The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,361

roused from their torpor, but before Kip could descend to the lines to make sure of it, Einin said, “My lord, that’s far enough. Commander Leonidas ordered me to keep you back from the lines.”

Kip glared at her. “Big Leo?” he asked instead of complaining. He should have known the new commander wouldn’t let him put himself in danger.

“Yessir. Uh, he hasn’t made it clear to us nunks what we’re allowed to call him.”

Regardless of what Andross had commanded, Kip should probably go up to the mirrors now, but what if the army messed up again? What if they needed him?

The razor wings reached the towers. Netting hung above every gun crew, and archers and musketeers armed with blunderbusses were posted with them.

Some of the will-cast birds were shot out of the sky. Others made it to the nets, tangling in them before exploding or bursting into flame.

A musketeer drawing a bead skyward on an incoming razor wing stepped backward into a cannon’s line of fire just as the gun crew, looking out to their own distant target, touched the linstock to the breech. Kip cried out, but they were too far away, there was too much noise.

The woman simply disappeared in the black-powder cloud that bellowed from the cannon’s muzzle. Kip caught a glimpse of her legs flying, launched off the wall.

The razor wing splashed fiery death amid the gun crew a moment later.

“I would love it if we went back to the Prism’s Tower now, my lord,” Einin said nervously.

He shot out chi at all the bane again. He couldn’t see all of them from here. That was a problem, though he thought he’d have felt if any of the others were rising from the depths. Where was Liv?

Out beyond the bay, some of the larger ships of the armada had turned broadside and stopped, apparently within their range now. He extended a hand and someone gave him a long-lens.

The ships were dropping anchors. Huh. Ah, to give themselves more stable firing platforms. The gun crews on the open decks, many of them bare-chested, were all very dark-skinned.

Ilytians. Dammit. Best gunners in the world, with the best guns. That meant the pirate kings were indeed working for the Wight King. Karris said she’d tried to bribe them away, but apparently after Gavin and Kip had sunk Pash Vecchio’s great ship, the Gargantua, he’d been beyond the reach of promises—and she hadn’t been willing to send him boatloads of coin merely in the hope that a pirate would act in good faith.

Kip watched the Ilytians fire their first rounds, the flash of light and the puff of rolling black smoke visible long before the sound could be heard.

He wanted to give an order to someone to focus on those ships, but it was unnecessary.

As those ships set up their bombardment, the rest of the fleet charged the East Bay.

Kip wondered where Corvan was.

Maybe he was content to lead from some safer, clearer vantage. Maybe there was an emergency somewhere else Kip didn’t even know about.

The Ilytian gun crews had a lucky early hit. Or Kip hoped it was luck, as a tower top exploded a hundred paces away.

The Chromeria’s army—here mostly Kip’s people, selected because they were battle-hardened—immediately jumped to the labor of trying to salvage guns from the emplacement that had been blown to pieces, working in the gore and slime of a crew exploded by shell. The teams were all arranged for this, ready to determine what large guns could be salvaged, ready to wheel in and set up smaller cannons or use teams of oxen to lift cannons that had merely fallen when shell demolished tower foundations and the like.

Backup gun crews waited a safe distance from the front lines, jittery, wanting a chance to fight, but knowing that when their chance came, it would be because that spot they were to step into was a target whose range and position had already been found.

This was to be a marathon with no end until victory or nightfall or death.

Falling behind meant that the armada would make landfall, and the Blood Robes making landfall would be the beginning of the end.

But now, despite all the defenders’ work, it looked like it was about to begin anyway.

The withering fire had grown sporadic as supply lines were stretched, powder stores exhausted. Ships that should have been easy pickings instead sailed all the way to the mouth of the bay.

The enormous chains barring the armada’s entry to East Bay were