by Jim Butcher
“Stay here,” she told the girl, her voice hard and clear, “until you are instructed otherwise.”
“Ye-yes, my lady,” Lyssa said, pressing herself abjectly to the floor. “Yes, yes, I will.”
She turned to the window, unlocked and opened it. The window overlooked the Slave Market courtyard, which looked much as it had when she had last seen it-full of prisoners, though with rather fewer guards than there had been. Only a few Vord were in sight-but the green glow of the croach was brighter, from other parts of Ceres, than it had been the night before.
She couldn’t be sure of any of the collared Alerans. Some of them could have been collaborators like the two with Rook when they’d bumped into one another. Some of them could have been more deeply conditioned by the modified collars than others. Some might be able to fight against the collars’ control and help them-but Amara had no way to know one from another.
So she had to regard each of them as the enemy.
Amara stood in the window for a moment, fully aware that she could be seen in the candlelight of the room. Dimly outlined, feminine shapes appearing in that window would doubtless be a familiar sight to those below-and she had no way of knowing where Bernard was, to be able to give him a more specific signal. She would simply have to trust that he had been keeping track of where she had been taken and would be in position to watch the building to see her standing there like a practice target. She counted slowly to thirty, then closed the curtains again.
She went out of the room on silent feet, wrapping herself in a windcrafted veil that should keep her unseen to anyone beyond the reach of her sword-a potent advantage if she decided to attack, but not an overwhelming one. A skilled enough metalcrafter would not need his eyes to know where her sword was, and the Vord didn’t seem to have kept anyone alive who was not at least wielding the skill of a Legion Knight at his given talents.
There were several collared Alerans in the main room of the inn, apparently off duty. Three were watching one of Brencis’s whisper-girls dance to music no one but she could hear. Another trio played listlessly at cards, and a silent pair were deep in their cups, drinking with grim, methodical determination. Amara went through the room with every ounce of stealth she could muster, wary of her own balance under the befuddling aftereffects of both collars’ euphoric bonding process. She managed to pass by them without attracting attention, and glided into the Slave Market.
She headed straight for the stone box-cages that held the captured windcrafters.
The cages didn’t have locks, thank goodness, and were held closed by simple bolts. In her current condition, she wasn’t sure how quickly she would have been able to open a more complex mechanism, even though she still had her tools in a pocket on the trouser leg that had survived. Snoring came from some of the cages.
Brencis had to have been slipping them the drugs in their water. She would just have to hope that some of the Alerans inside had been aware and determined enough to refuse it, hoping for their chance at escape.
Amara and Bernard were about to give it to them.
Or at least, she desperately hoped Bernard was.
“Can you hear me?” Amara hissed into one of the slots just under the top lip of the first cage.
It took a moment for someone to answer, “Who is there?”
“I’m a Cursor,” Amara whispered. “And keep your crowbegotten voice down.”
Confused murmurs came from the cage, sleepy voices speaking in blurred words. They were immediately shushed by other voices, which probably made more noise than all of the confused murmurs together.
“Quiet,” Amara hissed, looking around, certain that someone was going to notice the muted commotion any second. “We’re going to get you out of here, but we’re going to get as many people out as we possibly can. Stay alert. Everyone who can fly in a straight line needs to be ready.”
“Open the cage!” someone rasped.
“Be ready,” Amara responded. “I’ll be back.” Then she slipped over to the next cage, and repeated the conversation. And the next. And the next.
The Vord discovered her as she reached the fifth.
She had just shushed the final stone cage filled with captives when one of the lizard-form Vord twenty yards away raised its head, whuffling in through its nose, and let out a shriek that vibrated from the stones of the courtyard.
It must have smelled the blood still on me, she thought. Most animals would react strongly to the scent of bleeding prey. She should have taken a moment to clean herself better-but it was too late for that.
Speed was everything now.
Amara dropped the veil to call upon Cirrus for speed, and slammed open the bolts to the cage before hurling herself back down the line to the next cage and repeating the process.
