by Jim Butcher
"They're looking at them," Bernard said gently. His hands touched her head briefly, then ran back around the back of her head, gently probing. "You hit your head?"
Amara shook her head. "No. My braid caught in the rock."
She heard him let out a slow breath of relief, then felt him feeling his way along the length of the braid. When he got to the end of it, he said, "It's only an inch or two. It's right at the tie."
"Fine," Amara said.
She heard the rasp of Bernard's dagger being drawn from his belt. He applied the honed edge of the knife to the end of her braid and cut it loose from the rock.
Amara sighed as the pressure on her scalp eased. "Help me sit up," she said.
Bernard gave her his hand and pulled her to sit on the courtyard. Amara tried to get her breath back, and began methodically to work the now-loose braid out before it started tangling in knots.
"Sir?" Janus said. "Looks like we got here in time."
Bernard closed his eyes. "Thank the great furies. Who do we have here?"
"Children," Janus reported. "None of them over the age of eight or nine, and two infants. Four boys, five girls-and a young lady. They're unconscious but breathing, and their pulses are strong."
"A young lady?" Amara asked. "The steadholt's caretaker?"
Bernard squinted up at the sun and nodded. "It would make sense." He got up and paced over to the recumbent forms of the children and of one young woman. Amara rose, paused while her balance swayed a little, then followed him over.
Bernard grimaced. "It's Heddy. Aric's wife."
Amara stared down at a frail-looking young woman with pale blond hair and fair skin, only lightly weathered by sun and wind. "Sealed them in," she murmured. "And set their furies to make sure they stayed that way. Why would they do such a thing?"
"To make it impossible for anyone to get to them but the people who put them there," Bernard rumbled.
"But why?"
Bernard shrugged. "Maybe the holders figured that if they weren't around to get their children out, they didn't want whoever was attacking them to have the chance."
"Even if they died?"
"There are worse things than death," Doroga said. His rumbling basso startled Amara into a twitch of reflexive tension. The huge Marat headman had moved up behind them more silently than an Amaranth grass lion. "Some of them much worse."
One of the babies started squeaking out a stuttering little cry of complaint, and a moment later the infant was joined by the exhausted sobs of another child. Amara glanced up to find the children all beginning to stir.
Giraldi's watercrafter, a veteran named Harger, rose from the child beside Heddy and knelt over the young woman. He put his fingertips lightly on Heddy's temples, his eyes closed for a moment. Then he glanced up at Bernard, and said, "Her body is extremely strained. I don't know that her mind is straight right now, either. It might be better to give her the chance to sleep."
Bernard frowned and glanced at Amara, an eyebrow lifted.
She grimaced. "We need to talk to her. Find out what happened."
"Maybe one of the children could tell us," Bernard said.
"Do you think they could have understood what was going on?"
Bernard glanced at them, his frown deepening, and shook his head. "Probably not. Not well enough to risk more lives on what a small child remembers."
Amara nodded her agreement.
"Wake her up, Harger," Bernard said gently. "Careful as you can."
The old watercrafter nodded, his misgivings clear in his eyes, but he turned back to Heddy, touched her temples again, and frowned in concentration.
Heddy awoke instantly and violently, screaming in a raw, tortured wail. Her pale blue eyes flew open-torturously wide-the panicked eyes of an animal certain that its hungry pursuer had moved in for the kill. She thrashed her arms and legs wildly, and a sharp and sudden breeze, strong but unfocused, swept through the courtyard. It spun wildly, throwing up dust, straw, and small stones. "No!" Heddy shrieked. "No, no, no!"
She went on screaming the same word, over and over, and it sounded like she was tearing her own throat raw as she did.
"Heddy!" Bernard rumbled, eyes half-squinted against the wind-driven debris. "Heddy! It's all right. You're safe!"
She went on screaming, struggling, kicking, and bit the hand of one legionare who knelt along with Harger and Bernard in an attempt to restrain her. She struggled with a strength born of a fear so severe that it was its own kind of madness.
