by Jim Butcher
And victory was nowhere in evidence.
Marok stood with Fidelias calmly, looking out over the battle. Then he said, “You never asked me to lower the mists. I expected you to do so.”
“Nothing to be gained by it,” Fidelias said. “Except to show us exactly how many of the bloody vord are out there. The men fight better when it isn’t hopeless.”
Marok nodded. “As do our own warriors. But if I lowered the mists, the Canim units would see our plight.”
“The mission wasn’t for them to come rescue us. It was to kill sleeping vord. All of them. As long as we have the vord coming for us here, there are that many fewer in the field to oppose the others. They can kill twenty helpless vord in the time it takes to down one of the things while awake. It’s worth it.”
“Even if it means the death of everyone here?”
“That’s right.” Fidelias glanced aside as the courier waved a hand at him. The man gave him a thumbs-up. “They’re ready.”
Marok nodded slowly, and said, “The more vord attack your people, the fewer attack my own. Let us keep their attention.”
Then he lifted his dagger and cut deeply into his left forearm. Blood began to patter to the stone roof. The Cane growled, then began chanting something full of snarls and coughing growls. A moment later, Fidelias saw the mist about five feet in front of the first rank of legionares begin to thicken. As he watched, it darkened, becoming opaque, and a moment later the shrieks of dying vord began to echo across the Legions. A hideous stench filled the air.
Teams rushed out in pairs, each with one of the Legion’s best earthcrafters. Antillar Maximus looked hungover, but he wore his armor and moved under his own power. Beside him, the silver-skinned Araris Valerian kept pace, his eyes alert. Aldrick ex Gladius came after them, escorting a burly medico who had strapped Antillus Crassus to his back. Other Windwolves paced beside the engineers of the First Aleran, as they all hurried to spread themselves out equally within the defensive ring.
Marok kept on snarling and muttering to himself. The old Cane’s eyes were closed. His blood ran steadily.
Even before the earthcrafters all reached their positions, those who had gotten there began their work. The earth swelled and heaved like an ocean before the wind. Then it began to fold upon itself. Fidelias was reminded of the way a sheet would ripple and fold when one snapped it to get it spread out over a mattress.
Within moments, the crafting was complete. The earth rose slightly in a short ramp before the Legion lines, rising perhaps eighteen inches—but the far side of the ramp sloped down sharply, to a ditch seven or eight feet deep and twice as wide. Centurions began to shout orders to their units, and the Legions advanced to the lip of the ditch, dressing their ranks and changing out weaponry, to ply their spears against the vord as they tried to climb out. It was not by any means an ideal defensive structure—but it was also far, far better than nothing.
“They’ve got it,” Fidelias said.
Marok let out a slow exhale and allowed his snarling chant to trail off. The bloodspeaker slumped down to the stone of the roof and dropped heavily onto his side. His left arm was still extended, blood running from it. Fidelias turned to him with an alarmed intake of breath.
“Do not concern yourself for me, demon,” Marok said. “Bandages. My pouch.”
Fidelias found the bandages and began wrapping Marok’s arm to stanch the flow of blood.
“I thought you said clouds of acid were for amateurs,” Fidelias remarked.
“That was not a cloud. It was a wall.” He closed his eyes, and muttered, “Whining demon. You are welcome.”
Fidelias was about to order Marok taken to the healers when Ambassador Kitai stormed out onto the roof, looking around wildly. She spotted Fidelias and stalked toward him. “Where is he?”
“Not here,” Fidelias replied. “He dropped you off and left. The Queen went after him.”
Kitai ground her teeth, and said, “I might have known he would do something like this.”
Fidelias arched an eyebrow. “The healers said you had a bump the size of an apple on the back of your head.”
Kitai waved her hand impatiently. “I must go to him.”
Fidelias leaned toward her. “He’s alive?”
Kitai glanced aside, her eyes focused on nothing. “Yes. For now. And . . . pleased with his own cleverness, may The One help us.” She blinked and looked back at Fidelias. “Quick. What is the absolute worst place in this Valley one could go? The most insanely suicidal place to be found? The place where only a great fool would venture—and only an insane fool would follow?”
