The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,421

in a blink.

The reds reached the top of the wall in new places every minute, and Ferkudi spread his Mighty out. Most of the other defenders had disappeared, which at first Ferkudi thought was good—no one in his way as he ran back and forth.

Then he realized how bad it was.

One of his Mighty, Arius, went down with a leg wound. The nearest man, Amastan, flashed hand signals: Arius would live, but he’d fight no more today.

And then, inattentive for a moment while he tied a tourniquet around Arius’s bloody leg, Amastan took a spear through his armpit. Dying, Amastan clawed a pistol from the bag at his hip and handed it to the wounded Arius, even as he used his other hand to hold the spear piercing him in place. From his back, Arius shot the pagan drafter in the face, and they all collapsed on him.

Suddenly, the wall felt very, very empty.

Screaming defiance, Ferkudi reached up with his will and triggered the mirrors. He was flooded with blue light from a half-dozen directions in the waning light of the day. He jumped up on the battlements and bellowed his challenge at the Blood Robes below.

It drove them mad. Drafters who’d been unstoppably far to one side for Ferkudi to possibly fight abandoned attacking where they were and came to join the horde directly in front of him. They climbed over one another, crushing each other, making a ramp of their very bodies, heedless of everything except trying to kill him.

He hurled blue-luxin javelins into them. He broke reaching arms. He smashed faces with his knees and with his hellstone-knuckled fists. He carved great crimson wounds into their crimson bodies. Split heads with his glittering hand axes. Smashed once-men into each other. Extinguished flaming wights with blunderbuss gusts of blue luxin. Picked up wights and hurled them bodily from the walls.

But what he completely forgot was to let go of blue.

It should have helped him remember, blue should have, rational as it was.

But even blue can’t overcome the full grip of battle fury.

He didn’t remember the danger until he felt something twisting around his very will. It froze him, and locked up all the luxin in his body.

He couldn’t move. He stood with a Blood Robe’s chin in one hand, a fistful of his hair in the other, broken-necked. The dying man dropped from Ferkudi’s grip, almost taking him down with him. Better that he had. Now Ferkudi was exposed at the top of the wall, defenseless, hands extending, muscles straining against the empty air, his inchoate yell the only thing that could escape.

A red wight hopped up to the top of the wall a few paces away. His hair was slicked back to his head with white, fire-retardant gel and, uncommonly for a red wight, this man had no fresh burns or burn-scars whatsoever on his half-naked body, over which red danced and flickered. A careful red wight.

He balled fire in his hand, even as others mounted the wall and coiled to unleash it in Ferkudi’s face, when something dark and soft hit him from below. A wet cloth?

Ferkudi couldn’t even move to see where it came from. The wight threw down the wet dress—and was pierced through the ribs by a spear.

An instant later, he realized that the roaring of blood in his ears had been joined by another roar, and he heard impacts around him, saw bricks flung from inside the city pelting the Blood Robes taking the wall, and then hundreds of men streamed into view. The woman he’d seen beating at her flaming thatched roof with that wet dress pulled the spear from the wounded wight’s ribs and stabbed him with it again and again.

Then she stood, looking for Ferkudi’s approval. She looked scared and exhilarated, and her grip on the spear was all wrong.

Ferkudi noticed others claiming the top of the wall now, too: men in tradesman’s caftans, women in burnouses. They’d picked up the weapons dropped by the fleeing soldiers, and now suddenly even the soldiers were returning.

And Ferkudi was at the heart of it all. He was the frozen heart of it all.

They rallied around him, saving him, and saving themselves and their own homes.

But Ferkudi felt the blue twisting deeper into him, vengeful, seeking to still his very heart, his lungs. Breathing became slower, slower, and panic rose in him.

And then it snapped.

Mot’s hold on blue was dropped, and Ferkudi fell.

“What was that?!” Arius asked. The people had carried the