The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,224

vantage, but the Chromeria fleet was enveloping them with rank upon rank of ships.

The front ranks broke apart, every other ship slowly, slowly turning broadside. Then flashes of light blinked across the waves, followed by billows of black smoke floating up toward their sails—curiously silent from this far away. Those ships had turned forward again, as ahead of them those ships that had kept going now took their chance to turn broadside.

It was only then that the sound of the first cannons arrived, a distant thunder from that slow storm now covering most of the horizon.

No fire was returned from the White King’s ships, and Kip couldn’t see any result from the shelling, though scores must have died in the moments he’d been watching.

After the speed and chaos and dexterity required for ground combat, this naval positioning seemed graceless, ponderous. Give a man a sword and tell him to chase down another man, and the contest was decided within minutes; one ship chasing another could easily last all day.

And yet that apparent gracelessness was deceiving, Kip knew. There was a reason why famous admirals were famous. When you had to turn a ship weighing tens of thousands of sevens with only wind, and waves, and muscle, and had to judge exactly the rates at which your enemies could do the same, so that you could arrive at some future position where you could release a broadside at them before they could release one at you, it required a special brilliance to be successful. Add in needing to adjust any of your figures due to your slaves’ exhaustion, injuries to crew, the weight of your ship and of your opponent’s, timing to reload, then with possible damage to sails, rigging, oars, decks, or rudder, and you had to be brilliant to maneuver a single ship. Commanding a fleet must require another order of thinking altogether—especially when also having to deal with the egos of your subcommanders, like the idiot Caul Azmith, who’d broken ranks.

The single maneuver of interspersed fire, correctly executed, told Kip that whoever was admiral of the Chromeria’s fleet now, he or she was probably a genius.

A genius who was about to suffer a crushing defeat.

“Too late to get the Chromeria to pull back,” Kip said. “So we’re looking for the White King’s superviolet drafters, maybe in separate small boats. It seems the superviolets have to do something to trigger the bane to rise—so if we can kill them before they do that, we’ve got a chance.”

“I don’t see any boats out alone,” Cruxer said.

“Winsen, you’ve got the best eyes,” Kip said.

“Nothing. None alone,” the young man said.

“If they’re trying to get encircled,” Cruxer said, “and they have more than one bane, then maybe they’re planning to raise all the bane, all around them at once.”

Kip caught where he was going. The bane would rise in a giant ring, matching the encircling Chromeria fleet—and destroying all of it simultaneously. “So the superviolets who are raising the bane have to be in the middle of the formation. The command skimmer’s too big to penetrate between those ships. We’ll have to split. Ben, I know you said you were working on making the Blue Falcon IX submersible, how’s it going?”

“This is Blue Falcon XIII,” Ben-hadad said quickly.

“I know how you work. I see the core ideas already here. This honeycomb structure here? You told me once in some other application that that’s super strong.”

Ben-hadad expelled a breath. “Last resort, understand? And no more than maybe half speed, at most. Slower for you and Big Leo. Even with the wind shield reinforced to be a wave shield, either the water will sweep you off or it’ll disintegrate if you go too fast. But this generation was never meant—”

As he was speaking, an enormous cloud of ravens burst from the White King’s fleet. But there was nothing random or independent about their flight.

“Razor wings,” Einin said.

Winsen cursed aloud. The birds were will-cast to seek out rigging or crewmen and slice through them.

One of them exploded in midair.

“And they’ve figured out how to rig them to be bombs,” Winsen said. “Bomb wings. Great.”

“They can’t carry much explosive,” Kip said. “What are they doing? Ben?”

“They used pigeons before. But pigeons probably aren’t smart enough to be taught to seek out the powder kegs,” he said. “These are ravens. I’d guess they’ve will-cast them to seek out the gun decks.”

Damn. A single crazed raven flapping and cawing and threatening to explode at any moment could delay