First Lord's Fury

CHAPTER 20

Riva burned, illuminating the moonless night.

“There’s always a fire,” Amara said, her tone dull. “Why is there always a fire?”

“Fire’s a living thing,” Sir Ehren replied. He stared at the city as Amara did, looking up at it from the plain on its northern side. Refugees streamed past them in a dazed, shambling river, directed by elements of the Rivan civic legion, and flanked by the legionares of Riva. “If you don’t control it, it looks for food, eats, and grows. It’s in every house in the city, and it just takes a moment’s carelessness to set it loose.” He shrugged. “Though I imagine all the feral furies had something to do with it, too.”

A windmane swept out of the night, letting out a whistling shriek as it dived toward the pair of Cursors speaking at the side of the causeway. Amara idly lifted a hand and made an effort of will. Cirrus flung himself at the hostile fury in a rush of wind, and as the two met, Amara’s fury was outlined in ghostly white light, a specter of a long-legged horse. Like a dozen others in the past hour, the clash was brief. Cirrus’s lashing hooves rapidly drove the windmane away.

“Countess,” Ehren said. “I understand that you were in the city.”

Amara nodded. She felt oddly detached from the events of the night, smooth and unruffled. She wasn’t calm, of course. After what she had seen, only a madwoman would be calm. She suspected it was more like going numb. The terrified, wounded flood of humanity in front of her would have been heart-wrenching if she hadn’t seen so much worse within Riva’s walls as the feral furies overran them. “For a while. I was bearing messages back and forth between Riva and Aquitaine.”

Ehren studied her intently for a moment. Then he said, “That bad?”

“I saw an earth fury that looked like a gargant bull knock down a building being used to shelter orphaned children,” she said in a level tone. “I saw a pregnant woman burned to black bones by a fire fury. I saw an old woman dragged down into a well by a water fury, her husband holding her wrists the whole way. He went with her.” She paused, musing over the placid, inflectionless calm of her own voice, and added, “The second minute was worse.”

Ehren folded his arms and shivered. “I hate to think what would have happened if the High Lords hadn’t been able to return to the city to drive some of the ferals away.”

“True,” Amara said.

“Countess. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Perfectly.”

The little Cursor nodded. “And… the Count?”

Amara felt herself grow more distant. She thought it was likely the only reason she wasn’t weeping hysterically. “I don’t know. He was part of Riva’s command staff. He wasn’t there.”

Ehren nodded. “He… doesn’t seem the sort of man to stay indoors when something like this is happening.”

“No. He isn’t.”

“If I had to guess,” Ehren said diffidently, “I’d say he was probably assisting in the evacuation. And that you’ll see him as soon as he’s gotten everyone he can out of the city.”

“It wouldn’t be out of character,” Amara agreed. She took a deep drink from a flask of water she’d forgotten she was holding. Then she passed it back to Ehren. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” he said. “Where are you going now?”

“I’m to help provide an air patrol over the refugee column,” Amara said. “Princeps Attis thinks that their aerial troops will be in position to attack us farther down the causeway.” She paused, then asked, “And you?”

“I’m consolidating the food and supplies of the column,” Ehren said with a grimace. “Which closely resembles bald theft—especially to everyone whose food I order taken away.”

“There’s no choice,” Amara said. “Without rationing, most of these people won’t have the strength to reach Calderon.”

“I know,” Ehren said, “but that doesn’t make it any more palatable.” They both fell quiet and watched the refugees shuffle past. “Crows.” He sighed. “Hard to believe that this could have been worse. Give the Princeps his due. He reacted quickly. He’s light on his feet.”

Amara felt a thought stirring, deep down beneath the numbness. She frowned. “Yes,” she said. “The presence of the High Lords in the city made the difference…” She drew in a sharp breath as the thought crystallized in her head. “Sir Ehren. The vord will strike at them.”

“I wish them good luck,” Ehren snorted. “The High Lords are more than capable of handling an attack from any of the vord we’ve seen in this battle.”

