by Jim Butcher
“Tavi,” Isana said, her voice suddenly fierce. “My son.”
They fell quiet, and everyone listened to the distant sound of trumpets and firecrafting. Each sounded both near and far away by turns. Minutes crawled by in which nothing changed.
Then the exhausted Lady Aria, still slumped beneath the holes in the ceiling, drew in a sharp breath, and staggered back, crying, “Vord!”
And, as quickly as that, half a dozen mantis warriors came flooding into the hive.
CHAPTER 52
Fidelias sat upon his horse, keeping pace with the weary infantry of the Legions, and watched the most desperately aggressive military action he’d ever witnessed begin to play out.
The enshrouding mist complicated matters. The knot of Canim ritualists who kept pace with the command group muttered and snarled to themselves constantly. Every so often, one of the Canim would slice at himself with a knife and fling droplets of blood into the air. The drops vanished as they flew, presumably to maintain the misty shroud that would hide their precise location from the enemy.
Of course, it also meant that Fidelias couldn’t see his own bloody troops once they were a few hundred yards away. They’d had to work out several chains of couriers to relay signals between the units that had traveled out of sight of the command group. Even now, signals were coming in: Attack under way, light enemy resistance. Apparently, the vord Queen had left a few alert guardians among her sleeping brood—probably posing as sleepers. At least, that was how Fidelias would have done it.
The front ranks of Legion infantry had reached the old steadholt, and the most experienced cohort of the Free Aleran, together with the First Aleran’s Battlecrows, reached the gates and a broken-down section of the wall, respectively.
“Now,” Fidelias said to the trumpeter behind him.
The man raised his horn and sounded the charge. Other horns throughout both Legions took up the same call, and the sudden roar from nearly four hundred throats joined the voices of the trumpets as the two assault cohorts rushed the old steadholt, while the rest of the Legions moved up to support them. As they did, windstreams roared behind him, and Gaius Octavian and the First Aleran’s Knights Aeris took to the air.
A second later, there was an earsplitting cry, metallic, alien, and furiously hostile. It froze Fidelias’s throat and locked his limbs into place for an instant. His horse shuddered and danced nervously, nearly knocking him from the saddle. All around him, he could see the same expression of dread and confusion marking the faces of the officers and the men. Even the Canim’s mutterings had slowed to a trickle of soft sounds that fell from between their teeth.
“Sound the charge,” he rasped. It was hard to force himself to make that much noise, so intent were his instincts to avoid attracting the attention of whatever had made that sound. He looked over his shoulder at the dumbstruck trumpeter, whose face was as white as everyone else’s. Fidelias had played the role of Valiar Marcus for far too long to be stricken silent. He drew upon Marcus’s strength, stiffened his spine, drew in a deep breath, and bellowed, “LEGIONARE! SOUND THE CHARGE!”
The soldier stiffened as if Fidelias had slapped him and jerked his trumpet to his lips. He puffed out a weak breath of sound, and Fidelias turned to him and broke his centurion’s baton over the man’s helmet. Shocked by the blow, the man dragged in a deep breath and blasted out the trumpet call, loudly enough to hurt Fidelias’s ears.
Other trumpets took it up, and the momentary pause in the advance was over. Forty thousand infantry and cavalry resumed their motion, as a windstream larger and more powerful than any Fidelias had ever seen erupted from behind the old steadholt’s walls and rushed out over the fields of sleeping vord, bearing a pale figure in a dark cloak, already vanishing into a windcrafted veil.
The Queen shrieked again, farther away, and Fidelias ordered the trumpeter to continue sounding the attack. Reports started flashing in from the courier lines: Battlecrows heavily engaged. Horse cavalry light resistance. Taurg cavalry inflicting heavy casualties with no resistance. And the last had come with the signal he’d been dreading. Canim infantry heavily engaged by mobile enemy. And, only a moment after that, Enemy aerial forces in Legion strength, inbound.
