First Lord's Fury
Chapter 15~16
Chapter 15
Their kidnappers had bound Isana and covered her head with a hood before taking her from the room. Her stomach dropped from beneath her as they took to the air again, two windcrafters combining their skills to summon a single wind column to support the weight of three people. Isana was not clothed for such travel. The wind was making her skirts billow out and putting her legs on display.
She had to stop herself from laughing. The Realm's deadliest foe had just taken her from the heart of the most heavily defended city in the world of Carna, and she was worried about impropriety. It was laughable - but hardly funny. If she let the laughter start, she was not sure she would be able to stop it from becoming a scream.
Fear was not something she had ever become comfortable with. She had seen others who had - and not simply metalcrafters, either, who could cheat - walling away all of their emotions behind a cold, steely barrier of rational thought. She had known men and women who felt the fear every bit as intensely as she did, and who simply accepted its presence. For some of them, the fear seemed to flow through them, never stopping or finding purchase. Others actually seemed to seize on it, to channel it into furious thought and action. Countess Amara was an excellent example of the latter. Whereas, even closer to her, Araris had always stood as an example of the former...
Araris. She had seen him fly limply across the room. She had seen men dropping a hood over his lolling head. They had, apparently, taken him with her when they left. They wouldn't have hooded him if he was dead, surely.
Surely.
Isana flew on in her fear, and it neither gave her strength nor poured around her leaving her untouched. She felt like a bar of sand that was slowly and steadily being eaten away by the currents of terror around her. She felt sick.
Well enough, she chided herself sharply. If she vomited in the hood, she'd have a considerably humiliating situation to add to her danger and discomfort. If she could neither use nor coexist with the fear, she could at least force herself to carry on - refusing to let the fear make her stop using her mind to do everything within her power to resist her enemies. She could at least do as much as she had in the past.
She had been blinded before, and been forced to rely upon other senses to guide her. She could not see through the hood, nor hear over the roar of the wind, or feel with her cold-numbed, bound hands, nor smell nor taste anything but the slightly mildewed scent of the hood over her head. But that did not mean she was unable to learn anything about her captors.
Isana braced herself and opened up her watercrafter's senses to the emotions of those around her.
They came at her in a mind-searing burst of intensity. Emotions were high among the enemy, and intensely unpleasant to experience. Isana fought to sort out the various impressions, but it was like trying to listen to individual voices within a large chorus. A few high notes stuck out, but by and large they blended into a single whole.
The most intense sensations came from the two men holding her arms - and the primary emotion she felt in them was... confusion. They proceeded in a state of bewilderment and misery so acute that for a few seconds Isana could not distinguish her own emotions from theirs. Years of living with her gift had given her an ability to distinguish the subtle weave and flow of emotions, to make reasonably educated guesses at the thoughts that accompanied them.
The men knew that something was badly wrong, but they couldn't focus on what it might be. Every time they tried, waves of imposed sensation and emotion swept over the thought and washed it away. The only time anything solid held was when Isana heard an inhuman shriek drift up from somewhere ahead of them. Both men immediately concentrated with a ferocious intensity, their emotions perfectly synchronized, and Isana felt one of them rise slightly, the other sink, and guessed that they had just been ordered to bank into a long turn, changing their course in the air.
Isana shivered. They were most likely collared slaves, then, forcibly converted to the service of the vord through the use of slaver's collars. Once she'd determined that, she was able to feel more from the two men - their hearts overflowed with sadness. Though their minds had been rendered incapable of reason, on some level they must have known what had been done to them. They knew that their skills and power had been turned against their own people by an enemy, even if they could not consciously assemble the disparate pieces of the concept. They knew that they used to be something more but could not remember what it was, and that denial, that inability to reason, caused them enormous emotional pain.
Isana felt herself begin to weep for them. Kalarus Brencis Minoris had collared these men. Only he could free them - and he had been dead for more than half a year. They could never be freed, never be restored, never be made whole.
She made them a silent promise that she would do everything in her power to ensure that neither would live as a slave. Even if she had to kill them with her own hands.
As she pressed her awareness out past her two captors, she sensed other men. Not all of them were as badly disoriented as her escorts. Those who retained a greater capacity for reason harbored their own eidolon of raw terror. Fear so intense and so savage that it was practically a living thing had been forced into their thoughts, and it ruled their decisions utterly, like a watchdog placed within each of their minds. Some of them had lesser degrees of terror - and those men's emotions made Isana shudder with revulsion. In them, the darker portions of human nature, a lust for violence and blood and power, had been encouraged to grow and had overrun their thoughts like rampant weeds devouring a garden. Those men were nothing less than mortal monsters, terrors held on a psychic leash.
And there was...
Isana hesitated over this last sensation, because it was so faint, and came to her as a trembling vibration that she could barely be sure was real. She could feel the presence of... an innocent heart, one that felt emotions with the purity and depth and passion of a young child.
Then another shriek floated to her, and that sense of the child abruptly sharpened - and beneath the simple surface lurked alien currents of feeling, so strange and varied that Isana found herself wholly unable to tell one from the next, much less fit an accurate name or description to the emotion. They were cold things. Dry things. As they pressed against her, Isana was reminded of the rippling legs of a centipede that had once slithered up her calf.
She realized, with revulsion, that the being she sensed was the vord Queen.
Her two escorts began to descend, and her ears popped several times under the changing pressure.
Wherever her captors were taking her, it had not taken them long - and it seemed that they had arrived.
They landed roughly, and Isana would have fallen without the support of both guards. She was propelled forward, being dragged every few steps, and she stumbled upon a slight rise in the ground, as if their path had taken them over a flat stone a few inches high.
But instead of stony earth beneath her feet, the ground gave slightly with a kind of rubbery tension. Isana forced herself to keep breathing slowly and steadily.
She was walking on the vord's croach.
None of her captors spoke, and the surface beneath their feet deadened their footfalls to silence. Eerie sounds drifted in the air around her, muffled by the hood. Clicks. Chitters. Once, there was an ululating call that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Very faintly, she could hear booming reports, like distant thunder. She swallowed. Somewhere far away, Alera's firecrafters had begun their work, filling the skies with their furies.
The ground suddenly sloped down, and a rough hand pushed her head forward, her chin to her chest. She bumped her head against what felt like a rocky outcropping in any case, and it stung momentarily. Then the sounds all faded to silence, and the noise of her captors' breathing changed subtly. They must have brought her inside or underground.
One of her guards pushed her roughly to her knees. A moment later, he removed the hood, and Isana blinked her eyes against the sudden invasion of soft green light.
They were in a cavern, a large one, its walls too smooth to have been formed by nature. The walls, the floor, and a pair of supporting pillars were all covered in the croach. The waxy green substance pulsed and flowed with unsettling light. Liquids flowed beneath its surface.
Isana craned her neck, trying to find Araris, her heart suddenly hammering against her ribs.
A second pair of guards dragged him into Isana's line of view. They jerked the hood from his head and dropped him in a heap to the cavern floor. Isana could see that he'd suffered a number of abrasions and contusions, and she felt a physical burst of pain in her heart to see the bruises, the blood - but he had sustained no obvious critical trauma. He was breathing, but that was no guarantee of his safety. He could be bleeding to death internally even as she stared at him.
She never made a conscious decision, but she found herself suddenly straining against her captors, trying to go to Araris. They pushed her brutally to the floor. Her cheekbone dimpled the croach.
It was humiliating, how casually, how easily they had taken away her choice. She felt a blaze of anger, suffered a sudden urge to respond in earnest through Rill. She fought the impulse down. She was in no position to resist their strength. Until she had a better chance - until she and Araris had a better chance - to succeed in escaping, it would be wisest not to resist. "Please!" she said. "Please, let me see to him!"
Footsteps, softened by the croach, approached her. Isana lifted her eyes enough to see a young woman's bare feet. Her skin was pale, almost luminous. Her toenails were short, and the glossy green-black of vord chitin.
"Let her up," the Queen murmured.
The men holding Isana down withdrew at once.
Isana didn't want to look farther up - but it seemed somehow childish not to, as if she was too frightened to lift her face from her pillow. So she pushed herself from the floor until she was kneeling, sitting back on her heels, composed her wind-raveled dress along with her own equally frayed nerves, and lifted her gaze.
