by Jim Butcher
They went off the road, and approached the steadholt from the southwest, walking their horses carefully through the thick woods. A murmur from Tavi, and a low, constant effort of will made the trees bend back their limbs, and the new growth of briar and brush allow them to pass without sound or inconvenience. It took them only moments to come within sight of Aricholt.
Tavi had only heard it described by his uncle, and that had never been in great detail. The steadholt had been an average example of the breed—a barn, a great hall, some living quarters and workshops, all of them made of stone. A stone wall circled the place, though it had crumbled in multiple locations.
Standing in the fields were row after row of large, egg-shaped forms, which Tavi suddenly realized were the bodies of the vord warriors. They stretched for a square mile, easily, even with each one curled into a ball and stacked up touching the mantises beside it. None of them moved—it would appear that they were indeed asleep, at least for the moment.
Glowing green croach spread out from the barn and had already begun to creep outward. There was a crowd of mantis warriors sitting around the far side of the barn, a hundred or more. Further sentries crouched around the exterior of the barn, one every ten feet or so. Wax spiders rolled in and out, vomiting out fresh patches of croach, then trundling back inside to pick up more.
“Remind you of anything?” Tavi asked Kitai quietly.
She nodded. “The Queen’s hive under Alera Imperia.”
The high-pitched howl of windstreams bearing Aleran fliers screamed far overhead. Tavi looked up and saw a flier glide smoothly down to the barn entrance—a slender woman clad all in black, whose head had been badly scarred with burns. She passed through the crowd of mantises, shoving them out of the way like unruly lambs, then glanced over her shoulder and up before vanishing into the barn.
“She’s there,” he heard himself whisper. “Bloody crows, the Queen is right there in that barn.”
Kitai’s hand went to her sword. “Should we attack?”
He shook his head. Together they turned their horses and began moving slowly and stealthily back to the host.
Kitai stared at him, visibly furious, as they reentered the mists, and stopped her horse. “That was an opportunity. Perhaps the best one we are going to have. It was foolish of you to cast it aside out of some harebrained need to protect me.”
“That wasn’t what I was doing, Kitai.”
“The crows it was not,” Kitai said. “And if you think for a moment that you are going to hunt this Queen by yourself, Aleran, you are mistaken. I will not permit you to face her alone.”
“Kitai—”
“I don’t know who is on this strike team you mentioned, but I am hereby assigning myself to it.”
“You’re not on the team. You are the team. I’ve already decided that the safest place for you is next to me.”
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You have?”
He nodded. Then he stopped his horse and turned to her. “I wish you to become my mate,” he said, duplicating her own accented Aleran flawlessly. “Set the challenge of your choice.”
She tilted her head. “What?”
“You heard me,” he said.
Kitai stared at him for a moment more, then said, “Let the winner of the trial be the one who slays the vord Queen.”
Tavi huffed out a laugh. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you didn’t want me to marry you.”
She smiled at him. “No, fool,” she said. “I most certainly do. Kill this creature, my Aleran, and make our world a place where we might live again, where our child might grow up in safety. Kill her, and I will be yours until death parts us.”
Tavi stared at Kitai and thought that he’d never seen a creature so beautiful. He leaned over to her and kissed her hard on the mouth. When it was through, they rested their foreheads together, until Kitai’s horse sidestepped, and they both nearly plummeted off.
They shared another smile, righted themselves, and returned to the host.
Tavi rode up to Fidelias, who stood talking with Varg. “All right,” he said. “It’s just ahead. Give the order to get us under way and prepare to sound the attack.”
CHAPTER 50
Invidia stared at the vord Queen, transfixed.
“Do not make a fatal mistake, Invidia,” the vord Queen said, her voice calm. “One more dead Aleran means nothing to me. Nor should a few more matter to you, at this point. Kill them. I will keep my word to you.”