“What about from their fellow Citizens?” Amara asked. “Such as the ones who took Lady Isana.”

Ehren’s mouth opened slightly. “Ah,” he said. “Oh dear.”

Amara spun on her heel, leapt into the air, and let Cirrus lift her aloft. She gathered speed and was shortly hurtling like an arrow toward the burning city.

Amara soared up toward the High Lord’s citadel, the tallest of many towers in the great city. Several times, she had to bank around columns of thick black smoke. The air was turbulent as fires spread below.

She could hear the battle raging south of the city. Drums rolled, pounding out messages. Horns blared. The huge, hollow thumps of the more traditional fire-spheres thrummed through the air, whumping irregularly against Amara’s chest. Though the screams of wounded legionares did not reach her, the shrieks of dying vord carried through the air, the distance removing the steely menace from their high-pitched cries. They rather sounded like a distant, enormous flock of birds.

Amara wasn’t far enough away to escape the pain and terror of the night, though. Human shouts and cries and screams came up from the city—the men of the civic legion, trying to rescue those trapped by fires, the wounded, the dying. She saw several vord as she overflew the city—solitary warriors, leaner and swifter-looking than those attacking the front lines, who had somehow made their way into the city during the night’s confusion. Teams of three and four armored men, probably Knights Ferrous, seemed to be hunting the vord in turn, stalking through the blazing, panicked maze of Riva’s dying streets.

Knights Aeris and Citizens with the ability to fly were everywhere above the city, pulling trapped civilians from the fires, and Amara fancied that from a distance they must all look like so many moths—dark silhouettes in the air fluttering around Riva’s flames.

Rogue furies roamed the streets and rooftops, constantly repelled by the efforts of a single Citizen or by groups of civilians working in concert. Amara herself had bowled several more windmanes out of her path on the way to the city. At least the feral furies were not as numerous or aggressive as they had been in the hours before, though they were still deadly dangerous to any who met them without sufficient furycraft to defend themselves.

Lights moved through the streets, furylamps carried by fleeing civilians: The wounded and young and elderly piled into the few remaining wagons and their legionare escorts, mostly. The fires cast lights on some of the streets, but the shadows in the others were all the deeper for them.

The High Lord’s tower was the sole island of order and calm within the city walls. Lights blazed all around it, reflecting from the shining armor of the singulares on duty there. The tower had a wide stone balcony winding around its entire exterior, from which the High Lord could look out over his city. As Amara approached, she could see Lord Riva’s entourage, gathered around the man himself, as he paced a steady circle around the balcony, delivering orders to messengers who came and went with desperate haste.

Far too much desperate haste, Amara realized. The havoc resulting from the vord assault had thrown the entire defense of the city into chaos; there was no visible air patrol over the High Lord’s tower. Doubtless, Riva was planning to leave the city within the next hour and had dispatched the majority of his fliers to escort the fleeing refugees. Most of the other fliers were even now saving the lives of those trapped behind burning buildings, much as Amara had done during a fire in the capital during her days in the Academy, starving fires of air on a small scale or using walls of wind to shield those the fires would have consumed. Any remaining fliers had doubtless been pressed into service as messengers, coordinating with Gaius Attis and the Legions.

Black shapes darted and flitted through the smoke and firelight and shadows that covered the city, seemingly moving at random through the crisis. Amara gritted her teeth. She and a class of first-year Cursors from the Academy could have flown into the city blowing trumpets and breathing fire without being noticed, much less stopped. Any of those swift-moving human forms could be enemy fliers.

Amara looked wildly around the city, struggling vainly to identify Gaius Attis or one of the High Lords or Ladies. She darted up several dozen yards to try to get a better view. Riva’s lofty towers—Great furies, what kind of crowbegotten competitive delusion infected this city’s architects, to build so many of the bloody things?—presented a dizzying aerial maze of cornices, arches, and spires. The fires below and the rising columns of smoke threw off every angle, made distances difficult to judge, and reduced every airborne figure to a featureless outline.