That tore it. Against a sleeping enemy, they’d had a chance. But if the enemy was waking, and if, as Fidelias dreaded, the Queen had summoned reinforcements, they could be in for it. He was willing to die, if it was necessary to save Alera—but as far as his experience had taught him, a living, fighting solider was almost always more valuable to his Realm than a dead one.
The Aleran infantry had been tasked to take the steadholt. He would simply have to expedite matters. They couldn’t have fitted a fraction of the forces there into the steadholt, but at least it would provide a solid object against which the other forces in the field could put their backs—if it could be taken quickly enough.
Fidelias signaled for the Prime Cohort to move, sending them in after the first two, along with a pair of Knights Terra and Ferrous attached to the unit, with orders to support the Battlecrows and secure the steadholt with all due speed. Then he turned to the Canim.
“Master Marok,” he said. “There are significant enemy forces inbound. We need to secure the steadholt immediately. Are you willing to help?”
Marok flicked his ears in the affirmative and began loping calmly toward the steadholt. Fidelias and the command group followed him. Fidelias unlimbered the Canim balest from its holder upon his saddle, more a gesture of habit than of any real intent. He was unused to ordering things done at this level rather than doing them himself.
The interior of the steadholt was chaos. Vord rushed and darted everywhere, wax spiders and warriors alike, boiling out of windows and doorway, skittering across rooftops, rushing along the walls. The Battlecrows had formed into two separate squares with iron-hard discipline, defending themselves from attackers and moving, step by step, closer to what was obviously their objective—the mouth of the large stone barn. A furycrafted ramp sloped down into the earth below its flooring. It was often an area used for cool storage on a steadholt. The barn’s interior was shadowed, but a steady green glow emerged from two holes in the barn’s flooring.
The cohort from the Legion of ex-slaves hadn’t done as well as the veteran Battlecrows. Through whatever fortunes of war, they had not been able to lock into a defensive formation when swarmed by the vord. Half of them were dead, or isolated in odd corners of the steadholts, desperate rings of half a dozen men fighting a remorseless enemy. The other half had managed a defensive square, but it was a ragged one—the mantises were steadily picking it apart.
“Master Marok!” Fidelias called. He pointed at the rapidly disintegrating formation of the Free Aleran. Sensing weakness, the vord were attacking more ferociously and in greater numbers. “If you please!”
Marok stepped forward with four other Canim wearing vord-chitin mantles rather than those made of human leather. He snarled something in a language Fidelias did not understand, and the five ritualists drew their daggers in a single, simultaneous motion. A similar movement laid open a long cut upon each of their forearms, bloodying the bright steel of the daggers. They all threw their arms up, scattering droplets of blood to the sky, where they flickered and vanished—until with a single unified howl they lowered their arms—and the misty sky suddenly boiled with dark clouds and fell in time with the ritualists’ arms.
Something like a thundercloud fell over the beleaguered Free Aleran cohort, a mass of dark grey. Fidelias thought he could see things writhing within it, sinuous shapes and flickering tentacles.
The vord within the cloud began to shriek and wail in distress.
Marok watched the cloud intently for a moment, then threw his bleeding arm out again, scattering droplets of blood into the darkness of the cloud, crying, “It is enough! The demons are not for you!” in Canish.
The cloud went still. The brisk spring wind soon began dispersing it, and when it had all washed away a moment later, t
he Free Aleran legionares stood entirely alone, with confused, stunned looks on their faces, their chests heaving for breath.
There was no sign whatsoever of the vord who had been attacking them.
Marok turned to face Fidelias and took on the posture of a Cane waiting for the answer to a question.
“Impressive,” Fidelias said.
“Clouds of acid are for amateurs,” Marok replied. He glanced over his shoulder at most of the other ritualists, who continued their steady chant and occasional self-bloodletting. None of them looked at him. Marok growled in unmistakable satisfaction.
The four Knights attached to the Prime Cohort broke with their unit and crossed the courtyard to join the first square of the Battlecrows. Centurion Schultz, supporting a dazed-looking young Tribune with blood sheeting over half his face, saw them coming and brought them into the lines at once. Then he put the four men at the “point” of the square’s corner, wheeled it into a diamond relative to the second square, and began a steady march forward, using the devastating power of the Knights to cut a path through the vord. Within a moment, the two blocks of Battlecrows had rejoined, and they turned their efforts toward advancing, an implacable block of steel and swords that hacked and chopped its way step by bloody step into the barn.
