First Lord's Fury
Chapter 41~42
Chapter 41
Fidelias had watched Crassus run the Legions and manage the Canim in the retaking of Riva while Octavian rested from the rather spectacular display of furycrafting he'd put on. Fidelias was impressed with the young Antillan lord. He'd expected Crassus to behave quite a bit differently when he was the one in command. He'd expected someone much more like... well, like Maximus, from the heir of Antillus Raucus. Crassus had, it would seem, inherited the best traits of his mother's bloodline, House of Kalarus: cool logic, intelligence, and polish, seemingly without being infected with the megalomaniacal self-obsession in which most of those petty-minded monsters had reveled.
Granted, Crassus's levelheaded style wasn't necessarily a perfect one where the Canim were concerned. An officer of their corps, a young Shuaran, had dropped a challenge to Crassus's authority within hours, at which point his elder half brother Maximus had promptly brought one of Raucus's strengths of character to the forefront - the ability to make a decisive and unmistakable statement.
When the Cane went for Crassus's throat, Maximus threw him through a building.
It was a rather absolute form of diplomacy though Fidelias could only assume that Octavian had rubbed off on Maximus to some degree: It had been a wooden building rather than a stone one. The Cane in question was expected to recover from his injuries - eventually. Varg had denied the uppity Cane the services of Aleran healers, which Crassus had promptly offered.
Fidelias's grasp of Canim was still fairly rough, but Varg's comment had amounted to something like, "Your stupidity will get fewer good warriors killed if you have time to reflect on today's mistake before leading them."
Octavian dropped his head back at Fidelias's recounting and laughed. His voice came out sounding a little flat within the privacy windcrafting he had woven around them. "One-eared Shuaran pack leader? Tarsh?"
"Aye, Your Highness, the same."
Octavian nodded. The two of them were walking the perimeter of the camp's defenses as the sunset closed, after another day of hard marching, inspecting the work of the Legions and the warriors. "Maximus has wanted to have an excuse to take a swing at Tarsh ever since we met him in Molvar. And I can't imagine that Varg would be sorry about being given a reason not to place anyone under Tarsh's command." Octavian nodded. "What of the survivors from Riva?"
The Legions had found a handful of folk clever or fortunate enough to have successfully hidden from the vord during the days of occupation. None of them were in what would be considered good condition though few bore any injuries. "The children are showing signs of beginning to recover," Fidelias said. "The others... some of them have family who might be alive. If we get them to someplace warm and quiet and safe, they have a chance."
"Someplace warm, quiet, and safe," said the Princeps, his eyes hardening. "That can be a rare thing even in times of peace."
"True enough."
The Princeps stopped in his tracks. They were a short distance from the nearest sentries. "Your best guess. Could Crassus command this force in... my absence?"
"In your absence, as your lieutenant, yes," Fidelias replied immediately. "In the event of your loss, Captain? Not for long."
Octavian eyed him sharply. "Why?"
"Because the Canim respect Varg, and Varg respects you. The Free Aleran Legion respects you - but if you weren't here, they would follow Varg's lead."
The Princeps grunted, frowning. Then he said, "Are you telling me that I should name a Canim the second-in-command of our forces?"
Fidelias opened his mouth and closed it again. He blinked, thinking it over. "I believe... that Varg would have a better chance of holding the force together than Crassus, or anyone else in the First Aleran's command structure."
"Except, perhaps, Valiar Marcus," Octavian mused.
Fidelias snorted. "Yes, well, that's not an option now, is it?"
Octavian regarded him steadily and said nothing.
Fidelias tilted his head as it slowly dawned on him what Octavian meant. "Oh, Your Highness. You couldn't possibly do that."
"Why not?" Octavian asked. "No one but my personal guard and Demos's crew know the truth about you. They can keep a secret. So, Marcus runs the force until it can unite with the Legions, passes along Crassus's orders, and is watched by the Maestro - who is, I believe, still uncertain as to why you aren't hanging on a cross being eaten by vord."
"I'm a bit unclear on that point myself, at times."
Octavian's visage hardened briefly. "I will do as I see fit with your life. It is mine to spend. Remember that."
Fidelias frowned and inclined his head slightly. "As you wish, my lord."
"That's right," Octavian said, some measure of bitter humor touching the tone.
Fidelias studied the young man for a moment and realized that... the Princeps was torn over some decision. Normally he was so confident, so driven; Fidelias had never seen him like this. There was uncertainty hovering behind his words, hesitance: Octavian himself wasn't sure what his next steps would be.
"Are you planning on leaving the force, sir?" Fidelias asked carefully.
"At some point, it's inevitable," Octavian replied calmly. "If nothing else, I will be obliged to make personal contact with the Legions in Calderon - and hope to the great furies whoever is in charge over there has had sense enough to listen to my uncle."
Fidelias grunted. "But... that isn't what you think will happen."
Octavian grimaced, and said, "Someone has to command the men, regardless of what happens to me. We have to take down the vord Queen - and her cadre of captured or treacherous Citizens. I will, by necessity, be in the center of that conflict. And... the odds seem to be long against me."
Fidelias debated on how to respond to the moment of vulnerability the Princeps was showing. He finally just began chuckling.
Octavian frowned at him and lifted an imperious eyebrow.
"Long odds," he said. "Bloody crows, sir. Long odds. That's bloody funny."
"I don't see what's so amusing about it."
"Naturally, you don't," Fidelias said, still chuckling. "The furyless boy from the country who stopped an invasion."
"I didn't really stop it," Tavi said. "Doroga stopped it. I just..."
"Completely demolished an operation backed by the most dangerous High Lord and Lady in the Realm," Fidelias said. "I was there. Remember?" The last words were not bereft of irony.
Octavian gave a small inclination of his head in acknowledgment of the touch.
"The boy who personally saved the First Lord's life in his second term at the Academy. Who took command of a Legion and fought the Canim to a standoff - and who then stole Varg from the most tightly guarded prison of the Realm and brokered the first truce in history with the Canim to get them out of the Realm. The young upstart Princeps who pitted himself against a continent full of vord and hostile Canim and won."
"I got my people and Varg's out alive," Octavian corrected sharply. "I haven't won anything. Not yet."
Fidelias grunted. "Sir... honestly. Suppose you defeat the vord here. Suppose you unite our people again, take Alera back. Will that be a victory?"
Octavian raked his fingers through his hair. "Of course not. It'll be a good start. But there will be severe repercussions for the balance of power in our society that must be addressed. The Canim will, probably, be settling here, and we'll have to reach some kind of mutual understanding with them, and the Free Alerans are never going to back the same set of laws that allowed them to be enslaved. Not to mention the fact that - "
Fidelias cleared his throat gently. "Young man, I submit to you that your standards of victory are... set rather high. If you continue that way, no matter what you do, it will never be enough."
"That is exactly correct," Octavian replied. "Are the men and women the vord have already killed only partially dead? Are they only technically dead? Only legally dead? Can a compromise be made wherein they are given back some portion of their lives?" He shook his head. "No. No compromise. My duty to them, and to those still alive, demands nothing less than everything I can give them. Yes, old soldier, my standards are high. So are the stakes. They're a matched set."
Fidelias stared at him, then shook his head slowly. Gaius Sextus had held an air of absolute authority, of personal power that arrested one's sense of reason, at times, to extract support and obedience. Gaius Septimus had been a vibrant figure, driven and intelligent, always looking to the future. He could have inspired men to follow him down any path of reason, no matter how winding.
But Octavian... men would follow Octavian into a leviathan's gullet if he asked it of them. And crows take him if Fidelias himself wouldn't be one of them. The headstrong lunatic would probably discover some way to lead them all out the other side draped in the rings and crowns of a devoured treasure ship and somehow emerge clean.
"I couldn't lead the Legions and the Canim," Fidelias said quietly. "Not alone. But... if you made your will known to Varg, then Valiar Marcus could serve as Crassus's advisor, his huntmaster. Varg would give him the chance to stand on his own merits in that case. And I would direct him as best I could."
"You know the Canim," Octavian said. "Better than anyone else I have." His eyes glinted. "You've spent time with Sha, I think."
"I've met the Cane," Fidelias said calmly. "He seems most professional."
"And have you ever met Khral?"
"I do not believe my duties as First Spear ever brought me into contact with him, my lord."
"Oh," Octavian said, smiling suddenly. "Very smooth."
Fidelias inclined his head, his mouth touched with amusement at one corner.
The Princeps turned to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Thank you, Marcus."
Fidelias dropped his eyes. "My lord..."