Invidia bit her lip. Then she bent forward, slowly, her fingers outstretched for the sword’s hilt. Once she touched it, something in her seemed to solidify, some resolution that made her expression as smooth and as cold as glass in winter. Her hand seemed to gain strength as she touched the blade. Then she lifted it and turned toward the two Alerans, her eyes hard, the mad, bitter rage pouring off her like smoke from the scorched carcasses around them. “You brought this upon yourselves.”
It happened so swiftly. One instant, Invidia was beginning to take a step forward, a dead man’s sword in her hand.
The next, there was a hiss of rushing air, the sound of a whip crack, and the jagged point of what looked like a spear tip carved from bone erupted from Invidia’s chest, just below her breast, to the left of her sternum. The spear transfixed the burned woman and the creature clutching her body in a single blow, and she arched her back in agony, her eyes flying open wide, her mouth stretching into a breathless scream.
A hand gripping a stone knife emerged from a fraying windcrafted veil, swept around Invidia’s body, and with a swift, sure motion, cut her throat from ear to ear.
Invidia Aquitaine fell to the croach, her blood pouring out like a fountain, her eyes wide with shock and terror and rage and pain. She turned her head to stare, bewildered, at the woman who had killed her.
Countess Calderonus Amara stood over her with the bloodied stone knife in hand, and whispered, “Thus are you served in Alera, traitor.”
Invidia’s eyes rolled back into her head, and her breath rattled in her throat. She sank very slowly to the ground, the legs of the beast upon her breast quivering madly, uselessly. Her own legs twitched and kicked several times, as if she believed herself to be running away from something.
Then her bloodless face fell to one side, staring sightlessly, and she went still.
Isana stared at Amara in shock. The Cursor had been in the hive all along. She must have entered when Antillus and Phrygia did, concealing her presence with a veil—doubtless intending to strike down the vord Queen. But the Queen was surrounded by a wall of blade-beasts, and Invidia had been a perfect target, fully focused upon her own self-conflict and pain.
Amara bent and wrenched the bone spear from the body, bracing one boot against the dead woman’s shoulder blades. It was a short weapon, no more than three or three and a half feet long, and thicker than her wrist, decorated with Marat-style carvings. A bone spear, Isana thought, and a stone knife—neither of which would have been sensed by Invidia’s metalcrafting. Amara took the primitive weapons in hand and turned to face the Queen, her stance casually arrogant.
The Queen narrowed her black, glittering eyes, and Isana felt a surge of deep, hot anger pulse from her in a single wave, then vanish again. As it happened, the blade-beasts parted, rippling smoothly out of the space between the Queen and Countess Amara.
“That,” said the Queen, her diction precise, “was inconvenient.”
“In what way?” Amara asked, her tone flippant.
The vord Queen answered, but Isana had realized what Amara was doing. She bit her lip and placed her hand on Aria’s calf, her fingers clutching hard. Without the waters of a healing pool to work with, she couldn’t tell precisely what shape Aria was in. It was like trying to read a book underwater, with her vision blurred and the ink running—but she could feel it well enough to know that Aria knew precisely what was injured, and that she was, in fact, making an effort to heal it. Silently, Isana threw her support behind Lady Placida’s
efforts, and she could feel it as the other woman’s pains began to recede, as her wounds began to close.
“She was . . . uniquely useful to me,” the Queen said.
Amara flicked some of the blood off the tip of the spear with one finger, and said, “She’s still useful. You can eat her.”
“Her,” said the Queen, her eyes narrowing. “And you.”
Amara lifted her spear in silent invitation and gave the Queen a mocking bow.
Isana clutched Aria’s leg even harder, pouring all her energy into assisting her.
The Queen and the Cursor both called upon windcrafting to give them speed and abruptly rushed toward one another, streaks of motion. At the last instant, Amara flung the stone knife, and the vord Queen had to intercept it with her blade. Amara dropped into a slide and went by her, barely avoiding the sword’s backswing. The Cursor came up onto her feet, rolled beneath another blow as the Queen pursued her, then reversed her facing in midleap and flung the bone spear at the Queen with unearthly speed.
