by Jim Butcher
Until the taken began throwing salt at them.
Windcrafters screamed in agony as the salt crystals ripped holes through their furies, dispersing and weakening them. Several made it off the ground and managed to escape—but most didn’t. Though the Legions tried to push forward to shelter the exposed Knights Aeris, they had lost too much of their momentum to reach them in time. In seconds, the masters of Alera’s skies were all but drowned in armored bodies and hacking limbs.
And then the true death blow fell.
Crows by the tens of thousands suddenly plummeted into the capital’s streets, buildings, and rooftops. Several of the creatures even fell to the stones of the balcony upon which Ehren stood. The crows, upon landing, fluttered in bizarre spasms, then went still.
Ehren and the others stared around the balcony and out at the city, perplexed.
“Great furies,” Ehren breathed. “What was that about?”
Gaius’s pensive frown suddenly froze in place. His eyes widened slightly, and he said, “No. Cursor, ware!”
The bodies of the crows erupted with Vord takers.
They weren’t impressive things to look at. Each was about the size of a scorpion, and vaguely resembled one, except for dozens of flailing tendrils sprouting from all parts of its body. They were swift, though, as quick as startled mice, and half a dozen of the things scuttled toward those upon the balcony in a blur of green-black chitin.
Ehren spun and stomped a foot down upon one of the takers, and slapped a second from the back of his thigh. One of the couriers stomped at another one, missed, and lost his balance. Three takers swarmed up his body, and, as he cried out in surprise and revulsion, one of them plunged into his mouth.
The man screamed once, and then fell backward in convulsions, his eyes rolling back into his head. Another cry died as it was born—and then his eyes went flat, and swiveled toward the First Lord. He came to his feet and lurched at Gaius.
Ehren flung himself in between the First Lord and the taken courier. He seized the man’s tunic, and with a panicked effort of his entire body the young Cursor threw the doomed courier over the balcony railing.
There was a bright flash of light, a crackling snap, and the sharp smell of ozone. By the time Ehren was finished blinking the spots from his eyes, he realized that several takers lay curled up and dead on the balcony floor. The First Lord stood over them, his right hand out, flickers of lightning dancing between his spread fingers.
“Crows,” Gaius said simply, glancing up at the nearly empty sky. “I didn’t spare them a second glance.”
Screams began to echo up through the city. Not a minute later, a house or a garden one tier below the citadel level caught fire.
Outside the city, the Vord’s collared crafters came onto the field. They drove forward toward Aquitaine’s forces, and the redirected river began to waver and writhe like a vast, living serpent.
A scream of agony echoed through the halls of the Citadel, behind them.
“Never a second glance,” Gaius said, sighing quietly. Then he raised his voice to a tone of firm command. “Clear the balcony.”
Everyone there withdrew, except for Ehren. Gaius went to the balcony’s edge and stared down at Aquitaine’s desperate Legions. The High Lord had already realized his predicament, and his men were executing a fighting retreat, struggling to get away from the Vord before they were cut off, drowned, or overwhelmed.
Gaius bowed his head for a moment, then looked up again, and calmly took a pair of folded, sealed envelopes from his jacket. He passed them to Ehren.
Ehren blinked and looked down at it. “Sire?”
“The first is for my grandson,” Gaius said simply. “The second, for Aquitaine. There’s a tunnel concealed behind my desk in my mediation chamber in the deeps. It exits two miles north of the city, on the road to the Redhill Heights. I want you to take the messages and Sireos and go.”
“Sire,” Ehren said, “no, I couldn’t . . . We should all go. We can retreat toward Aquitaine or Riva and prepare a better—”
“No, Ehren,” Gaius said quietly.
Another scream echoed through the citadel.
“I’ll be dead before we can establish another stronghold—and the seat of my power is here,” Gaius said. “This is where I can hurt them the most.”
Ehren’s eyes stung and he looked down. “We’re to sound the retreat then?”