"Whatever else you've done," Octavian said gently, "I have seen you. I have trusted you with my life, and you have trusted me with yours. I have seen you work tirelessly to serve the First Aleran. I have seen you give your body and heart to the Legion, to your men. I refuse to consider the idea that it was all a ploy."
Fidelias looked away from him. "That hardly matters, sir."
"It matters if I say it matters," Octavian growled. "Crows take me, if I am to be First Lord, we're going to establish that from the outs - "
The earthcrafting went beneath Fidelias so swiftly, so softly, that he hardly noticed it. He froze in place and narrowed his eyes, sending his own awareness into the ground beneath them.
A second passed by him. And a third.
They were all heading in the same direction - toward the command tent, the center of the camp.
"... if I have to crack every skull in the Senate to..." Octavian frowned. "Marcus?"
Fidelias's hand went to his side, where his sword would normally be. It was, of course, gone. "Sir," he said, his voice tight, "there are earthcrafters passing beneath us at this very moment."
Octavian blinked. Powerful the young man might be, but he didn't have the subtlety, the awareness, that could only come from decades of experience. He hadn't sensed a thing. But once he closed his own eyes for a moment, frowning, he let out a blistering curse. "Friendlies would never attempt to enter the camp like that. The vord had a number of Citizens in their control."
"Aye."
"Then we can't send legionares against them. It will be a bloodbath." He "listened" for a moment more, then opened his eyes. "They're heading for command," Octavian said shortly. Only his eyes showed strain. "Kitai's there."
"Go," Fidelias said. "I'll bring the Pisces after you."
"Do it," Octavian snapped, and before he was finished speaking, he took a single bounding step and leapt into the air on a roaring gale of wind. Within another heartbeat, he had drawn his sword, and white-hot, furious fire burned forth from the blade.
Fidelias turned to sprint toward the center of the camp. As he went, he began bellowing orders that carried even over the hollow roar of Octavian's monstrous windstream.
He did not need to be doing such things at his age, but he tried to focus on the positive: At least he wasn't running in full armor. And, thank the great furies, the Princeps hadn't taken Fidelias flying alongside him. Even so, some part of Fidelias noted with amusement that he wasn't simply following Gaius Octavian, unarmed and unarmored, into the leviathan's mouth.
He was sprinting.
Chapter 42
Tavi didn't know how many earthcrafters the vord had collared and enslaved, but given how quickly Alera said that they had affected repairs upon the causeways, it was either a great many Citizens with lesser gifts or a few very powerful ones. Either way, Kitai was in the command tent, averting friction between the Antillan brothers and the Canim, and between the command staff of the Free Aleran and Maestro Magnus, and unaware of what was coming.
Tavi dived at the command tent, a dangerous maneuver when flying so low - but he managed to land perhaps twenty feet off without breaking his legs or ankles, then promptly redirected his windstream to catch the command tent and tear it neatly up off its posts and stakes like an enormous kite. A dozen people in the tent, staff and guards, Aleran and Canim, came lurching to their feet. Half a dozen of them, including Kitai, had already drawn steel before Tavi got a clear look at them.
"To arms!" he thundered, before either the guards or the people within the tent could react. He ran toward the tent, the sword in his hand sending out sparks that threatened to catch his own bloody cloak on fire, and shouted, "Enemy earthcrafters coming in low!"
"Oh crows take it," muttered Maestro Magnus in a positively offended tone. He had to gather up his long tunic to show pale, scrawny legs as he stepped up onto a wooden camp stool. "Of all the ridiculous nonsense."
"Where?" Kitai snapped, taking several rapid steps from the others, looking left and right at the ground beneath her.
Tavi focused his thoughts upon the earth beneath him. Subtle though such travel might be, his flight to the command tent had been far swifter, and he felt the foremost earthcrafting coming toward him, several yards away. Instead of answering, he stopped, took a quick pair of steps, and with the power of the earth itself behind his arms and shoulders, thrust the burning blade straight down into the soil beneath him. The blade struck home, though he could tell only from the sudden quivering jerks that ran through the steel to his hand, like the wriggling motion of a fish caught upon a hook that ran through the line and pole to the hand of an angler. He withdrew, the motion effortless with the burning sword, and struck again only inches from the first blow.
The earth beneath him suddenly collapsed downward in a circle perhaps ten feet across. One moment, he was standing upon solid ground, and the next it was falling from beneath him. One hand, formed into a stiffening claw, thrust up from the loose soil. Tavi tried not to take note of the fact that the hand was a woman's and not young, forcing the fact of what he had just done to the back of his mind.
"Aleran!" cried Kitai's voice. Her anxious face appeared at the top of the sudden pit Tavi found himself in.
"I'm all ri - " Tavi began.
The enemy earthcrafter following in the wake of the first suddenly stumbled out of the earth five feet from Tavi, abruptly finding himself standing in the open air at the bottom of the pit. Tavi stared at him for a motionless instant of recognition. He hadn't seen the massively muscled, lank-haired man who had appeared, a thug named Renzo, since commencement activities at the Academy. The enormous young man was perhaps a year older than Tavi and weighed two of him. An extremely accomplished earthcrafter, Renzo had been stupid enough to be a friend of Kalarus Brencis Minoris, which doubtless explained the steel slaver's collar about his mountainous neck. Tavi had beaten Renzo into screaming surrender before he'd had use of any furycrafting at all, and the act still shamed him in his memory.
The instant of hesitation gave Renzo a chance to react. He flicked a hand, and the earth surged up around Tavi, as if to bury him alive.
Tavi recovered his balance and immediately drew strength from the earth - specifically, from the earth trying to smother him, weakening the furies responding to Renzo's command. He waded forward, through the failing power of those furies, and, with an instant of razor-sharp focus, cut cleanly through Renzo's hastily raised blade, the steel collar about the huge man's neck - and the neck beneath it. Renzo's body dropped like a slaughtered hog's, still quivering.
Time slowed.
There was little blood. The blazing sword in Tavi's hand had cauterized the cuts even as he made them. The courtyard bully's broad hands twitched and spasmed. His head had fallen facedown, and Tavi could see his mouth moving for a few seconds, as if to spit out the dirt upon his tongue. That didn't last long. A heartbeat, two, then there was stillness.
Renzo had been an appallingly petty evil from the last days of Tavi's childhood.
Tavi felt sick at how easy it had been to murder him.
His thoughts and focus were, for a few seconds, entirely shattered, and so, when the vord Queen exploded from the earth behind Renzo's corpse, she nearly killed him in the first instant of their meeting.
Tavi seized upon a windcrafting, weak though it was down in the sinkhole, to speed his perceptions. Even with the crafting, there was time for no more than a bizarre, flash impression of a beautiful face, glittering black eyes, a tattered old dress - and then there was a flicker of motion as a shadowy blade darted toward his heart.
Tavi had enough time to think, I didn't feel it coming, it's not made of metal. Fortunately, his reflexes hadn't had any metalcrafting to rely upon when he first trained with a weapon, and they hadn't needed the advance warning. His own burning blade caught the dark weapon in the vord Queen's hand, defeated the Queen's disengage, then suddenly slipped and wobbled as the resistance of the other weapon vanished. The dark blade curled in her hand like a striking serpent and drove into his belly. It pierced his armor as though it were made of soft cloth instead of battle steel, and he felt himself thrown back hard against the layers of a stone shelf lining the pit wall behind him.
The vord Queen came at him, her eyes shining with a terrible intensity, but he responded with the instant, deadly reflexes of a man who had been wise enough to embrace the cold, insensible strength of his armor and weaponry, who felt no pain though his body was trapped against the rough wall, impaled upon a deadly blade. The vord Queen was swift enough to avoid having her head taken from her shoulders, but only just. Tavi's burning sword left a wound in her scalp and seared away a mass of thin white hairs. She blurred away from him, letting out a metallic shriek, and simply bounded up out of the pit.
An explosion of light and furious sound bright enough to hurt his eyes - odd, that metalcrafting didn't seem to offer any protection from that source of pain - made the shape of the disappearing Queen a silhouette and left her profile burned onto his eyes in bright color as the rest of the world went dark.
Every instinct in him screamed to get out of the hole, get into action, move, move, move. But he didn't. When the Queen had leapt from the pit, she hadn't been holding a sword. Whether he could feel the pain or not, given the rock at his back it was almost certain that there was a preternaturally sharp weapon still thrust into his belly, sunk into the stone behind him like a nail into wood. If he simply tore his way free, he could all but cut himself in half.