Isana had read Tavi's letters describing the vord queen he had encountered beneath the now-lost city of Alera Imperia, and had spoken to Amara regarding her own experience with the creature. She had expected the pale skin, the dark, multifaceted eyes. She had expected the unsettling mixture of alien inconsistency with everyday familiarity. She had expected her to bear an unsettling resemblance to the Marat girl, Kitai.
What she had not expected, not at all, was for another achingly familiar face to appear, contained within the canted eyes and exotic beauty of Kitai's visage. Though the Queen resembled Kitai, she was not identical. There was a subtle blending of the features of her face, as parents' faces would combine in the face of their child. The other face within the Queen's was one Tavi had never seen - that of his aunt, Isana's sister, who had died the night he was born. Alia.
Isana saw her younger sister's face in the vord Queen, muffled but not subsumed, like a stone lying quietly beneath a blanket of snow. Her heart ached. After all this time, she still felt Alia's loss, still remembered the moment of awful realization as she stared at a limp bundle of muddy limbs and ragged clothing on the cold stone floor of a low-roofed cavern.
The vord Queen's distant expression suddenly shifted, and she jerked her head back from Isana as though she had smelled something vile. Then, an instant later, seemingly without crossing the space in between, the vord Queen's eyes were immediately in front of hers, her nose all but brushing Isana's. She took a slow, seething breath, then hissed, "What is it? What is that?"
Isana leaned back, away from the Queen. "I... I don't understand."
The Queen let out a low hiss, a boiling, reptilian sound. "Your face. Your eyes. What did you see?"
Isana struggled for a moment to slow her racing heart, to control her breath. "You... you looked like someone familiar to me."
The Queen stared at her, and Isana felt a terrible, invasive sensation, like a thousand worms writhing against her scalp.
"What," the vord Queen hissed, "is Alia?"
Rage struck Isana without warning, cold and biting, and she flung the memory of that cold stone floor against the sensation upon her scalp as though she could crush the worming caress with the very image. "No," she heard herself say, her voice flat and cold. "Stop that."
The vord Queen twitched, a motion that moved her entire body, like a tree swaying in a sudden wind. She twitched her head to one side and stared at Isana, her mouth open. "Wh-what?"
Isana felt the creature abruptly, her presence coalescing to her watercrafting senses like a suddenly rising mist. There was a sense of complete, startled surprise in her, coupled with a child's flinching pain at rejection. The vord Queen stared at Isana in wonder for an instant - an emotion that segued rapidly toward something like...
Fear?
"That is not yours to take," Isana said in a hard, firm tone. "Do not try to do so again."
The vord Queen stared at her for an endless moment. Then she rose with another eerie hiss and turned away. "Do you know who I am?"
Isana frowned at the vord's turned back. Do you? she wondered. Why else would you ask?
Aloud, she said only, "You're the first Queen. The original, from the Wax Forest."
The vord Queen turned to give her an oblique look. Then she said, "Yes. Do you know why I am here?"
"To destroy us," Isana said.
The vord Queen smiled. It was not a human expression. There was nothing pleasant in it, no emotion associated with it - only a movement of muscles, something performed in imitation rather than truly understood. "I have questions. You will answer them."
Isana returned her smile with as blank and calm an expression as she could find. "I fail to see why I should do so."
"If you do not," the vord Queen said, "I will cause you pain."
Isana lifted her chin. She found herself smiling, very slightly. "It would not be the first time I have felt pain."
"No," the Queen said. "It would not."
Then she turned, took two long strides, seized Araris by the front of his mail coat, and lifted him into the air. With a motion of perfectly unfiltered speed and violence, she spun and slammed his back against the croach-covered wall. Isana's heart caught in her throat, and she waited for the Queen to strike him, or rake him with her gleaming, green-black nails.
But instead, the vord Queen simply leaned into the unconscious man.
Araris's shoulders slowly began to sink into the glowing croach.
Isana's throat tightened. She had read reports, spoken to holders who had seen their family or loved ones trapped beneath the croach in a similar fashion. Those so entombed did not die. They simply lay passively, as if they had drifted into a light sleep in a warm bath. And, as they drowsed, the croach slowly, painlessly ate them down to bones.
"No," Isana said, shifting forward into a crouch, lifting one hand out. "Araris!"
"I will ask questions," the vord Queen said slowly, as if chewing the words to test them for flavor, while Araris sank into the gelatinous substance. She released him after a few moments, though he continued to be drawn slowly into it, until only his lips and nose remained free of the croach. She turned, and her alien eyes glittered with something that Isana could sense as a kind of raw, uncaring fury. "You will speak with me. Or I will cause him pain you cannot imagine. I will take him away from you, little by little. I will feed his flesh to my children before your eyes."
Isana stared at the vord Queen and shuddered, before lowering her eyes.
"You are a momentary curiosity," the vord Queen continued. "I have other concerns. But understand that your fate is mine to decide. I will destroy you. Or I will allow you to live out your days in peace with those other Alerans who have already seen reason. Live it with your intended mate - or without him. It means little to me."
Isana was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "If what you say is true, young lady, then I cannot help but wonder why you are so angry."
She saw the vord Queen move - a blur of motion that she did not register in time to allow her to so much as flinch before the blow fell across her face. Isana fell back to the floor, fire burning her forehead, and wet, hot blood flowed down over her face, into one eye, half-blinding her. She did not cry out - at first because she was simply too startled to respond to the sheer speed of the assault, then because she forced herself to remain silent, to show no sign of pain or weakness before the alien being before her. She ground her teeth as fire spread over her forehead and face, and she made no sound.
"I will ask the questions," the vord Queen said. "Not you. As long as you answer them, your mate will remain whole. If you refuse, he will suffer. It is that simple."
She turned away from Isana, and a radiant green glow filled the chamber. Isana hunched her body uselessly against the agony as she lifted her hand to her forehead. A single cut perhaps four inches long ran along her brow, in an almost precisely straight line. The cut was open nearly all the way to her skull and bled freely.
Isana drew several deep breaths, focusing her effort through the pain, and called upon Rill. The work was harder, much harder than it would have been with even a modest basin of water, but she was able to watercraft the wound closed. A few moments later, she was able to reduce the pain somewhat, and between that and the cessation of bleeding, she felt dizzy, mildly euphoric, her thoughts clogged into muddled clumps. She must have looked a horror, half her face a sheet of red. Her dress was ruined. There was no reason not to use the sleeve to try to wipe some of the blood away, though her skin was tender, and she thought she probably succeeded in nothing but smearing it around a little more.
Isana swallowed. Her throat burned with thirst. She had to focus, to find a way to survive, for Araris to survive. But what could she do, here, with this creature facing her?
She looked up to find the cavern transformed.
Green light swirled and danced through the croach covering the cavern's ceiling. Bright pinpoints of light, many of them, stood in slowly swaying ranks. Other lights darted and flowed. Others pulsed at varying rates of speed. Waves of color, subtle variations of shades, washed across the ceiling, while the vord Queen stared up at it, utterly motionless, her alien eyes reflecting pinpoints of green like black jewels.
Isana felt slightly nauseated by the seething, organic motion of the luminous display, but was struck by the impression that there was something about it, a kind of link between the luminosity and the vord Queen that she could not fathom.
Perhaps, she thought, her eyes simply were not complex enough to see what the vord Queen saw.
"The attack progresses well," the vord Queen said, her tone distracted. "Gaius Attis, if that is what he is to be called now, is a conventional commander. An able one, but he shows me nothing more than I have seen already."
"He's killing your forces, then," Isana said quietly.
The vord Queen smiled. "Yes. He has increased the efficiency of the Legions remarkably. The soldiers who escaped me last year are blooded now. He spends their lives well." The vord Queen watched for a moment more before asking, calmly, "Would you give your life for him?"
Isana's stomach twisted as she thought of Aquitaine wearing the First Lord's crown. She remembered the friends of the entirety of her adult life she had buried because of his machinations.
"If necessary," she said.
The vord Queen looked at her, and said, "Why?"
"Our people need him," Isana said.
The vord Queen's head tilted slowly to one side. Then she said, "You would not do it for his sake."
"I..." Isana shook her head. "I don't think so. No."
"But you would do it for them. For those who need him."
