The dog’s heads sizzled in Orholam’s obliterating light, and his whole body burnt like any man’s—at least that of any man with three blackened dogs’ skulls attached to three necks.
For Karris, the moment stretched like a raindrop about to fall off a leaf, bulging, heavy with intent.
No one even breathed. The civilians had ducked back, cowering, and for this precious instant they still disbelieved. The Blackguards had weapons drawn—as did Karris herself, all unknowing, her other hand out to them, signaling no.
A collective gasp passed over the crowd in the next moment. It was disbelief. Literal incredulity: Did I actually see that? Did you see that?
But it was undeniable. The skeletal remains had three heads.
And then the collective question: What the hell was that?
What the hell is that?
Karris gave a signal, and finally the mirrors turned away.
When the light faded, there reigned a baffled quiet. The audience held mirrors in nerveless fingers, forgetting to turn them away. Still no one spoke.
And then children started weeping—and not only children, but men and women, too.
Karris had always been fast. Not being big or strong, she’d taken to heart early the lesson her trainer had given: it’s often not who hits hardest who wins, but who hits first. So she ignored the terror raging in her own stomach, the knee-weakening, bile-churning confusion.
“Orholam be praised!” she shouted, throwing her hands over her head. Don’t look shaken, look triumphant.
“Orholam invictus,” Andross Guile said quietly behind her. Of course he was the next fastest to move. Even he hadn’t expected this.
“Orholam invictus!” Karris shouted. Orholam the invincible, the unconquered.
“Orholam invictus!” the crowd roared.
What they’d seen wasn’t a monster, Karris proclaimed.
What they’d seen was a monster vanquished by Orholam’s light.
The crowd roared as Karris had never heard before, and the crisis was averted.
And though nothing she had done had been intended to aggrandize herself, she saw the truth of what Orea Pullawr had once told her: a small woman standing next to a great light casts a long shadow.
From that day forth, the people no longer referred to Karris as Karris White Oak or Karris Guile, and only rarely as Karris White. She wasn’t the new White, or the Blackguard’s White, or Gavin Guile’s widow, or the girl who had caused the False Prism’s War.
The people loved her.
They called her the Iron White.
Chapter 31
On the sixth day, at the fourth hour after dawn, exactly 558,032 seconds since she had first touched the superviolet seed crystal, Liv rose from the stones of the great promontory overlooking the Everdark Gates. She had once been Aliviana Danavis, daughter of General Corvan Danavis, child of Rekton in Tyrea, discipula of the Chromeria, later rebel and Blood Robe—naïf entangled in the schemes of powerful men. Who she was now, she wasn’t sure.
But she’d decided she was about to become something different. Something other.
Phyros lay dead and rotting still where she’d killed him. He’d given her the option of slavery or death. Do what I want or I’ll make you regret it, he’d said, as had so many men in her life.
She’d been attracted to him, before he’d betrayed her. Now she felt nothing. The insistent wind here on the mountain blew away all his stench, and she had neither time nor strength to bury him or even drag him away. Not while she had to think.
The superviolet that people thought so cold and brutally rational was to her a warm blanket. Not least literally. She was here to think and not to move until she decided which way of moving would be most efficient and which objectives would in turn attain at least a plurality of her desires, but she was still embodied. A woman could freeze to death up here in the cold wind, even on a summer night. A series of overlapping thin shells to trap a layer of air warmed by her own heat was enough for that.
Irritatingly, the body had other demands, and amid her deeper concerns, she kept forgetting about eating. She’d lost a fair amount of weight, and she’d now reached the end of the provisions she and Phyros had brought.
But she hadn’t been wasting her time. The Color Prince had wanted her to be a god and his slave. The slave part was simple to figure out.
The necklace Phyros had tried to force her to wear was a fragment of living black luxin, somehow controllable at a distance or imbued with will. At his command or at her removal of the necklace, the stone would cut through her neck. Presumably it would also work on gods—unless it was a very, very reckless bluff. She’d used a stick to put it in a bag, as if it were a serpent. She didn’t want it anywhere close to her until she understood it.
The god portion was harder to comprehend. She was, quite clearly, no god.
Holding the seed crystal helped her think more clearly, to notice when she was going in circles mentally, and it let her see the superviolet light around her at all times without having to constrict her eyes. But that was all.
That wasn’t enough.
Finally, she’d come to understand that the god portion was impossible for her to comprehend in her present state. The seed crystal was incarnitive; to harness its full powers, she needed to integrate it with her body.
To do that, she had to break the halo.
Her gut twisted again at the very thought. Growing up, she’d always thought breaking the halo was pretty much the same as dying. The two were always inextricable. Breaking the halo on purpose was tantamount to suicide.
Despite all she’d learned of the Chromeria’s lies, those were still her foundational truths, ruts in the streets of her mind. To be fair, even in the Color Prince’s camp, it was known to be very, very dangerous. Even the Color Prince had had to put down some drafters who attempted too much too soon.
Not that she herself was so far from breaking the halo anyway. A few more battles, or a couple of years without them. She’d used superviolet wantonly in her time with Zymun. It had stilled her terror, given her poise, and she had relied on it utterly.