He held the blazing sword uncomfortably close to his own body, squinting down with his light-dazzled eyes, and confirmed it. There was a bar of gleaming, green-black material still thrust through the plates of his lorica. He touched a hand to it, lightly, and found that it was double-edged and as sharp as a scalpel. The lightest touch had opened flesh with a horrible, delicate ease. It looked like vord chitin and, for all that he knew, it was. When the blood from his fingers touched it, the weapon quivered, sending silver shocks of sensation through his body, though his metalcrafting kept him from experiencing it as pain.
Bloody crows. The thing was alive.
Outside the pit, the vord Queen shrieked again, the sound a brassy challenge. Explosions of fire thundered outside. People screamed. Steel rang on steel.
Tavi was having a hard time getting enough breath. It couldn't be the lungs themselves. The chitin blade's thrust had been far too low. He glanced at his fingers and saw them smeared with something tarry and green. It smelled vile. Lovely - poison, which must have been shutting down his breathing.
Tavi grimaced. The chitin blade didn't have a guard or a tang. It simply... segued, from a long, lightly curved blade to an oblong, rounded handle. He couldn't walk forward and off the impaling blade. The handle would never fit through the relatively small hole the blade had made, and widening the wound himself seemed... counterproductive.
Stars thickened in his vision. His body was running out of air.
Tavi debated simply striking the sword, snapping it with his own burning blade, but there were excellent reasons not to. The blow might not break the vordblade, in which case it would just cut through him with all the power of his own strike. If he tried to burn through, it would heat the blade and cauterize the wound, rendering it all but untreatable by watercraft. Simply seizing it and breaking it with earthcrafted strength was a fool's game as well - the blade would nip off his fingers all the more neatly because of the supernatural power backing the attempt.
More screams, human and vord, came from above. Incoming windstreams howled, and a Cane let out a furious roar. He began to feel dizzy.
The soil around him, all over his clothes, his boots, his armor, was loose, fairly sandy.
That would do.
Moving carefully, he gestured with one hand, and a long pseudopod of sandy earth rose up from beneath him. He scooped up a handful, and mused that his own blood had made it sticky and clumpy. He caked it around the vordblade. He did that twice more, until a thick clump of bloody, sandy mud clung to it.
Then he ground his teeth, held out his sword, and poured fire from the glowing blade down onto the mud, shaping it with his thoughts and will. It enveloped the mud in a swift, sudden, short-lived flash of fire that brought up blisters on his hands and face - and when the light had faded, the sand glowed dull red with heat, clinging gelatinously.
A second pass of the sword allowed him to draw the heat back out of the sand again, before it could spread up the blade and into his vitals, and the vordblade was suddenly encased in an irregular lump of glass.
Tavi seized it, took a steadying breath, and drew on the weapon. It didn't move at first, but he didn't dare turn this into an exercise of brute strength. He increased the pressure slowly, gently, until the weapon abruptly slid free of the stone behind him. It raised sparks from his armor as Tavi pulled it carefully from his flesh.
He gave the vordblade a little toss so that it landed on the far side of the pit. Then he focused on his own body, finding the wound, a narrow and reasonably minor injury in its own right. But the tissues around the wound, all the way through his body, were swelling as though they meant to burst.
Tavi ground his teeth, focused his will, and stopped them from growing any worse. To some degree, the swelling was an advantage - it kept him from bleeding too hideously, for the moment. But he could feel his body's own unwitting rebellion in progress, a toxin-induced physical frenzy in his blood that would kill him in minutes if allowed to run its course.
Minutes suddenly seemed an endless amount of time. If he could move fast enough, he could end the Vord War in seconds.
Tavi reached for more strength from the earth beneath him and used it to spring from the pit in a single leap, taking in his surroundings as he did. There was a circle of blackened, smoking earth around the top of the pit, the ground glazed to dirty glass, presumably from the firecrafting launched at the Queen when she appeared. There were dozens of other pits in sight, and the sounds of desperate struggle. Corpses, clad both in chitin and Legion armor, littered the ground. The earthcrafters had attacked like ant lions, opening a sinkhole beneath their targets and drawing them down into close combat, where the enslaved Citizens would have all the advantages. The loose soil would slow Tavi's people and make them vulnerable to the vicious physical strength of the attackers. Old Maestro Magnus stood on his wooden stool, beating frantically at his beard, which had somehow been set on fire - but, rendered invisible to the subterranean attackers by his precarious perch, he was thus far unhurt.
Tavi landed lightly, on his toes, just as a chitin-armored man wielding an enormously oversized sword swept it in a deadly arc toward Varg.
The Cane caught the fury-assisted blow with a perfect deflection parry, redirecting the vast power of the strike, sliding it away at an angle instead of pitting the raw strength of his bloodred steel directly against the Aleran's greatsword. The Cane flowed forward and to one side in the wake of the huge sword's passing, graceful for all his tremendous size and weight, and struck cleanly, once.
The enslaved Citizen dropped dead in his tracks, his head attached to his body only by a scrap of muscle and flesh. Varg continued the motion, never stopping, his blade coming up to a guard that stopped a fraction of a second before becoming an attack directed at Tavi.
"Where?" Tavi demanded, in Canish.
Varg pointed with one clawed finger, then whirled and threw his great curved blade with a smooth contraction of what seemed like every muscle in the Cane's lean body. It tumbled twice and buried itself in the back of one of two enemy earthcrafters attacking his son, Nasaug. The thrown weapon struck with so much force that it pierced the chitin-armor, but even if it hadn't, Tavi saw the target's head snap back at the violence of the strike, and clearly heard the brutal impact break the enemy's collared neck.
Tavi looked in the direction Varg had pointed and spotted the vord Queen, vanishing into the mists that still surrounded the camp, courtesy of the ritualists. Kitai was pursuing her. That much Tavi had expected. He just hadn't expected to see the two of them running along the tops of the standard Legion white canvas tents.
Legion tents were mostly of the northern design, made to shed water and snow. Two upright poles at either end supported a long cross-pole, which held up the line of the roof. The cross-pole was perhaps an inch and a half thick.
Kitai and the Queen sprinted along them as though they were as wide as the avenues of old Alera Imperia.
Tavi leapt into the air and roared aloft on a column of wind. Though Kitai and the vord Queen were moving more swiftly than any human could have without crafting, flight was faster still.
"Stay with the Princeps!" someone bellowed behind him, maybe Maximus.
A second roar of wind joined his, and Tavi glanced over one shoulder to see Crassus soaring after him, fresh blood dripping from his wetted blade.
Kitai bounded from one tent to the next, took a half stride from one end of the tent to the other, and leapt to the next tent, following the vord Queen. As Tavi began to close in, she narrowed the Queen's lead to only feet, and their next leap between tent poles came at nearly the same instant. Kitai's sword, seething with amethyst fire (how the bloody crows had she done that? Tavi's fire always looked like... fire.) licked out and struck the vord Queen low on one calf - only a last-second convulsion of the limb prevented the blow from striking the tendon at the ankle. Kitai had gone for a crippling blow to slow the Queen and allow the rest of the First Aleran's skilled furycrafters to catch up.
The Queen spun in midair, her body contorting with what could only have been the aid of windcrafting, and a clawed foot lashed out at Kitai's face as the two of them soared through their leap. Kitai was not caught unawares by the attack, and intercepted it with her left arm - but away from the support of any earthcrafting, she was no match for the vord Queen's sheer power. The kick broke bones and laid open flesh in a short spray of blood. Kitai cried out and lost her balance as she came down again, tumbling into the tent canvas and bringing the tent down. The vord Queen took a single, contemptuous step on the tent's cross-pole before it could fall and continued without slackening her pace.
She met Tavi's eyes for an instant, and her expression unsettled him. He had rarely seen any emotion at all displayed by a vord queen, and he had encountered several - but this Queen was not wearing a blank mask. She was smiling, a child's gleeful grin of excitement and joy, an expression seen only in the midst of favorite games and birthday celebrations.
Bloody crows. The creature was having fun.
Tavi let out a cry of rage and flew faster, blade held ready for a cavalry-style passing stroke, but Crassus was surging steadily past him, his years of experience surpassing Tavi's raw power at windcrafting. He had shifted his blade to his left hand, and was arrowing toward the fleeing Queen's right side. The young Tribune clearly intended to occupy the vord's attention and defenses while Tavi took the killing stroke on her left. Tavi altered his flight path slightly, the edges of Crassus's violent windstream ripping his cloak to shreds. He braced himself and closed half an instant behind Crassus's leading attack.
Before they reached her, the Queen spun between one step and the next, a neat pirouette, and one pale arm moved in a swath across her body, spreading a small, arcing cloud of crystals into the air.