“Alerans!” she cried, the words oddly elongated to her altered perceptions. “Alerans, to arms!”
She slammed open the bolts to the last cage as a chorus of Vord shrieks arose around them. The captive windcrafters began shoving their way out of the cages in their wake, screaming cries of their own.
“Alera!”
“Fight, you miserable bastards!”
Only Amara’s heightened senses allowed her to see the flicker in the air above her, where the Citizens were caged under multiple layers of counters to their furycraft. There was a small explosion of sparks, where steel had met steel-and another burst of sparks, where a second arrow had struck another of the hinges on the hanging cage with impossible force and precision, and a dozen Citizens were abruptly dropped fifteen feet to the wet stones of the courtyard floor.
Sparks exploded from the second cage of hanging Citizens, and more cries went up.
“To me!” Amara cried, leaping up onto the nearest cage. “Alerans, to me!”
“Cursor, look out!” screamed someone in the darkness.
Amara whirled, sword in hand, to find the Vord that had first raised the alarm bounding toward her. She waited until it was in the air to lean far to one side, striking with Brencis’s sword, and felt the blade crunch through the Vord’s chitinous armor. She had misjudged her balance, though, crows take those bloody collars, and she fell to the stones with the Vord, bleeding vile, dark fluid, scrambling to find her.
There was a crack like a miniature thunderbolt and the creature dropped as still and dead as if crushed by an enormous hammer. One of Bernard’s arrows protruded from the base of its skull, sunk all the way to the green-and-brown fletching.
Amara looked up to see her husband leap from a low rooftop to the back of a wagon, bow in hand, and from there to the courtyard beside her. He strode to the nearest wooden cage, presumably filled with metalcrafters, and ran his hand along the top. It immediately groaned and warped and fell to pieces, freeing the prisoners inside.
“Are you all right?” Bernard asked, extending his hand to her, his eyes wide with fear. “Are you hurt?”
She took it, and he hauled her to her feet. “I’ll… yes, all things considered. I mean, I’m fine. The blood isn’t mine. It’s Brencis’s.”
“Oh,” Bernard breathed, his face sagging in nearly comic relief. “Good.”
Pleasure washed through her from the collar bound about her thigh at his approval. “Oh,” she breathed. “Love, please. Be careful of your words.”
Bernard blinked at her, then seemed to understand. His face clouded and he stepped in close to her, setting his bow aside. He growled in his throat, seized the steel collar about her throat and snapped it clear of her neck with his bare hands. “I never found the key to the first one,” he told her, kneeling. The collar about her thigh was rather a tighter fit, and his fingers felt warm and rough, sliding beneath it. “Hold still. It could cut you.”
She saw him pause for a heartbeat, and she had a wild thought that he was being tempted. He didn’t have to take the collar off her, did he? No one could except for him, after all. What if he simply left it on her? The collar pulsed with pure bliss again at the very thought, and Amara swayed on h
er feet, struggling to remember why that would be a bad thing-
And then there was another sound of snapping metal, and her thoughts were abruptly clear again.
“Foul thing,” Bernard spat, rising with the broken steel circlet in his hand.
“Vord!” screamed one of the prisoners still trapped inside a wooden cage.
One of the lizard-forms had swarmed over a nearby wall and leapt down onto one of the water-drenched cages holding the miserable firecrafters, raking at them with its talons.
Bernard spun, lifted the steel circlet, and threw it with fury-born strength. The metal struck the Vord in midlimb and ripped through it like paper. The Vord fell, shrieking and spraying filthy-looking blood all over the courtyard around it.
Amara tossed her sword to one of the freed metalcrafters as more Vord swarmed over the walls. She pointed at the other cages, and snapped, “Free them!”
“Yes, my lady!” shouted the man. He spun to the nearest suspended cage of earthcrafters and slashed it open with the fine steel blade, the bars parting in a shower of sparks, before he moved on to the one beside it.