"Yes."
"But you would be dead. How would that serve the attainment of your goals?"
"There are things more important than my goals," Isana said.
"Such as the survival of your people."
"Yes."
"And that of your son."
Isana swallowed. She said, "Yes."
The vord Queen considered that for a time. Then she returned her eyes to the ceiling, and said, "You answered me clearly and promptly. As a reward, you may go to your male. Assure yourself of his health. See that I have not yet taken his life. If you attempt to escape or attack me, I will prevent you. And tear off his lips as punishment. Do you understand?"
Isana ground her teeth, staring at the Queen. Then she rose and walked to Araris. "I understand."
The Queen's glittering eyes flicked to her once more, then turned back to the ceiling. "Excellent," she said. "I am glad that we have begun learning to speak to each other. Grandmother."
Chapter 16
Amara watched the battle with the vord unfold from the air.
She had seen battles before, but mostly those joined between Alera's Legions and her more traditional foes - the forces of rebel Lords and High Lords, smaller-scale conflicts with armed outlaws, and of course, the Second Battle of the Calderon Valley, fought between multiple factions of the Marat and the hideously outnumbered defenders of Garrison, at the valley's easternmost end.
This battle bore little resemblance to those.
The vord approached, not like an army in the array of battle but like an oncoming wave, a tide of gleaming green-black darkness beneath the light of a weak moon. It was like watching the shadow of a storm cloud roll forward over the landscape - the vord moved with the same steady, implacable speed, with the same sense of impersonal, devouring hunger. It was an easy matter to track their progress: There was little light upon the lands of Riva, but where the vord walked, they consumed it all.
By contrast, the Legions were clothed in light. All up and down the Aleran lines, the standards of the individual centuries and cohorts blazed with furycrafted fire, each in the signature colors of their Legions and home cities. In the center of the lines, the Crown Legion was a blaze of scarlet-and-azure light, flanked by First and Second Aquitaine in a shroud of crimson fire. The right flank was centered upon the veteran forces of High Lord Antillus, burning with cold blue-and-white light, the left around the similarly veteran Legions of High Lord Phrygius, its standards sheathed in glacial green-and-white fire.
Other Legions, some from cities that no longer remained standing, all of them far less experienced than the northern veterans, had been interspaced between those three points and spread across the rich fields surrounding the plain south of Riva in a wall of solid steel and light.
Behind them, hidden from the vord by a wall of illumination, Amara could see the ranks of cavalry waiting for direction, for the battle captains of their Legions to decide where they could best be used. Rangy, long-legged coursers from the plains of Placida stood beside the hulking, heavily muscled chargers of Rhodes, who in turn stood next to the shaggy, hardy little northern horses that were barely taller than ponies.
Aquitaine was not content to rest behind the massive fortifications built around the city. The invaders had driven Aleran forces from one defensive position after another, and he had been strongly against Gaius Sextus's defensive strategy from the beginning. Supported by the experienced Legions of the north, he was determined to carry the battle to the enemy.
The Aleran forces were in motion, moving forward.
From high above, Amara could sometimes see entire cohorts of Knights Aeris, black spots of shadow, far below, sharply outlined against the lighted columns of Legions on the ground. There were fewer than there should have been relative to the forces on the move. The Knights Aeris of Alera had taken hideous casualties in the battle to defend Alera Imperia. Their sacrifice had been one of the factors to help convince the enemy to commit the lion's share of its forces to the final assault on the city itself - an assault that had resulted in annihilation for the attacking vord.
Gaius Sextus's final, suicidal gambit had bought Alera the time the Realm needed to recover and prepare for this battle, but the cost had been grievous - and Amara feared that their comparative weakness in the skies would leave the Legions with a deadly weak point in their order of battle.
The leading edge of the vord tide rushed to within a quarter mile of the front ranks of the advancing Legions, and a flare of scarlet-and-blue light leapt skyward from the Crown Legion, Aquitaine's signal to commence. Alera's Knights and Citizens, after months of preparation and fear, after enduring more than a year of humiliation and pain inflicted by the invaders, were ready, at last, to give them an appropriate reply.
Even though she'd heard of the general theory behind the opening salvo of furycraft, Amara had never seen anything quite like it. She had witnessed the utter destruction of the city of Kalare by the wrath of the great fury Kalus, and it had been a horrible, hideous sight, vast beyond imagining, uncontrolled, horrible in its beauty - and completely impersonal. What happened to the leading wave of vord was every bit as terrible and even more frightening.
The lords of Alera spoke in a voice of fire.
The standard assault of a skilled firecrafter was the manifestation of a sudden and expanding sphere of white-hot fire. They were generally large enough to envelop a mounted rider. Anything caught inside them would be charred to ashes in an instant. Anything within five yards would generally be melted or set aflame - and anything living within another five yards of that would be scorched beyond the capacity of a human being to sustain hostilities. The fire came with an ear-piercing hiss and vanished with a hollow boom. It would leave secondary fires and smooth depressions of molten earth in its wake.
Manifesting such an attack was extremely draining upon the furycrafter involved. Even those with the talents of Lords and High Lords counted the number of spheres he could manifest without resting in the dozens, and not many of those. Given how many vord were on the field, even with the gathered might of all Alera's firecrafters, they could not inflict instant, significant losses upon the mass of the enemy body.
Gaius Attis had considered a way to improve on that.
Instead of the roar of full-blown fire-spheres, a flicker of tiny lights, like thousands of fireflies, sprang up ahead of the oncoming vord. A moment later, Amara began to hear a tide swell of tiny reports, pop pop pop, like the celebratory fireworks crafted by children at Midsummer. The sparkling lights thickened, redoubling, creating a low wall in front of the enemy, who charged ahead without slowing.
No single one of the little firecraftings was a deadly threat to a human being, much less to an armored warrior form of the vord - but there were hundreds of thousands of them, each one an almost-effortless crafting. As the little flowers of fire continued to blossom, the air around them began to shimmer, turning the sparkling line of lights into strip of hellishly molten air that almost seemed to glow with its own fire.
The leading elements of the vord plunged into the barrier and agonizing destruction. Their screams came up to Amara only distantly, and with a little help from Cirrus, she could see that the vord had not moved more than twenty feet across the killing oven Gaius Attis had prepared for them. The warriors staggered and collapsed, roasted alive, bits of flesh and armor cooking away and being flung up into the gale of rising hot air as ash. Tens of thousands of vord perished in the first sixty seconds.
But they kept coming.
Moving with frantic energy, the vord flung themselves in utter abandonment at the barrier, and thousands more died - but each vord that perished absorbed some of the furycrafted flame. Amara was reminded uncomfortably of a campfire in a thunderstorm. Certainly, no single drop of water could extinguish the flame. It would be boiled to steam as it tried - but sooner or later, the fire would go out.
The vord began to push through, bounding over the charred corpses of those who had come before, using as shields the bodies of their companions who were collapsing from the heat, each successive vord pushing a few feet farther than the one ahead of it.
Signals from the Crown Legion pulled the line of deadly heat back toward the Legion lines, forcing the enemy to pay the full price for those last yards of ground, but they could not bring the band of superheated air too close to the Aleran lines without exposing their own troops to the flame - which also blinded the Aleran battle commanders to the movements of the enemy. So, as the vord began to break through, another signal went up from the Crown Legion, and the massive firecrafting ceased. Seconds later, the vord joined battle with the Legions.
"They have no thought for their own lives," said Veradis, staring down as Amara did. "No thought at all. How many of them died just now, simply so that they could reach the battle?"
Amara shook her head and didn't answer. She hovered upon her windstream, high up in the night sky, where the air was cold and bitter. Three wind coaches carrying Aldrick and his swordsmen hovered a few yards off.
"When will the scouts return?" Veradis asked anxiously. The young Ceresian woman was only a moderately good flier, and her long hair and dress were hardly ideal for the circumstances, but she handled herself with composure. "Every moment we wait here, they could be taking her farther away from us."
"It won't do the First Lady any good to go charging off in the wrong direction," Amara called back. "I don't like them, but Aldrick's people know their business. When one of their fliers reports in, we'll move. Until then, we're smartest to wait here, where we can get anywhere we need to be the most quickly." She pointed a finger. "Look. The cyclone teams."