Crassus never had a chance. The salt crystals struck him before he could have registered the threat, tearing his wind furies to useless shreds. He fell with a short, frustrated cry into the sea of white tents beneath them, heavy poles snapping, heavy canvas tearing under the bone-shattering force of his speed.
Tavi rolled over and over to his own left, barely avoiding the spray of salt crystals, nearly losing control of his flight. A desperate thrust of wind sent him arcing up into the air instead of down into entangling tents, and the harsh, metallic laugh of the vord Queen mocked him. A motion of her arm gave birth to a sphere of fire that wiped away half a dozen legionares as they came pouring out of their tent, and with each step she cast more fire to the left and right, killing men as easily as a child crushed ants. Screams of terror and agony followed in her wake.
Tavi stabilized his flight and shook his head furiously. He could not afford to let his emotions control him. The Queen was deadly, and deadly rational. She wasn't simply running along the tents for a lark. She had a goal in mind, a destination.
Tavi didn't need to look ahead to know what was coming - and neither, he realized, did the vord Queen. The layout of a Legion camp was standard from one end of the Realm to another, established by centuries of practice, and he realized with a sudden chill that he had given the enemy some margin of advantage by adhering to Legion rote.
She was heading for the healer's tents.
With a snarl, Tavi dropped his concentration on everything but his windstream and shot past her. He gained a fifty-, sixty-, seventy-yard lead, then had to come down at the most oblique angle he could, on his side in the air, his feet leading. The instant his boots hit the earth, he called upon it to shape itself to the line of his motion, to guide and slow him rather than simply kicking his feet out from beneath him and seeing to it that he broke his fool neck.
His boots tore up a furrow of turf as wide as his foot and six inches deep, sending a spray of soil, pebbles, and spring grass flying up in front of him in a bow wave for better than fifty feet and bringing him to a stop in the entrance to the main healer's tent. He whirled, called fire back into his sword, and then the vord Queen slammed into his chest, driving him into the tent and through the large support post just inside the entrance.
Tavi slapped one speed-blurred, dark-nailed hand aside as the vord Queen swept it at his throat, dropped his sword, and seized her by the hair with his other hand, rolling as they both hit the ground and putting her in front as their momentum carried her into the side of a filled metal healing tub, slamming his own heavily armored body into her slender form.
Water exploded up out of the tub as their impact crushed its nearer side flat against the other. The Queen let out a huff of expelled air. The pain he'd been holding off with metalcrafting until perhaps five or six seconds ago suddenly smashed into him in a wave, and he remembered that he had let go of the crafting that was slowing the toxin coursing from the agonizing wound in his belly.
She came rolling to her feet, never stopping her motion, bounding on all fours like something more feline than human. Fire-spheres charred half a dozen healers and two wounded survivors of Riva to so much meat. A young woman in healer's garb and a silver discipline collar was the next target. But Foss threw himself in front of her, giving her a powerful shove that sent her tumbling head over heels away from him - and then he was enveloped in another blast that left little more than blackened bones and melted steel in its wake.
The vord Queen hissed and gestured again - but Tavi suddenly recognized the young woman Foss had died to protect as Dorotea, who, in another life, had been the High Lady of Antillus.
Collared by her own allies, commanded to do no harm, the woman had been serving as a healer in the Free Aleran since its inception. Her personal ambition had been a cancer that the collar had neatly amputated, and she had done more good in her months as a slave than she ever had as a Citizen. A watercrafter skilled beyond anything that a Legion could hope for, she had doubtless been called in to treat some difficult or delicate harm suffered by one of the survivors.
Her lips spread in a snarl as another sphere of fire bloomed practically upon her, and the earth itself heaved and bucked into a dome that shielded her from the blast. A second motion sent the contents of two healing tubs abruptly hurtling toward the vord Queen like two enormous, transparent stones. The blasts of water smashed the vord to the ground.
Dorotea cried out in sudden agony and clutched at the silver collar at her throat, her body contorting.
Tavi ground his teeth and forced steel into his limbs, his mind, dismissing the pain as something unimportant. The former High Lady had pushed the vord into an open, unoccupied space to one side of the tent. Tavi lifted his sword and sent a thunderbolt of seething fire, whiter than the light of the sun, writhing into the form of some vast and deadly serpent, lancing toward her.
The vord Queen's smile was gone. Her glittering black eyes widened as the sun-fire streaked toward her. She crossed her forearms in front of her with another brassy scream, and the blast of fire struck her, burning again at Tavi's vision with a furious light bright enough to blind him though he had closed his eyes to shield against it.
He opened them again, peering.
The entire side of the tent was gone in a great, gaping circle, the canvas charred to fine ash, cut as neatly as with shears. The ground all around the blast area was several inches lower than it had been a moment before and smoothed to glowing glass.
Except for one small circle around the vord Queen. She stood up slowly, uncrossing her arms, and that gleeful smile spread over her face again as she stood over Tavi. Though her tattered old gown was singed black over most of its surface, she was apparently unharmed.
He let out a panting snarl and fought his way up to one knee, sword in hand.
"I came here only to weaken you, Father," the Queen said in a purring voice. "This was more than I dared to hope for. Perhaps there is such a thing as good fortune, after all."
A movement sent a fire-sphere toward Tavi. He caught it on his sword, willing the weapon to absorb the heat, to make it burn all the more brightly - but the effort made his vision tighten down to a narrow tunnel. His heart was racing, faster than he'd ever felt it. He couldn't breathe. She was coming, so fast, faster than he could see, even clawing for the speed of windcrafting, and he couldn't get his sword to move -
Maximus slammed into the vord Queen with a roar of pure rage, his armored body hurtling into her, a self-contained avalanche of steel. He carried her past Tavi and through a second upright, shattering it to kindling, and bringing two-thirds of the remaining canvas of the large tent down upon them all like an enormous, smothering blanket.
Tavi lifted his sword and cut an opening almost before the canvas could settle. He stumbled upright, through the opening, only to see the vord Queen neatly duplicate his maneuver using her talons, drag a metal tub out with her, and slam it with savage force onto a thrashing lump beneath the canvas - one that sagged and abruptly went still.
The vord turned toward Tavi, a wild grin twisting her lips, showing him teeth that were very white, with threads of green-black running in crazed lines over their surfaces.
Tavi lifted his sword, calling more heat to it, more light furiously shining forth. He couldn't move. His body was shaking, too weak. He knew that he now stood nearer death's door than he ever had before, though his furycraft allowed him to stay on his feet.
"Your grandfather," the vord Queen said, "died just that way. Defiant to the last, his sword in hand."
Tavi showed her his teeth, and said, "This isn't a guard position. It's a signal fire."
The Queen tilted her head, her eyes narrowed, and a steel balest bolt hit her in the ribs, just below her left arm. It didn't pierce her pale, seemingly soft skin, but the sheer force behind the bolt struck her from her feet and sent her down. She was up again almost instantly. Thirty yards away, all but invisible in the dark and the mist, Fidelias dropped his balest - and swung a second such weapon, already loaded, from his back, lifting it to his shoulder to shoot as he shouted, "Go!"
Windstreams rose in a howl as the Knights Pisces came streaking past Fidelias, thirty strong, some of them passing only inches over his head. A solid wall of wind preceded them, slamming into the vord Queen, forcing her back and away from Tavi like a leaf driven by a gale.
She looked at them for an instant, unimpressed and unafraid, her smile undiminished.
Then she let out another brassy, mocking laugh and bounded away, toward the northeast. She leapt into the air, gathering up a windstream of her own that ripped every tent within fifty yards from the earth, vanished behind a veil, and was gone in a howl of cyclonic thunder.
Fidelias tracked the movement with the second balest but didn't shoot. He came sprinting toward Tavi after that, as the Knights Pisces streaked forward in pursuit - but the men didn't go far before pulling up and spreading into a defensive formation over the camp. Tavi sagged in relief. If they'd followed her out there, she would surely have torn them to shreds.
"Your Highness," Fidelias breathed as he reached Tavi. He set the Canim weapon down and began to examine Tavi's injuries. "Oh. Oh, bloody crows, man."
"Kitai," Tavi grated. "Crassus. Back behind me. Dorotea and Maximus under the tent. Foss is dead. I couldn't stop her."
"Bloody crows, hold still," Fidelias snarled. "Stay down. Stay down, sire, you're bleeding. Stay down."
"Poison," Tavi mumbled. "Poison. Check her trail. Think we went by the water tanks. She could have dropped something in."
"Be still," Fidelias snarled. "Oh, great furies."
Tavi felt the metalcrafting slip. A second later, he felt the agony of his wounds rush up as viciously as a rabid gargant.