Bernard had taken up his bow again, and Amara watched as he calmly shot a pair of oncoming Vord from the walls. “We can’t hold them,” he said. “Get the windcrafters and get them out of here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Amara retorted. “We’re all leaving together.”
“There are too many of them. Our people aren’t armed. Half of them can barely stand,” Bernard said. A vordknight buzzed down from above, and he shot it through the center of its chest. It fell to the ground like a wounded pheasant, and one of the freed earthcrafters smashed it with a heavy iron bar ripped from the walls of the cage that had recently held him.
But more Vord were coming. Many more. They swarmed over the walls from every direction, and the thrum of vordknight wings quivered in the air all around them, before materializing into half a dozen of the winged horrors, diving upon some of the still-dazed, defenseless prisoners.
A sphere of white-hot fire erupted abruptly in the air-not among the Vord, but immediately above and behind them. For an instant, Amara thought that the firecrafter’s aim and timing had been badly off, but the wash of heat blackened and curled the Vord’s relatively delicate wings, and the eruption of hot wind from the firecrafting sent them spinning and tumbling completely out of control to crash haphazardly to the ground.
“Bloody crowbegotten bugs!” roared a gravelly voice, and a blocky old man, his silver hair still shot with streaks of fiery red limped into sight, being supported by the slender, bedraggled young woman Brencis had called Flora.
“Gram?” Bernard said, surprise and delight on his face.
The old firecrafter squinted about until he spotted Bernard. “Bernard! What the crows are you doing in the south?”
Bernard shot one of the crashed vordknights who had survived the fall and risen to its feet in the courtyard. “Rescuing you, apparently.”
“Bah,” Gram growled, and Amara finally placed the old man as the previous Count of Calderon. He raised his hand and waved it in a circle, and a sheet of fire arose atop the walls surrounding the courtyard, a red-hot curtain that came from nowhere and drew howls of pain and protest from dozens of as-yet-unseen Vord. “Move to the Vale, Gaius says. Retire in wealth and comfort, he says. My ass, the crowbegotten old confidence man.” He squinted at Bernard. “Figure us a way out of this mess, boy. I can’t hold this for more than half an hour or so.”
“Half an hour?” Bernard asked, grinning.
“The wooden cages,” Amara said. “We can use them as wind coaches, long enough to get clear of the city at least.”
Bernard turned to her and kissed her hard on the mouth. Then he drew his sword and tossed it to another freed metalcrafter. He pointed at that man and the one who had taken Amara’s sword. “You, you. You’re on guard. Kill anything that gets through.” He jabbed a finger at the freed earthcrafters. “Arm yourselves with something and help.” He spun to the Citizens, gathering loosely around Lord Gram. “Anyone with any watercrafting, do what you can to help the others shake off the aphrodin, starting with Citizens and windcrafters.”
One of the Citizens, a man who would have been pompously impressive if he’d been clean, groomed, and standing in a civilized part of the world, demanded in a dazed voice, “Who do you think you are?”
Bernard took one step forward and rammed his clenched fist into the dissenter’s mouth.
The other man dropped bonelessly to the ground.
“I,” Bernard said, “am the man who is going to save your lives. You two, toss him into one of the wooden cages. He’ll slow us down less when he’s unconscious. Move it people!”
“Do as he says!” bellowed Lord Gram.
Citizens scrambled to obey.
“Bloody crows,” Amara breathed. “Do you know who that was?”
“An idiot,” Bernard said, his eyes sparkling. “He can challenge me to the juris macto later, if he likes. Shall we get to work?”
“What should I do?”
“The windcrafters and coaches. Get them ready.”
Amara nodded. “Bernard, the slaves…”
“We’ll take whoever disarms himself and wants to go,” Bernard said. “If there’s room.” He leaned down and kissed her swiftly, again, then growled, “When I get you out of here, Countess…”
A thrill ran through her that had nothing to do with furycrafted collars. “Not until we’ve both bathed. Now, don’t make me punch you in the mouth, Your Excellency.”