Small, dark clouds of fliers swept down in ranks over the meeting of the opposing forces. As Amara watched, she saw them seizing the air, made treacherously turbulent by the extended fury of the slow-motion firecrafting the Alerans had held before the vord. Citizens and Knights Aeris seized upon that motion in the air, focusing and shaping it, each team adding its own momentum as they wheeled in a caracole down the lines, spinning the furious winds and spinning them again.
It took them only a few moments, working together - and then in half a dozen places just behind the frontmost ranks of the vord, great whirling columns of ash and soot and scorched earth writhed up from the ground. The cyclones roared, howling out a ground-scorching wail of hunger, and began to rush ram pantly through the vord ranks, seizing the creatures like ants and tossing them hundreds of feet through the air - when they didn't drive tiny bits of detritus through their carapaces like so many diminutive arrowheads, or simply rend them limb from limb on the spot. Each cyclone was shepherded by its own team of windcrafters, each of which kept its own massive, deadly vortex from turning back upon Aleran lines. Windmanes, glowing white forms, like skeletal human torsos trailing a shroud of smoke and mist where their legs should have been, began to glide out of the cyclones and swept down to attack anything within their reach upon the earth.
Amara shook her head. She'd been trapped without shelter in a furystorm that had called up windmanes once before - and the deadly, wild wind furies had nearly torn her to pieces. Gaius Attis was creating hundreds more of the creatures with the cyclones he was harnessing, and they would haunt the region for decades, if not centuries to come, posing a threat to holders, cattle, wildlife -
Amara forced herself to abandon that line of thought. In this respect, at least, she thought Aquitaine was quite right - if the vord weren't stopped, here, now, there wouldn't be any holders. Or cattle. Or wildlife.
We aren't just fighting for ourselves, she thought. We're fighting for everything that lives and grows in our world. If we do not throw down the vord, nothing of what we know will remain. We will simply cease to be - and no one will be left to remember us.
Except, she supposed, for the vord.
Amara clenched her hands hard and restrained herself from calling upon Cirrus and flinging her own skills into the battle being fought below.
"Countess?" called Veradis in a shaking voice.
Amara looked around until she spotted the younger woman, hovering several yards farther south and slightly lower than Amara was. She altered her windstream until she had maneuvered into position beside the Ceresian Citizen. "What is it?"
Veradis pointed wordlessly at the causeway leading up from the southwest.
Amara frowned and focused Cirrus upon the task of bringing the road into clearer visibility. At first, in the dim light of the weak moon, she could see nothing. But then flickers of light farther down the road drew her attention, and she found herself staring at...
At a moving mass, on the road. That was all she could be certain of. It was different from the stream of still-coming vord warrior forms in that there was no gleam of wan light on vord armor, no regular, seething mass of creatures moving as many bodies under the control of a single mind. There were flickers of light moving amidst that body, irregular in shape, spacing, and color, or she wouldn't have been able to see anything at all.
Amara concentrated, murmuring to Cirrus to draw the distant road even closer in her sight. It was difficult to do so while maintaining her windstream, but the far road sprang into focus after a moment of effort and showed Amara the last thing that she had been expecting in the vord's train.
Furies.
The road was filled with manifest furies. Thousands, tens of thousands, of them.
The variety of the furies in sight was dizzying. Earth furies showed themselves as hummocks of stone in the road, rumbling along through the earth. Some were vaguely shaped like animals, but most were not. The largest of them pushed the entire causeway up into a single hummock as they cruised forward, moving as fast as a running horse. Wood furies bounded along the causeway, their shapes never quite matching that of any single animal or creature, but blending the traits of many - others, invisible in the trees and plants at either side of the road, could only be seen as a ripple of forward motion amidst the living things. Water furies bounded or slithered forward, some shaped like great serpents or frogs, while others were simply amorphous shapes of pure water, held together by the will of the fury inhabiting it. Fire furies rushed among them, mostly in the form of predator animals, though others were flickering forms of fire, changing from one instant to the next - it was they whose light Amara had seen. And from three to twenty feet above the surface of the road rushed a horde of wind furies. They were mostly windmanes, though Amara could see far larger wispy shapes ghosting among them, the largest in the form of a truly enormous shark that cruised through the air as if it were the sea.
So many furies. Amara felt slightly dizzied.
She dimly noted forms moving along the outer edges of the road, or flying slightly above it - captured Alerans. She realized, after a moment's thought, that they were herding the furies below, using furycraft of their own to keep the mass of furies moving along the causeway. The driven furies were not pleased about it either. Their aggressive anger was something that Amara could practically feel pressing against her teeth.
But if they were doing that it meant...
"Bloody crows," Amara swore. "Those are feral furies."
Veradis stared at her with wide eyes, her face pale. "All of them? Th-that's impossible."
But it wasn't. Not after months of warfare against the vord. The enemy had been indiscriminate in its slaughter. And every Aleran killed meant more furies suddenly bereft of human restraint and guidance. Somehow, the vord had gathered together bloody legions of the deadly things. And this was no problem like that of dealing with windmanes in a furystorm, easily solved by taking shelter in a building of earth and stone. If someone tried that against this mob, the earth furies would crush him in his own shelter, assuming the wood furies didn't simply follow them in, or the fire furies turn what should have been a haven into a murderous furnace.
Feral furies were not easily intimidated or dissuaded from their violence. It required the skills of a full-blown Citizen to deal with them. It had taken Aleran Citizens centuries to pacify the settled lands of Alera, then the routes followed by the causeways.
And now several centuries' worth of danger and death were racing toward the Aleran lines.
The Legions would never be able to stand before the hammerblow those feral furies would deliver. Simply surviving them would require all of the focus and furycraft at their command - which would mean that they would not be able to direct it toward the vord. And in a purely physical contest, the invaders would grind the Alerans to dust.
And should the feral horde shatter the Legion lines and rush through to Riva and the freemen and refugees now living there... their deaths would be violent and horrible, the loss of life enormous.
The enemy had just transformed Riva from a stronghold into a trap.
Amara felt herself breathing harder and faster than she needed. To the best of her knowledge, there were no Aleran fliers operating as high as her group. The teams covering the lower altitudes wouldn't be able to see the oncoming threat until it was far too late to react.
Amara shivered and suppressed a desire to scream in frustration.
"Aldrick," she snapped. "Take the Windwolves back to Riva, directly to the High Lord's tower. Stand there to cover Lord and Lady Riva, and to respond to any emergency requiring your team's support." Her eyes flicked to Veradis. "Lady Veradis will explain."
Aldrick stared at her, but only for a second. His eyes shifted down and back up, then he nodded once. He made a short series of hand gestures to one of his men, and seconds later, the Windwolves' fliers and the coaches they carried were banking into a turn, to descend toward the embattled city at their best possible speed.
"Amara," Veradis said.
"There is no time," Amara replied calmly. "The enemy has those furies channeled and moving in the proper direction, but they don't have anything like real control over them. They must have modified the causeway, somehow. Once they turn those furies loose, everything is going to change."
"What do you mean?" Veradis asked.
"We won't be able to hold the city," Amara spat. "Not in the face of so many hostile furies. They'll rip the city to shreds around us, killing our people along the way. The only thing we can do is withdraw."
The younger woman shook her head dazedly. "W-withdraw? There's nowhere left to go."
Amara felt a surge of fierce pride rush through her. "Yes," she said. "There is. You will follow Aldrick and his people. Explain to him about the feral furies. Make sure Lord Riva knows, as well."
"B-but... what are you going to do?"
"Warn Aquitaine," she snapped. "Stop hovering there like an idle schoolgirl and go!"
Veradis nodded jerkily, turned, and began accelerating to catch up with the Windwolves. Amara watched for a few seconds, to be sure Veradis wasn't about to fly off in the wrong direction in sheer confusion. Then she turned, called to Cirrus, and dived, rushing down toward the far-distant earth with all the speed that gravity and her fury could give her. There was a thunderous explosion all around her as her speed peaked, and she realized that she had none of the operating passwords for the battlefield below. She would just have to hope that the combat teams patrolling the air were too slow to stop her or kill her before she could speak to Aquitaine.
Besides, that was the least of her worries.
How was she going to be able to face Bernard and tell him that for the sake of the Realm, she had chosen to leave his sister's fate in enemy hands?