Fidelias responded at once and found himself speaking in chorus with the Ambassador as they both said, “Garados.”
“He is there,” Kitai said. And without another word she turned, leapt into the air, and vanished behind a veil as she raised a windscreen and shot off into the open sky. Half a dozen vordknights dropped into her flight path, hoping to intercept her even though they couldn’t see her.
Their wings burst into flame, and they went plunging to their deaths on the ground below.
Fidelias exhaled slowly. Then he turned back to the business of battle, redeploying their new assets, though he knew that their position could not long be held against such numbers, not for more than a few hours.
But he had a feeling he had done all that he could.
His eyes drifted in the direction of Garados. Somewhere on the cold, hard slopes of that mountain, a young man was pitting all the strength and cunning and brilliance of a thousand-year dynasty against the intelligence and remorseless power at the heart of the world-eating vord.
And, like everyone else, all Fidelias could do was wait to see what happened.
CHAPTER 56
From a distance the mountain was undeniably beautiful: tall and imposing, crowned with snow and ice. But the closer one got to it, the more a sense of malevolent, hostile presence seemed to grow. Tavi had encountered the mountain’s ire once before—and what he had felt that day had been nowhere near this oppressively bleak. Garados wasn’t simply surly and resentful this time.
The vast fury was absolutely enraged.
The thunderclouds gathering around its peak were growing darker by the moment, as though they had drawn the night into themselves as it waned. Thana Lilvia, the vast wind fury that came sweeping down off the Sea of Ice and over the Calderon Valley, was making a show of force today, gathering her herds as usual near her husband. Flashes of lightning in wildly varying colors lashed constantly through the clouds, and even from miles away, Tavi could see the gliding, looping, sinister forms of windmanes, windmanes by the score, prowling the mountain’s slopes.
A low thread of fear ran down Tavi’s throat, and he swallowed it as manfully as he could. He had seen windmanes kill, and it had been terrifying. But for a stroke of good luck, they would have torn him to shreds as they had that luckless deer.
He ground his teeth. He didn’t need to be rehashing his life’s closest calls. He needed to be focused on the enemy behind him, a being more dangerous than a cohort of windmanes. He checked over his shoulder. The vord Queen had closed his lead to a scant two hundred yards or so.
Tavi plunged into the thunderclouds gathered at Garados’s summit and let out a quick bark of mocking laughter.
A pulse of anger strong enough to destroy worlds flashed through the mist, and Tavi winced at the intensity of it. That wrath belonged to the vord Queen, and was being directed entirely at him. He banked left and reduced his speed, aware that the mountain was near but not sure of its precise location.
He almost found it with the end of his nose. The grey mist occluded the frosty grey stone of the mountaintop near perfectly, and Tavi had to shift course frantically to keep from smashing against it. He avoided disaster, steadied himself, and settled down to light gently upon a slope near the mountain’s peak, crouching. The vord Queen’s windstream roared on by. She had apparently lost track of him in the mist.
Tavi w
aited for a moment, but nothing happened. He stomped on the rocky ground beneath him a few times. Then he jumped up and down, feeling exceptionally foolish.
If that didn’t provoke the enormous fury, he wasn’t sure what would.
Without warning, the vord Queen’s voice called through the mist, disassociated from any particular direction. “Where are you, Father?”
Tavi blurred the obvious direction of his own voice with a windcrafting over his mouth. “Why do you keep calling me that?”
“Because your blood gave me birth. Yours and that of my mother.”
“So that was you,” Tavi said. “You were the thing Doroga dropped that big rock on.”
The Queen’s voice buzzed with steely undertones. “Yes.”
“Grampa Doroga,” Tavi mused. “I am not your father. It means more than blood.”
“You are close,” the Queen said, her words clipped and sharp. “For all practical purposes, it is a fact.”
The stone beneath Tavi’s feet quivered. He focused some of his attention downward. Though Garados was deadly dangerous, it was not swift. He should be able to leap clear if he was paying attention.