And then he felt nothing.
Fidelias had watched Crassus run the Legions and manage the Canim in the retaking of Riva while Octavian rested from the rather spectacular display of furycrafting he'd put on. Fidelias was impressed with the young Antillan lord. He'd expected Crassus to behave quite a bit differently when he was the one in command. He'd expected someone much more like... well, like Maximus, from the heir of Antillus Raucus. Crassus had, it would seem, inherited the best traits of his mother's bloodline, House of Kalarus: cool logic, intelligence, and polish, seemingly without being infected with the megalomaniacal self-obsession in which most of those petty-minded monsters had reveled.
Granted, Crassus's levelheaded style wasn't necessarily a perfect one where the Canim were concerned. An officer of their corps, a young Shuaran, had dropped a challenge to Crassus's authority within hours, at which point his elder half brother Maximus had promptly brought one of Raucus's strengths of character to the forefront - the ability to make a decisive and unmistakable statement.
When the Cane went for Crassus's throat, Maximus threw him through a building.
It was a rather absolute form of diplomacy though Fidelias could only assume that Octavian had rubbed off on Maximus to some degree: It had been a wooden building rather than a stone one. The Cane in question was expected to recover from his injuries - eventually. Varg had denied the uppity Cane the services of Aleran healers, which Crassus had promptly offered.
Fidelias's grasp of Canim was still fairly rough, but Varg's comment had amounted to something like, "Your stupidity will get fewer good warriors killed if you have time to reflect on today's mistake before leading them."
Octavian dropped his head back at Fidelias's recounting and laughed. His voice came out sounding a little flat within the privacy windcrafting he had woven around them. "One-eared Shuaran pack leader? Tarsh?"
"Aye, Your Highness, the same."
Octavian nodded. The two of them were walking the perimeter of the camp's defenses as the sunset closed, after another day of hard marching, inspecting the work of the Legions and the warriors. "Maximus has wanted to have an excuse to take a swing at Tarsh ever since we met him in Molvar. And I can't imagine that Varg would be sorry about being given a reason not to place anyone under Tarsh's command." Octavian nodded. "What of the survivors from Riva?"
The Legions had found a handful of folk clever or fortunate enough to have successfully hidden from the vord during the days of occupation. None of them were in what would be considered good condition though few bore any injuries. "The children are showing signs of beginning to recover," Fidelias said. "The others... some of them have family who might be alive. If we get them to someplace warm and quiet and safe, they have a chance."
"Someplace warm, quiet, and safe," said the Princeps, his eyes hardening. "That can be a rare thing even in times of peace."
"True enough."
The Princeps stopped in his tracks. They were a short distance from the nearest sentries. "Your best guess. Could Crassus command this force in... my absence?"
"In your absence, as your lieutenant, yes," Fidelias replied immediately. "In the event of your loss, Captain? Not for long."
Octavian eyed him sharply. "Why?"
"Because the Canim respect Varg, and Varg respects you. The Free Aleran Legion respects you - but if you weren't here, they would follow Varg's lead."
The Princeps grunted, frowning. Then he said, "Are you telling me that I should name a Canim the second-in-command of our forces?"
Fidelias opened his mouth and closed it again. He blinked, thinking it over. "I believe... that Varg would have a better chance of holding the force together than Crassus, or anyone else in the First Aleran's command structure."
"Except, perhaps, Valiar Marcus," Octavian mused.
Fidelias snorted. "Yes, well, that's not an option now, is it?"
Octavian regarded him steadily and said nothing.
Fidelias tilted his head as it slowly dawned on him what Octavian meant. "Oh, Your Highness. You couldn't possibly do that."
"Why not?" Octavian asked. "No one but my personal guard and Demos's crew know the truth about you. They can keep a secret. So, Marcus runs the force until it can unite with the Legions, passes along Crassus's orders, and is watched by the Maestro - who is, I believe, still uncertain as to why you aren't hanging on a cross being eaten by vord."
"I'm a bit unclear on that point myself, at times."
Octavian's visage hardened briefly. "I will do as I see fit with your life. It is mine to spend. Remember that."
Fidelias frowned and inclined his head slightly. "As you wish, my lord."
"That's right," Octavian said, some measure of bitter humor touching the tone.
Fidelias studied the young man for a moment and realized that... the Princeps was torn over some decision. Normally he was so confident, so driven; Fidelias had never seen him like this. There was uncertainty hovering behind his words, hesitance: Octavian himself wasn't sure what his next steps would be.
"Are you planning on leaving the force, sir?" Fidelias asked carefully.
"At some point, it's inevitable," Octavian replied calmly. "If nothing else, I will be obliged to make personal contact with the Legions in Calderon - and hope to the great furies whoever is in charge over there has had sense enough to listen to my uncle."
Fidelias grunted. "But... that isn't what you think will happen."
Octavian grimaced, and said, "Someone has to command the men, regardless of what happens to me. We have to take down the vord Queen - and her cadre of captured or treacherous Citizens. I will, by necessity, be in the center of that conflict. And... the odds seem to be long against me."
Fidelias debated on how to respond to the moment of vulnerability the Princeps was showing. He finally just began chuckling.
Octavian frowned at him and lifted an imperious eyebrow.
"Long odds," he said. "Bloody crows, sir. Long odds. That's bloody funny."
"I don't see what's so amusing about it."
"Naturally, you don't," Fidelias said, still chuckling. "The furyless boy from the country who stopped an invasion."
"I didn't really stop it," Tavi said. "Doroga stopped it. I just..."
"Completely demolished an operation backed by the most dangerous High Lord and Lady in the Realm," Fidelias said. "I was there. Remember?" The last words were not bereft of irony.
Octavian gave a small inclination of his head in acknowledgment of the touch.
"The boy who personally saved the First Lord's life in his second term at the Academy. Who took command of a Legion and fought the Canim to a standoff - and who then stole Varg from the most tightly guarded prison of the Realm and brokered the first truce in history with the Canim to get them out of the Realm. The young upstart Princeps who pitted himself against a continent full of vord and hostile Canim and won."
"I got my people and Varg's out alive," Octavian corrected sharply. "I haven't won anything. Not yet."
Fidelias grunted. "Sir... honestly. Suppose you defeat the vord here. Suppose you unite our people again, take Alera back. Will that be a victory?"
Octavian raked his fingers through his hair. "Of course not. It'll be a good start. But there will be severe repercussions for the balance of power in our society that must be addressed. The Canim will, probably, be settling here, and we'll have to reach some kind of mutual understanding with them, and the Free Alerans are never going to back the same set of laws that allowed them to be enslaved. Not to mention the fact that - "
Fidelias cleared his throat gently. "Young man, I submit to you that your standards of victory are... set rather high. If you continue that way, no matter what you do, it will never be enough."
"That is exactly correct," Octavian replied. "Are the men and women the vord have already killed only partially dead? Are they only technically dead? Only legally dead? Can a compromise be made wherein they are given back some portion of their lives?" He shook his head. "No. No compromise. My duty to them, and to those still alive, demands nothing less than everything I can give them. Yes, old soldier, my standards are high. So are the stakes. They're a matched set."
Fidelias stared at him, then shook his head slowly. Gaius Sextus had held an air of absolute authority, of personal power that arrested one's sense of reason, at times, to extract support and obedience. Gaius Septimus had been a vibrant figure, driven and intelligent, always looking to the future. He could have inspired men to follow him down any path of reason, no matter how winding.
But Octavian... men would follow Octavian into a leviathan's gullet if he asked it of them. And crows take him if Fidelias himself wouldn't be one of them. The headstrong lunatic would probably discover some way to lead them all out the other side draped in the rings and crowns of a devoured treasure ship and somehow emerge clean.
"I couldn't lead the Legions and the Canim," Fidelias said quietly. "Not alone. But... if you made your will known to Varg, then Valiar Marcus could serve as Crassus's advisor, his huntmaster. Varg would give him the chance to stand on his own merits in that case. And I would direct him as best I could."
"You know the Canim," Octavian said. "Better than anyone else I have." His eyes glinted. "You've spent time with Sha, I think."
"I've met the Cane," Fidelias said calmly. "He seems most professional."
"And have you ever met Khral?"
"I do not believe my duties as First Spear ever brought me into contact with him, my lord."
"Oh," Octavian said, smiling suddenly. "Very smooth."
Fidelias inclined his head, his mouth touched with amusement at one corner.
The Princeps turned to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Thank you, Marcus."
Fidelias dropped his eyes. "My lord..."