There, down near the street level. An avian shriek rose from below, and a falcon-shaped burst of white-hot flame soared down into an alleyway, plunging in a raptor’s strike. The light from the fire fury briefly illuminated one of the vord infiltrators, lurking not thirty feet from a laboring wagon heavily loaded with wounded civilians. The fire falcon exploded into a fireball that shattered and scattered the enemy horror, leaving behind half a dozen small fires and a large, greasy stain. Campfire sparks leapt from the smaller fires, swirling into a flowing stream that rushed up through the air and gathered upon the extended wrist of a woman dressed in legionare’s armor. The sparks congealed into the form of a small, almost delicate hunting falcon, and let out another whistling shriek that somehow conveyed a fierce sense of primal triumph.

Amara rushed down toward Lady Placida, who tossed her long braid of red hair over her shoulder and turned to face her before she had come within a hundred feet, her sword in hand.

Amara slowed, lifting both hands, until she had come close enough for Lady Placida to see her features in the light cast by the glowing falcon.

“Countess Amara,” Lady Placida said. She returned the sword to her side with fluid grace. Her voice was roughened by smoke and exertion. Her eyes turned back down to the escaping wagon below, and she waved at the elderly man coaxing its overburdened mule, gesturing for him to continue. “What can I do for you?”

“Did you know that there is no longer an aerial curtain over the city?” Amara called.

Lady Placida’s eyes widened, noticeable even in the half-light against her smoke-stained face. “What? No, no it’s been complete madness here.” She looked around her, clearly calculating. “But that would mean that… bloody crows. We’re vulnerable.”

Amara nodded. “Where is Aquitaine?”

“The southern plaza. Probably still there.” Lady Placida flicked her wrist and sent the little fire falcon hurtling up into the night. “Countess, apprise the Princeps of the situation. I will warn the Citizens—behind you!”

Amara immediately redirected Cirrus, and shot twenty feet down, to her left, and behind her. She turned over as she went, and had a brief vision of a man in black chitin-armor, long blade in hand, plunging toward her and compensating for her dodge. She twisted and arched her back in midair, and the sword swept by not two inches from the end of her nose.

With a mental hammerblow of recognition, Amara realized that she knew the young man wearing the collar and armor of the vord. His name was Cantus Macio, a young Forcian Citizen who had attended the Academy in one of the same two-year terms she had been there. His dark blond hair was shorter than she remembered, his face and body heavier with maturity, but she remembered him. He’d shared several of her classes and been one of the minority of Citizens who would treat the relatively small number of freemen at the Academy with courtesy and respect—and had been one of the more capable furycrafters in his class.

Macio’s eyes showed no similar recognition. They were wide and empty. Amara quickly changed her course to a reciprocal of his, which would buy her the largest lead before he could alter his own path of flight, dodging lightly around a column of smoke so that Macio wouldn’t be able to see her immediately.

Above Amara, three more vord-armored forms had plunged down upon Lady Placida. She bobbed lightly in the air, left and right, then drew her slender sword and struck in the same motion. A shower of bright green sparks flared up, and the enemy flier she’d struck went soaring past her into an uncontrolled spin, trailing a bright scarlet spiral of blood. He slammed into a wall with sickening force, as Lady Placida shot straight upward, turning to engage the other two vord-taken Citizens.

As the leading foe closed on her, Lady Placida reached out with one hand, and a wooden banner pole thrusting from the side of a tower suddenly twisted in place and lashed out like a club, striking one of the enemy fliers in the hip and sending him tumbling. The second flier closed to sword range, and sparks lashed out in emerald fountains as his blade met Lady Placida’s, chiming half a dozen times as the two swept past one another.

Lady Placida spun in the air to face Amara, blood coursing from a cut on one cheek. “Countess!” she cried. “Find the Princeps!” Then she spun again, her lips locked in a defiant snarl, as the pole-struck Citizen swept past her, blade in hand. The light and steely music of the clash of powerful metalcrafters rang through the fire-choked night.

