for a fraction of their power, but he could still burn wights one at a time, still signal, and still bathe whole groups of wights coming over the walls in their opposite colors to make things difficult for them.
It didn’t always stop them even from drafting, but it did confuse them, and it gave Danavis’s defenders a small edge, one neighborhood at a time.
Twenty green wights were climbing the wall over at Weasel Rock, climbing, dropping down to the ground, and bouncing up ever higher until they reached the very edge. Kip turned fifty mirrors to send bursts of white light straight into their faces as they pulled over the wall. Blinded, they gave the defenders atop the wall a chance to cut them down.
At East Bay, dozens of red wights with burning hands were hurling fireball after fireball. Kip turned mirrors to flood them with blue.
Fists went up and defenders turned toward the sources—blue drafters. Danavis had stationed blue drafters opposite the red bane, super-violets across from sub-red, red across from the blue, and so forth to minimize the proximity and hopefully the impact of the bane on the drafters.
As those blue drafters started drafting—why were they drafting?! They’d been ordered not to touch blue! But maybe they were just that desperate. Maybe there was something in that neighborhood worth their lives to save.
Kip felt more than saw something emanate from the blue bane toward them—a thousand tendrils of paryl. Those were the strings through which the blue drafters could be paralyzed.
How did the bane do that? What was the mechanism? If Kip could see how the bane reached out to control the drafters of their color. He could stop it.
Orholam’s balls. Paryl, the master color. Of course. The immortals could use paryl, at least when in conjunction with the bane. He didn’t know how it worked, but he didn’t have to exactly.
Maybe there was still hope here.
Kip slapped that wave back, ripped it apart with paryl himself.
Then he blinked, blinded from having opened his pupils so wide.
If paryl was half of the answer . . .
With chi, he could see written in the very bodies of the drafters what colors they used and how much they were holding. He could see through walls.
He sank into the fight.
The situation was desperate—wights and Blood Robe drafters were pouring over the walls in half a dozen areas, but now Kip had a tool. The blue drafters in East Bay could, for the first time in the battle, actually draft. And they did.
The control began sliding back out of Kip’s grasp immediately, and he shot messages in brief flashes of light to the blue drafters—but he knew now that he could do this, at least once, with each of the colors in turn.
It might be enough to make it until sundown.
It might be enough to give the Mighty a chance to kill those things.
Corvan had made no distractions thus far, but Kip himself could be one. Kip would make himself such an inviting target that even the gods would get war-blind.
His senses were burning. His skin was burning. Once before, when he’d sunk the great ship the Gargantua, he had been this alive, this focused on everything all at once.
That polychrome over there needed green and yellow, but was about to need blue when he reached that corner. Kip slaved mirrors in those colors to him.
Those red wights were low on their source. Kip flooded them with yet more blue.
Kip put whole neighborhoods under diffuse green.
He fried a Blood Robe marksman’s hands as he tried to take a shot at Corvan Danavis from a nearby rooftop.
Kip’s eyes felt like he’d not blinked in many minutes. His bones felt hot from chi. This was ruining him, he knew. Already colors felt dangerous, his halos straining. He checked the position of the sun. It was getting close to sunset.
He could make it, probably.
But they had to win this battle today. Because Kip was going to be finished by the time they reached sunset. If the battle stretched into a second day, they’d lose, because Kip wouldn’t be there to fight regardless.
There was no time for reflection or regret. Nothing was static on the battlefields of Big Jasper. Already the wights were reacting, and the gods themselves were, too. One tried to willjack Kip in paryl, and he barely slipped away.
Below, Corvan Danavis was moving forces and slipping men through neighborhoods that were disconnected from the battle zones. It was either a mistake based on bad intelligence or a stratagem too subtle for Kip to understand immediately. There were still two major breaches of the walls over—
Suddenly everything went blank.
Weird. An aftereffect of widening his eyes to paryl? He hadn’t broken the halo, had he?
No, no, he was sure he hadn’t. He wasn’t drafting any colors at all now.
They could do this! By Orholam’s beard, the wights were drawing back in half a dozen places.
They were going to win this! Or were they being drawn back because the immortals had figured out that the Mighty were attacking them? Kip needed to make sure—
Everything went blank again, and Kip reeled.
Another punch knocked his hands off the controls and he was suddenly back to his own body. Strapped in and taking blows.
He was spun around and walloped in the stomach.
Kip retched, but he didn’t look at his attacker; instead, drawn by a familiar voice’s yell, he saw a dozen men lock shields and plow into the remaining Mighty nunks on the top of the tower. The injured men tried to push back. They dropped their weapons and pushed, pushed, feet scrambling desperately, but the strength of the Lightguards was too much for them.