The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,405

crystals and the bane. It hadn’t been much, but some ancient writer had taken care to preserve a line revealing that shattering the seed crystals could break the bane when they were small. He or she had guessed that it would work even when they were large.

Karris herself was a red/green bichrome, and she didn’t know how much those bane might mess with her if she attacked them—but the blue bane was right here, floating jammed in the strait between Cannon Island and Big Jasper, grinding slowly through as if it had will. It looked like it was trying to move directly onto Little Jasper.

She didn’t have anything else to go on.

“Blue! Let’s go!” she said.

“High Lady! Wait one moment!” a voice called out behind her.

She spied a man carrying a large satchel, running from the Chromeria toward her. Andross’s slave Grinwoody?

“High Lady, please, let me accompany you. Please. I made a promise that I wouldn’t leave your side today.”

“What? No,” Karris said. “What’s the promachos doing?”

“He’s in the infirmary, High Lady. Deathly ill. I’m afraid he’s been poisoned. Before he lost consciousness, he was angry with me for not stopping it. Ordered me to get out of his sight. Demanded I go serve you and get myself killed if I could. I dare not disobey him. I dare not be there when he wakes . . . if he wakes, Mistress.”

Grinwoody looked utterly miserable.

The Order! Karris swore. They were everywhere. Dammit!

Andross wasn’t easy to work with, but today was a day when the Chromeria needed all hands to work defending it.

“I trained with the Blackguard,” Grinwoody said. “And yes, it was long ago, but I’m not useless in a fight.” He opened a satchel and handed out a fortune’s worth of lux torches in every color to the Blackguards, and the finest Ilytian pistols. “Please. I owe Gavin a debt. He did me a, a great favor once. Let me fight beside you.”

Well, Karris had just been thinking how she needed every hand possible to defend the Chromeria. She nodded sharply, not turning from studying the blue bane where it lay in the water. She looked hard at the topography of the thing, its bristling porcupine shards sticking into the air and confusing the eye about the underlying structure, but she could see that it rippled and folded as the structure slowly crawled up and down the hills and valleys of the seabed beneath it.

Blue drafters were already attacking the walls, being answered with small arms and small cannon fire, and being mostly repulsed, though the enemy drafters were less concentrating on the attack and more simply building a series of interlocking ramps for those behind them to follow. When the main attack came, there would be no scaling ladders—the soldiers, drafters, and wights would attack at speed.

The defenders were trying to blow apart that blue luxin as fast as it was drafted, and all the drafters they could hit, too.

And she suddenly had a plan. She was no blue drafter, but she’d always had an affinity for the blue virtues. She knew how blues thought: rational, logical, straight lines.

So she’d be circuitous.

They ran together through Big Jasper at the speed Blackguards run, but she decided to make a stop before they reached the wall. It took two stops instead, and two baffled shopkeepers who initially thought they were looters. Grinwoody, who’d fallen behind on the run, caught back up in the second shop. And though winded, he wasn’t exhausted, nor did he complain. Pretty good for an old man.

Then they made it to the walls, to the side of where the main attack was coming. The nearest commander looked delighted at getting Blackguards to reinforce his line, then baffled.

“High Lady?” he asked, stunned to see her here herself.

“I’m not here to help. Not directly,” she said. She was already sliding a knife down her tunic, splitting the silk, then tearing it off to expose the mirror armor beneath. The Blackguards had it easier, merely shucking off their tunics and trousers, exposing their own mirror armor beneath.

“Maybe now’s a good time to tell us the plan?” Commander Fisk asked.

“We’ve got Blackguards posted on Cannon Island. We go save them.”

“What are the blue cloaks and dresses for?” he asked.

“The blue bane will be our bridge to charge over to Cannon Island.”

“They’ll see us coming as soon as we cross over the wall,” Fisk said.

“Yep.”

“They’ll know exactly what we’re doing.”

“Almost,” Karris said. “Cannon Island’s citadel and guns are a huge prize