Crows take it!" Harger snarled. "We'll have to sedate her." Wait," Amara snapped. She knelt beside the struggling holder. "Heddy," she said in the softest voice she could to be heard over the screams. "Heddy, its all right. Heddy, the children are all right. The Count is here with the guard from Garrison. They're safe. The children are safe."
Heddy's panicked eyes flicked over to Amara, and her eyes focused on someone for the first time since she'd awoken. Her screams slowed a little, and her expression was tortured, desperate. It raked at Amara to see a woman in so much pain. But she kept her voice gentle, repeating quiet reassurances to the terrified holder. When Heddy had quieted even more, Amara put her hand on the young woman's head, stroking her cobweb-fine hair back from her forehead, never stopping.
It took nearly half an hour, but Heddy's screams died out into cries, then into groans, and finally into a series of piteous whimpering sounds. Her eyes stayed locked on Amara's face, as if desperate to find some kind of reference point. With a final shudder, Heddy fell silent, and her eyes closed, tears welling.
Amara glanced up at Bernard and Harger. "I think she'll be all right. Perhaps you gentlemen should leave me here with her for a little while. Let me take care of her."
Harger nodded at once and rose. Bernard looked less certain, but he nodded to Amara as well and walked over to Captain Janus and Centurion Giraldi, speaking in low tones.
"Can you hear me, Heddy?" Amara asked quietly.
The girl nodded.
"Can you look at me, please?"
Heddy whimpered and started trembling.
"All right," Amara soothed. "It's all right. You don't have to. You can talk to me with your eyes closed."
Heddy's head twitched into a nod, and she kept on shaking with silent sobs. Tears bled down over her cheekbones to fall upon the courtyard's stones. "Anna," she said after a moment. She twitched her head up off the ground, looking toward the sounds of crying children. "Anna's crying."
"Shhh, be still," Amara said. "The children are fine. We're taking care of them."
Heddy sank down again, trembling from the effort it had taken to partially sit up. "All right."
"Heddy," Amara said, keeping her voice smooth and quiet. "I need to know what happened to you. Can you tell me?"
"B-bardos," Heddy said. "Our new smith. Large man. Red beard."
"I do not know him," Amara said.
"Good man. Aric's closest friend. He sent us down into that chamber. Said that he was going to make sure that we weren't…" Heddy's face twisted in a hideous grimace of agony. "Weren't taken. Like the others."
"Taken?" Amara said quietly. "What do you mean?"
The young woman's voice became agony grinding in her throat. "Taken. Changed. Them and not them. Not Aric. Not Aric." She curled into a tight ball. "Oh, my Aric. Help us, help us, help us."
A huge, gentle hand settled on her shoulder, and Amara glanced back up at Doroga's quiet frown.
"Let her be," he said.
"We've got to know what happened."
Doroga nodded. "I will tell you. Let her rest."
Amara frowned up at the big Marat. "How do you know?"
He rose and squinted around the steadholt. "Tracks outside," he said. "Leading away. Shoes, no-shoes, male and female. Cattle, sheep, horses, gargants." He gestured around the steadholt. "Vord came in here two, maybe three days ago. Took the first. Not everyone at once. First they take a few."
Amara shook her head, her hand still resting on the
curled form of the weeping holder. "Took. What do you mean?"
"The vord," Doroga said. "They get inside you. Go in through the mouth, nose, ear. Burrow in. Then you die. But they have your body. Look like you. Can act like you."
Amara stared at Doroga, sickened. "What?"
"Don't know what they look like exactly," Doroga said. "The vord have many forms. Some like the Keepers of Silence. Like spiders. But they can be little. Mouthful." He shook his head. "The Takers are small, so they can get inside you."
"Like… some sort of worm? A parasite."
Doroga tilted his head, one pale war braid sliding over a massive shoulder. "Parasite. I do not know this word."
"It's a creature that attaches itself to another creature," Amara said. "Like a leech or a flea. They feed on a host creature to survive."
"Vord are not like this," Doroga said. "The host creature doesn't survive. Just look like they do."
"What do you mean?"
