by Jim Butcher
The lords of Alera spoke in a voice of fire.
The standard assault of a skilled firecrafter was the manifestation of a sudden and expanding sphere of white-hot fire. They were generally large enough to envelop a mounted rider. Anything caught inside them would be charred to ashes in an instant. Anything within five yards would generally be melted or set aflame—and anything living within another five yards of that would be scorched beyond the capacity of a human being to sustain hostilities. The fire came with an ear-piercing hiss and vanished with a hollow boom. It would leave secondary fires and smooth depressions of molten earth in its wake.
Manifesting such an attack was extremely draining upon the furycrafter involved. Even those with the talents of Lords and High Lords counted the number of spheres he could manifest without resting in the dozens, and not many of those. Given how many vord were on the field, even with the gathered might of all Alera’s firecrafters, they could not inflict instant, significant losses upon the mass of the enemy body.
Gaius Attis had considered a way to improve on that.
Instead of the roar of full-blown fire-spheres, a flicker of tiny lights, like thousands of fireflies, sprang up ahead of the oncoming vord. A moment later, Amara began to hear a tide swell of tiny reports, pop pop pop, like the celebratory fireworks crafted by children at Midsummer. The sparkling lights thickened, redoubling, creating a low wall in front of the enemy, who charged ahead without slowing.
No single one of the little firecraftings was a deadly threat to a human being, much less to an armored warrior form of the vord—but there were hundreds of thousands of them, each one an almost-effortless crafting. As the little flowers of fire continued to blossom, the air around them began to shimmer, turning the sparkling line of lights into strip of hellishly molten air that almost seemed to glow with its own fire.
The leading elements of the vord plunged into the barrier and agonizing destruction. Their screams came up to Amara only distantly, and with a little help from Cirrus, she could see that the vord had not moved more than twenty feet across the killing oven Gaius Attis had prepared for them. The warriors staggered and collapsed, roasted alive, bits of flesh and armor cooking away and being flung up into the gale of rising hot air as ash. Tens of thousands of vord perished in the first sixty seconds.
But they kept coming.
Moving with frantic energy, the vord flung themselves in utter abandonment at the barrier, and thousands more died—but each vord that perished absorbed some of the furycrafted flame. Amara was reminded uncomfortably of a campfire in a thunderstorm. Certainly, no single drop of water could extinguish the flame. It would be boiled to steam as it tried—but sooner or later, the fire would go out.
The vord began to push through, bounding over the charred corpses of those who had come before, using as shields the bodies of their companions who were collapsing from the heat, each successive vord pushing a few feet farther than the one ahead of it.
Signals from the Crown Legion pulled the line of deadly heat back toward the Legion lines, forcing the enemy to pay the full price for those last yards of ground, but they could not bring the band of superheated air too close to the Aleran lines without exposing their own troops to the flame—which also blinded the Aleran battle commanders to the movements of the enemy. So, as the vord began to break through, another signal went up from the Crown Legion, and the massive firecrafting ceased. Seconds later, the vord joined battle with the Legions.
“They have no thought for their own lives,” said Veradis, staring down as Amara did. “No thought at all. How many of them died just now, simply so that they could reach the battle?”
Amara shook her head and didn’t answer. She hovered upon her windstream, high up in the night sky, where the air was cold and bitter. Three wind coaches carrying Aldrick and his swordsmen hovered a few yards off.
“When will the scouts return?” Veradis asked anxiously. The young Ceresian woman was only a moderately good flier, and her long hair and dress were hardly ideal for the circumstances, but she handled herself with composure. “Every moment we wait here, they could be taking her farther away from us.”
“It won’t do the First Lady any good to go charging off in the wrong direction,” Amara called back. “I don’t like them, but Aldrick’s people know their business. When one of their fliers reports in, we’ll move. Until then, we’re smartest to wait here, where we can get anywhere we need to be the most quickly.” She pointed a finger. “Look. The cyclone teams.”
