The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,411

were slashed, spun, muskets seized, muskets discharged into others, kneeling men knocked down, stabbed on the ground even as the Blackguard attacked the next and the next.

Twenty-four men, killed by six, in seconds.

But Karris was looking back up toward the Prism’s Tower, where that incredible magic had come from. Her heart swelled.

Someone was looking out for them. Someone saw, someone cared, someone was trying to save them.

They ran on.

She saw that two great lines now stretched from the top of the Prism’s Tower, one to Ebon’s Hill and the other to Cannon Island. Small figures were zipping down each one.

So her repairs had worked. Good.

But still, those guys must have balls of steel. Zipping down the escape chains into this?

With a spear, Grinwoody moved down the line of falling pagans, stabbing and twisting, stabbing and twisting. He said, “Sure didn’t think I’d go out like this.”

The others had been taking advantage of the lull to reload.

“What?” Karris asked. Having mounted this rise, they finally had a good view of what was around them in every direction. Behind them, the Blood Robes had caught on to their incursion, and several hundred were chasing to catch up with them. The sides were open, but led nowhere, and would be closed off in minutes.

Between Karris and her goal of the great blue plinth were hundreds and hundreds of blues—thousands—with more coming by the moment, called back from the front lines to stop her attack. Against Karris and her six.

Her heart cratered.

The blues were already between her little force and the bane. And the bane itself was sheer-sided, with no helpful steps for her to charge up like the bane at Ru had had.

But . . . the tower’s perfection was marred, not far from the base.

A single line left by that falling-star strike from the Prism’s Tower cut across it as if it were a bamboo shoot cut with a sword.

Except dropping blue luxin the width of the sword-cut meant dropping an entire tower’s mass onto the crystalline blue luxin beneath it. Luxin that was marvelously strong on one plane but otherwise fragile on others.

A sharp report echoed across the plain of this weird blue island, and Karris saw cracks race up the tower’s face, and slower ones run down from the cut as well.

They shattered into vast crystals the size of whole buildings and fell in many directions, not least toward Karris.

“Oh, shit,” Gill said.

She found herself thrown into a crack and buried under a pile of protective bodies just as chunks of razor-sharp blue luxin rained from the sky. Gill threw the shield above them, only to have it ripped away by some blow or from the vast chalky wind of gritty blue dust blasting over them.

A minute later, they stood, binding cloths over their faces so they wouldn’t breathe the sharp blue dust. Miraculously, none of them had died, though everyone other than Karris had at least small cuts from flying frostglass. The same could not be said for many hundreds of the enemy. A great portion of the tower had fallen into the bulk of the pagan army. Others had been sliced to ribbons by the sideways-flying shrapnel.

Hundreds more, farther out, couldn’t have actually been injured, but they were stunned to immobility, their wills shaken by the cataclysm that had befallen what they’d thought impervious to attack.

Others were slowly recovering, moaning under the blue dust and the rubble.

Karris gave hand signals to advance. The blues might be broken altogether—or they might recover at any moment.

Soon, Gill pointed sharply in one direction and took the lead.

That was right, Gill was almost a blue drafter; he’d barely failed his testing in it, and hadn’t tried again, afraid he would be named a polychrome and become too valuable for Blackguard service. He must be feeling something.

They climbed over the rubble of blue luxin shards, sharp enough to cut through a careless boot and the foot inside it. Not a few times, Karris felt more yielding ground beneath her foot, only to find a body, bleeding an all-too-human red into the dust.

But many, many of the wights and drafters were recovering. Far more of them than she would have imagined still seemed to be alive, even here.

Then, suddenly, they were upon her.

The Mot was still alive. Crippled and broken, she’d tried to draft luxin wings to glide from the top of her collapsing tower, but she’d been too slow.

Under the ice-blue skin, shimmering in a million facets so that it could move, Karris