The injured men were bulled off the edge of the tower.
The next punch hit Kip hard in the jaw and he crumpled. Men released his limbs from the array and he fell to the ground.
He had trouble focusing his eyes, and his limbs were trembling from the exertions he’d been through, but he looked up and saw the cruel idiot grin on Zymun’s face.
There were bodies everywhere. While Kip had been sunken into the array, Zymun’s men had taken the tower.
“Looks like you did some good work here,” Zymun said, looking out over the islands. “Looks like we’re winning!”
“Winning?” Kip asked. “Maybe for the moment, but I have to consolidate our—”
“Everyone,” Zymun said to the men around him, “when you’re asked, I did all this. I’m the savior of the Jaspers. You’ll be rewarded for your little white lie. Or you can be skinned alive. Your choice.”
“What are you even talking about?” Kip asked. “The Jaspers aren’t even close to being saved yet. I need—”
Zymun kicked him in the stomach. “As for this trash,” Zymun said. “He attacked me, the Prism.”
“Zymun, this is not the time for this! Are you insane?! You’re doing this now?”
“That makes him a traitor. We’ve got enough sun left. Hot day. But we’ll have to move fast. Don’t want anyone to get ideas about saving him.”
“You have to listen to me,” Kip said. “Zymun, you can’t do this.”
“I can’t? Brother, I already am. I’m gonna burn you, Kip, as I’ve been trying to burn you since I lit the fires at Rekton.”
Kip almost went blank with fury, but he came back to himself. “I don’t mean killing me. I mean you can’t handle the mirrors how I can. You can kill me an hour from now, for Orholam’s sake. Just wait that long! Let me save the city!”
“I know you’re afraid to die. Beg me. Beg me, little Guile.”
“Of course I’m afraid, you sheep-swiving shit-for-brains! If you take me off these mirrors, you’ll doom us all! How long would it take you to blow your halos? Oh, no. You already have! Zymun, mine are intact, and I’m still working. I’m better at this than you are. I’m the only one who can do this.”
The Lightguards were shifting uneasily. But they’d already killed men for Zymun, injured men. They were in too deep to risk disobeying him now.
“If you can do it, I can do it better,” Zymun said. “And look, we’re already winning. They’ll withdraw for sunset.”
“Sir,” one of the Lightguards said nervously, “maybe we should . . .”
“Maybe we what?!” Zymun roared, grabbing the man by his lapels. The man was too shocked to do anything, too scared to attack his commander until he realized Zymun was running him toward the edge of the tower. Too late.
Zymun flung the man off the edge and turned immediately, not even watching him fall.
Pointing at Kip, he said, “We do not leave an enemy like this holding the biggest weapon in the goddam world. Do you morons understand?”
They understood.
“I, the Prism, will save us personally,” Zymun said. “Aram, can you handle a small task for me, or are you going to louse it up like you did the last one?”
“Anything, High Lord Prism. To the death.”
“Good. Send our people to seize the towers’ Mirror Rooms. Send the rest with us. I want no rescue. And find his wife while you’re at it. I’m going to put my brother up on Orholam’s Glare. We’re gonna watch him burn.”
“Yes, my Lord Prism,” Aram said, and Kip could feel all the cripple’s bitterness seething and bubbling with joy. “Gladly, sir.”
Chapter 128
“Why are they being so slow?” Gill Greyling asked. “They can’t have missed us, can they?”
Still in the first phase of their plan, they’d crashed into the rear of the blue pagan drafters assaulting Cannon Island—and they were demolishing them. A few of these blue drafters had begun to transition their bodies, making themselves wights by degrees as they incorporated luxin into their skin, over their eyes as lenses to give themselves plentiful blue source, and along their arms or elbows to make spears or scythes or whatever other weapons they could dream up. But none of them seemed like they’d fought against any force tougher than terrified civilians before.
Slow, predictable, and amateurish, they didn’t even realize how much danger they were in until Karris’s Blackguards had cut through half of them.
Karris wasn’t sure if her small force in mirror armor had been assumed to be mere soldiers (not drafters, and thus inconsequentially weak, to the Blood Robes’ way of thinking) or if the blues were simply so inflexible. But what she did know was that the fact that the Blood Robes weren’t quick to turn around to fight them meant that the Blackguards holding Cannon Island were still alive and holding it.
“Feels like there was some kind of war within blue itself, sir,” Tamerah said. She was a blue drafter herself. “But . . . it’s over now. I think we can expect an attack from the center of the island any moment.”
“We got this,” Commander Fisk said to Karris, though they were still outnumbered by more than two to one—even without the reinforcements coming. “What are you going to do if the seed crystal is at the top of that?” He nodded toward the vast spire in the center of the blue bane reaching toward the sky, higher by the moment.
“Signal us when you take the guns,” Karris said. “We might need you to knock it down for us.”
“I’ll make sure we save enough powder,” Commander Fisk said. “Orholam go with you.”
It killed them to let her go without them, and it killed her to abandon them just as they were about to be attacked, but Karris and her strike force peeled away, heading into the deepest part of the valley and out of sight. Then they donned blue robes or cloaks or dresses, or whatever they’d taken from the stores to camouflage themselves, securing these around their bodies with whatever was available so that the clothes wouldn’t interfere with their fighting. Karris produced the jar of boot black she’d grabbed from the store, and they each dulled their mirror armor in the places where it might flash and give them away through the gaps in their clothing, at their shins, and elsewhere.
Then, after everyone reloaded their discharged muskets, they were off again.
They circled the back of the bane without even seeing anyone, and then charged the center, flitting from great crystalline outcroppings and sapphire forests to empty, gleaming villages of static topaz laid out with straight boulevards of arithmetic precision. It was as if the wights both reviled the natural world and longed for it at the same time, mimicking it in these weird facsimiles.
“Here we go!” Gill said.
Karris hadn’t even seen anyone up ahead, but moments later, missiles of blue glass streaked for her head. They shattered and sheared apart on Gill’s mirror shield, though she’d ducked, maybe even enough to evade them.
More missiles streaked in, and all life became dodging and deflecting and slicing with her own shield edge and, once, stabbing the shield far off to one side to catch a missile that Gill had turned his back to as he threw a wight to the ground for the kill.