Small, dark clouds of fliers swept down in ranks over the meeting of the opposing forces. As Amara watched, she saw them seizing the air, made treacherously turbulent by the extended fury of the slow-motion firecrafting the Alerans had held before the vord. Citizens and Knights Aeris seized upon that motion in the air, focusing and shaping it, each team adding its own momentum as they wheeled in a caracole down the lines, spinning the furious winds and spinning them again.
It took them only a few moments, working together—and then in half a dozen places just behind the frontmost ranks of the vord, great whirling columns of ash and soot and scorched earth writhed up from the ground. The cyclones roared, howling out a ground-scorching wail of hunger, and began to rush ram pantly through the vord ranks, seizing the creatures like ants and tossing them hundreds of feet through the air—when they didn’t drive tiny bits of detritus through their carapaces like so many diminutive arrowheads, or simply rend them limb from limb on the spot. Each cyclone was shepherded by its own team of windcrafters, each of which kept its own massive, deadly vortex from turning back upon Aleran lines. Windmanes, glowing white forms, like skeletal human torsos trailing a shroud of smoke and mist where their legs should have been, began to glide out of the cyclones and swept down to attack anything within their reach upon the earth.
Amara shook her head. She’d been trapped without shelter in a furystorm that had called up windmanes once before—and the deadly, wild wind furies had nearly torn her to pieces. Gaius Attis was creating hundreds more of the creatures with the cyclones he was harnessing, and they would haunt the region for decades, if not centuries to come, posing a threat to holders, cattle, wildlife—
Amara forced herself to abandon that line of thought. In this respect, at least, she thought Aquitaine was quite right—if the vord weren’t stopped, here, now, there wouldn’t be any holders. Or cattle. Or wildlife.
We aren’t just fighting for ourselves, she thought. We’re fighting for everything that lives and grows in our world. If we do not throw down the vord, nothing of what we know will remain. We will simply cease to be—and no one will be left to remember us.
Except, she supposed, for the vord.
Amara clenched her hands hard and restrained herself from calling upon Cirrus and flinging her own skills into the battle being fought below.
“Countess?” called Veradis in a shaking voice.
Amara looked around until she spotted the younger woman, hovering several yards farther south and slightly lower than Amara was. She altered her windstream until she had maneuvered into position beside the Ceresian Citizen. “What is it?”
Veradis pointed wordlessly at the causeway leading up from the southwest.
Amara frowned and focused Cirrus upon the task of bringing the road into clearer visibility. At first, in the dim light of the weak moon, she could see nothing. But then flickers of light farther down the road drew her attention, and she found herself staring at…
At a moving mass, on the road. That was all she could be certain of. It was different from the stream of still-coming vord warrior forms in that there was no gleam of wan light on vord armor, no regular, seething mass of creatures moving as many bodies under the control of a single mind. There were flickers of light moving amidst that body, irregular in shape, spacing, and color, or she wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all.
Amara concentrated, murmuring to Cirrus to draw the distant road even closer in her sight. It was difficult to do so while ma
intaining her windstream, but the far road sprang into focus after a moment of effort and showed Amara the last thing that she had been expecting in the vord’s train.
Furies.
The road was filled with manifest furies. Thousands, tens of thousands, of them.
The variety of the furies in sight was dizzying. Earth furies showed themselves as hummocks of stone in the road, rumbling along through the earth. Some were vaguely shaped like animals, but most were not. The largest of them pushed the entire causeway up into a single hummock as they cruised forward, moving as fast as a running horse. Wood furies bounded along the causeway, their shapes never quite matching that of any single animal or creature, but blending the traits of many—others, invisible in the trees and plants at either side of the road, could only be seen as a ripple of forward motion amidst the living things. Water furies bounded or slithered forward, some shaped like great serpents or frogs, while others were simply amorphous shapes of pure water, held together by the will of the fury inhabiting it. Fire furies rushed among them, mostly in the form of predator animals, though others were flickering forms of fire, changing from one instant to the next—it was they whose light Amara had seen. And from three to twenty feet above the surface of the road rushed a horde of wind furies. They were mostly windmanes, though Amara could see far larger wispy shapes ghosting among them, the largest in the form of a truly enormous shark that cruised through the air as if it were the sea.