“Not quite,” Tavi said. “If I were your father, you’d be the heir to the Realm.”
“I am already the heir of this Realm, and after that, this world,” came her answer, from the mist. “All that is left is for you”—her voice suddenly changed, coming from immediately behind him—“is to die.”
He spun and barely got his sword up in time. Steel rang on steel, and again sparks bellowed forth in a thundercloud of their own, illuminating the mist around them with flashes of red, blue, and green light.
Her speed was incredible. Even without furycrafting, the vord Queen moved with blinding swiftness. Tavi had drawn upon all the windcraft he could to expand his perceptions, and it was barely enough to allow him to defend himself. Similarly, her strength was unbelievable, easily greater than a large Cane’s, and Tavi found himself forced to draw strength from the earth simply in order to meet her attacks with enough power to stop them.
In retrospect, he thought, it probably wasn’t one of his most insightful tactical decisions.
Within seconds of Tavi’s drawing upon the earth for strength, the mountain was wrenched with a spectacular thundercrack of sound, so loud that it knocked both Tavi and the vord from their feet. In front of Tavi’s widening eyes, the peak of the mountain abruptly split, a sudden crack running from the summit down to Tavi and beyond him. Within a heartbeat, the crack had widened, with rock and stone grinding and screaming. Tavi rolled rapidly to one side, an instant before the crack—well on its way to becoming a crevasse—swallowed him whole.
The mountain groaned with an enormous basso voice, and rocks began to fall around them. Most of the falling material consisted of pebbles, but among many of those were other stones, more than large enough to kill a man if they fell on him. Tavi regained his feet and dodged a falling rock. From the corner of his eye, he saw the vord Queen simply bat a stone the size of an ale keg away with her free hand.
A red glow suddenly suffused the walls of the crevasse, the light welling up from within, and Tavi sucked in a sharp breath of surprise. He had not realized that Garados was a fire-mountain.
A medium-sized stone clipped his ribs, and though the armor absorbed the blow, he staggered and barely got out of the way of the next bounding stone. On the other side of the crevasse, the vord Queen turned toward him and crouched to leap, her sword held up and ready to strike—when a fountain of liquid fire shot forth from the crevasse, sending molten stone high into the air.
Tavi turned from that at once, bounded into the air downslope as strongly as he could, called up a windstream . . .
. . . and realized, an instant too late, that he was covered in a layer of dirt and dust.
The wind furies he managed to summon were far from strong enough to lift him into the air, and after an extra second or so of hanging at the apogee of his jump, he was on his way back to the ground—to the steeply inclined, stony ground of Garados. His heart leapt into his throat. If he should lose his balance, there was virtually nothing to stop him from bouncing all the way to the base of the mountain, while falling boulders and rocky outcroppings conspired with gravity to grind him to paste.
He planted his right boot on a stable bit of rock and pushed himself up into another leap, frantically calling the wind—not to bear him aloft this time but merely to nudge him a foot or so to one side, so that his left boot could land on the next piece of stable shelf he spotted. There was no time to think, only to react, and so Tavi found himself running at full speed down the precipitous slopes of the mountain, bounding like a mountain goat and accelerating with a rather alarming ease. It wasn’t until a few seconds later that he realized that he was actually beginning to outrun some of the falling stones, and he rather felt that the entire situation was shaping up to be quite exciting all the way up to an abrupt, ugly sort of end.
Behind him, there was a sound. A sound so deep and enormous that he did not hear it so much as feel it shaking his teeth. It rose and rose until it topped out in a gargantuan, basso brass horn sound, and Tavi risked a glance over his shoulder to see what had made the noise.
It was Garados.
The mountain’s entire top had lifted, rocks melting and collapsing and rearranging into the features of an enormous and ugly humanlike face. Burning red pits substituted for eyes, and its mouth was a great, gaping maw without visible lips or teeth. The entire mountain shook, and Garados twisted left and right, its vast, broad shoulders tearing free of the mountainside. Tavi’s brain seemed to stutter and trip as he saw the great fury in motion. He simply could not believe he was looking at something so unthinkably large.
