The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,363

struck Kip was that it was almost all men. Not drafters. Not wights.

The pagans had achieved an almost perfect inversion of the Chromeria’s values: in battle the Chromeria would save its people by spending those who had gone wight and the drafters closest to breaking the halo first, because those were closest to death or insanity. The Blood Robes were saving their wights and drafters by spending their people, because their people were farthest from magic and godhood.

All the White King’s promises of freedom and of a new order, a utopia where all would be made right, were belied.

For the Chromeria, the privileges of power were paired with prices. Drafters were expected to stand in the first line of defense, as the promachos did. Human nature being what it is, they didn’t always do so, but that was the deal, the expectation. By contrast, the nine kings would happily rule a wasteland, if they could rule.

Orholam damn them.

How many of these invaders about to die just wanted a better life, or hadn’t dared to stand against the White King when his armies had marched through their lands and had pressed them into his armies? They weren’t quite innocent, but they were men, not monsters. They deserved a second chance, and Kip couldn’t afford to offer them one. Not right now.

“Still not time to go?” Ben-hadad asked. He’d come back, as had others of the Mighty.

Kip looked around again, though he still didn’t know what he was looking for. “No.”

They’d pushed in far enough. Thousands of men were clambering over the moored ships and onto the docks, between the boathouses and warehouses.

“Raise the red,” Kip commanded.

The men had been waiting for it. They raised a red flag, and immediately, the cannons atop the walls began firing incendiary shot at the Chromeria’s abandoned ships and docks still moored within the bay. Pyrejelly had been drafted into barrels and hidden away yesterday. The last order for all the sailors abandoning their ships was to open those barrels and splatter it about.

The Blood Robes had surely suspected fire, but they expected nothing as ferocious as the holocaust that swept in upon them.

The men and women of Big Jasper stood agape, watching a spectacle such as they would never see again if they lived a hundred years. The intensity of the flames was matched only by the intensity of the screams as every dock, every ship, and the whole length of the seawall went up in sudden flames. In a few places, the incendiary luxin hadn’t been set or had failed, but it didn’t matter. The flames jumped gaps and burned everything.

“Fire crews ready?” Kip asked.

“Yes, sir. Watching the wind carefully and spread out appropriately. Looks like it’s in our favor.”

One of the worst things about commanding was that sometimes you see what’s going to happen some minutes hence, and you know how to stop it, and there’s time to stop it, but your people won’t listen to you.

Such was the commander of the armada’s plight.

Kip could see him waving his arms and screaming. The drafters had made his situation much worse by connecting the ships. With no incendiaries aboard, the floating-island armada caught fire far more slowly than the docks had, but they were lashed together. They couldn’t push apart from one another to make gaps too large for the fire to pass. The ones at the back were having great difficulty breaking free to retreat.

After a few minutes, though, he rallied enough drafters and officers, and cut deep, setting a fire line where he gave up fully a quarter of his fleet. At this line, they would break away from the island and abandon all those on the side nearer to Big Jasper.

It was what Kip had been waiting for.

“Catapults, go,” Kip said. The crews knew where to aim.

Catapults. Who used catapults in the age of gunpowder? It was one of Corvan’s discoveries when he did a personal inventory of the Jaspers’ defenses. They’d been kept for decades beyond their obsolescence by Carver Black, who couldn’t bear to sell them off for a pittance for lumber, yet hadn’t been able to replace them all on the meager budget he had to buy cannon.

The catapults now hurled barrels of red luxin and sub-red charges skyward and onto the armada—behind the lines where all the drafters and officers were working. They exploded in the air, or even in the water, flinging pyrejelly everywhere on the ships and even floating on the waves.

Suddenly, those people, the