“If we do,” Gaius said quietly, “there’s no chance of the queen’s exposing herself. Their forces will disperse to pursue us, and the roads will become abattoirs.” Gaius turned haunted eyes toward the city’s defenders below. “I need them. If there’s to be any chance at all . . . I need them.”
“Sire,” Ehren breathed. Though it didn’t feel as if he was crying, he felt his tears falling on his hands.
Gaius put a hand on Ehren’s shoulder. “It was an honor, young man. If you should see my grandson again, please tell him . . .” The old man frowned slightly for a moment before his lips turned up in a sad, weary smile. “Tell him that he has my blessing.”
“I will, sire,” Ehren said quietly.
Gaius nodded. Then he untied the thong that bound the scabbard of his signet dagger, the symbol and seal of the First Lord, to his side. He passed the dagger to Ehren, and said, “Good luck, Sir Ehren.”
“And you, sire,” Ehren said.
Gaius smiled at him. Then he put his hand on the hilt of his sword and closed his eyes.
Gaius’s skin changed. At first, it became very pale. Then it began to gleam in the moonlight. Then it gained a silvery sheen, and within seconds it actually shone like freshly polished steel. Gaius drew his sword, and his fingers clinked against it, steel upon steel.
Ehren simply stared. He had never even heard of such a feat of crafting before, much less seen it.
Gaius took one look at Ehren’s face and smiled again. The motion made his shining steel visage moan like metal under stress, though his teeth looked normal, and his tongue seemed almost unnaturally bright pink. “It doesn’t matter,” he told Ehren. His voice was rough, oddly monotone. “I hadn’t planned on lasting much longer in any case.” The smile faded. “Now go.”
Ehren bowed to the First Lord. Then he turned, clutching the letters, and ran.
Ehren and Sireos exited the tunnel an hour later and began making their way to the causeway so that they could attempt to catch up with the fleeing civilian refugees. Most of another hour of running with the effortless ease of fury-assisted travel brought them into the hills north of Alera Imperia, the beginning of the Redhill Heights, and they paused there to look back.
The capital was burning.
Vord swarmed all over it, like some kind of gleaming mold. Aquitaine’s Legions had apparently made good their escape—though he had only three of them remaining, not the five he’d begun the operation with. They had managed to cross the Gaul, then bring it back into its normal course, and were withdrawing to the north.
White and violet fire like nothing Ehren had ever seen suddenly flashed from the top of the First Lord’s tower. Vordknights swarmed through the air toward it. Knights Aeris, presumably the enemy’s, rushed toward it upon gales that sounded hollow in the distance. A star of scarlet-and-azure light suddenly blazed upon the tower top—the First Lord’s sword, kindled to life.
Ehren held up his hands and brought the air between them into focus. His gifts at windcrafting were, at best, modest. He would not be able to see nearly so well through his visioncrafting as he had through Gaius’s. But it would have to do.
He couldn’t see much more than a gleam of silver and the blazing sword upon the top of the Citadel, but he knew that it had to be Gaius. Vordknights buzzed around the tower like moths around a lantern, so thickly that they sometimes obscured the light almost completely.
Lightning crackled down from the sky to strike the tower, but immediately flashed back upward again, bouncing off like light against a mirror. Vord began to scale the tower, hundreds of them, clawing their
way directly up its sides.
Then the figure atop the tower raised both arms above his head, and the earth itself bucked and shook like a stallion at the bite of a horsefly. Ehren was thrown from his feet to the ground, and he lost his visioncrafting—but he could not look away.
The ground rippled like the surface of the sea, shattering buildings like so many toothpicks. The earth split open, great, yawning cracks spreading out for a mile in every direction from the citadel—and then those cracks began to glow with inner, scarlet light. The tremors stopped, and for an instant everything was perfectly silent, motionless.