There was a shriek and a sudden rush of pressure as dozens of warriors flung themselves at the Battlecrows in wholehearted, berserk determination to cut the invaders down, and for a moment the Battlecrows slowed. But then, abruptly, an apparition materialized from the darkness of the barn, a black shadow against the green light in the form of a man. The figure began to move, and suddenly strode out into the light, a completely metallic form the likes of which Fidelias had never seen and only once heard about. Fidelias recognized him at a glance—Araris Valerian, one of the deadliest blades in the Realm, a man whose sword had made him a legend before he’d gotten out of his mid-twenties.
Fidelias had never seen a furycrafter do what Araris had done, though.
The first vord warrior he approached never knew he was near. Araris’s sword clove the legs from one side of its body, then swept its head from its trunk before it could finish falling.
The next vord spun to face the steel swordsman. Its plunging scythe struck Araris on his left shoulder and shattered like a length of desiccated wood. Araris parried the second scythe aside, split the creature’s head with his sword, and kicked the vord’s corpse, still thrashing dangerously, into the crowd of its brethren trying to stop the Battlecrows.
The vord broke, then, rushing back into the barn—but their flight took them within reach of Araris Valerian’s blade. The swordsman never seemed to move with any particular speed—only a fluid, delicate grace entirely at odds with his statuelike appearance. And yet, his sword always seemed to move swiftly enough, no matter how quickly the vord might attempt to evade him. He dropped the first several, it seemed, merely to slow the escape of the others, and his blade and those of the Battlecrows took a heavy toll of the remaining vord. No more than half a dozen of them had survived to flee back into the barn.
Araris nodded at Schultz and looked wildly around him. “Marcus!” he called, his voice buzzing oddly. He tossed a stone from his hand into a long arc, and Fidelias snatched it out of the air. He could feel the tingle of a firecrafting in it—a signal flare, most likely. “The First Lady, and three others are trapped in the hive, wounded. They need to be taken to the stronghold at Garrison immediately. There’s the flare for their escort. Lord Placida may be down at the bottom of that ramp. Find him.”
Then he spun on one heel and began a heavy run back toward the green-lighted holes in the barn floor.
“Schultz!” Fidelias barked, tossing the stone to the centurion, who caught it handily enough. “Get that to some open ground and set it off!”
“Yes, sir!” Schultz said. He looked around the havoc within the courtyard a bit blankly, then seemed to be struck by an idea. He muttered something to the stone and hurled it up to fall onto the flat stone roof of the barn. A few seconds later, there was a loud hissing sound, and brilliant blue-white light blazed from the flare.
“Fine,” Fidelias said. “Get a detail to the bottom of that ramp.”
“Aye, First Spear,” Schultz said, and began bawling assignments to his men.
Fidelias watched it happen and shook his head. “Never rains but it pours.”
Between the mopping-up combat in the courtyard, the ongoing trumpet cries to attack, and the sound of the bloody flare all but burning a hole into the flat stone roof of the barn, Fidelias didn’t hear the approaching windstream until Princeps Octavian had all but slammed into him. Flying backward and upside down, Octavian was hauling Kitai through the air, her back against his chest as he came in to land in the courtyard. His heels struck first, digging a furrow in the hard soil, then slipped out from beneath him. He slid across the ground on his back until he fetched up against the inner side of the steadholt’s wall with a grunt.
“Marcus!” Octavian bellowed. “She’s hurt! Get a medico over here, now!” He thrashed his way a bit awkwardly to his feet, lowering Kitai gently to the ground as he went. He spun and threw his right arm up, dragging with it a sheet of earth and stone more than a foot thick, raising it up into a shielding dome just as a flash of green-white lighting ripped out of the mists. It struck the improvised wall and shattered it, but when the debris settled, Octavian remained standing over the wounded Marat woman. “Bloody crows, Marcus!” he bellowed. “I’m a little busy here!”
