Gavin had reached from beyond the grave to give them one chance.
He had died to bring them light.
“To the Glare!” Karris shouted.
She would mourn her husband. Later. She was a warrior.
Warriors know how to honor a hero’s sacrifice: first you finish the fucking fight.
Chapter 132
If there was one thing Corvan Danavis excelled at, it was being able to ignore a little personal danger (say, a battle raging around him) in order to focus on more important things. It was part of what made him an excellent commander, and in truth, he’d never understood how other people couldn’t do it.
Which was why right now he was cursing in the face of a shaking messenger, spit flying as he bellowed, “How old is this message?! And don’t tell me you don’t fucking know!”
“Maybe, maybe half an hour, sir? Less?” the messenger said. “I came straight here, but the others—”
“An hour?” Corvan demanded.
“Uh, maybe? Maybe, sir. Yes. There was so much fighting, and I wanted to make sure I got through safely so I didn’ t—”
“Get out of my face!”
Two of Corvan’s bodyguards, one from either side, suddenly threw their shields up in front of him as a fireball the size of a woman’s head arced toward him. It bounced off their shields and rolled into the crowd behind him.
Nope. Not a fireball the size of a woman’s head. A literal flaming woman’s head. Odd.
The messenger blanched. A coward. It was the last trait a messenger could afford—but one didn’t find out which messengers could handle the job until they’d been through a battle or two.
A distraction, Kip said. Kip needed a distraction.
The city was in a bad way. Corvan had just had news that the wall bordering the poor neighborhood of Overhill nearest the red bane was nearly abandoned, most of its defenders lured to the walls elsewhere in the nobles’ neighborhoods, or even worse, lured to guard their houses against the looters they feared during the battle.
If the city survived until tomorrow, Corvan was going to find those damned nobles and put them on the walls as rank infantrymen themselves.
But first came survival.
Corvan had found any plan with too many working parts tended to fall apart in direct relation to how many parts depended on other parts doing what they should, so his battle plan was simple: defend and delay. As islands, the most obvious weakness of the Jaspers was that they were easy to lay under siege.
But anyone laying them under siege was, in effect, under siege themselves. Karris had directed the isles’ fishermen to deliberately overfish the nearby waters, not only to stockpile dried fish but to deprive invaders. Fresh water was an even bigger problem for a besieging armada, so where there were springs that drained into the sea, Corvan had massed defenders in greater numbers than any other general would have. If the fight lasted long enough, the availability of potable water might actually be the key to the victory.
Everywhere, he’d prepared the defenders with how long to hold their walls, and what to do when they lost them, and how to signal everyone else that such loss was imminent.
The defenders would stagger their losses, hopefully containing those to nonessential areas. A few natural ambush choke points could be used if the local commanders dared.
Corvan liked to push certain decisions down the chain of command as much as possible. Men paralyzed waiting for orders that might never come through the chaos of battle were dead men, not defenders.
Today the hope had been to hold the Blood Robes off the walls.
Unsurprisingly, that hadn’t worked out.
The next plan had been to make them pay in rivers of blood for every street they took, delaying them until dark, when the Jaspers’ defenders would no longer be at a disadvantage.
But there were places the Chromeria couldn’t afford to lose, full stop: some of the gun emplacements that could be turned against the city and the Chromeria itself, certain neighborhoods, the Lily’s Stem—and the Great Fountain. Corvan had set up his headquarters here to stress to his people how it was the linchpin to their defense. Not only was it the most abundant source of fresh water in the city with its artesian well, but it sat at one of the five great intersections of the city. That made it hard to defend, but also easy to dispatch reinforcements to anyplace in the city that needed it.
The battle had come here, in surprising force.
The razor wings and bomb wings and the crawling vermin will-cast to burrow into the street barricades before bursting into flame had waited until the assaults by tens of thousands of Blood Robe soldiers. Kip had warned Corvan of this: the use of munds as cannon fodder and auxiliaries.
It had meant a catastrophic loss of life for the attackers, especially as the bane had been so confused, so late in locking down all the Chromeria’s defenders.
The defenders had lost neighborhood after neighborhood, including some sections of wall with their most powerful guns—all spiked before they were abandoned, luckily.
But the Blood Robes hadn’t broken off the attack here, even as full dark was gathering.
Why weren’t they withdrawing?
After all, at night the Blood Robes were deprived of their greatest advantage—their drafters and wights. Why wouldn’t they wait until tomorrow to attack again? Were they hoping to take the city before full dark, and were giving their attack a few more minutes to succeed? Did they think Corvan’s forces so close to breaking?
He thought them wrong, though not by much.
That was when Kip sprang his own gambit: attacking the bane themselves with small squads. Suicidally small squads.
Kip, repulsing unbelievably strong magical attacks, was trying to wrest victory directly from the enemy while their forces were at Corvan’s throat.
It was just the kind of move Corvan would have attempted as a young man, though not, he thought, with such small forces.
His people had fought the Blood Robes to a standstill. Indeed, some of the invading soldiers had even withdrawn to their bane.
Corvan swore aloud again, suddenly putting the pieces together.
Those Blood Robes had withdrawn to protect their bane from Kip’s Mighty. Kip’s men had been striking at the heart of the White King’s power and had needed the distraction Kip requested so they wouldn’t be overwhelmed.
But the messenger was a coward.
Corvan’s damned messenger might have gotten not just the Mighty but everyone killed.
Was it too late now?
Kip’s men might have saved Corvan’s forces here, but could he save them now?
What could serve as a suitable distraction?
Was that it? His wife, Polyhymnia, the Third Eye, had called him her Titan of the Great Fountain. He’d set up his defense here partly because of that.
But that plan couldn’t work because of the bane’s influence locking down red.
Magic rocked the isles again and again. Not only the loss of blue—there were reports of white?! Some even claimed to have felt black.
But even as detached as Corvan liked to think he was in the midst of issuing orders and hearing reports and dodging razor wings, he realized he couldn’t even comprehend everything that was happening elsewhere. There were at least two battles happening here simultaneously, probably three, all overlapping one another.
And he might be screwing up all of them.