The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,357

inconvenient time.

She saw the signal from her partner, her god of gods, Koios. She couldn’t help but roll her eyes as she thought of him and his overly intricate battle plans.

Battles. It was so hard to concentrate on them.

Just tell me who wins and who’s left alive at the end, please. I have things I need to do once we get to that point.

When everyone lets down their guard in victory, that’s when things get really interesting. Aliviana was looking forward to that.

Oh, right. The signal.

The Chromeria was funny like this: for all that their powers came from sunlight, for all that they worshipped a god they believed to exist literally above them, the cretins so rarely looked up.

Aliviana gathered her powers and lifted the bane up, out of the waves and into the sky.

Chapter 110

“Put on the wraparound blue spectacles,” Kip told the messenger. “Ride as fast as you can. Tell High General Danavis the orange bane rises. Go now!”

Blue was the best color to use to sharpen the mind against orange. He didn’t know how well it would work, though. The Chromeria’s damnable fear of teaching hex-casting left them ignorant of how best to defend against it. After all, ‘Don’t look at the hex’ isn’t very useful advice during a battle, when the hex might be painted on your enemies’ very shields and helms. How are you supposed to fight without looking at your enemy?

For more than an hour now, Kip had been carefully scanning the horizon with chi, as instructed. He’d toyed with melting open the silvery globe of gallium he wore on his neck to access the chi bane, but he had no idea what he’d do with it. He’d drafted chi only a handful of times in his entire life, and none of them had been pleasant. He hadn’t jumped on any opportunity since then to practice with it.

It was just another mistake he’d made. He should’ve practiced to find out what he could do with chi instead of vaguely thinking that it could be used for signaling, and that it was better in his own hands than in someone else’s. No, he should have brought the Keeper with him. She should be doing this.

But bringing the Keeper with him would have been a death sentence for her and her sect, and maybe for Kip, too. Consorting with heretics? Bringing a bane to the Jaspers, at the very time the White King was? With her masks and gaudy armor and tumors, the Keeper wasn’t exactly concealable, either.

“Breaker, sir? Should we go?” Big Leo asked.

“Not yet,” Kip said. “I’ve got my orders.” He wasn’t supposed to come back until he saw a signal, Andross had said.

What signal?

‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ Andross had said.

Which drove Kip crazy.

Quit that. Too much thinking. And the wrong kind.

Kip had thought he understood the old soldier’s maxim that the waiting is the worst part of war. He’d waited before. He’d waited to spring traps. He’d waited to order men to fire. He’d waited for the rush of the battle’s beginning.

But once it began, he’d always been right there, in the thick of it. Now the battle was about to begin—but not for him.

He was going to watch. Once the bane rose, he’d make his way up to the top of the Prism’s Tower to do what he could from up there. Which might not be much of anything at all.

He might be stuck watching all day, depending on what the Wight King did. Watching, while others died.

With the bane still submerged, and with the great number of the Blood Robes’ ships and sea chariots, all of them in constant motion, the bane were initially hard to find, but Kip had finally discerned their locations with chi and had sent word to Corvan. The high general had rearranged his defenses appropriately—and without any help asked or needed from Kip on where to put them.

At regular intervals, Kip had shielded his eyes and gazed in chi toward each arc encircling the island, then in paryl, then he put on each of the colored spectacles he carried at his hip in turn, hoping to see something. He kept it up now so that he didn’t get caught unawares by the others rising. It was easy to get war-blind and focus all your attention on only the one threat in front of you.

But he’d spent his time debating with himself about what he should do: Use the chi bane? Don’t use it?