The Queen’s blade snapped out and shattered the bone weapon into hundreds of shards, and the frantic pace stilled again. Amara came to her feet weap onless, wearing only light clothing, not even a plated coat. The vord Queen stared at her with glittering black eyes, and said, “I had a bond with her. Why was such a thing so difficult to notice until it was gone?”
She tilted her head, still staring at Amara, and said, “This isn’t fun any more.”
She flicked her wrist, a distracted motion, and there was a sudden high-pitched, hissing hum. Amara gasped, jerked, and twisted several times, driven back half a pace by some kind of impact.
Isana wasn’t sure what had happened until she saw half a dozen creatures, like unthinkably large wasps, writhing on Amara’s chest, belly, shoulders, arms, and legs. Each of them sported a stinger as long as a woman’s finger, made of serrated and gleaming vord chitin.
Amara looked down at herself, at the enormous wasps, shocked. And then her eyes rolled back in her head, and she toppled to the ground, her back arched into a rigid bow, her limbs thrashing.
“Countess!” Aria cried, her face a mask of blood—but no longer bleeding, at least, no longer blinding her. She took a step forward, and her wounded leg buckled beneath her, nearly throwing her down.
The vord Queen looked over her shoulder and made the exact same gesture. Aria lifted her sword in a vain defensive motion, but there was the hiss-hum of more wasps flashing from some gaping orifice within the croach, high up on one wall. Where they struck steel, they hit with a heavy thump—it sounded like a hailstorm as literally hundreds of wasps lashed at Lady Placida. She shielded her eyes, but several of the creatures struck her cheeks, her neck, including one spectacular impact where the wasp’s stinger pierced her left earlobe and all but tore it off her head.
Aria fell to one knee, gasping for breath. The little wounds frothed with poison, and the stream of wasps was merciless and unending. One struck her thigh, below the hem of the skirt of plated leather straps hanging from her belt. Another pierced her boot. Seconds later, the wasps had simply pounded her balance from her, and she toppled as well, letting out a high-pitched moan of agony and despair as her own body began to thrash like Amara’s.
Isana felt her fingers tightening helplessly on the sheathed sword in her hand. Though she had some rudimentary training with such a weapon, she was in no way fit to compare herself to violent professionals such as Amara and Lady Aria—and even if she had been, neither of them had managed to defend herself. Her eyes flicked to the pool of water, but it was simply too far away. She would never be able to use what was in it in time.
The vord Queen’s dark eyes focused on Isana.
She lifted her hand—and then her black eyes widened in surprise.
A gleaming metal hand reached out from behind Isana and gently took the late Invidia’s weapon from her grasp. She twisted her head up to see Araris, stepping clear of the croach like a man walking through a field of grain. And yet, it was not Araris, as she had last seen him. Every inch of visible skin gleamed like polished steel. The mail he’d been wearing was gone, and Isana realized with a start that the master metalcrafter had, somehow, incorporated it into his very flesh.
He took two steps forward, each one falling with more sound and force than any being of flesh and blood should have possessed. He flipped the sword through several calm circles, evidently testing its weight and balance. Then Araris Valerian squared off against the vord Queen, and said, quietly, his voice strangely roughened, burred, “You will not touch her.”
The Queen bared her teeth and flung her hand toward Araris, hissing. A sudden storm of wasps leapt through the air in three distinct streams. They hammered into Araris, hundreds of them in the space of seconds, each impact making its own sharply distinct pinging sound—and each and every one of them rebounded from his steely flesh, landing on the floor amidst the remains of his shredded shirt, their legs and stingers thrashing.
The streams of wasps died down and stopped, and Isana could clearly hear her own swift breathing in the silence that followed. The impotent wasps were littered into a pile halfway up Araris’s thighs.
Moving very slowly, very calmly, his living-steel hand drifted up and lightly touched the hilt of his sword, settling the grip one finger at a time. “All right,” he said in a soft, quiet voice. “My turn.”
And suddenly one of the deadliest swordsmen in Alera was rushing across the distance separating him from the vord Queen, his weapon still sheathed.