He barely turned back around in time to make his next step. A falling stone the size of his fist hammered his calf, and he cried out in pain—and kept bounding, guiding his leaps with his weakened windcrafting.
Garados lifted one leg clear of the mountain, and Tavi had to scramble to leap off what looked like a kneecap the size of a steadholt. A few steps later, a broad foot rose out of the mountain and came sweeping down toward Tavi as if he had been an annoyance, an insect to be smashed and never considered again.
Tavi bounded frantically down the slope, trying to get out from under the enormous foot, and suddenly felt that he had an entirely new appreciation of the word hubris. He heard someone laughing hysterically as a vast shadow fell over him, and recognized that the voice was his own and that he had an impossible half mile of ground to cover, at least, to be clear of the enormous fury’s descending power.
He realized with a cool and practical certainty that he simply wasn’t moving fast enough. There was no way he was going to get clear in time.
Ehren stood up slowly from his seat beside Count Calderon on the citadel’s bench at Garrison. He watched as a mountain—as the mountain—rose from its resting place in the form of man, twice as tall as the mountain itself had been, unthinkably huge. Sheer distance clouded its features into haze, though Ehren could see that it was built heavily, disproportionately, a being of ugliness and spite and horrible power.
“Bloody crows,” Ehren breathed, as he watched that far-distant form move, raising a foot as a man might to crush an insect. “What is that?”
Bernard stared at it and shook his head slowly. “Great furies, boy,” he muttered. “Are you mad?”
The ground shook hard enough to slop water out of the improvised healing tubs that had been crafted from the stone floors in the old hall of the ruined steadholt. Amara steadied herself against a wall and hoped that the earthquake wouldn’t bring the hall down on their heads. After a moment, the tremors subsided, but did not quite stop, and startled, incredulous cries were added to the din of cries of pain and agony.
Amara glanced over to where Isana and Odiana and the healers of Octavian’s Legions labored on the wounded, too far gone into their own battles and crafting to take any note of their surroundings. The
n she staggered to the door and met Lady Placida there. Placidus Sandos had been found beneath a mound of dismembered vord nearly eight feet deep, badly wounded but alive. Even now, he lay on the ground nearby, and this was the first time Aria had left his side.
She and Amara both stared out, at the incredible form rising from the mountain to the northwest, its brow crowned with thunder and lightning, its shoulders cloaked in storm clouds and rain, its vast and terrible shape blotting out miles of blue sky. Something like a mouth gaped open, and its roar shook the ground again. The two women had to grab at the frames of the doorway to stay standing.
“Great furies,” Amara whispered.
“Aye,” Lady Placida breathed, her eyes wide, her face pale. “Two of them.”
Tavi managed his next bounding leap, useless as he knew it would be, frantically calling the wind for all that he was worth—and was suddenly hit in the back by something moving at incredible speed. Pale arms twined beneath his shoulders, preventing him from falling, and Kitai shouted, “Hold on!”
They accelerated as the mountain’s foot fell toward them, blotting out the sky, darkening the morning to twilight. Kitai’s windstream drove them faster and faster toward the rapidly dwindling strip of trees and sunlight at the mountain’s base—and as they grew near, that passage to survival suddenly filled with a small legion of windmanes, their inhuman faces stretched into eerie howls, their claws reaching.
“That’s cheating!” Kitai declared hotly—even as their forward pace increased in proportion to her outrage.
“Mind your eyes!” Tavi shouted back.
He lifted his right hand, noting with a touch of surprise that he still held his sword. An effort of will let the weapon burst into flame. He lifted the weapon awkwardly, still being held under the arms by Kitai, then shaped the familiar blade-shaped firecrafting into an elongated, white-hot lance, reaching out in front of them. The terrible speed of their passage didn’t simply blunt the end of the lance; it spread the fire out into a concave disc a dozen feet across. The heat from the fire flooded back to them, distinctly uncomfortable, a hot wind that scorched exposed skin—and sent its own wind flowing out and upward from it.