"Whatever else you've done," Octavian said gently, "I have seen you. I have trusted you with my life, and you have trusted me with yours. I have seen you work tirelessly to serve the First Aleran. I have seen you give your body and heart to the Legion, to your men. I refuse to consider the idea that it was all a ploy."
Fidelias looked away from him. "That hardly matters, sir."
"It matters if I say it matters," Octavian growled. "Crows take me, if I am to be First Lord, we're going to establish that from the outs - "
The earthcrafting went beneath Fidelias so swiftly, so softly, that he hardly noticed it. He froze in place and narrowed his eyes, sending his own awareness into the ground beneath them.
A second passed by him. And a third.
They were all heading in the same direction - toward the command tent, the center of the camp.
"... if I have to crack every skull in the Senate to..." Octavian frowned. "Marcus?"
Fidelias's hand went to his side, where his sword would normally be. It was, of course, gone. "Sir," he said, his voice tight, "there are earthcrafters passing beneath us at this very moment."
Octavian blinked. Powerful the young man might be, but he didn't have the subtlety, the awareness, that could only come from decades of experience. He hadn't sensed a thing. But once he closed his own eyes for a moment, frowning, he let out a blistering curse. "Friendlies would never attempt to enter the camp like that. The vord had a number of Citizens in their control."
"Aye."
"Then we can't send legionares against them. It will be a bloodbath." He "listened" for a moment more, then opened his eyes. "They're heading for command," Octavian said shortly. Only his eyes showed strain. "Kitai's there."
"Go," Fidelias said. "I'll bring the Pisces after you."
"Do it," Octavian snapped, and before he was finished speaking, he took a single bounding step and leapt into the air on a roaring gale of wind. Within another heartbeat, he had drawn his sword, and white-hot, furious fire burned forth from the blade.
Fidelias turned to sprint toward the center of the camp. As he went, he began bellowing orders that carried even over the hollow roar of Octavian's monstrous windstream.
He did not need to be doing such things at his age, but he tried to focus on the positive: At least he wasn't running in full armor. And, thank the great furies, the Princeps hadn't taken Fidelias flying alongside him. Even so, some part of Fidelias noted with amusement that he wasn't simply following Gaius Octavian, unarmed and unarmored, into the leviathan's mouth.
He was sprinting.
Chapter 42
Tavi didn't know how many earthcrafters the vord had collared and enslaved, but given how quickly Alera said that they had affected repairs upon the causeways, it was either a great many Citizens with lesser gifts or a few very powerful ones. Either way, Kitai was in the command tent, averting friction between the Antillan brothers and the Canim, and between the command staff of the Free Aleran and Maestro Magnus, and unaware of what was coming.
Tavi dived at the command tent, a dangerous maneuver when flying so low - but he managed to land perhaps twenty feet off without breaking his legs or ankles, then promptly redirected his windstream to catch the command tent and tear it neatly up off its posts and stakes like an enormous kite. A dozen people in the tent, staff and guards, Aleran and Canim, came lurching to their feet. Half a dozen of them, including Kitai, had already drawn steel before Tavi got a clear look at them.
"To arms!" he thundered, before either the guards or the people within the tent could react. He ran toward the tent, the sword in his hand sending out sparks that threatened to catch his own bloody cloak on fire, and shouted, "Enemy earthcrafters coming in low!"
"Oh crows take it," muttered Maestro Magnus in a positively offended tone. He had to gather up his long tunic to show pale, scrawny legs as he stepped up onto a wooden camp stool. "Of all the ridiculous nonsense."
"Where?" Kitai snapped, taking several rapid steps from the others, looking left and right at the ground beneath her.
Tavi focused his thoughts upon the earth beneath him. Subtle though such travel might be, his flight to the command tent had been far swifter, and he felt the foremost earthcrafting coming toward him, several yards away. Instead of answering, he stopped, took a quick pair of steps, and with the power of the earth itself behind his arms and shoulders, thrust the burning blade straight down into the soil beneath him. The blade struck home, though he could tell only from the sudden quivering jerks that ran through the steel to his hand, like the wriggling motion of a fish caught upon a hook that ran through the line and pole to the hand of an angler. He withdrew, the motion effortless with the burning sword, and struck again only inches from the first blow.
The earth beneath him suddenly collapsed downward in a circle perhaps ten feet across. One moment, he was standing upon solid ground, and the next it was falling from beneath him. One hand, formed into a stiffening claw, thrust up from the loose soil. Tavi tried not to take note of the fact that the hand was a woman's and not young, forcing the fact of what he had just done to the back of his mind.
"Aleran!" cried Kitai's voice. Her anxious face appeared at the top of the sudden pit Tavi found himself in.
"I'm all ri - " Tavi began.
The enemy earthcrafter following in the wake of the first suddenly stumbled out of the earth five feet from Tavi, abruptly finding himself standing in the open air at the bottom of the pit. Tavi stared at him for a motionless instant of recognition. He hadn't seen the massively muscled, lank-haired man who had appeared, a thug named Renzo, since commencement activities at the Academy. The enormous young man was perhaps a year older than Tavi and weighed two of him. An extremely accomplished earthcrafter, Renzo had been stupid enough to be a friend of Kalarus Brencis Minoris, which doubtless explained the steel slaver's collar about his mountainous neck. Tavi had beaten Renzo into screaming surrender before he'd had use of any furycrafting at all, and the act still shamed him in his memory.
The instant of hesitation gave Renzo a chance to react. He flicked a hand, and the earth surged up around Tavi, as if to bury him alive.
Tavi recovered his balance and immediately drew strength from the earth - specifically, from the earth trying to smother him, weakening the furies responding to Renzo's command. He waded forward, through the failing power of those furies, and, with an instant of razor-sharp focus, cut cleanly through Renzo's hastily raised blade, the steel collar about the huge man's neck - and the neck beneath it. Renzo's body dropped like a slaughtered hog's, still quivering.
Time slowed.
There was little blood. The blazing sword in Tavi's hand had cauterized the cuts even as he made them. The courtyard bully's broad hands twitched and spasmed. His head had fallen facedown, and Tavi could see his mouth moving for a few seconds, as if to spit out the dirt upon his tongue. That didn't last long. A heartbeat, two, then there was stillness.
Renzo had been an appallingly petty evil from the last days of Tavi's childhood.
Tavi felt sick at how easy it had been to murder him.
His thoughts and focus were, for a few seconds, entirely shattered, and so, when the vord Queen exploded from the earth behind Renzo's corpse, she nearly killed him in the first instant of their meeting.
Tavi seized upon a windcrafting, weak though it was down in the sinkhole, to speed his perceptions. Even with the crafting, there was time for no more than a bizarre, flash impression of a beautiful face, glittering black eyes, a tattered old dress - and then there was a flicker of motion as a shadowy blade darted toward his heart.
Tavi had enough time to think, I didn't feel it coming, it's not made of metal. Fortunately, his reflexes hadn't had any metalcrafting to rely upon when he first trained with a weapon, and they hadn't needed the advance warning. His own burning blade caught the dark weapon in the vord Queen's hand, defeated the Queen's disengage, then suddenly slipped and wobbled as the resistance of the other weapon vanished. The dark blade curled in her hand like a striking serpent and drove into his belly. It pierced his armor as though it were made of soft cloth instead of battle steel, and he felt himself thrown back hard against the layers of a stone shelf lining the pit wall behind him.
The vord Queen came at him, her eyes shining with a terrible intensity, but he responded with the instant, deadly reflexes of a man who had been wise enough to embrace the cold, insensible strength of his armor and weaponry, who felt no pain though his body was trapped against the rough wall, impaled upon a deadly blade. The vord Queen was swift enough to avoid having her head taken from her shoulders, but only just. Tavi's burning sword left a wound in her scalp and seared away a mass of thin white hairs. She blurred away from him, letting out a metallic shriek, and simply bounded up out of the pit.
An explosion of light and furious sound bright enough to hurt his eyes - odd, that metalcrafting didn't seem to offer any protection from that source of pain - made the shape of the disappearing Queen a silhouette and left her profile burned onto his eyes in bright color as the rest of the world went dark.
Every instinct in him screamed to get out of the hole, get into action, move, move, move. But he didn't. When the Queen had leapt from the pit, she hadn't been holding a sword. Whether he could feel the pain or not, given the rock at his back it was almost certain that there was a preternaturally sharp weapon still thrust into his belly, sunk into the stone behind him like a nail into wood. If he simply tore his way free, he could all but cut himself in half.