The Queen let out a shriek of challenge and darted forward to meet him. In the very last instant, before the two reached each other, both of their swords leapt out, little more than blurs of green croach light on steel, and a thunderstorm of sparks erupted in the center of the hive.
The chiming sound of steel on steel from within the continual cloud of sparks sounded like twenty swordsmen were fighting, not two. It lasted for two seconds, three, four, then the sparks washed away over the floor, revealing a tableau: Araris stood facing the vord Queen, his sword before him, gripped in both hands. She stood facing him, sword arm extended down and to the side. Her pale cheek was marked by a thin line of green-brown blood.
Her eyes were slightly wide, and they flicked down to the cut on her face in disbelief. Her lip lifted in a snarl, and she made a hissing sound, pointing her sword at him.
Instantly, two of the blade-beasts bounded forward, menacing him with their weapon-limbs. They rushed Araris, unbelievably swift and strong. Blades descended toward the man Isana loved, and her heart flew up into her throat.
But Araris Valerian was their match.
The first two blades to come sweeping at him were shattered entirely in fountains of white and green sparks. Another blade struck his chest and rebounded in another shower of sparks, even as he caught a fourth in a literal steely grip and calmly drove the blade down through the limb of the other vord before him, slamming it through the vord and into the bedrock below, trapping one blade-beast in place with the piercing limb of the second. His sword flashed once, dispatching the trapped beast—and then he spun and drove his left fist forward, through the second beast’s guard and into its head. His metallic fist smashed through the blade-beast’s skull like a warhammer, until he had sunk his arm halfway to the elbow in the creature’s skull. He withdrew his arm with a calm, smooth motion, and the blade-beast collapsed.
He had barely moved his feet.
The vord Queen’s eyes narrowed, and she streaked toward Araris again, her sword flashing. Again, sparks flooded the hive, and Isana had to lift her hand to shield her eyes against them. By the time the two had parted once more, a second cut, almost precisely parallel to the Queen’s first injury, but an inch closer to her throat, also graced her cheek.
“Speed isn’t enough,” Araris said in a gentle voice. “Not by itself. Your technique is sloppy. You haven’t drilled enough.”
The vord Queen’s mouth spread into a very slow smile. Her eyes raked Araris, moving
up and down his gleaming form, as she said, “Metal skin. Impressive. Painful?”
“Quite,” said Araris.
The Queen made a quick gesture of her left hand, and the temperature in the hive seemed to drop. Crystals of ice formed upon Araris’s steely skin, first here and there, then in a thick, spreading blanket. Isana felt the surge of agony in Araris, as the torment of the frozen steel began to gouge at him even through a metalcrafter’s insulation against pain.
“And now more so,” the Queen said, and launched another attack.
Araris made his first defensive movement, and there was the peculiar sound of squealing metal. He screamed in sudden agony, a pain so great that it broke through his metalcrafting and left him at its mercy, raking against Isana’s senses like frozen claws. He reeled back before the Queen, howling in pain with every tormented movement. He parried the first two blows, and the third, but missed the fourth, and the Queen’s sword struck his shoulder.
There was a peculiar, hollow sound, and a webwork of cracks abruptly spread over the surface of his metallic skin.
Araris choked on another scream, his eyes wide and round, as the agony drove him down to one knee before the vord Queen.
“You cannot stop me,” the vord Queen said. Her sword kindled to green-white flame as she loomed over Araris. “None of you can stop me.”
Isana reached out a hand and seized upon the water in the little pool. She bade it leap up toward the Queen, but the vord was far too swift. She sensed the column of water speeding toward her and took a single step back as it washed by. As it went past her, the Queen stretched out a hand and Isana felt her rip control of the water from her as easily as Isana might have torn it from a child. The Queen sent it crashing into Araris, where it promptly began freezing on his armor, drawing even more pain from the battered man.
The Queen turned to look at Isana, and said, “Grandmother, you have one chance to live. Agree to govern the postconflict Alerans and to assist me in my current efforts, and I will spare your life and your mate’s.”