He winked at her, then turned, barking orders as the freed Aleran Citizens and Knights prepared to make good their escape.
* * *
Half an hour later, dozens of makeshift wind coaches sailed up from the captured city, Vord shrieking useless protest behind him. Perhaps a score of vordknights attempted to stop the coaches, but were driven away by half a dozen firecrafters, and moments later the coaches were too high and moving too swiftly for any winged pursuit to catch up with them.
Amara vaguely remembered working as hard as she could to help keep one of the coaches aloft, and bringing it in for a brutal but nonlethal landing an endless amount of time later, as the sun began to rise. Then someone put a stale piece of bread into her hand, which she ate ravenously. A moment later, there was a warm fire-a real fire, by the great furies, and its heat wrapped her in blessed warmth.
Bernard pressed her head gently down onto a cloak he’d spread on the ground, and said, “Rest, my Countess. We’ll have to move again soon. I’ll keep watch.”
Amara was going to protest that he needed rest, too, she honestly was, but the fire was beautiful and warm and…
And for the first time in weeks, Amara felt safe.
She slept.
CHAPTER 43
Tavi stood atop the earthworks and stared out across the rolling plain. His armor and helmet had been scoured clean and freshly polished by the First Aleran’s valets, and gleamed in the setting sun.
Since they had arrived the night before, thousands more refugees had appeared, and the flow of Canim makers fleeing the Vord was only growing heavier. The crafters of the Legions had made sure that there was freshwater available, but food was in much shorter supply, and shelter was almost nonexistent.
Heavy, purposeful footsteps marched up behind Tavi and stopped.
“What is it, Marcus?” Tavi asked.
“Your Highness,” Valiar Marcus replied. He stepped up beside Tavi and stood in a natural-looking parade rest. “Did you sleep?”
“Not nearly enough,” Tavi said. “But that’s going around.” He nodded at the berm that was Molvar’s only defense. “You and your people must have worked without stopping.”
“It was the Canim, sir,” Marcus replied, his voice serious. “The ground around here has got a lot more rock than earth in it. Thousands of them were out here, moving stones. I knew that some of their warriors were strong, but bloody crows.” He shook his head. “You should see what so
me of their makers can do. The ones who lift heavy things for a living, I mean.”
“Impressive?”
“Terrifying,” Marcus said. “This berm is as much rock as earth. Considering that Your Highness sent all of our engineers on a different mission, our men had to work like mad to keep up with the Canim.”
Tavi nodded. “Well, it shouldn’t have surprised us. We saw evidence enough of what they could do at Mastings, and even more since we’ve gotten here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you have the latest reports?”
“Such as they are,” Marcus said. The faintest trace of reproach laced his voice. “We could do a lot better if our Knights Aeris were available, sir.”
“They’re busy,” Tavi said. “How much time do we have?”
“The Canim mounted packs have been encountering the Vord closer and closer to the port, sire. They’re steering refugees in this direction.”
“What is the count on refugees?”
“Just over sixty thousand, give or take.”
Tavi grunted. “Has there been any contact with the main body of Lararl’s forces?”
“No,” Marcus said quietly. “But on the positive side, no sightings of the Vord main body yet, either.”
“I’d almost feel better if we had seen them,” Tavi said. “They have a way of turning up where they aren’t expected.”
“Your Highness is becoming paranoid,” Marcus said. “I approve.”
“Highness!” called another voice, and Magnus came puffing up the terraces to the top of the berm. The old Cursor’s hair was in disarray, as if from sleep, and he clutched a sealed letter in his hand. He came and passed it over to Tavi, still huffing. His eyes stayed steadily on Marcus. Marcus stolidly ignored him.
Tavi took the letter, glancing between them. “Something I should know about, gentlemen?”
“Not that I know of, sir,” Marcus said. He glanced at the old Maestro. “Magnus?”