Without the scent of fear inflaming its predator’s nose, but accepted, respected, the great black beast calmed. Then its power entered him.
Even at Sundered Rock, he hadn’t drafted so much. He drew and drew, taking all the dark night into his soul. He drew, lancing those darkened memories for all his own old poison, all the hatred and envy inside him, all the cruelty of taunting victory he’d unleashed before. He connected the darkness above with the old darkness within, though each was punctuated by its celestial lights. He was beyond fear now. How could he be daunted? He could give no more than everything in him, and that was exactly what he planned to do.
He threaded his fingers tight through the beast’s mantle and then with a yell of defiance, Dazen slapped its flank: Take all this, and go! Go!
The black luxin leapt toward the horizon like a war hound on a lead seeing a cat and leaping to the hunt. It nearly tore Dazen’s arm off. He could only nudge it this way and that, directing his fraying will toward the Chromeria.
It took all the excellence of Dazen’s superchromacy to maintain the exact tone. The slightest flaw would mean madness or agonizing death or the obliteration of memory and self or even time.
Even the descending starlight eroded the black as they flew across so many leagues, and Dazen had to cushion every quantum that infected his streaming black, had to split it away from the stream and push more power into it, like a sprinter shrugging off battering rain, forging through buffeting winds—and he lost precious luxin continuously as he did it, a hundred times a second. Dazen could feel the black unraveling in his grasp, like the southern lights dancing across the sky, defying his control.
And as the magic unraveled, it unraveled him. He braided the open cords together again and again, weaving them tight with fingers that felt a million paces away. He himself was dissipating, losing awareness altogether into the cold dark, but he pulled himself back to consciousness again and again.
This was for Karris. This was for Kip. This was for Marissia. This was for mother. This was for Gavin. This was for Sevastian . . .
He couldn’t fail them. He couldn’t fail them again.
But then he was there. He couldn’t see the islands, he couldn’t see anything, but he could feel the entirety of Big Jasper and Little Jasper both, those shapes he knew and loved so well. He could feel the physical and magical shapes of the bane, each one extending overlapping bubbles of control far beyond themselves. No red drafter could draft red within the red bane’s bubble, nor green in green’s, nor yellow in yellow’s, and so on.
Dazen didn’t have enough time or will or magic or life left to obliterate the bane. They were too far away, too dense, too numerous, too different from one another.
The control he would need to find the seed crystals themselves was far too fine for his skills. Father had always told him he needed to develop his fine-drafting skills, but Dazen had always ignored him, believing more was better: always the hammer, never the tweezers.
There they lay: all the bane, everywhere around the islands, like leeches clinging to the Chromeria’s face. He could pierce those bubbles of drafting control easily with the black, but to find five single figures—these so-called gods?—in the few seconds he had left? To find the bane’s hidden seed crystals?
It would be like trying to pick a lock with a feather duster.
His will, thus overextended, began to fray apart now in hopelessness. The black he’d flung so far dissipated into the amorphous clouds as the magic finally pulled itself away from his fingers.
And then he felt her.
He wouldn’t have thought he could know anyone from this distance, but he couldn’t have missed her, not if she’d been twice so far away. Her will burned in the evaporating cloud he’d thrown, like a lighthouse burning white in the black of a lost captain’s night.
Karris!
* * *
Karris’s Blackguards and all the other soldiers they’d recruited on the spot had made it halfway to Orholam’s Glare when they’d been jumped by the White King’s platoon of assassins. Forty men didn’t seem like they’d be a problem against her hundred and fifty, especially when fifty of them were her Blackguards—who’d appeared from all over the island, escaping from the Chromeria and abandoning Zymun, or the promachos, or the Colors to find and join their Iron White.
Forty men wouldn’t have been a problem. Forty wights was a huge problem. They were clad head to toe in white, gloved and hooded to hide what colors they drafted. In moments, she was in a fight for her life.
And no fair fight. Every one of the Blackguards except the monochrome blues were feeling it. The bane had tightened their grip. Anyone who had the least luxin left in their bodies had to fight against luxin locking up inside them—and every drafter except the youngest had some luxin permanently in their bodies.
Even those who’d carefully drained their power with hellstone were slowed. The best off fought as if in a high wind. Those worse off fought as if in water, sluggish, their old strength turned against them.
But then she felt something. The air turned colder, somehow murky, as if a dry fog had rolled in. The city darkened perceptibly. Night had arrived on sprinting feet instead of its usual gentle wings. But, in the fighting, everyone around her missed it.
She stepped back from the fight, back into the mass of Blackguards here to protect her.
There was something familiar—
She gasped.
Gavin!
She opened her will to him, and she knew. He was dying.
She felt his strength faltering, fraying. Her heart froze.
Live, damn you, live! You come back to me!
* * *
But it was too late. He was dying. He was failing her, again.
He could feel her weighed down by the bane’s oppressive power. Her light dimmed, her limbs heavy from the very luxin that lived in her, shackled, unable to defend herself from the death he knew was stalking her. He could feel the lock and knew how he might release her from it, but from this distance, it was like feeling the teeth of a key with a fingertip.
No.
No, not while he had breath.
He released all else and clung to her, his lighthouse, the white in the foggy seas of his black.
* * *
Karris was frozen, even amid the clash of arms around her. Gill Greyling, blood splashed across his face, was shouting something at her. ‘Retreat. We’ve failed. We can’t . . .’
Mere words.
It was like they didn’t even notice.
Don’t do it, my love. Please, no. Gavin, what are you doing?
There was something fatal and final she could feel in Gavin’s will.
Please, no. Forgive me, my love, but I gave up on you once—don’t you dare do it, too. Don’t you dare!
And then he was gone.
* * *
“More darkness,” Dazen gasped as he dropped the luxin. He pulled his hand angrily out of Orholam’s. “I need more black! More black!”
The sky above was dotted now with thousands of stars, shining, brilliant. The descending darkness should have given him more source, but it only made those points of defiant light shine all the brighter.
Orholam said, “Even eagles must sometimes dive into a lake to hunt, no matter that it momentarily destroys the lake’s reflection of the sky.”
“What are You even talking about? Reflection of the—”
Dazen looked at the sword stuck into the black crust covering the tower.