The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,403

blue bane pressing from Cannon Island to the seawall, sealing West Bay. It glittered like cut sapphires in the sun and crept forward on a million crystalline teeth, each sprouting off its leading edge, being smashed forward by the weight of the bane behind it, and digging in, devouring territory like a hungry mouth. Around a great central tower, great faceted stalagmites sprouted everywhere. At the island’s edge, those shards shattered ships and docks, soon to roll over homes and bodies.

The green bane lay in a tentacled mass of vegetation and horror south of the blue, across the wall from the neighborhood of Weasel Rock. The yellow, blinding as it flashed from liquid to solid to light, and the orange bane, dull as an oil slick but just as iridescent and oddly fascinating under the weight of its hexes, were on the south and southeast sides of the island. Red and sub-red together sealed East Bay, making a conflagration that smoked and steamed as it hit the water, bubbling ever forward like lava meeting the sea.

If killing the chief wight of each color didn’t stop the bane, what could?

The seed crystals. They had to shatter the seed crystals. They were what empowered the wights to become nearly gods. They were what spawned and controlled the entire magical islands that were the bane.

Kip threw his will toward the green bane now clambering up the very walls with great wet roots like tentacles, shattering rock and burying defenders. He’d barely made it to the surface of the bane when something there knocked him off his feet with incredible force. It seemed to grab at him, sucking him toward it.

Someone—some thing—was trying to willjack him.

Kip hit back instantly, but it was like punching a brick wall. He slammed against it again and again, but he felt it clinging to him, clinging to green, pulling him in, in. His mind felt bloodied from his strikes, dazed, and the green’s grip on him only strengthened.

He felt probing against his mind, as if yellow were reaching out for him, too, with glee.

Launching himself backward, cutting off green and yellow, Kip snapped back to his own body. He dropped his hands from the array’s grips as if they were hot coals.

“What was that?!” Big Leo asked.

“Did you feel it, too?” Kip asked. “Same thing as at Ru, wasn’t it?”

“Breaker, there’s blood coming from your ears.”

Kip touched his ears and looked at the wetness on his fingers. “Just blood,” he said. “Not spinal fluid.”

Not that bleeding from your ears is good.

“Zymun’s here with his drafters!” Ben-hadad called from where he stood beside the door to the roof. The door itself was mere splinters now, held together with every color of luxin, put into some honeycombed pattern Ben-hadad must have made up.

“Stop all your drafting now,” Kip commanded. “Something’s changed. Their influence is spreading over the islands even now. And move.”

In moments, he was going to lose the ability to draft any color at all. So he threw everything he had into doubling and tripling the strength of the barricade Ben-hadad and the others had drafted in front of the door.

Then he turned his will back to Big Jasper. Samila Sayeh was charging up her own tower, halfway to the top, and somehow seemed at war with some unseen figure for control of her own bane-island. She had the blue seed crystal in her hand.

Knowing it might be the last chance he had to draft at all, Kip used the mirror to hurl a spear of sub-red and red interlaced into solid flame at her and the blue bane’s central tower.

It felt like he’d walked past a catapult’s release lever and nudged it; instead of throwing a stone, it threw every bit of red and sub-red luxin Kip might have been able to draft in forty years, all at once.

But he felt like he’d been kicked just as he released the burning spear.

He was spinning in the array.

For a long moment, Kip held still, gasping. His eyes throbbed. He could tell he’d gone from the occasional drafter of fire to suddenly now straining his halos in both sub-red and red.

“Who grabbed the array!” Kip yelled. “Who spun me?! Who the hell spun me?!”

As his eyes cleared, he looked at the Mighty. They appeared as baffled as he was.

If he hadn’t physically been spun, and he hadn’t willed himself to spin, then only superviolet hijacking the controls could have done that.

At that moment, something like a shock wave passed over