Had relied on it from her own weakness, truth be told.
Her own weakness was the enemy now, and the only way to overcome that was to become a goddess.
The Danavis motto was Fealty to One. Her father had lived by that, at least for a while, and it had done him no good. Her uncles and grandparents before him had served some fool lord and lost everything. Fealty to One? More like Fealty to None. There is only one to whom I will have fealty: myself.
So she would become a goddess—for herself, not for them. The Chromeria said that the sin associated with superviolet was pride. This wasn’t pride. This was power, and Liv chose power now with all her heart, mind, soul, and strength.
With the superviolet seed crystal in one hand, she streamed great gulps of alien, logical light and let it suffuse her body. She became a waterfall, a cataract of the invisible and barely visible purplish light.
She felt her body reach its boundary. No one had talked to her about this. Wasn’t that strange? When the price for stepping too far was death, that no one in the Chromeria explained exactly how you could tell when you’d reached the edge of the precipice?
No, those fearmongers were ignorant. More worried about paying homage to their sky puppeteer than about paltry matters of life and death for hundreds of drafters every year.
To hell with them.
She would have said it was like giving birth—reaching a crisis and then pushing through—except she had never given birth and never would. There was a sense of building energy, building resistance, of moving with agonizing slowness suddenly, like what athletes called hitting the wall—
And then.
Parts of her mind seemed to blow apart. She felt or heard something in her, and it felt as if her eyes were bleeding.
It was like when she’d first tried ratweed and smoked far, far too much to impress some so-called friends. First
was the sense of having done something really, truly wrong to her body. Then came a rush of euphoria so strong it threatened to carry her away. This felt like the way a deep draft of brandy on an empty stomach set fire to your body, except this started from her head and rushed through her limbs, her eyes hot and cold, the drafting scars on her hands freezing, every pathway through her blood alive and tingling like a first kiss.
She gulped deep breaths and tamped the corners of her hot eyes.
For a long time, she didn’t dare move. Didn’t dare look to see if her hands had come away from her eyes bloodied or worse. She knew that when she started, everything would be different.
Non serviam, she thought. I shall not serve.
Nor would she have to. She felt connected now, not a part of a greater whole, but the mistress of it. A spider feeling vibrations in her web. And one such vibration was before her. A magical creature of some sort? Bound to her?
She couldn’t yet decipher all that her new feelings were telling her. It was like stretching a new pair of arms, opening a new pair of eyes, suddenly standing three times as tall and having to learn to run again. She opened her eyes slowly, feeling the qualities of the light streaming over her.
She looked first at her hand. It was unbloodied. Whatever had changed her hadn’t injured her. Then she saw him.
Hands clasped behind his back, a tiny man who came no higher than her chin stood before her. He had golden-etched skin that sparkled in the cold sun.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Your humble slave, Mistress. How do you wish me to address you in your magnificence?”
But she ignored the question. “I have duties for you,” Liv said.
“Of course, Mistress.”
Chapter 32
Not many archers were brazen enough to try a head shot on a sentry. Too many bones, too many angles that could deflect even a perfectly aimed arrow. A man could turn his head fractionally even in the time it took an arrow to fly. Most archers thought such a shot was foolish. Especially on a sentry wearing a helmet. Especially in the gathering dark of an evening.
But Winsen was different. Danger was an abstraction too alien for him to grasp. Sometimes it seemed he couldn’t even conceive of the possibility of his failing, much less the consequences of such a failure.
He had disappeared into the brush minutes ago, saying he’d take care of the sentry. Kip could see where Winsen had to be, but with their camouflage in the dim woods, he couldn’t make him out at all.
The sentry was walking the deck of a light-hulled scout boat, which had been drawn up on the bank about fifty paces downstream from where two huge barges floated in the river, tied to the bank with many ropes, with ingenious walkways spiderwebbed out to them for loading grain.
Given how low the barges were sitting in the water, this was not the foraging party’s first stop; they were laden with some cargo already. If they were sunk, it would be a more significant blow against the Color Prince than Kip had originally thought.
Kip was hiding behind a mossy stone with Big Leo and Ferkudi. The air felt humid and full. Cruxer had left to climb the ridge that separated this fork of the river from the waterfall and the village of Deora Neamh.
Cruxer crept back now, putting his back to the broad trunk of a pine tree.
“Things aren’t quite going according to plan,” Cruxer told Kip. “Conn Arthur seized the warehouse rather than attacking and falling back. Must have been a weaker defense there than we expected. He set fire to two barges identical to these at their docks. Saw three other barges burnt out, different design, though, so the town already had burnt their own. White King’s people brought barges with them.”
Worse luck for them, now that the Conn Arthur had burnt them, but it also meant this foraging party was larger than Kip had hoped. “Reinforcements?” Kip asked.
“I saw maybe two hundred soldiers from up here headed down the trail. They should be close enough to the waterfall by now that it will mask whatever noise we make. But if they look back, they’ll be able to see any smoke until they get to the base of the falls. Their main camp is farther down in the valley, not up here. They have probably another two hundred soldiers and only Orholam knows how many wights and drafters down there. I don’t know if Conn Arthur has any idea how many people he’ll soon be facing.”
