They climbed over the rubble of blue luxin shards, sharp enough to cut through a careless boot and the foot inside it. Not a few times, Karris felt more yielding ground beneath her foot, only to find a body, bleeding an all-too-human red into the dust.
But many, many of the wights and drafters were recovering. Far more of them than she would have imagined still seemed to be alive, even here.
Then, suddenly, they were upon her.
The Mot was still alive. Crippled and broken, she’d tried to draft luxin wings to glide from the top of her collapsing tower, but she’d been too slow.
Under the ice-blue skin, shimmering in a million facets so that it could move, Karris recognized the woman: Samila Sayeh, one of the legends from the Prisms’ War. She’d fought for Gavin at Garriston. She and her longtime lover Usef Tep, the Purple Bear, Karris thought. Or had they fought on opposite sides?
That was right. Opposite sides during the war, then lovers afterward.
But Samila had fought for Gavin.
“Samila?” Karris asked. “You’re with them?”
The woman wore a black luxin collar. She tapped it. “Slave,” she said with difficulty. And Karris understood. Somehow, Samila had been given the choice to serve Koios or die.
“Red light and blue,” Samila said, wincing. Something was wrong with the woman’s spine, for sure. But Karris wasn’t sure what Samila was talking about. The red and blue stroke from the Prism’s Tower that had doomed her?
“He died, you know. My Purple Bear,” Samila said. “Usef, left me alone. Not his fault. Irrational to blame him. Irrational to be so angry. But Usef helped me feel passion. Made it acceptable for a lady of my stature and intellect.”
She grinned, and suddenly there was something young and mischievous and fierce in her old, cold eyes.
“He loved a big show. Going out with a bang. Iron White, listen!” She suddenly clamped her eyes tightly shut. Then she hissed, “The djinn are real. When they find a powerful drafter who pleases them, like me, like the nine kings of old, they may possess her, trading power for power. Then at the moment of death they take—but she doesn’t want this broken body. She wants to flee! But she’s vulnerable now. You can bar them from this realm forever, maybe from all the Thousand Realms together. But only if you can strike fast, before she escapes my will. Do you have the Blinding Knife? Quickly now, before—”
Her face contorted as if something had just caused her tremendous pain.
“Quickly!” Samila grunted. She gritted her teeth. “The Knife!”
But Karris didn’t have it.
And then Samila Sayeh died. And Karris had the terrible feeling that somehow she’d focused all her energies the wrong direction.
Just then a huge young man with a flaming chain in his hands and black armor with the sigil of Kip’s Mighty on it came running up. Karris’s Blackguards nearly panicked until they recognized him; it was their old compatriot, Big Leo. One of Kip’s men now. Behind him came thirty more of Kip’s elite drafters.
Big Leo’s gear was bloodied, with some of the black lacquer rubbed off his armor from luxin bolts, showing the mirroring beneath it. “Wait,” he said. He looked down at Samila Sayeh. His war chain went out, and drooped. “You’re all done? You did it without me?”
“Gimme that,” Gill Greyling said off to one side. “C’mon!” He snatched a glowing blue stone that Grinwoody was trying to tuck away.
Big Leo looked bereft. “ But—but do you know what we had to do to get all the way out here? . . . And—and I came all this way to . . .”
“Thanks,” Gill said, throwing the blue seed crystal on the ground. He drew a musket and shot it. The glowing crystal blasted apart as if it were just a globe of glass.
“I don’t know if you should have done that just—” Grinwoody started to say.
But Karris cut him off, her eyes locked on the horizon between Big and Little Jasper. “What the hell is that?”
They all looked. Two fans of flame like wings were jetting into the air at the northern tip of Big Jasper.
“Forget it!” Karris barked. “This island’s coming apart! Run! Unless you wanna swim, run!”
Chapter 129
This can’t be happening.
There was a veil of surreality over the entire walk. Kip thought he was too smart to get sucked into thinking the same things over and over, swirling ’round and ’round like a ship spinning down Charybdis’ maelstrom until it was devoured whole, helpless. Yet here he spun.
He can’t get away with this.
This can’t be happening.
Someone’s gonna step in to stop this any moment now. They’ve got to.
How can he think he’ll get away with this? This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.
Part of Kip knew that Zymun wouldn’t get away with this. His congenital lack of fear was also a lack of sense; it would get him killed. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow. With the friends Kip had, and the other desperate actors in this city, Zymun certainly wasn’t long for this world.
But he didn’t need to be alive tomorrow in order to kill Kip today. Zymun had the most willing men with guns in the immediate vicinity. Even as one suicidal fanatic with a musket could prevail against the entire Blackguard itself, Zymun was rendering moot all the long-term, careful plans of those more skilled and better trained than he was.
The Chromeria’s drafters were locked down now by the bane. Cowed by the shock of being separated from the power that defined them. None of them were going to step forward against the thugs of the Lightguard, not now.
And thus Kip passed through the gates from the Chromeria.
Footstep followed footstep, dozens of Lightguards walking beside him, before him, behind him. One of them had even had the wit to throw a red cloak around Kip’s shoulders to hide his bound hands behind his back. Many of those they passed now wouldn’t even know Kip was a prisoner.
Everywhere around the walls of the city, the battle continued, even as the sun sank low in the sky. The attention of everyone sane in this city was turned to the walls and to the horrors that lay outside them. Every friend Kip had was off fighting, doing vital work to save the islands.
Zymun, overconfident in victory, wasn’t even manning the mirror array.
Orholam’s Glare came into view, perched as it was at the base of the Lily’s Stem, just on the Big Jasper side of the bridge. There would be no rescue. Kip knew how far away all the people who would come to his aid were now: too far.
I knew this would happen, he thought. I knew I was going to die on this island.
He’d had the temerity to think it would be a heroic death, that he might accomplish something as he died. Hell, he could’ve died on the mirror array ten minutes ago and counted it a good death. A noble death.
This? A traitor’s death on the Glare?
How could anyone find meaning in that?
When the Chromeria used the Glare, they did it at noon. It was a horrible death, burning—but it was done in half a minute. How long would it take Kip to die, with the sun low in the horizon? How much torture would he endure?
And then they arrived. The simple walk was finished without any theatrics, without any attempts at rescue, without anyone even crying out for them to stop—a brisk walk across the Lily’s Stem like Kip had made hundreds of times before.