Amara stared up at Lady Placida for a heartbeat, torn, but her duty was clear. Even more than its most capable furycrafters, the Realm needed leadership. Princeps Octavian might be on his way, but he was not here. Princeps Attis was. If Alera lost him now, in these chaotic circumstances, the confusion of sorting out who would take command could mean the destruction of the Legions as well as the civilians they fought to protect. They might never reach the fortifications at Calderon.

She turned and willed Cirrus to plunge them both into the nearest plume of smoke, the better to hide from any pursuit, and rushed southward through the city’s towers. The route was treacherous, deadly. Slender stone bridges arched between some of the towers, and she nearly took her head off on one of them, concealed as it was in smoke and shadow. Banner poles and stone carvings thrust from the towers, too—but she dared not fly at street level. Below, where the refugees and lower-class civilians had dwelt in numbers, laundry lines frequently crisscrossed the streets. Hitting one at flight speed would be lethal.

She found the southern plaza within moments—a broad, wide-open space of furycrafted stone that had been used as a market practically since Riva’s founding. A lone figure stood in the precise center of the plaza—and even from her elevation, Amara recognized the bearing and profile of Gaius Attis.

In a circle around him, filling most of the rest of the plaza, stood more than a dozen feral furies, the smallest of them larger than a bull gargant. A serpent, its scales made of granite and obsidian, coiled upon itself, its back broader than a large city street. The deadly, wispy form of the wind-shark Amara had seen before came next, swirling and pacing in a circle all around Attis. A bull formed of knotted roots and hardwood boughs snorted and tossed its head, each of its horns longer than a legionare’s spear, while its cloven hooves scraped and scored the stone of the plaza.

The air fairly shimmered with power, the energies of those enormous, aggressive furies thickening it until Amara felt that she could hardly breathe. She stared down for a few seconds, stunned. Furies of that size and strength were tremendously powerful, the sorts of beings that could only be mastered by the most powerful Citizens in the Realm. If anyone had commanded even one of these beings, it had been someone with the skill and power of a High Lord.

And Gaius Attis was, quite calmly, holding a dozen of them in their places, like so many unruly schoolchildren.

As she watched, he lifted one arm, his hand clenched into a fist, the gesture a beckoning, like a man hauling in on a heavy rope. The fury that faced him most directly, a long, lizardlike creature made of muddy water, arched as if in sudden agony and let out a howl like a thousand boiling teakettles. Then it simply flew into individual droplets of water, driven as if before a hurricane’s winds—directly toward Gaius Attis. His head dropped back and he let out a low cry of pain. Then, without a pause, he whirled toward the fire fury shaped like an animate, walking willow tree, flinging out his hand, and the water of the defeated lizard fury rushed toward the tree. As steam gushed forth, Gaius Attis jerked his arm toward him again in that same, beckoning gesture, and the steam and fire both rushed back toward him, swirling around him, and again he screamed.

It hit Amara with a sudden shock—Gaius Attis was claiming new furies.

She dared not approach him, not in that seething cauldron of raw power. Even if Cirrus hadn’t been loath to go near, she wouldn’t have tried it. Claiming furies was a dangerous business. Claiming furies of such size was… was practically lunacy. The energies unleashed by a struggling fury could bake a man to bones, rip him to shreds, and Amara did not have Gaius Attis’s formidable array of talents with which to insulate herself from harm.

Instead, she landed on a nearby rooftop, gathered Cirrus to her, and sent him forth in a farspeaking crafting. They only functioned in a direct line of sight, and she didn’t know how badly the discharge of energies below would garble her message, but she could think of nothing else.

“Your Highness,” she said, her voice urgent, “we’ve lost control of the local skies. Former Citizens are attacking the Citizens still attempting to aid the evacuation. It is imperative that you leave immediately.”

Attis lifted his eyes and scanned the nearby rooftops until he spotted Amara. He grimaced and answered in a voice cut thin with strain. “A few moments more. I cannot permit these beings to run loose, Cursor. They’ll leave this entire region uninhabitable for a thousand years.”