"Say a vord gets into my head. Doroga dies. The Doroga that is in here." He thumped his head with his thumb. "What Doroga feels. That is gone. But this Doroga"-he slapped his chest lightly with one hand-"this remains. You don't know any better, because you only know the true Doroga"-he touched his head-"through the Doroga you can see and talk to." He touched his chest.
Amara shivered. "Then what happened here?"
"What happened among my people," Doroga said. "Takers came. Took just a few. Looked around, maybe deciding who to take next. Then taking them. Until more were taken than were themselves. Took more than seven hundred Wolf Clan like that, one pack at a time."
"Is that what you fought?" Amara asked. "Taken Marat?"
Doroga nodded, his eyes bleak. "First, them. Then we found the nest. Fought the Keepers of Silence. Like big spiders. And their warriors. Bigger. Faster. They killed many of my people, our chala." He inhaled slowly. "And then we took the vord queen at that nest. A creature who…" He shook his head, and Amara saw something she never thought she might in Doroga-the shadow of fear in his eyes. "The queen was the worst. From her, all the others are born. Keepers. Takers. Warriors. We had to keep going, or the queen would have escaped. Founded another nest. Started over."
Amara pursed her lips and nodded. "That's why you fought as you did. To the end."
Doroga nodded. "And why the queen near this place must be found and destroyed. Before she spawns young queens of her own."
"What do you think happened here?" Amara said.
"Takers came in," Doroga said. "That was what she meant when she said them and not them. This Aric she speaks of was one who was taken. This other man, who sealed her into the stone, must have been free. Maybe one of the last of your people still free."
"Then where is he now?" Amara asked.
"Taken. Or dead."
Amara shook her head. "This isn't… this is too incredible. I've never heard of such a thing. No one has ever known anything like this."
"We have," Doroga rumbled. "Long ago. So long ago that few tales remained. But we have seen them."
"But it can't be," Amara said quietly. "It can't be like that."
"Why not?"
"Aric couldn't have been taken. He was the one who came to warn Bernard. If he was one of these vord now, then they would know…"
Amara felt a slow, vicious spike of cold lodge in her belly.
Doroga's eyes narrowed to slits. Then he spun to one side and took up the enormous war club he had left leaning against a wall. "Calderon!" he bellowed, and outside the walls of the steadholt, his gargant answered with a ringing trumpet of alarm. "Calderon! To arms!"
Amara staggered to her feet looking around wildly for Bernard.
And that was when she heard legionares begin to scream.
Chapter 20
Amara snapped an order to the nearest healer to watch over Heddy, then called to Cirrus. Her fury gathered around her, winds swirling up a cloud of dust that outlined the vague form of a long-legged horse in the midst of the winds. Amara cried out and felt Cirrus sweep her clear of the ground and into the open sky above Aricholt.
She spun in a circle, eyes flickering over the ground beneath her and the skies about her, taking in what was happening.
In the steadholt below her, she saw legionares emerge sprinting from the enormous stone barn. The last man out let out a cry and abruptly fell, falling hard to the stony ground. Something had hold of his ankle and began hauling him back into the barn. The soldier shouted, and his fellow legionares immediately turned back to help him.
Amara held up her hands to the level of her eyes, palms facing each other, and willed Cirrus into the air before her face, concentrating the winds to bend light and draw her vision to within several yards of the stone barn.
The legionares sword slashed through a shining, black, hard-looking limb like nothing that Amara had ever seen, save perhaps the pinching claws of a lobster. The sword bit into the vord's claw-but just barely. The legionare struck again and again, and even then only managed to cripple the strength of the claw, rather than severing it completely.
The men dragged their wounded companion away from the barn, his boot flopping and twisting at a hideous angle.
The vord warrior followed them into the sunlight.
Amara stared down at the creature, her stomach suddenly cold. The vord warrior was the size of a pony, and had to have weighed four or five hundred pounds. It was covered in slick-looking, lacquer-gloss plates of some kind of dark hide. Four limbs thrust straight out to the sides from a humpbacked central body, rounded and hunched like the torso of a flea. Its head extended from that body on a short, segmented stalk of a neck. Twists and spines of chitin surrounded its head, and a pair of tiny eyes recessed within deep grooves glared out with scarlet malevolence. Massive, almost beetlelike mandibles extended from its chitinous face, and each mandible ended in the snapping claw that had crippled the legionare.