Their kidnappers had bound Isana and covered her head with a hood before taking her from the room. Her stomach dropped from beneath her as they took to the air again, two windcrafters combining their skills to summon a single wind column to support the weight of three people. Isana was not clothed for such travel. The wind was making her skirts billow out and putting her legs on display.
She had to stop herself from laughing. The Realm's deadliest foe had just taken her from the heart of the most heavily defended city in the world of Carna, and she was worried about impropriety. It was laughable - but hardly funny. If she let the laughter start, she was not sure she would be able to stop it from becoming a scream.
Fear was not something she had ever become comfortable with. She had seen others who had - and not simply metalcrafters, either, who could cheat - walling away all of their emotions behind a cold, steely barrier of rational thought. She had known men and women who felt the fear every bit as intensely as she did, and who simply accepted its presence. For some of them, the fear seemed to flow through them, never stopping or finding purchase. Others actually seemed to seize on it, to channel it into furious thought and action. Countess Amara was an excellent example of the latter. Whereas, even closer to her, Araris had always stood as an example of the former...
Araris. She had seen him fly limply across the room. She had seen men dropping a hood over his lolling head. They had, apparently, taken him with her when they left. They wouldn't have hooded him if he was dead, surely.
Surely.
Isana flew on in her fear, and it neither gave her strength nor poured around her leaving her untouched. She felt like a bar of sand that was slowly and steadily being eaten away by the currents of terror around her. She felt sick.
Well enough, she chided herself sharply. If she vomited in the hood, she'd have a considerably humiliating situation to add to her danger and discomfort. If she could neither use nor coexist with the fear, she could at least force herself to carry on - refusing to let the fear make her stop using her mind to do everything within her power to resist her enemies. She could at least do as much as she had in the past.
She had been blinded before, and been forced to rely upon other senses to guide her. She could not see through the hood, nor hear over the roar of the wind, or feel with her cold-numbed, bound hands, nor smell nor taste anything but the slightly mildewed scent of the hood over her head. But that did not mean she was unable to learn anything about her captors.
Isana braced herself and opened up her watercrafter's senses to the emotions of those around her.
They came at her in a mind-searing burst of intensity. Emotions were high among the enemy, and intensely unpleasant to experience. Isana fought to sort out the various impressions, but it was like trying to listen to individual voices within a large chorus. A few high notes stuck out, but by and large they blended into a single whole.
The most intense sensations came from the two men holding her arms - and the primary emotion she felt in them was... confusion. They proceeded in a state of bewilderment and misery so acute that for a few seconds Isana could not distinguish her own emotions from theirs. Years of living with her gift had given her an ability to distinguish the subtle weave and flow of emotions, to make reasonably educated guesses at the thoughts that accompanied them.
The men knew that something was badly wrong, but they couldn't focus on what it might be. Every time they tried, waves of imposed sensation and emotion swept over the thought and washed it away. The only time anything solid held was when Isana heard an inhuman shriek drift up from somewhere ahead of them. Both men immediately concentrated with a ferocious intensity, their emotions perfectly synchronized, and Isana felt one of them rise slightly, the other sink, and guessed that they had just been ordered to bank into a long turn, changing their course in the air.
Isana shivered. They were most likely collared slaves, then, forcibly converted to the service of the vord through the use of slaver's collars. Once she'd determined that, she was able to feel more from the two men - their hearts overflowed with sadness. Though their minds had been rendered incapable of reason, on some level they must have known what had been done to them. They knew that their skills and power had been turned against their own people by an enemy, even if they could not consciously assemble the disparate pieces of the concept. They knew that they used to be something more but could not remember what it was, and that denial, that inability to reason, caused them enormous emotional pain.
Isana felt herself begin to weep for them. Kalarus Brencis Minoris had collared these men. Only he could free them - and he had been dead for more than half a year. They could never be freed, never be restored, never be made whole.
She made them a silent promise that she would do everything in her power to ensure that neither would live as a slave. Even if she had to kill them with her own hands.
As she pressed her awareness out past her two captors, she sensed other men. Not all of them were as badly disoriented as her escorts. Those who retained a greater capacity for reason harbored their own eidolon of raw terror. Fear so intense and so savage that it was practically a living thing had been forced into their thoughts, and it ruled their decisions utterly, like a watchdog placed within each of their minds. Some of them had lesser degrees of terror - and those men's emotions made Isana shudder with revulsion. In them, the darker portions of human nature, a lust for violence and blood and power, had been encouraged to grow and had overrun their thoughts like rampant weeds devouring a garden. Those men were nothing less than mortal monsters, terrors held on a psychic leash.
And there was...
Isana hesitated over this last sensation, because it was so faint, and came to her as a trembling vibration that she could barely be sure was real. She could feel the presence of... an innocent heart, one that felt emotions with the purity and depth and passion of a young child.
Then another shriek floated to her, and that sense of the child abruptly sharpened - and beneath the simple surface lurked alien currents of feeling, so strange and varied that Isana found herself wholly unable to tell one from the next, much less fit an accurate name or description to the emotion. They were cold things. Dry things. As they pressed against her, Isana was reminded of the rippling legs of a centipede that had once slithered up her calf.
She realized, with revulsion, that the being she sensed was the vord Queen.
Her two escorts began to descend, and her ears popped several times under the changing pressure.
Wherever her captors were taking her, it had not taken them long - and it seemed that they had arrived.
They landed roughly, and Isana would have fallen without the support of both guards. She was propelled forward, being dragged every few steps, and she stumbled upon a slight rise in the ground, as if their path had taken them over a flat stone a few inches high.
But instead of stony earth beneath her feet, the ground gave slightly with a kind of rubbery tension. Isana forced herself to keep breathing slowly and steadily.
She was walking on the vord's croach.
None of her captors spoke, and the surface beneath their feet deadened their footfalls to silence. Eerie sounds drifted in the air around her, muffled by the hood. Clicks. Chitters. Once, there was an ululating call that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Very faintly, she could hear booming reports, like distant thunder. She swallowed. Somewhere far away, Alera's firecrafters had begun their work, filling the skies with their furies.
The ground suddenly sloped down, and a rough hand pushed her head forward, her chin to her chest. She bumped her head against what felt like a rocky outcropping in any case, and it stung momentarily. Then the sounds all faded to silence, and the noise of her captors' breathing changed subtly. They must have brought her inside or underground.
One of her guards pushed her roughly to her knees. A moment later, he removed the hood, and Isana blinked her eyes against the sudden invasion of soft green light.
They were in a cavern, a large one, its walls too smooth to have been formed by nature. The walls, the floor, and a pair of supporting pillars were all covered in the croach. The waxy green substance pulsed and flowed with unsettling light. Liquids flowed beneath its surface.
Isana craned her neck, trying to find Araris, her heart suddenly hammering against her ribs.
A second pair of guards dragged him into Isana's line of view. They jerked the hood from his head and dropped him in a heap to the cavern floor. Isana could see that he'd suffered a number of abrasions and contusions, and she felt a physical burst of pain in her heart to see the bruises, the blood - but he had sustained no obvious critical trauma. He was breathing, but that was no guarantee of his safety. He could be bleeding to death internally even as she stared at him.
She never made a conscious decision, but she found herself suddenly straining against her captors, trying to go to Araris. They pushed her brutally to the floor. Her cheekbone dimpled the croach.
It was humiliating, how casually, how easily they had taken away her choice. She felt a blaze of anger, suffered a sudden urge to respond in earnest through Rill. She fought the impulse down. She was in no position to resist their strength. Until she had a better chance - until she and Araris had a better chance - to succeed in escaping, it would be wisest not to resist. "Please!" she said. "Please, let me see to him!"
Footsteps, softened by the croach, approached her. Isana lifted her eyes enough to see a young woman's bare feet. Her skin was pale, almost luminous. Her toenails were short, and the glossy green-black of vord chitin.
"Let her up," the Queen murmured.
The men holding Isana down withdrew at once.
Isana didn't want to look farther up - but it seemed somehow childish not to, as if she was too frightened to lift her face from her pillow. So she pushed herself from the floor until she was kneeling, sitting back on her heels, composed her wind-raveled dress along with her own equally frayed nerves, and lifted her gaze.