And then fire like nothing Ehren had ever seen, rock so hot that it had begun to flow like liquid, erupted upward from the ground in a column that was literally miles across. The magma clawed for the sky like a fountain in a city square, and hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of winged forms erupted from the fiery spray, eagles which spread their great wings and streaked through the air, leaving blazing columns of fire in their wakes. The wind rose violently, the superheated air reacting to the eruption, and the fire-eagles swept and spun in great circles, crying out in shrieks made tiny by distance.
Fire filled the skies over Alera Imperia. Cyclones of flame spun away from the city, deadly funnels that seemed to lift everything they touched from the ground, only to incinerate them to ashes.
The ground beneath the city and for miles around began to buckle. Falling walls and buildings added their own gravelly screams to the night’s cacophony. The Vord died by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, devoured by insatiable flame and ravenous earth.
With a final scream, Alera Imperia collapsed into the earth, lowered like a corpse into its grave and consumed by the fires that raged there.
So died Gaius Sextus, First Lord of Alera, his pyre lighting the Realm for fifty miles in every direction.
Ehren sat numbly, staring at the end of the Realm. The three Legions who had escaped with Aquitaine had nearly reached them. Their outriders came pounding up the causeway on horseback, and one of the weary-looking men drew to a halt as he reached them.
“Gentlemen,” the outrider said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to get moving or else clear the road. The Legions are coming through.”
“Why?” Ehren asked quietly. “Why run now? Nothing could have lived through that.”
“Aye,” the outrider said in a subdued voice. “But there were some of those things that weren’t close enough to get burned up. They’re coming.”
Ehren felt sick to his stomach again. “So what Gaius did . . . it was for nothing?”
“Crows no, young man,” the outrider said. “What’s left ain’t half a tithe of their numbers—but we’ve only three exhausted Legions left to us and no strong defensive position. It’s more than enough for them to do for us.” He nodded to them, then kicked his horse up into a canter, riding on down the road.
“Sir Ehren?” asked Sireos wearily. “What do we do?”
Ehren sighed and bowed his head. Then he pushed himself to his feet. “We retreat. Come on.”
CHAPTER 41
Placidus Aria looked down from the Redhill Heights at the embattled Legions below.
Smoke blackened the skies, so thickly that not even the omnipresent crows were at hand. Where the smoke would part for seconds at a time, the sky to the south burned a sullen scarlet. What disaster could have done that to the skies? Only the release of one of the Great Furies, surely. But the only place south of here where one of the Great old Furies might rise was . . .
“Merciful furies,” she breathed.
Far below, a mass of humanity fled through a nightmare.
The vast majority were freemen, men and women and older children trundling along the road at the steady lope of those propelled by furycraft—dodging the occasional cart or mounted rider. Many of them, though, either did not have the ability to utilize the causeway or else were too young or too old to keep the pace of the panicked flood of refugees. They made their way as best they could at the side of the road, mostly through fields barren for winter. Recent rains had made the ground into little more than mud pits stretching for miles. The unfortunate refugees struggled through them at a snail’s pace.
Behind them, spread out in a broad bar of muscle and steel came three Legions, marching side by side, straddling the road in tight formation. Their march was slow but steady, their engineers moving ahead of them, earthcrafting the mud into more tractable footing as they approached and restoring it to mud as they passed.
Behind the Legions came the Vord.
The front edge of the enemy pursuit was a ragged line, the swift-moving Vord as slowed and separated by the horrible footing as the fleeing Alerans. But the farther back from that front edge one looked, the more coherent and organized the Vord became. The lizard-wolf creatures ran together in ranks, centered around the enormous hulking mass of the Vord warriors, or around the still-larger giants that covered the ground in strides yards long. Overhead swarmed the black-winged form of hundreds of vordknights, clashing and skirmishing with Knights Aeris covering the retreating Legions.
The three bars of Legion steel were badly outnumbered by their pursuers, but the black-and-scarlet banners flying from the center Legion flew bravely in the breeze, and the discipline of the troops held them in good order as the foe closed in on them.