The vord rushed out of the doorway, hard on the heels of its prey, its gait alien, ungainly, and swift. Two of the legionares turned to face it, blades in hand, while the third dragged the wounded man away. The vord bounded forward in a sudden leap that brought it down on top of one of the legionares. The man dodged to one side, but not swiftly enough to prevent the vord from knocking him to the earth. It landed upon him and seized his waist between its mandibles. They ground down, and the man screamed in agony.
His partner charged the vord's back, screaming and hacking furiously with his short, vicious gladius. One of the blows landed upon a rounded protrusion upon the creature's back, and it sprayed forth some kind of greenly translucent, viscous liquid.
A string of clicking detonations emerged from the vord, and it released the first legionare to whirl on its new attacker and bounded into the air as before. The legionare darted to one side, and when the vord landed, he struck hard at its thick neck. The blow struck home, though the armored hide of the vord barely opened. But it had been enough to hurt it.
More liquid, nauseating greenish brown, spurted from the wound, and more explosive clicks crackled from the monster. It staggered to one side, unable to keep its balance despite its four legs. The legionare immediately seized his wounded companion, and began to drag the other man away from the wounded, unsteady vord. He moved as quickly as he could.
It wasn't enough.
Another half dozen of the creatures rushed out of the barn like angry hornets from a nest, and the buzzing click of the wounded vord became a terrifying, alien chorus. The vibrating roar increased, and the humped, round backs of the things abruptly parted into broad, blackened wings that let them leap into the air and come sailing at the fleeing legionares.
The vord tore them to shreds before Amara's horrified eyes.
It happened quickly-start to finish in only a handful of seconds, and there was nothing anyone could have done to save the doomed legionares.
More vord emerged from other buildings in the steadholt, and Amara saw three of them leaping forth from the steadholt's well. She heard Girald
i bellowing over the rumble of angry clicking, and a sudden flash of fire boomed into the air as one of Commander Janus's Knights Ignus unleashed furies of fire upon a charging vord.
Another scream, this one very near, snapped Amara's gaze upward, to see one of the Knights Aeris struggling against a pair of winged vord warriors. The man slashed a hand at the air, and a burst of gale-force wind sent one vord tumbling to the side, spinning end over end as it fell toward the earth. But the second vord flared its wings at the last second and it struck him belly first, legs wrapping him, jaw-claws gripping and tearing. The Knight screamed, and the pair of them plummeted toward the ground.
Below her, the veterans of Giraldi's century had immediately linked up to stand together, their backs to one of the steadholt's stone walls and the nearest building securing one flank. Eight or nine of the vord bounded forward, only to be met by a solid wall of heavy Legion tower-shields and blades in the first rank, while the two ranks behind plied their spears in murderous concert with the front row. Supporting one another, Giraldi's veterans stopped the vord charge cold, steel flashing, men screaming defiance. Blood and nauseating vord-fluid sprinkled on the courtyard's stones.
The other century was in trouble. Only half of them had managed to draw together in concentration, and pockets of a half dozen legionares or a handful of armed holders were scattered on the walls and within the courtyard. The vord had already left a dozen dismembered corpses draining blood onto the stones. Trapped and on their own, Amara knew that the other isolated groups of Alerans would die within minutes.
There was another scream almost directly below her, a child's wail, and Amara's gaze snapped down to see three of the vord wheeling in perfect unison toward the healers and the survivors below. There was no one close enough to help them.
With a howl of terror and rage, Amara drew her sword and flung herself into a dive that could have outraced a hungry falcon. She swept her dive to the horizontal at the last possible instant, and swept in front of the lead vord. She struck with her sword as she passed, and though she was not herself particularly strong, the sheer speed of her dive delivered her blow with the force of a charging bull. The shock of the impact went all the way up her arm to her shoulder, and her fingers exploded with tingling sensation and went partially numb.