“Don’t be a bloody fool, Your Highness,” Amara snarled back. “Without you, there might not be anyone left to inhabit it.”

Attis snarled, his dark eyes smoldering for a moment with quite literal fire. “One doesn’t just drop everything and walk away from a business like this, Countess. You may note the eleven rather large and irate furies trying to kill me at the moment.”

“How long will it take you to disengage?”

Aquitaine gave a twitching shake of his head, then extended a hand toward the bull-shaped wood fury and ground his teeth. “Unknown,” he said, his voice strained. “Not long. If there are any survivors out here when they are freed, they won’t have a chance. If you would kindly cease jogging my elbow with this farspeaking…”

Amara grimaced and recalled Cirrus and sensed the presence coming at her back as a ribbon of ice laid over her spine. She didn’t waste time looking back. She flung herself forward, off the five-story roof, and dropped like a rock.

The stone edging of the roof behind her exploded into a cloud of gravel. One stone struck her hard in the back, another in the thigh. She grimly focused through the pain, calling upon Cirrus to cushion her fall, spun her body in midair, and, supported by the fury, landed in a catlike crouch. She leapt forward into a rolling dive, and an instant later a heavy boot slammed down onto the surface of the plaza with enough force to send cracks through the stone for ten feet in every direction.

Amara drew her sword even as she came to her feet and raised it to a high guard position. She found Cantus Macio staring at her with blank eyes.

“Macio,” she said, her voice shaking. “Hello. Do you remember me? From the Academy? Amara?”

He tilted his head, watching her.

Then he lifted his hand, and fire rushed at her in a swirling vortex.

Amara called to Cirrus, raising a wall of wind to stop the onrushing fire, but Macio was simply far more powerful than she. The rush of wind shoved back against her with tremendous force as it tried to slow the onrushing firestorm, and Amara found herself tossed back like a leaf.

Rather than fighting the motion, she spun into it, calling out to Cirrus again to take to the air—only to see the shimmer of something moving behind a windcrafted veil, and to feel a shock of stunning pain as an unseen fist slammed into her jaw.

Amara staggered, her concentration upon maintaining flight shattered, and tumbled down. Fortunately, she’d had little time to gather altitude or speed, but even so, her landing upon the hard stone of the plaza was an acutely painful experience. Training let her turn her motion into a rolling one, but it still slammed her limbs brutally. Her weapon was knocked clear of her hand, and she counted herself lucky not to have wound up impaled on it.

She struggled to push herself up, panicked. Speed was her only chance. She didn’t have the power she would need to confront Macio and his veiled ally directly. The only way she could survive would be to take the battle to the open skies. She found the wall of one of the buildings framing the plaza and used it to help herself stand.

She had risen to her knees by the time Macio’s fist tangled painfully in her hair. He dragged her up with fury-born strength, lifting her flailing toes clear of the ground.

Her arms felt like they’d been weighted with lead. She drew the knife from her belt and drove it up and back at the arm holding her. If she could cut the tendons, it wouldn’t matter how much earthcraft Macio knew—the mechanisms of his arm would be broken, and his grip would be gone. The cut slid off something rigid, probably the chitin-armor that encased Macio. Twisting her shoulders, she thrust one heel down at him, aiming for the knee. The blow struck home, but suspended as she was, it was weak. Macio grunted and shifted his weight, and her next two kicks hit what felt like this armored thigh, doing him no harm.

Amara felt Macio’s arm surge with power and slam her into the stone wall behind her. Her teeth snapped together on her tongue as her back and shoulders hit the stone. The taste of blood filled her mouth. Stars clouded her vision, and her limbs hung limp and flaccid.

Move. She had to move. Speed was her only chance.

Macio drew his sword with a deliberate motion, frowning up at her as he did. Then he set the sword’s tip against her ribs, just beneath her left breast. It would be a thrust to the heart.

“Amara,” he said, his voice that of someone who has recognized a former acquaintance at a dinner party. He nodded to himself, then said, “There’s no more Academy, you know.” His fingers tightened on the sword’s hilt. “I’m sorry.”