“Bloody crows,” Antillus Raucus breathed. “Crows and bloody furies.”
“Do we attack?” Lady Placida breathed.
Gaius Isana, First Lady of Alera, nudged her horse to stand between Aria’s and Raucus’s. “Of course we do,” she said in a firm voice, ignoring the twinge of discomfort from the still-tender wound in her stomach. “I didn’t go through all of this and march these Legions all the way down from the Wall to stand around and watch things happen.”
High Lord Antillus’s mouth spread into a wolfish smile. “Looks like the boys are going to earn their pay today, then.”
“Look at the banners in the center Legion,” Lady Placida said. “Do you know who that is?”
“An Aleran,” Isana said, her tone steady. She felt Araris’s steady presence at her back, and looked over her shoulder to find him, on his horse, hovering a few feet away from her, his eyes focused on nothing and everything at the same time. “An Aleran in trouble.” She turned to Raucus, and said, “Attack, Captain.”
Raucus nodded sharply. His horse danced a step sideways, evidently picking up on his rider’s excitement. “I recommend we wait, Your Highness,” he said. “Let them advance another mile down that causeway, and I’ll leave those ugly things in pieces.”
Isana felt the confidence flowing from him, and arched an eyebrow. “You’re sure?”
“They’re coming with maybe thirty thousand troops. I’ve got three standing Legions, three Legions of veteran militia, better than a thousand Knights and every bloody Citizen in Antillus. Pieces, Your Highness,” Raucus replied, vicious satisfaction in his voice. “Little ones.”
“As you think best, High Lord Antillus,” Isana said.
He threw back his head and laughed. “Hah! That’s a good one.” He turned his horse and said, “There are preparations to make. If you will excuse me.” He saluted Isana and turned his horse—then hesitated, glancing back at Isana.
“Your Grace?” Isana asked.
“It’s a battle. Things can happen.” He reached into his coat and withdrew an envelope. It was brown with water stains and brittle with age. He held it out to her and said, “In case I’m not able to give it to you later.” He nodded to them. “Ladies.”
Isana took the envelope and watched as Raucus rode back to his senior centurion and the captains of his Legions.
“What is that?” Aria asked.
Isana shook her head. “I think it’s . . .” She opened the letter hurriedly—and instantly recognized Septimus’s liquid, precise handwriting.
Raucus,
My insides are whole again, and I’m getting ready to leave the back en
d of nowhere. I expect that the holders here in Calderon will be just as happy to see the Crown Legion go. Too many handsome young men for all these pretty young hold-girls to resist—which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to tell you that I’ve got a surprise for Father. He’s going to choke on it, but Mother will make him see reason. More later, old friend, but I’ll need you to find some time to cover my flank during an important engagement.
Murestus and Cestaag just got back from Rhodes. I had them following the money trail of those cutters I told you about. They didn’t find anything that could go to a court, but I think I might like to visit Rhodes and Kalare with a few good friends once I wrap up my current obligations. Interested? I wrote Attis already, and he’s in.
Invidia got my letter. She was furious that I told Father no, though you had to read between the lines to see it. You know how she is—polite and cold as a fish, even when she’s about to beat someone senseless. Father will be in a rage about me turning her down, though what else is new? To tell you the truth, though, I was never really sure about her. Oh, gorgeous, intelligent, strong, elegant, everything Father thinks I would need. But Invidia just doesn’t give a crow’s feather about people in any sense other than how they can profit her. It means she fits right in with everyone at the capital, but at the same time, I’m not sure she’s entirely sane.
Give me passion—and compassion—any day.
I’m glad I can write you. There are fewer and fewer people I can speak my heart to, these days. Without you and Attis, I think I’d have lost my bloody mind after Seven Hills.
Here’s truth, old man.
The next few months are going to bore future students of history at the Academy for decades.
The three of us will get together again with the old gang from the fencing hall—minus Aldrick. Then we’ll sort some things out.