He held the blazing sword uncomfortably close to his own body, squinting down with his light-dazzled eyes, and confirmed it. There was a bar of gleaming, green-black material still thrust through the plates of his lorica. He touched a hand to it, lightly, and found that it was double-edged and as sharp as a scalpel. The lightest touch had opened flesh with a horrible, delicate ease. It looked like vord chitin and, for all that he knew, it was. When the blood from his fingers touched it, the weapon quivered, sending silver shocks of sensation through his body, though his metalcrafting kept him from experiencing it as pain.
Bloody crows. The thing was alive.
Outside the pit, the vord Queen shrieked again, the sound a brassy challenge. Explosions of fire thundered outside. People screamed. Steel rang on steel.
Tavi was having a hard time getting enough breath. It couldn't be the lungs themselves. The chitin blade's thrust had been far too low. He glanced at his fingers and saw them smeared with something tarry and green. It smelled vile. Lovely - poison, which must have been shutting down his breathing.
Tavi grimaced. The chitin blade didn't have a guard or a tang. It simply... segued, from a long, lightly curved blade to an oblong, rounded handle. He couldn't walk forward and off the impaling blade. The handle would never fit through the relatively small hole the blade had made, and widening the wound himself seemed... counterproductive.
Stars thickened in his vision. His body was running out of air.
Tavi debated simply striking the sword, snapping it with his own burning blade, but there were excellent reasons not to. The blow might not break the vordblade, in which case it would just cut through him with all the power of his own strike. If he tried to burn through, it would heat the blade and cauterize the wound, rendering it all but untreatable by watercraft. Simply seizing it and breaking it with earthcrafted strength was a fool's game as well - the blade would nip off his fingers all the more neatly because of the supernatural power backing the attempt.
More screams, human and vord, came from above. Incoming windstreams howled, and a Cane let out a furious roar. He began to feel dizzy.
The soil around him, all over his clothes, his boots, his armor, was loose, fairly sandy.
That would do.
Moving carefully, he gestured with one hand, and a long pseudopod of sandy earth rose up from beneath him. He scooped up a handful, and mused that his own blood had made it sticky and clumpy. He caked it around the vordblade. He did that twice more, until a thick clump of bloody, sandy mud clung to it.
Then he ground his teeth, held out his sword, and poured fire from the glowing blade down onto the mud, shaping it with his thoughts and will. It enveloped the mud in a swift, sudden, short-lived flash of fire that brought up blisters on his hands and face - and when the light had faded, the sand glowed dull red with heat, clinging gelatinously.
A second pass of the sword allowed him to draw the heat back out of the sand again, before it could spread up the blade and into his vitals, and the vordblade was suddenly encased in an irregular lump of glass.
Tavi seized it, took a steadying breath, and drew on the weapon. It didn't move at first, but he didn't dare turn this into an exercise of brute strength. He increased the pressure slowly, gently, until the weapon abruptly slid free of the stone behind him. It raised sparks from his armor as Tavi pulled it carefully from his flesh.
He gave the vordblade a little toss so that it landed on the far side of the pit. Then he focused on his own body, finding the wound, a narrow and reasonably minor injury in its own right. But the tissues around the wound, all the way through his body, were swelling as though they meant to burst.
Tavi ground his teeth, focused his will, and stopped them from growing any worse. To some degree, the swelling was an advantage - it kept him from bleeding too hideously, for the moment. But he could feel his body's own unwitting rebellion in progress, a toxin-induced physical frenzy in his blood that would kill him in minutes if allowed to run its course.
Minutes suddenly seemed an endless amount of time. If he could move fast enough, he could end the Vord War in seconds.
Tavi reached for more strength from the earth beneath him and used it to spring from the pit in a single leap, taking in his surroundings as he did. There was a circle of blackened, smoking earth around the top of the pit, the ground glazed to dirty glass, presumably from the firecrafting launched at the Queen when she appeared. There were dozens of other pits in sight, and the sounds of desperate struggle. Corpses, clad both in chitin and Legion armor, littered the ground. The earthcrafters had attacked like ant lions, opening a sinkhole beneath their targets and drawing them down into close combat, where the enslaved Citizens would have all the advantages. The loose soil would slow Tavi's people and make them vulnerable to the vicious physical strength of the attackers. Old Maestro Magnus stood on his wooden stool, beating frantically at his beard, which had somehow been set on fire - but, rendered invisible to the subterranean attackers by his precarious perch, he was thus far unhurt.
Tavi landed lightly, on his toes, just as a chitin-armored man wielding an enormously oversized sword swept it in a deadly arc toward Varg.
The Cane caught the fury-assisted blow with a perfect deflection parry, redirecting the vast power of the strike, sliding it away at an angle instead of pitting the raw strength of his bloodred steel directly against the Aleran's greatsword. The Cane flowed forward and to one side in the wake of the huge sword's passing, graceful for all his tremendous size and weight, and struck cleanly, once.
The enslaved Citizen dropped dead in his tracks, his head attached to his body only by a scrap of muscle and flesh. Varg continued the motion, never stopping, his blade coming up to a guard that stopped a fraction of a second before becoming an attack directed at Tavi.
"Where?" Tavi demanded, in Canish.
Varg pointed with one clawed finger, then whirled and threw his great curved blade with a smooth contraction of what seemed like every muscle in the Cane's lean body. It tumbled twice and buried itself in the back of one of two enemy earthcrafters attacking his son, Nasaug. The thrown weapon struck with so much force that it pierced the chitin-armor, but even if it hadn't, Tavi saw the target's head snap back at the violence of the strike, and clearly heard the brutal impact break the enemy's collared neck.
Tavi looked in the direction Varg had pointed and spotted the vord Queen, vanishing into the mists that still surrounded the camp, courtesy of the ritualists. Kitai was pursuing her. That much Tavi had expected. He just hadn't expected to see the two of them running along the tops of the standard Legion white canvas tents.
Legion tents were mostly of the northern design, made to shed water and snow. Two upright poles at either end supported a long cross-pole, which held up the line of the roof. The cross-pole was perhaps an inch and a half thick.
Kitai and the Queen sprinted along them as though they were as wide as the avenues of old Alera Imperia.
Tavi leapt into the air and roared aloft on a column of wind. Though Kitai and the vord Queen were moving more swiftly than any human could have without crafting, flight was faster still.
"Stay with the Princeps!" someone bellowed behind him, maybe Maximus.
A second roar of wind joined his, and Tavi glanced over one shoulder to see Crassus soaring after him, fresh blood dripping from his wetted blade.
Kitai bounded from one tent to the next, took a half stride from one end of the tent to the other, and leapt to the next tent, following the vord Queen. As Tavi began to close in, she narrowed the Queen's lead to only feet, and their next leap between tent poles came at nearly the same instant. Kitai's sword, seething with amethyst fire (how the bloody crows had she done that? Tavi's fire always looked like... fire.) licked out and struck the vord Queen low on one calf - only a last-second convulsion of the limb prevented the blow from striking the tendon at the ankle. Kitai had gone for a crippling blow to slow the Queen and allow the rest of the First Aleran's skilled furycrafters to catch up.
The Queen spun in midair, her body contorting with what could only have been the aid of windcrafting, and a clawed foot lashed out at Kitai's face as the two of them soared through their leap. Kitai was not caught unawares by the attack, and intercepted it with her left arm - but away from the support of any earthcrafting, she was no match for the vord Queen's sheer power. The kick broke bones and laid open flesh in a short spray of blood. Kitai cried out and lost her balance as she came down again, tumbling into the tent canvas and bringing the tent down. The vord Queen took a single, contemptuous step on the tent's cross-pole before it could fall and continued without slackening her pace.
She met Tavi's eyes for an instant, and her expression unsettled him. He had rarely seen any emotion at all displayed by a vord queen, and he had encountered several - but this Queen was not wearing a blank mask. She was smiling, a child's gleeful grin of excitement and joy, an expression seen only in the midst of favorite games and birthday celebrations.
Bloody crows. The creature was having fun.
Tavi let out a cry of rage and flew faster, blade held ready for a cavalry-style passing stroke, but Crassus was surging steadily past him, his years of experience surpassing Tavi's raw power at windcrafting. He had shifted his blade to his left hand, and was arrowing toward the fleeing Queen's right side. The young Tribune clearly intended to occupy the vord's attention and defenses while Tavi took the killing stroke on her left. Tavi altered his flight path slightly, the edges of Crassus's violent windstream ripping his cloak to shreds. He braced himself and closed half an instant behind Crassus's leading attack.
Before they reached her, the Queen spun between one step and the next, a neat pirouette, and one pale arm moved in a swath across her body, spreading a small, arcing cloud of crystals into the air.