So many furies. Amara felt slightly dizzied.
She dimly noted forms moving along the outer edges of the road, or flying slightly above it—captured Alerans. She realized, after a moment’s thought, that they were herding the furies below, using furycraft of their own to keep the mass of furies moving along the causeway. The driven furies were not pleased about it either. Their aggressive anger was something that Amara could practically feel pressing against her teeth.
But if they were doing that it meant…
“Bloody crows,” Amara swore. “Those are feral furies.”
Veradis stared at her with wide eyes, her face pale. “All of them? Th-that’s impossible.”
But it wasn’t. Not after months of warfare against the vord. The enemy had been indiscriminate in its slaughter. And every Aleran killed meant more furies suddenly bereft of human restraint and guidance. Somehow, the vord had gathered together bloody legions of the deadly things. And this was no problem like that of dealing with windmanes in a furystorm, easily solved by taking shelter in a building of earth and stone. If someone tried that against this mob, the earth furies would crush him in his own shelter, assuming the wood furies didn’t simply follow them in, or the fire furies turn what should have been a haven into a murderous furnace.
Feral furies were not easily intimidated or dissuaded from their violence. It required the skills of a full-blown Citizen to deal with them. It had taken Aleran Citizens centuries to pacify the settled lands of Alera, then the routes followed by the causeways.
And now several centuries’ worth of danger and death were racing toward the Aleran lines.
The Legions would never be able to stand before the hammerblow those feral furies would deliver. Simply surviving them would require all of the focus and furycraft at their command—which would mean that they would not be able to direct it toward the vord. And in a purely physical contest, the invaders would grind the Alerans to dust.
And should the feral horde shatter the Legion lines and rush through to Riva and the freemen and refugees now living there… their deaths would be violent and horrible, the loss of life enormous.
The enemy had just transformed Riva from a stronghold into a trap.
Amara felt herself breathing harder and faster than she needed. To the best of her knowledge, there were no Aleran fliers operating as high as her group. The teams covering the lower altitudes wouldn’t be able to see the oncoming threat until it was far too late to react.
Amara shivered and suppressed a desire to scream in frustration.
“Aldrick,” she snapped. “Take the Windwolves back to Riva, directly to the High Lord’s tower. Stand there to cover Lord and Lady Riva, and to respond to any emergency requiring your team’s support.” Her eyes flicked to Veradis. “Lady Veradis will explain.”
Aldrick stared at her, but only for a second. His eyes shifted down and back up, then he nodded once. He made a short series of hand gestures to one of his men, and seconds later, the Windwolves’ fliers and the coaches they carried were banking into a turn, to descend toward the embattled city at their best possible speed.
“Amara,” Veradis said.
“There is no time,” Amara replied calmly. “The enemy has those furies channeled and moving in the proper direction, but they don’t have anything like real control over them. They must have modified the causeway, somehow. Once they turn those furies loose, everything is going to change.”
“What do you mean?” Veradis asked.
“We won’t be able to hold the city,” Amara spat. “Not in the face of so many hostile furies. They’ll rip the city to shreds around us, killing our people along the way. The only thing we can do is withdraw.”
The younger woman shook her head dazedly. “W-withdraw? There’s nowhere left to go.”
Amara felt a surge of fierce pride rush through her. “Yes,” she said. “There is. You will follow Aldrick and his people. Explain to him about the feral furies. Make sure Lord Riva knows, as well.”
“B-but… what are you going to do?”
“Warn Aquitaine,” she snapped. “Stop hovering there like an idle schoolgirl and go!”