Isana had read Tavi's letters describing the vord queen he had encountered beneath the now-lost city of Alera Imperia, and had spoken to Amara regarding her own experience with the creature. She had expected the pale skin, the dark, multifaceted eyes. She had expected the unsettling mixture of alien inconsistency with everyday familiarity. She had expected her to bear an unsettling resemblance to the Marat girl, Kitai.
What she had not expected, not at all, was for another achingly familiar face to appear, contained within the canted eyes and exotic beauty of Kitai's visage. Though the Queen resembled Kitai, she was not identical. There was a subtle blending of the features of her face, as parents' faces would combine in the face of their child. The other face within the Queen's was one Tavi had never seen - that of his aunt, Isana's sister, who had died the night he was born. Alia.
Isana saw her younger sister's face in the vord Queen, muffled but not subsumed, like a stone lying quietly beneath a blanket of snow. Her heart ached. After all this time, she still felt Alia's loss, still remembered the moment of awful realization as she stared at a limp bundle of muddy limbs and ragged clothing on the cold stone floor of a low-roofed cavern.
The vord Queen's distant expression suddenly shifted, and she jerked her head back from Isana as though she had smelled something vile. Then, an instant later, seemingly without crossing the space in between, the vord Queen's eyes were immediately in front of hers, her nose all but brushing Isana's. She took a slow, seething breath, then hissed, "What is it? What is that?"
Isana leaned back, away from the Queen. "I... I don't understand."
The Queen let out a low hiss, a boiling, reptilian sound. "Your face. Your eyes. What did you see?"
Isana struggled for a moment to slow her racing heart, to control her breath. "You... you looked like someone familiar to me."
The Queen stared at her, and Isana felt a terrible, invasive sensation, like a thousand worms writhing against her scalp.
"What," the vord Queen hissed, "is Alia?"
Rage struck Isana without warning, cold and biting, and she flung the memory of that cold stone floor against the sensation upon her scalp as though she could crush the worming caress with the very image. "No," she heard herself say, her voice flat and cold. "Stop that."
The vord Queen twitched, a motion that moved her entire body, like a tree swaying in a sudden wind. She twitched her head to one side and stared at Isana, her mouth open. "Wh-what?"
Isana felt the creature abruptly, her presence coalescing to her watercrafting senses like a suddenly rising mist. There was a sense of complete, startled surprise in her, coupled with a child's flinching pain at rejection. The vord Queen stared at Isana in wonder for an instant - an emotion that segued rapidly toward something like...
Fear?
"That is not yours to take," Isana said in a hard, firm tone. "Do not try to do so again."
The vord Queen stared at her for an endless moment. Then she rose with another eerie hiss and turned away. "Do you know who I am?"
Isana frowned at the vord's turned back. Do you? she wondered. Why else would you ask?
Aloud, she said only, "You're the first Queen. The original, from the Wax Forest."
The vord Queen turned to give her an oblique look. Then she said, "Yes. Do you know why I am here?"
"To destroy us," Isana said.
The vord Queen smiled. It was not a human expression. There was nothing pleasant in it, no emotion associated with it - only a movement of muscles, something performed in imitation rather than truly understood. "I have questions. You will answer them."
Isana returned her smile with as blank and calm an expression as she could find. "I fail to see why I should do so."
"If you do not," the vord Queen said, "I will cause you pain."
Isana lifted her chin. She found herself smiling, very slightly. "It would not be the first time I have felt pain."
"No," the Queen said. "It would not."
Then she turned, took two long strides, seized Araris by the front of his mail coat, and lifted him into the air. With a motion of perfectly unfiltered speed and violence, she spun and slammed his back against the croach-covered wall. Isana's heart caught in her throat, and she waited for the Queen to strike him, or rake him with her gleaming, green-black nails.
But instead, the vord Queen simply leaned into the unconscious man.
Araris's shoulders slowly began to sink into the glowing croach.
Isana's throat tightened. She had read reports, spoken to holders who had seen their family or loved ones trapped beneath the croach in a similar fashion. Those so entombed did not die. They simply lay passively, as if they had drifted into a light sleep in a warm bath. And, as they drowsed, the croach slowly, painlessly ate them down to bones.
"No," Isana said, shifting forward into a crouch, lifting one hand out. "Araris!"
"I will ask questions," the vord Queen said slowly, as if chewing the words to test them for flavor, while Araris sank into the gelatinous substance. She released him after a few moments, though he continued to be drawn slowly into it, until only his lips and nose remained free of the croach. She turned, and her alien eyes glittered with something that Isana could sense as a kind of raw, uncaring fury. "You will speak with me. Or I will cause him pain you cannot imagine. I will take him away from you, little by little. I will feed his flesh to my children before your eyes."
Isana stared at the vord Queen and shuddered, before lowering her eyes.
"You are a momentary curiosity," the vord Queen continued. "I have other concerns. But understand that your fate is mine to decide. I will destroy you. Or I will allow you to live out your days in peace with those other Alerans who have already seen reason. Live it with your intended mate - or without him. It means little to me."
Isana was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "If what you say is true, young lady, then I cannot help but wonder why you are so angry."
She saw the vord Queen move - a blur of motion that she did not register in time to allow her to so much as flinch before the blow fell across her face. Isana fell back to the floor, fire burning her forehead, and wet, hot blood flowed down over her face, into one eye, half-blinding her. She did not cry out - at first because she was simply too startled to respond to the sheer speed of the assault, then because she forced herself to remain silent, to show no sign of pain or weakness before the alien being before her. She ground her teeth as fire spread over her forehead and face, and she made no sound.
"I will ask the questions," the vord Queen said. "Not you. As long as you answer them, your mate will remain whole. If you refuse, he will suffer. It is that simple."
She turned away from Isana, and a radiant green glow filled the chamber. Isana hunched her body uselessly against the agony as she lifted her hand to her forehead. A single cut perhaps four inches long ran along her brow, in an almost precisely straight line. The cut was open nearly all the way to her skull and bled freely.
Isana drew several deep breaths, focusing her effort through the pain, and called upon Rill. The work was harder, much harder than it would have been with even a modest basin of water, but she was able to watercraft the wound closed. A few moments later, she was able to reduce the pain somewhat, and between that and the cessation of bleeding, she felt dizzy, mildly euphoric, her thoughts clogged into muddled clumps. She must have looked a horror, half her face a sheet of red. Her dress was ruined. There was no reason not to use the sleeve to try to wipe some of the blood away, though her skin was tender, and she thought she probably succeeded in nothing but smearing it around a little more.
Isana swallowed. Her throat burned with thirst. She had to focus, to find a way to survive, for Araris to survive. But what could she do, here, with this creature facing her?
She looked up to find the cavern transformed.
Green light swirled and danced through the croach covering the cavern's ceiling. Bright pinpoints of light, many of them, stood in slowly swaying ranks. Other lights darted and flowed. Others pulsed at varying rates of speed. Waves of color, subtle variations of shades, washed across the ceiling, while the vord Queen stared up at it, utterly motionless, her alien eyes reflecting pinpoints of green like black jewels.
Isana felt slightly nauseated by the seething, organic motion of the luminous display, but was struck by the impression that there was something about it, a kind of link between the luminosity and the vord Queen that she could not fathom.
Perhaps, she thought, her eyes simply were not complex enough to see what the vord Queen saw.
"The attack progresses well," the vord Queen said, her tone distracted. "Gaius Attis, if that is what he is to be called now, is a conventional commander. An able one, but he shows me nothing more than I have seen already."
"He's killing your forces, then," Isana said quietly.
The vord Queen smiled. "Yes. He has increased the efficiency of the Legions remarkably. The soldiers who escaped me last year are blooded now. He spends their lives well." The vord Queen watched for a moment more before asking, calmly, "Would you give your life for him?"
Isana's stomach twisted as she thought of Aquitaine wearing the First Lord's crown. She remembered the friends of the entirety of her adult life she had buried because of his machinations.
"If necessary," she said.
The vord Queen looked at her, and said, "Why?"
"Our people need him," Isana said.
The vord Queen's head tilted slowly to one side. Then she said, "You would not do it for his sake."
"I..." Isana shook her head. "I don't think so. No."
"But you would do it for them. For those who need him."
"Yes."