Crassus never had a chance. The salt crystals struck him before he could have registered the threat, tearing his wind furies to useless shreds. He fell with a short, frustrated cry into the sea of white tents beneath them, heavy poles snapping, heavy canvas tearing under the bone-shattering force of his speed.
Tavi rolled over and over to his own left, barely avoiding the spray of salt crystals, nearly losing control of his flight. A desperate thrust of wind sent him arcing up into the air instead of down into entangling tents, and the harsh, metallic laugh of the vord Queen mocked him. A motion of her arm gave birth to a sphere of fire that wiped away half a dozen legionares as they came pouring out of their tent, and with each step she cast more fire to the left and right, killing men as easily as a child crushed ants. Screams of terror and agony followed in her wake.
Tavi stabilized his flight and shook his head furiously. He could not afford to let his emotions control him. The Queen was deadly, and deadly rational. She wasn't simply running along the tents for a lark. She had a goal in mind, a destination.
Tavi didn't need to look ahead to know what was coming - and neither, he realized, did the vord Queen. The layout of a Legion camp was standard from one end of the Realm to another, established by centuries of practice, and he realized with a sudden chill that he had given the enemy some margin of advantage by adhering to Legion rote.
She was heading for the healer's tents.
With a snarl, Tavi dropped his concentration on everything but his windstream and shot past her. He gained a fifty-, sixty-, seventy-yard lead, then had to come down at the most oblique angle he could, on his side in the air, his feet leading. The instant his boots hit the earth, he called upon it to shape itself to the line of his motion, to guide and slow him rather than simply kicking his feet out from beneath him and seeing to it that he broke his fool neck.
His boots tore up a furrow of turf as wide as his foot and six inches deep, sending a spray of soil, pebbles, and spring grass flying up in front of him in a bow wave for better than fifty feet and bringing him to a stop in the entrance to the main healer's tent. He whirled, called fire back into his sword, and then the vord Queen slammed into his chest, driving him into the tent and through the large support post just inside the entrance.
Tavi slapped one speed-blurred, dark-nailed hand aside as the vord Queen swept it at his throat, dropped his sword, and seized her by the hair with his other hand, rolling as they both hit the ground and putting her in front as their momentum carried her into the side of a filled metal healing tub, slamming his own heavily armored body into her slender form.
Water exploded up out of the tub as their impact crushed its nearer side flat against the other. The Queen let out a huff of expelled air. The pain he'd been holding off with metalcrafting until perhaps five or six seconds ago suddenly smashed into him in a wave, and he remembered that he had let go of the crafting that was slowing the toxin coursing from the agonizing wound in his belly.
She came rolling to her feet, never stopping her motion, bounding on all fours like something more feline than human. Fire-spheres charred half a dozen healers and two wounded survivors of Riva to so much meat. A young woman in healer's garb and a silver discipline collar was the next target. But Foss threw himself in front of her, giving her a powerful shove that sent her tumbling head over heels away from him - and then he was enveloped in another blast that left little more than blackened bones and melted steel in its wake.
The vord Queen hissed and gestured again - but Tavi suddenly recognized the young woman Foss had died to protect as Dorotea, who, in another life, had been the High Lady of Antillus.
Collared by her own allies, commanded to do no harm, the woman had been serving as a healer in the Free Aleran since its inception. Her personal ambition had been a cancer that the collar had neatly amputated, and she had done more good in her months as a slave than she ever had as a Citizen. A watercrafter skilled beyond anything that a Legion could hope for, she had doubtless been called in to treat some difficult or delicate harm suffered by one of the survivors.
Her lips spread in a snarl as another sphere of fire bloomed practically upon her, and the earth itself heaved and bucked into a dome that shielded her from the blast. A second motion sent the contents of two healing tubs abruptly hurtling toward the vord Queen like two enormous, transparent stones. The blasts of water smashed the vord to the ground.
Dorotea cried out in sudden agony and clutched at the silver collar at her throat, her body contorting.
Tavi ground his teeth and forced steel into his limbs, his mind, dismissing the pain as something unimportant. The former High Lady had pushed the vord into an open, unoccupied space to one side of the tent. Tavi lifted his sword and sent a thunderbolt of seething fire, whiter than the light of the sun, writhing into the form of some vast and deadly serpent, lancing toward her.
The vord Queen's smile was gone. Her glittering black eyes widened as the sun-fire streaked toward her. She crossed her forearms in front of her with another brassy scream, and the blast of fire struck her, burning again at Tavi's vision with a furious light bright enough to blind him though he had closed his eyes to shield against it.
He opened them again, peering.
The entire side of the tent was gone in a great, gaping circle, the canvas charred to fine ash, cut as neatly as with shears. The ground all around the blast area was several inches lower than it had been a moment before and smoothed to glowing glass.
Except for one small circle around the vord Queen. She stood up slowly, uncrossing her arms, and that gleeful smile spread over her face again as she stood over Tavi. Though her tattered old gown was singed black over most of its surface, she was apparently unharmed.
He let out a panting snarl and fought his way up to one knee, sword in hand.
"I came here only to weaken you, Father," the Queen said in a purring voice. "This was more than I dared to hope for. Perhaps there is such a thing as good fortune, after all."
A movement sent a fire-sphere toward Tavi. He caught it on his sword, willing the weapon to absorb the heat, to make it burn all the more brightly - but the effort made his vision tighten down to a narrow tunnel. His heart was racing, faster than he'd ever felt it. He couldn't breathe. She was coming, so fast, faster than he could see, even clawing for the speed of windcrafting, and he couldn't get his sword to move -
Maximus slammed into the vord Queen with a roar of pure rage, his armored body hurtling into her, a self-contained avalanche of steel. He carried her past Tavi and through a second upright, shattering it to kindling, and bringing two-thirds of the remaining canvas of the large tent down upon them all like an enormous, smothering blanket.
Tavi lifted his sword and cut an opening almost before the canvas could settle. He stumbled upright, through the opening, only to see the vord Queen neatly duplicate his maneuver using her talons, drag a metal tub out with her, and slam it with savage force onto a thrashing lump beneath the canvas - one that sagged and abruptly went still.
The vord turned toward Tavi, a wild grin twisting her lips, showing him teeth that were very white, with threads of green-black running in crazed lines over their surfaces.
Tavi lifted his sword, calling more heat to it, more light furiously shining forth. He couldn't move. His body was shaking, too weak. He knew that he now stood nearer death's door than he ever had before, though his furycraft allowed him to stay on his feet.
"Your grandfather," the vord Queen said, "died just that way. Defiant to the last, his sword in hand."
Tavi showed her his teeth, and said, "This isn't a guard position. It's a signal fire."
The Queen tilted her head, her eyes narrowed, and a steel balest bolt hit her in the ribs, just below her left arm. It didn't pierce her pale, seemingly soft skin, but the sheer force behind the bolt struck her from her feet and sent her down. She was up again almost instantly. Thirty yards away, all but invisible in the dark and the mist, Fidelias dropped his balest - and swung a second such weapon, already loaded, from his back, lifting it to his shoulder to shoot as he shouted, "Go!"
Windstreams rose in a howl as the Knights Pisces came streaking past Fidelias, thirty strong, some of them passing only inches over his head. A solid wall of wind preceded them, slamming into the vord Queen, forcing her back and away from Tavi like a leaf driven by a gale.
She looked at them for an instant, unimpressed and unafraid, her smile undiminished.
Then she let out another brassy, mocking laugh and bounded away, toward the northeast. She leapt into the air, gathering up a windstream of her own that ripped every tent within fifty yards from the earth, vanished behind a veil, and was gone in a howl of cyclonic thunder.
Fidelias tracked the movement with the second balest but didn't shoot. He came sprinting toward Tavi after that, as the Knights Pisces streaked forward in pursuit - but the men didn't go far before pulling up and spreading into a defensive formation over the camp. Tavi sagged in relief. If they'd followed her out there, she would surely have torn them to shreds.
"Your Highness," Fidelias breathed as he reached Tavi. He set the Canim weapon down and began to examine Tavi's injuries. "Oh. Oh, bloody crows, man."
"Kitai," Tavi grated. "Crassus. Back behind me. Dorotea and Maximus under the tent. Foss is dead. I couldn't stop her."
"Bloody crows, hold still," Fidelias snarled. "Stay down. Stay down, sire, you're bleeding. Stay down."
"Poison," Tavi mumbled. "Poison. Check her trail. Think we went by the water tanks. She could have dropped something in."
"Be still," Fidelias snarled. "Oh, great furies."
Tavi felt the metalcrafting slip. A second later, he felt the agony of his wounds rush up as viciously as a rabid gargant.
And then he felt nothing.