Veradis nodded jerkily, turned, and began accelerating to catch up with the Windwolves. Amara watched for a few seconds, to be sure Veradis wasn’t about to fly off in the wrong direction in sheer confusion. Then she turned, called to Cirrus, and dived, rushing down toward the far-distant earth with all the speed that gravity and her fury could give her. There was a thunderous explosion all around her as her speed peaked, and she realized that she had none of the operating passwords for the battlefield below. She would just have to hope that the combat teams patrolling the air were too slow to stop her or kill her before she could speak to Aquitaine.
Besides, that was the least of her worries.
How was she going to be able to face Bernard and tell him that for the sake of the Realm, she had chosen to leave his sister’s fate in enemy hands?
CHAPTER 17
Tavi stood at the prow of the Slive and stared ahead of the fleet as it raced across the long strip of ice laid out upon the north side of the Shieldwall. The ride was not a gentle one. Extra ropes and handholds had been added all over the ship, and Tavi only stayed standing by virtue of holding on to one supporting rope with each hand.
He had grown used to the sound of the runners screaming as they glided over the ice, a sort of endless squeal-hiss that went on and on and on. The ship juddered and shook as it raced before the unnaturally steady northwestern wind, sails rigged to catch it to best advantage. The Slive creaked and groaned with every shudder and thump. Those of her crew not terrified for dear life were frantically running up and down the ship, making constant efforts of woodcrafting to keep her timbers from shivering apart under the strain.
“There it is,” Tavi called back, pointing ahead to where a Legion javelin with a green cloth tied across its butt had been thrust into the ice. Crassus and his windcrafters had been racing ahead of the fleet, ensuring that the frozen path the Icemen had created for them remained smooth and safe.
Well. Relatively safe. The pace of the ships was faster than any travel Tavi had ever heard of, short of actual flight. They had covered the full day’s marching distance of a Legion on a causeway in the first three hours. At that speed, a patch of bare earth within the ice could catch a ship’s keel, and sheer momentum would send it tumbling end over end down the length of the vessel. The Tiberius actually had struck such a bare spot, where the ice hadn’t had time to harden properly.
Tavi
had watched in helpless horror from a hundred yards away as the vessel wavered, its wing-runners snapping off, and began to tumble, its masts snapping like twigs, its planks splintering into clouds of shattered wood—its crew being tumbled before and among the juggernaut mass of the doomed ship.
Three other ships had foundered as well, overbalanced by the wind, or by mismanagement of their sails, or by simple foul luck. Like the Tiberius, they had come to pieces. Tavi thought himself a bit cowardly for feeling relieved that at least he hadn’t actually seen it happening with his own eyes: When an ice-sailing ship went down at full speed, no one survived the wreckage. Canim and men were simply crushed and broken like limp, wet dolls.
Now the fliers were marking any spots that might cause another such accident. It was a simple precaution that had already guided them around two more potentially lethal patches of ground. Any idiot could have thought of it ahead of time, but Tavi hadn’t—and the lives of the crews of four ships, Canim and Aleran alike, now hung over him.
“The way remains smooth!” Tavi called, noting the next green-flagged javelin beyond the first. “Keep the pace!”
“Giving orders to keep doing what they’re already doing,” drawled Maximus from a few feet down the handrail. “Well, they say never issue an order you know won’t be obeyed, I suppose.”
Tavi gave Max an irritated glance and turned back to face forward. “You want something?”
“How’s your stomach?” Max asked.
Tavi clenched his teeth and stared out over the land ahead of them. “Fine. It’s fine. It’s that slow rolling that really does me in, I think.” The ship struck a depression in the ice, and the entire vessel sank, then rose sharply into the air, its runners actually clearing the ice for a fraction of a second. Tavi’s heels flew up, and only his hold on the safety ropes kept him from being slammed violently to the deck or off the ship completely.
His stomach gurgled and twisted in knots. One fine thing about being up in the prow was that the ship’s sails hid him from view of the stern. He’d already lost what little breakfast he’d had over the rail with no one the wiser. And, with the Slive running out in front of the two columns of ships sailing in neat lines behind them, the reputation of the invincibility of the House of Gaius was neatly preserved.