“He’s got his orders. We have to trust him to figure it out.” Besides, Kip was the only superviolet drafter they had up here, and there was no time for him to climb the ridge and signal.
Cruxer made the sign of the seven and muttered a quick prayer. Kip mimicked him. They’d need all the help they could get.
Then Kip turned and peeked over the rock just in time to see a sentry’s helmet fly into the air—off the head of a sentry Kip hadn’t even seen. Before that helmet even landed, the other sentry dropped instantly, an arrow angled through the back of his neck up through his forehead.
Winsen popped up from the ground—he’d been lying on his back to get the right angle for the two shots, and he’d crawled into the very shadow of the scout boat to do it.
Kip and the Mighty leapt over their mossy boulder and bolted toward the boats. Before they even reached the scout boat, Winsen had scrambled aboard with the dexterity of an acrobat. A third sentry, who had been seated below, rose to see why his comrades had disappeared, only to find Winsen’s knife rammed into his kidney and a hand over his mouth.
Letting go of his knife for one moment while he still held the dying man tight against himself with his left hand, Winsen waved them on—no other opposition here—so they ran directly to where the barges were moored.
A campfire was being lit not far from the planks leading to the barge, and half a dozen men were standing around or helping clean up camp, or cleaning muskets or repairing armor or preparing food.
They didn’t see the Mighty zigzagging toward them, breaking the sight line with what trees they could, but mostly closing the distance as quickly as possible. Cruxer easily outpaced the rest of them until he stopped suddenly, tossing a small ball the size of his fist in a high arc. It landed just beyond the fire with a sound like shattering glass as the blue luxin Kip had drafted broke open. The men at the fire turned instinctively to see what it was—and the flashbomb’s yellow luxin exploded into brilliant, blinding light.
Kip was looking at the Mighty when the flashbomb geysered its light, and the light etched every one of them in his memory. Long-legged, supple Cruxer was hurdling a fallen tree with the grace and ease of a stag while carrying a long slender spear. Big Leo ran with all the stealth of an avalanche, and just as much frightening speed. The man managed to sprint while carrying a tower shield, and his short black beard was split by his ferocious, eager smile. Big, dopey Ferkudi sprinted with each hand streaming luxin like smoke, green in his left, blue in his right. It was usually a sign of poor drafting—all that luxin lost—but it was scary as hell. Ferkudi’s face showed an expression closest to regret. Ferk wasn’t a born killer.
Or maybe it just pained him to be thinking so hard.
At twenty paces out, Kip threw his hands forward and hurled all his weight into shooting two brightwater missiles. He’d taken what he could draft competently and brought it together. Namely, he could now make solid yellow into unbreakable blades, and he could shoot the Great Big Green Bouncy Balls of Doom, which were good for knocking people over, but not much else. On the other hand, throwing an orb of yellow blades or a ball of yellow spikes was pretty much impossible without cutting yourself to pieces. So he encased yellow blades in a green ball and shot that from his right hand, and yellow spikes inside a green ball and shot that from his left.
They worked differently. The orb of spikes caught a man in the armpit as he staggered, covering his blinded eyes. The green luxin bent and then broke apart, and the spikes stuck into him, caving in his ribs and sticking. The orb of blades hit another man in the face, the green luxin flexing in, a blade slashing a cheek, and then it bounced off him, caroming into the n
eck of another man, and then off into the woods.
The transference of momentum had brought Kip to a halt, so as he prepared his next attack, the Mighty thundered past him.
Cruxer went for two men on the periphery who hadn’t been blinded. One was a blue wight, just beginning his transformation, who still had the face of a man but wore no tunic, his chest a rippling crystalline wonder better than skin, impervious to the elements.
But not impervious to steel.
Cruxer buried the spear through the wight’s chest and spun, instantly, snapping off his dual-bladed spear at its blue luxin haft on purpose, like a bee leaving its stinger in its victim. The other leaf-blade of Cruxer’s spear slashed through a green wight’s arm and into his chest and out again, so light and thin and fast it barely slowed. The spear spun up into a javeliner’s hold, flinging blood in a circle, and then Cruxer hurled it into the back of a man rushing for the camp’s cone-stack of muskets.
An arrow pierced the same man before he even hit the ground, and Kip saw that Winsen had taken up an overwatch position behind them with his bow. Fifty or sixty paces was an easy shot for the little archer, and he was picking off anyone who seemed like they might be getting away or about to raise an alarm.
Before Kip, newly rearmed, could make it to the campfire to join Ferkudi and Big Leo, the battle here was suddenly over. There was a splash from one of the barges and a yelp from the other.
A man had fallen into the water at the nearest barge, and on the other, a soldier was staring at Winsen’s arrow buried in his thigh. Another arrow streaked through the air above him as he stooped to look at the curious marvel. But Winsen’s next arrow dove through his stomach.
Bless Winsen, his distance had helped him not get the tunnel vision Kip had.
But Ferkudi had never paused. Running across the web of planking and lines, Ferkudi got to the arrow-pierced man just after he fell out of sight behind a low gunwale.