The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,229

Battle of Ru, the Blood Robes had used a single rowboat filled with superviolet drafters to raise the bane.

Kip had expected the same here, but perhaps with nine rowboats.

There were no rowboats.

This was a fucking dragon-ship.

A dozen galleys had been lashed together, the disparate parts melded into a whole with wood and burnt red luxin. Cut in the brutal style of early pagan art, this floating castle had the look of something crafted by a master artist equipped only with an ax. Brushed white pine skin yielded to spikes carved from ivory tusks. The open maw, equipped with great spouts for shooting out burning red luxin, showed lips of burnt red luxin, like blackened, cracked skin. It had claws and eyes of atasifusta wood, ever-burning.

In a carven saddle, high on the dragon’s back and raised high above the waves, was a black throne. Empty.

But that didn’t mean the rest of the dragon-ship was empty. Like fire ants rushing up your trouser leg when you stepped full into their anthill, the Blood Robes on it were in a violent panic, frothing forth onto every surface Kip could see.

And all of them—red-robed though they were—were drafters or wights. There were hundreds.

But that wasn’t what frightened Kip.

Behind the immense throne was a tower of chains and gears. Six great crank wheels were being turned by a dozen slaves each, and six taut chains with links as large as a man raised pulleys at their apex at the foot of the throne itself.

A great deal of chain had already accumulated around each of those crank wheels, and as Kip took a moment, he could feel a burgeoning tension in every color—like he’d felt in green before the Battle of Ru.

The bane were rising in a circle around the dragon-ship. All of them.

The Mighty were too late.

Kip’s heart jumped, but then he felt something immense nearby. He blinked furiously and felt as if between blinks something happened to his eyes—had he been hit?

He glanced down, but in chi’s spectrum, and his gaze saw something beyond his ken, a single slice of ocean down to the depths, being crossed by a monstrous shape.

A flutter of the eyes, as if clearing blood away. Blink. Nothing. Blink. Another slice, half a degree departed. A curve of pectoral fin. Blink. Gone. A fluke. Gone.

A whale?

She was turning, deep under the waves, even as dozens of sharks bit at her flanks and flukes.

It broke Kip out of his paralysis.

He hurled the retreat signal flares skyward for the Mighty and banked sharply away himself.

An explosion shook the distant waters out where the Mighty had penetrated the first ring of ships. Ah, Ben-hadad had put a hull-wrecker on another of the galleons.

But the inner ring that they had just penetrated had closed tight behind the Mighty.

Gunports were rattling open on this side of the ships as the cannon crews slowly reacted to the threat that was the Mighty. Had the Mighty proceeded to attack the center island dragon, the cannons wouldn’t have been able to fire without endangering their own. But now the Mighty were turning back into range of safe and accurate fire.

A second explosion rocked the seas, this time on another of the ships in the inner circle, even as they sped toward it. Though the ship immediately sagged in the water, and all the cannon crews had been killed or stunned on that one ship, it did nothing to the others, who started opening up.

Nor was that ship going to sink in time. The bane was rising behind them, and if Kip and the Mighty didn’t make it several leagues away within the next few minutes, they would all be paralyzed.

Throwing another signal flare, Kip sliced out a wide, fast circle, and each of the rest of the Mighty slotted in seamlessly, re-forming the command ship one at a time.

“Bane rising!” Kip gasped out as they finally locked in all together. He threw over the steering to Cruxer as he peered into the sea.

“Can’t dive together!” Ben-hadad said. “Too much drag.”

Cruxer steered their circle in close to the ship that they’d hit with the hullwrecker, hoping that the other ships would be reticent to fire up on their own comrades.

As they came out of that second circle, though, Winsen shouted a curse. He pointed back in toward the great dragon-ship. “Breaker!”

Kip ignored him.

“Breaker! Kip! For Orholam’s sake, man—”

Kip glanced up, trying to narrow his eyes so that he wouldn’t be blinded. He caught only a terror of skimmers streaming