The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,359

people. He didn’t want to see whatever hex was coming. “Remember,” he called out to them, “you cannot trust what you feel; trust what you know to be real. The bane will lie to you, so hold to what you know is true. Your brothers and sisters will fight and they’ll die for you. Be not afraid. Be not afraid! Though hell itself march against us, be not afraid in what you do!”

What the hell? Speaking in rhyme?

Shit! Liv. Somewhere, the superviolet bane was out there, too!

Kip turned and roared, all turtle-bear.

The wave hit the city’s walls at every tower hard enough to make them shake, gushing water, dropping all the moisture it had picked up from the sea in a sudden rain. But the physical force of the attack was purely ancillary—the attack itself was the wave of fear blasted over Kip with the force of a tsunami, leaving him breathless and panicked, frozen.

His heart was lodged in his throat. They were doomed. This was like nothing they’d prepared for.

They were all going to die. It was all his fault. He didn’t know the first thing about anything. He was just a child, a child in the face of gods. Literal gods.

Everything he’d mocked, everything he’d sneered at was suddenly here and more real than he could have imagined.

“Hey,” a distant voice said.

Kip could hear the war dogs whining.

He was going to get them all killed. Everyone. It was too late already. They were already dead. Kip’s heart was seizing in his chest with grief and dread as he was enveloped in the soft orangey cloud.

He was losing everyone he loved, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He heard the clatter of a sword falling from someone’s hand.

“Hey! The hell is wrong is with you all?” Winsen said.

Suddenly a hand was rubbing Kip’s face, scrubbing it as if to brush away water—or luxin. Winsen’s face appeared in Kip’s sight.

Winsen, the broken man who’d never really understood danger or avoiding it. Winsen, the literally fearless, was standing in front of Kip looking puzzled. He had a hand drawn back, preparing to slap Kip.

“I’m good,” Kip said, coming back to himself. “Get the rest of us. Cwn y Wawr!”

He turned to them, some on the tower, more below. The handlers were almost as bad off as everyone else on the towers and walls, catatonic. Some had wet themselves. Their war dog partners were whining, alarmed, not understanding. Some of the dogs licked their humans, and a few of those had been roused by the fearless love of their canine friends.

“Eyes!” Kip shouted to them. “Their eyes!”

The dogs, preternaturally intelligent, understood immediately. Through growling or tugging or even bracing on their partners’ shoulders and licking their faces, the dogs dragged their masters’ attention to themselves and cleared away the hex. Most people snapped out of the hex immediately, but some seemed broken by the terrors they’d just suffered.

“Here they come. Everyone!” Kip shouted. “You know what to do!”

The White King’s armada was rapidly resolving from a black mass of ships into individual ranks as the sun rose and as they sailed closer.

But all the Chromeria’s ships sheltered by the seawall sat as if dead, crews paralyzed.

The gun emplacements were the target, not anyone inland. The first attack was going to come not from the bane but from the armada. The armada was going to try to land, and if the Chromeria’s cannons didn’t do something soon, they would land unopposed.

That couldn’t happen.

Kip shouted, “Winsen, you get to High General Danavis! Wake him if he needs it, tell him how we are! Cruxer, go—shit!” Cruxer was dead. “Big Leo, you run out to the ships with the Cwn y Wawr. Wake them up, get them fighting. We need those cannons now. Meet me above East Bay. Messengers, you wake all the rest of the gun towers—no one goes alone, though. Terrified people might get violent. You, you, and you, take your regiments and rally the rest of the island. Let them know we just got hit with magic, and it’s already dissipating. It’s not real. We can stand! Gun crews, start firing rounds—I know they’re out of range, just do it! It might wake some people. We got this! Go!”

Chapter 111

When Karris burst into the Spectrum’s council chamber, none of the damned Colors was there except Klytos Blue, slumped in a chair at the great windows, watching the battle beginning to unfold.

“You stupid sack of shit!” she said. “What have you