"But you would be dead. How would that serve the attainment of your goals?"
"There are things more important than my goals," Isana said.
"Such as the survival of your people."
"Yes."
"And that of your son."
Isana swallowed. She said, "Yes."
The vord Queen considered that for a time. Then she returned her eyes to the ceiling, and said, "You answered me clearly and promptly. As a reward, you may go to your male. Assure yourself of his health. See that I have not yet taken his life. If you attempt to escape or attack me, I will prevent you. And tear off his lips as punishment. Do you understand?"
Isana ground her teeth, staring at the Queen. Then she rose and walked to Araris. "I understand."
The Queen's glittering eyes flicked to her once more, then turned back to the ceiling. "Excellent," she said. "I am glad that we have begun learning to speak to each other. Grandmother."
Chapter 16
Amara watched the battle with the vord unfold from the air.
She had seen battles before, but mostly those joined between Alera's Legions and her more traditional foes - the forces of rebel Lords and High Lords, smaller-scale conflicts with armed outlaws, and of course, the Second Battle of the Calderon Valley, fought between multiple factions of the Marat and the hideously outnumbered defenders of Garrison, at the valley's easternmost end.
This battle bore little resemblance to those.
The vord approached, not like an army in the array of battle but like an oncoming wave, a tide of gleaming green-black darkness beneath the light of a weak moon. It was like watching the shadow of a storm cloud roll forward over the landscape - the vord moved with the same steady, implacable speed, with the same sense of impersonal, devouring hunger. It was an easy matter to track their progress: There was little light upon the lands of Riva, but where the vord walked, they consumed it all.
By contrast, the Legions were clothed in light. All up and down the Aleran lines, the standards of the individual centuries and cohorts blazed with furycrafted fire, each in the signature colors of their Legions and home cities. In the center of the lines, the Crown Legion was a blaze of scarlet-and-azure light, flanked by First and Second Aquitaine in a shroud of crimson fire. The right flank was centered upon the veteran forces of High Lord Antillus, burning with cold blue-and-white light, the left around the similarly veteran Legions of High Lord Phrygius, its standards sheathed in glacial green-and-white fire.
Other Legions, some from cities that no longer remained standing, all of them far less experienced than the northern veterans, had been interspaced between those three points and spread across the rich fields surrounding the plain south of Riva in a wall of solid steel and light.
Behind them, hidden from the vord by a wall of illumination, Amara could see the ranks of cavalry waiting for direction, for the battle captains of their Legions to decide where they could best be used. Rangy, long-legged coursers from the plains of Placida stood beside the hulking, heavily muscled chargers of Rhodes, who in turn stood next to the shaggy, hardy little northern horses that were barely taller than ponies.
Aquitaine was not content to rest behind the massive fortifications built around the city. The invaders had driven Aleran forces from one defensive position after another, and he had been strongly against Gaius Sextus's defensive strategy from the beginning. Supported by the experienced Legions of the north, he was determined to carry the battle to the enemy.
The Aleran forces were in motion, moving forward.
From high above, Amara could sometimes see entire cohorts of Knights Aeris, black spots of shadow, far below, sharply outlined against the lighted columns of Legions on the ground. There were fewer than there should have been relative to the forces on the move. The Knights Aeris of Alera had taken hideous casualties in the battle to defend Alera Imperia. Their sacrifice had been one of the factors to help convince the enemy to commit the lion's share of its forces to the final assault on the city itself - an assault that had resulted in annihilation for the attacking vord.
Gaius Sextus's final, suicidal gambit had bought Alera the time the Realm needed to recover and prepare for this battle, but the cost had been grievous - and Amara feared that their comparative weakness in the skies would leave the Legions with a deadly weak point in their order of battle.
The leading edge of the vord tide rushed to within a quarter mile of the front ranks of the advancing Legions, and a flare of scarlet-and-blue light leapt skyward from the Crown Legion, Aquitaine's signal to commence. Alera's Knights and Citizens, after months of preparation and fear, after enduring more than a year of humiliation and pain inflicted by the invaders, were ready, at last, to give them an appropriate reply.
Even though she'd heard of the general theory behind the opening salvo of furycraft, Amara had never seen anything quite like it. She had witnessed the utter destruction of the city of Kalare by the wrath of the great fury Kalus, and it had been a horrible, hideous sight, vast beyond imagining, uncontrolled, horrible in its beauty - and completely impersonal. What happened to the leading wave of vord was every bit as terrible and even more frightening.
The lords of Alera spoke in a voice of fire.
The standard assault of a skilled firecrafter was the manifestation of a sudden and expanding sphere of white-hot fire. They were generally large enough to envelop a mounted rider. Anything caught inside them would be charred to ashes in an instant. Anything within five yards would generally be melted or set aflame - and anything living within another five yards of that would be scorched beyond the capacity of a human being to sustain hostilities. The fire came with an ear-piercing hiss and vanished with a hollow boom. It would leave secondary fires and smooth depressions of molten earth in its wake.
Manifesting such an attack was extremely draining upon the furycrafter involved. Even those with the talents of Lords and High Lords counted the number of spheres he could manifest without resting in the dozens, and not many of those. Given how many vord were on the field, even with the gathered might of all Alera's firecrafters, they could not inflict instant, significant losses upon the mass of the enemy body.
Gaius Attis had considered a way to improve on that.
Instead of the roar of full-blown fire-spheres, a flicker of tiny lights, like thousands of fireflies, sprang up ahead of the oncoming vord. A moment later, Amara began to hear a tide swell of tiny reports, pop pop pop, like the celebratory fireworks crafted by children at Midsummer. The sparkling lights thickened, redoubling, creating a low wall in front of the enemy, who charged ahead without slowing.
No single one of the little firecraftings was a deadly threat to a human being, much less to an armored warrior form of the vord - but there were hundreds of thousands of them, each one an almost-effortless crafting. As the little flowers of fire continued to blossom, the air around them began to shimmer, turning the sparkling line of lights into strip of hellishly molten air that almost seemed to glow with its own fire.
The leading elements of the vord plunged into the barrier and agonizing destruction. Their screams came up to Amara only distantly, and with a little help from Cirrus, she could see that the vord had not moved more than twenty feet across the killing oven Gaius Attis had prepared for them. The warriors staggered and collapsed, roasted alive, bits of flesh and armor cooking away and being flung up into the gale of rising hot air as ash. Tens of thousands of vord perished in the first sixty seconds.
But they kept coming.
Moving with frantic energy, the vord flung themselves in utter abandonment at the barrier, and thousands more died - but each vord that perished absorbed some of the furycrafted flame. Amara was reminded uncomfortably of a campfire in a thunderstorm. Certainly, no single drop of water could extinguish the flame. It would be boiled to steam as it tried - but sooner or later, the fire would go out.
The vord began to push through, bounding over the charred corpses of those who had come before, using as shields the bodies of their companions who were collapsing from the heat, each successive vord pushing a few feet farther than the one ahead of it.
Signals from the Crown Legion pulled the line of deadly heat back toward the Legion lines, forcing the enemy to pay the full price for those last yards of ground, but they could not bring the band of superheated air too close to the Aleran lines without exposing their own troops to the flame - which also blinded the Aleran battle commanders to the movements of the enemy. So, as the vord began to break through, another signal went up from the Crown Legion, and the massive firecrafting ceased. Seconds later, the vord joined battle with the Legions.
"They have no thought for their own lives," said Veradis, staring down as Amara did. "No thought at all. How many of them died just now, simply so that they could reach the battle?"
Amara shook her head and didn't answer. She hovered upon her windstream, high up in the night sky, where the air was cold and bitter. Three wind coaches carrying Aldrick and his swordsmen hovered a few yards off.
"When will the scouts return?" Veradis asked anxiously. The young Ceresian woman was only a moderately good flier, and her long hair and dress were hardly ideal for the circumstances, but she handled herself with composure. "Every moment we wait here, they could be taking her farther away from us."
"It won't do the First Lady any good to go charging off in the wrong direction," Amara called back. "I don't like them, but Aldrick's people know their business. When one of their fliers reports in, we'll move. Until then, we're smartest to wait here, where we can get anywhere we need to be the most quickly." She pointed a finger. "Look. The cyclone teams."