Marcus kicked a team of singulares and a Prime Cohort medico to rush over to Kitai. As soon as Octavian saw that, he took two steps and leapt off the ground and into flight, vanishing into the mists. A second windstream, far larger and more violent, swept over the courtyard, clearly in pursuit.
“Marcus!” bellowed Araris in an iron voice from within the barn. “I need more men here!”
“First Spear, First Spear!” said a young legionare frantically. He made a series of frantic gestures.
“Bloody crows, boy, I’m standing right here!” Marcus snapped. “Tell me!”
“Enemy infantry,” the boy panted. “At least thirty thousand, here in two minutes. Enemy airborne troops have been delayed by the Knights Pisces, and will arrive at the same time, approximately seven thousand. Sir, what do we do?”
Two minutes?
Two minutes?
Nearly forty thousand vord were inbound—and his own troops were scattered all over the terrain, out of sight of each other in the fog. They would be swallowed whole in detail.
Bloody crows, what had Octavian gotten him into?
If both he and that young man survived the day, which was looking increasingly unlikely, Fidelias thought, he might be forced to kill him on general principles.
CHAPTER 53
“Count Calderon,” Ehren said, “I know not everything is as it seems. But I would truly love to know why the fact that we’re about to get crushed by that pair of vordbulks is not as it seems. I mean, I thought it would have been obvious by now.”
“Crows,” Bernard breathed quietly. His face was tight with tension. “They must have missed the Queen.”
“What?” Ehren asked.
A seventy-pound boulder went whizzing past them, hurled by one of the hulking behemoths accompanying the vordbulks. It missed them by no more than a foot and smashed into the wall of the tower behind them, sending a webwork of cracks into the stone.
“Bloody crows!” Ehren cried.
“The High Lords and…” He swallowed, and seemed to ignore the near miss. “And my wife learned where the vord Queen was.”
“Oh,” Ehren said quietly. The obvious move would have been to attempt to end the war immediately—a decapitating strike. Had it happened, the vord would not now be operating with such focus and direction. It was, therefore, reasonable to assume that the strike had failed. Given how critical it was, Ehren judged it unlikely that the High Lords would have done anything but fight to the death. And Countess A
mara, while a skilled windcrafter, had been by far the person least able to defend herself against a threat like the one the Queen represented.
“I see,” Ehren said quietly. A moment later, he added, “I think it’s more likely that the Queen escaped than that they were all killed, Your Excellency. I’m sure your wife is all right.”
Bernard shook his head. “Thanks for lying, son.”
Ehren grimaced.
“Well,” Bernard said. He turned to look at the damage the boulder had done to the tower. “If the High Lords haven’t done the job, we’ll just have to handle it ourselves, won’t we?”
He disappeared inside the tower and emerged a moment later with a great, black bow as long as he was tall, its staves thicker than Ehren’s forearms, and a war quiver packed with arrows. Count Calderon took a deep breath. Then he grunted and bent the great bow, leaning into it with the whole of his body. He strained with fury-born strength to bend the bow far enough to set its string—which was more like a cable as thick as Ehren’s smallest finger.
Calderon let up on the bow gingerly and let out a huge exhale. The veins on his neck were standing out, and his face was red with the exertion. Ehren looked around nervously as Count Calderon readied the weapon.
The battle on the outer wall was still going well, as battles went, the legionares holding steady. The fight on the northern bluff had slowed the vordbulk dramatically—Cereus and the Citizens he led had been steadily assaulting the monstrous beast with every form of furycraft imaginable.
Dozens of square yards of its chitinous hide had been burned away. Trees swayed and bowed, lashing out with their limbs like enormous clubs, but the black chitin-armor seemed to absorb the impacts readily. Spikes rose from the ground to pierce the vordbulk’s feet, but the beast had begun dragging its feet forward, shattering the stone spikes before they could pierce it—and anyone coming close enough to the enormous creature to attempt to bring up the spikes beneath one of the monster’s planted feet was viciously assaulted by the vord protecting it.