Brent Weeks - The black prism

Maybe it had been a bad choice. Orholam, she'd abandoned Kip. A baby drafter.

Not that she could have done much to help him. At the Chromeria, they called what Kip had done going green golem. At one time, they had taught it as a war magic. No longer.

There were three problems with going green golem. First, you couldn't seal the green luxin. If you did, you couldn't move. Some drafters got around that by making big sealed plates and just holding the joints in open green. What Kip was doing was much harder. He was holding all the magic at once. It took enormous focus, and the armor was only as hard as his will. If someone broke his focus, he'd lose his armor instantly. Second, using that much green luxin burned out drafters fast. In the False Prism's War, Karris had heard of green drafters breaking the halo after going green golem only three or four times. Third, you had to be strong as a bull. The suit-the armor, the golem, whatever it was-had weight. For the drafter, it was less because their will took part of the weight, but they still had to move an enormous hunk of luxin. That said, using open green in the legs did mean that a skilled user could make enormous bounds, and once they got moving, they were nearly impossible to stop.

It all meant that Kip was more likely to get himself killed than anything. And Karris had abandoned him. Damn it. What kind of woman abandons a child?

Karris double-checked the position of the sun from the shadows. The sun was still low in the sky and these alleys were swaddled in shadows and mist. As she looked up, she was struck by it. The rooftops rose from the mists like distant, square mountain peaks reigning over the clouds. Then she saw the retreat flares. It was the color Gavin or the Blackguards were supposed to use, and she was sure that was how he was using them now. But retreat to where?

The docks. They knew they were going to lose the city. They were just trying to make King Garadul pay as heavy a price as possible. Karris didn't have much time to make sure that price was the ultimate price.

She ran into an empty house-she was pretty sure all the houses were empty here. Pushing past the leavings of chickens and several dogs, and one live skinny cow-lots of people brought their animals inside during the night, both for safety and to warm the house-she found the stairs, ran up to the family's quarters, which had been hurriedly emptied, and found the ladder to the roof.

The square, squat houses of Garriston all had these flat roofs. The roof became a third room for most families. A perfect place to cool down on the hot, long summer evenings, the commoners' only chance of catching a breeze off the Cerulean Sea. The buildings were packed tight, but by no means uniform. Not every building was three stories, and even of the many that were, the stories were different heights.

All the same, as Karris reached the roof, for one moment she was struck by the beauty of the scene. The whitewashed roofs, little squares and rectangles, gleaming in the sun, with mist curling up around every edge, churches and a few mansions rising like mountains out of the clouds, and the Travertine Palace dominating everything. Farther south, she could just see Brightwater Wall, like a golden belt around the city. Nearer, there was black smoking rising from the city wall, flashes of magic from the gates.

She shut it out. Found the market she'd been heading for. With the mist, she couldn't see enough to tell if her guess had been correct.

You've already bet Kip's life on this course, might as well see if it pays off.

Cursing herself for a fool, Karris drafted a green weapon harness, sheathed both blades on her back, messed with the harness for a second to get it to set right with the quiver and bow, cursed the torn, tight sleeves on her dress, cursed her muscular shoulders, and tore the sleeves off. She breathed. Then she sprinted to the edge of the roof and leapt.

The houses here were so close, it was an easy jump. Some homes even had planks between them so neighbors could visit each other. So long as she didn't want to cross the street, it was easy going. She ran as fast as she could. One street to clear, then another block of houses, then the market. Her eyes bounced back and forth as she approached the larger gap of crossing the street.

There! One of the houses on the other side had a significantly lower roof. Karris veered left and leapt, passing over the heads of thirty or forty Mirrormen. She hit the lower roof, rolled, popped to her feet just in time to have to leap again-to a higher roof. She hit the next roof with one foot extended. She pushed up, trying to push herself just a little higher but not stop her forward momentum.

Her body popped up, but not forward enough. She landed with half of her torso on flat, whitewashed stucco, then slid down, scrambling, trying to find purchase.

She dropped to her fingertips, on dirty, cracked, crumbling stucco. She swung sideways, lost one handhold for a second as the stucco ripped away. She latched her hand back onto the roof, a clean grip this time, and swung back the other way. Her foot reached the edge, tearing the slit of her dress up even higher. She pulled herself up quickly, not trusting that the rest of the stucco wouldn't crumble at any moment.

No time to be elated at being alive. Karris checked her swords and bow, glanced once down at the twenty-foot drop onto an uneven surface below-a broken leg there if she'd fallen, at least. Then she ran again.

She reached a roof overlooking the market and stopped. King Garadul was coming, with hundreds of Mirrormen and a few drafters-and Kip was hot on their heels. Literally.

This was going to get messy.

Karris smiled.

Kip was on fire. Someone had doused him in red luxin and lit him up.

It didn't stop him. He simply thickened the green that encased him so the red wouldn't burn through. The pyre jelly stuck to the green. He couldn't rub it away from his face, it was glued in place, implacable. But he could move the green luxin itself, so he made it swirl outward, until his eyes were clear and he could see again. Using the same technique, he swirled all of the pyre jelly to his arms and shoulders, then along his sides, so he was outlined in flame. It all took only a few moments. He thought it, and the luxin did it. Or more precisely, he willed it, and it happened.

The wildness within him was so strong that he wanted to break free of the city and run away. But he wouldn't allow it. He harnessed the wildness. The wildness would serve him. It would help him destroy the man who held the lash and the leash, the man who wanted to control him: King Garadul.

He wasn't sure that he was going the right way, but he followed the flow of King Garadul's soldiers. Kip himself was like a beacon, burning as he was in the misty morning. But the light made his vision lousy. It was like holding a torch: if you held it over your head, you might see into the darkness, but if you held it between yourself and the darkness, you weren't going to see anything at all. Kip was the torch. He couldn't see much, and he didn't care. He could see the men streaming away from him, some of them seeing him and just running like hell, but others seemed to be running toward something. A meeting place, a rallying point. Where King Garadul would be.

Kip barreled around a corner into the backs of half a dozen soldiers. They hadn't seen him and he couldn't stop. He ran right over them in a mess of screams and burning flesh and curses and blood and a struggle just to keep from falling as he stepped on body parts. He swung his arms in big sweeping motions, fire and blood and blades unleashed into a crowd.

And it was a crowd. Kip had made it. There were hundreds of soldiers here. He could see dim flashes of the winking armor of the Mirrormen on the other side of the square. Then he was subsumed, folded into the loving arms of battle. There was no morning mist. No counting of his foes. No deciphering the shouts of his enemies into plain language, orders that might help him know what was coming. There was only the roar coming from Kip's own throat, the hammering of his own heart, the pulsing life that was his magic. There was only the burning in his muscles, the resistance his arm felt as a bladed arm cut into a man's torso, and the freedom as he pulled it all the way through.