Small, dark clouds of fliers swept down in ranks over the meeting of the opposing forces. As Amara watched, she saw them seizing the air, made treacherously turbulent by the extended fury of the slow-motion firecrafting the Alerans had held before the vord. Citizens and Knights Aeris seized upon that motion in the air, focusing and shaping it, each team adding its own momentum as they wheeled in a caracole down the lines, spinning the furious winds and spinning them again.
It took them only a few moments, working together - and then in half a dozen places just behind the frontmost ranks of the vord, great whirling columns of ash and soot and scorched earth writhed up from the ground. The cyclones roared, howling out a ground-scorching wail of hunger, and began to rush ram pantly through the vord ranks, seizing the creatures like ants and tossing them hundreds of feet through the air - when they didn't drive tiny bits of detritus through their carapaces like so many diminutive arrowheads, or simply rend them limb from limb on the spot. Each cyclone was shepherded by its own team of windcrafters, each of which kept its own massive, deadly vortex from turning back upon Aleran lines. Windmanes, glowing white forms, like skeletal human torsos trailing a shroud of smoke and mist where their legs should have been, began to glide out of the cyclones and swept down to attack anything within their reach upon the earth.
Amara shook her head. She'd been trapped without shelter in a furystorm that had called up windmanes once before - and the deadly, wild wind furies had nearly torn her to pieces. Gaius Attis was creating hundreds more of the creatures with the cyclones he was harnessing, and they would haunt the region for decades, if not centuries to come, posing a threat to holders, cattle, wildlife -
Amara forced herself to abandon that line of thought. In this respect, at least, she thought Aquitaine was quite right - if the vord weren't stopped, here, now, there wouldn't be any holders. Or cattle. Or wildlife.
We aren't just fighting for ourselves, she thought. We're fighting for everything that lives and grows in our world. If we do not throw down the vord, nothing of what we know will remain. We will simply cease to be - and no one will be left to remember us.
Except, she supposed, for the vord.
Amara clenched her hands hard and restrained herself from calling upon Cirrus and flinging her own skills into the battle being fought below.
"Countess?" called Veradis in a shaking voice.
Amara looked around until she spotted the younger woman, hovering several yards farther south and slightly lower than Amara was. She altered her windstream until she had maneuvered into position beside the Ceresian Citizen. "What is it?"
Veradis pointed wordlessly at the causeway leading up from the southwest.
Amara frowned and focused Cirrus upon the task of bringing the road into clearer visibility. At first, in the dim light of the weak moon, she could see nothing. But then flickers of light farther down the road drew her attention, and she found herself staring at...
At a moving mass, on the road. That was all she could be certain of. It was different from the stream of still-coming vord warrior forms in that there was no gleam of wan light on vord armor, no regular, seething mass of creatures moving as many bodies under the control of a single mind. There were flickers of light moving amidst that body, irregular in shape, spacing, and color, or she wouldn't have been able to see anything at all.
Amara concentrated, murmuring to Cirrus to draw the distant road even closer in her sight. It was difficult to do so while maintaining her windstream, but the far road sprang into focus after a moment of effort and showed Amara the last thing that she had been expecting in the vord's train.
Furies.
The road was filled with manifest furies. Thousands, tens of thousands, of them.
The variety of the furies in sight was dizzying. Earth furies showed themselves as hummocks of stone in the road, rumbling along through the earth. Some were vaguely shaped like animals, but most were not. The largest of them pushed the entire causeway up into a single hummock as they cruised forward, moving as fast as a running horse. Wood furies bounded along the causeway, their shapes never quite matching that of any single animal or creature, but blending the traits of many - others, invisible in the trees and plants at either side of the road, could only be seen as a ripple of forward motion amidst the living things. Water furies bounded or slithered forward, some shaped like great serpents or frogs, while others were simply amorphous shapes of pure water, held together by the will of the fury inhabiting it. Fire furies rushed among them, mostly in the form of predator animals, though others were flickering forms of fire, changing from one instant to the next - it was they whose light Amara had seen. And from three to twenty feet above the surface of the road rushed a horde of wind furies. They were mostly windmanes, though Amara could see far larger wispy shapes ghosting among them, the largest in the form of a truly enormous shark that cruised through the air as if it were the sea.
So many furies. Amara felt slightly dizzied.
She dimly noted forms moving along the outer edges of the road, or flying slightly above it - captured Alerans. She realized, after a moment's thought, that they were herding the furies below, using furycraft of their own to keep the mass of furies moving along the causeway. The driven furies were not pleased about it either. Their aggressive anger was something that Amara could practically feel pressing against her teeth.
But if they were doing that it meant...
"Bloody crows," Amara swore. "Those are feral furies."
Veradis stared at her with wide eyes, her face pale. "All of them? Th-that's impossible."
But it wasn't. Not after months of warfare against the vord. The enemy had been indiscriminate in its slaughter. And every Aleran killed meant more furies suddenly bereft of human restraint and guidance. Somehow, the vord had gathered together bloody legions of the deadly things. And this was no problem like that of dealing with windmanes in a furystorm, easily solved by taking shelter in a building of earth and stone. If someone tried that against this mob, the earth furies would crush him in his own shelter, assuming the wood furies didn't simply follow them in, or the fire furies turn what should have been a haven into a murderous furnace.
Feral furies were not easily intimidated or dissuaded from their violence. It required the skills of a full-blown Citizen to deal with them. It had taken Aleran Citizens centuries to pacify the settled lands of Alera, then the routes followed by the causeways.
And now several centuries' worth of danger and death were racing toward the Aleran lines.
The Legions would never be able to stand before the hammerblow those feral furies would deliver. Simply surviving them would require all of the focus and furycraft at their command - which would mean that they would not be able to direct it toward the vord. And in a purely physical contest, the invaders would grind the Alerans to dust.
And should the feral horde shatter the Legion lines and rush through to Riva and the freemen and refugees now living there... their deaths would be violent and horrible, the loss of life enormous.
The enemy had just transformed Riva from a stronghold into a trap.
Amara felt herself breathing harder and faster than she needed. To the best of her knowledge, there were no Aleran fliers operating as high as her group. The teams covering the lower altitudes wouldn't be able to see the oncoming threat until it was far too late to react.
Amara shivered and suppressed a desire to scream in frustration.
"Aldrick," she snapped. "Take the Windwolves back to Riva, directly to the High Lord's tower. Stand there to cover Lord and Lady Riva, and to respond to any emergency requiring your team's support." Her eyes flicked to Veradis. "Lady Veradis will explain."
Aldrick stared at her, but only for a second. His eyes shifted down and back up, then he nodded once. He made a short series of hand gestures to one of his men, and seconds later, the Windwolves' fliers and the coaches they carried were banking into a turn, to descend toward the embattled city at their best possible speed.
"Amara," Veradis said.
"There is no time," Amara replied calmly. "The enemy has those furies channeled and moving in the proper direction, but they don't have anything like real control over them. They must have modified the causeway, somehow. Once they turn those furies loose, everything is going to change."
"What do you mean?" Veradis asked.
"We won't be able to hold the city," Amara spat. "Not in the face of so many hostile furies. They'll rip the city to shreds around us, killing our people along the way. The only thing we can do is withdraw."
The younger woman shook her head dazedly. "W-withdraw? There's nowhere left to go."
Amara felt a surge of fierce pride rush through her. "Yes," she said. "There is. You will follow Aldrick and his people. Explain to him about the feral furies. Make sure Lord Riva knows, as well."
"B-but... what are you going to do?"
"Warn Aquitaine," she snapped. "Stop hovering there like an idle schoolgirl and go!"
Veradis nodded jerkily, turned, and began accelerating to catch up with the Windwolves. Amara watched for a few seconds, to be sure Veradis wasn't about to fly off in the wrong direction in sheer confusion. Then she turned, called to Cirrus, and dived, rushing down toward the far-distant earth with all the speed that gravity and her fury could give her. There was a thunderous explosion all around her as her speed peaked, and she realized that she had none of the operating passwords for the battlefield below. She would just have to hope that the combat teams patrolling the air were too slow to stop her or kill her before she could speak to Aquitaine.
Besides, that was the least of her worries.
How was she going to be able to face Bernard and tell him that for the sake of the Realm, she had chosen to leave his sister's fate in enemy hands?
