First Lord's Fury

CHAPTER 31

Gaius Octavian’s host came down upon the vord-occupied city of Riva like a thunderstorm.

Though I’m not sure anyone’s ever done it quite this literally, Fidelias mused.

As the Legions and their Canim allies swept down from the hills above Riva, the low-hanging clouds and curtains of rain seemed to cling to the banners of Aleran troops and Canim warriors alike, bound by a myriad of misty, intangible scarlet threads that stretched out into the air all around. The leashed clouds engulfed the entire force, concealing their numbers and identity from outside observation—courtesy of the Canim ritualists, led by their new commander, Master Marok.

Within the cloud, Crassus and the fliers of the Knights Pisces hovered over the heads of the marching forces. The Knights Aeris had gathered up the swirling energy of a dozen thunderbolts from a storm that had come through before first light. The strokes of lightning rumbled and crackled back and forth between the Knights, blue-white beasts caged in a circle of windcrafting. Their growling thunder rolled out ahead of the advancing host, concealing the sound of marching troops and cavalry alike.

“This all looks quite stylishly ominous,” Fidelias commented to the Princeps. “And appearances can be quite important. But I can’t help but wonder why we’re doing this, Your Highness.”

Octavian waited for a crash of thunder to roll by before he answered. “There just aren’t many ways to disguise the identity of a force on the move,” he called back, his voice confident. “And I want our full strength to come as a surprise to the vord.”

“I see,” Fidelias said. “For a moment I thought that you’d effectively blinded and deafened us all for the sake of making a memorable entrance.”

The Princeps grinned, showing Fidelias his teeth. “We have eyes outside the mist—Varg’s Hunters and the Knights Flora of both Legions.”

“You’re still creating an information delay. They’ll have to come running in here to tell you anything. If a large force arrives unexpectedly, that could be fatal.”

The Princeps shrugged. “There won’t be any such force,” he said with a confidence so perfectly familiar that Fidelias was almost violently reminded of Sextus.

Fidelias lowered his voice. “You can be sure of that?”

The Princeps looked at him for a moment, pensive, and nodded. “Yes.”

“Then why not bypass Riva completely?”

“First, because we need to be tested in an actual battle,” he replied. “We’ve never coordinated in offensive operations before, at least not on this scale. It’s important that we know what we can do against these particular vord forms.”

“And second?”

The Princeps gave Fidelias a bland look that had something granite-hard lurking under the surface. “It’s not their city. Is it.” He looked out at the mist, as though focusing on whatever was beyond. “Besides, Riva could conceal legions of vord behind her walls. Better to find out now and deal with them rather than waiting for them to come marching up our spines when we reach Calderon.”

There was the sound of approaching hoofbeats, and Kitai appeared out of the mist. She pulled in on the Princeps’ right side and matched her mount’s pace to his, her green eyes intent. “The gates were not destroyed when the city was taken,” she said. “They are currently closed and guarded. There are vord on the battlements and in the sky above the city.”

“There’s a problem,” Fidelias said. “We don’t have siege equipment.”

The Princeps shook his head. “We won’t need it.” He drew a deep breath, as if bracing himself for something unpleasant, and said, “I’m going to take them down.”

Fidelias found himself lifting both eyebrows. The siege gates of the great cities of Alera were more than simple steel and stone. They were wound through and through with furycraftings of every kind imaginable, and more craftings were laid upon them every year, so that they built one upon another like layers of paint. It was done that way for the specific purpose of making the gates almost entirely resistant to the influence of hostile furycraft. A High Lord of the Realm would be daunted by such an obstacle.

“You think you’re strong enough to manage that, sir?”

The Princeps nodded once. “Yes, I do.”

Fidelias studied Octavian’s confident profile. “Be wary of hubris, Your Highness.”

“It’s only hubris if I can’t do it,” he replied. “Besides, I need to be tested, too. If I’m to step into my grandfather’s shoes, I can’t keep on concealing my abilities forever. I need to prove myself.”

Kitai snorted quietly. “About bloody time,” she said. “Does this mean I’m free to be more obvious as well, Aleran?”

“I don’t see why not,” said the Princeps.

Fidelias lifted his eyebrows. “Your Highness? I knew she could manage minor furycraftings, lights and such, but…”

“But?” He smiled faintly.

“But she’s a Marat, sir. Marat don’t use furies.”

The Princeps feigned an astonished expression. “She is? Are you sure?”

Fidelias gave him a sour look.

The Princeps let out a warm laugh. “You may have noted that our dear Ambassador has very little regard for the proprieties.”

“Not when they’re ridiculous,” Kitai sniffed.

The two sentences came out one after the other, so close together that they might have been uttered by actors following a script or spoken by the same person. Fidelias peered at their identically colored eyes as if for the first time, feeling somewhat stupid. “The way Marat operate in tandem with their clan animals. It’s more than just their custom, isn’t it?”

“There’s a bond,” the Princeps said, nodding. “I scarcely understand it myself—and she honestly gives me no help whatsoever when I try.”

“That is because knowledge given freely to another is not really knowledge at all, Aleran,” Kitai replied. “It is rumor. One must learn for oneself.”

“And this bond… it allows her to furycraft as you do,” Fidelias said.

“Apparently,” the Princeps said.

Kitai rode for a moment, frowning. Then she said, “He’s stronger. Better focused. But I can manage more things simultaneously.”

The Princeps lifted his eyebrows. “You think so?”

Kitai shrugged her shoulders.

Fidelias frowned. “Ambassador… did you just ride up to the city gates under a veil and try to craft them down?”

Kitai shot Fidelias an annoyed scowl—and said nothing.

The Princeps looked back and forth between the pair of them, his expression unreadable. Then he said, “That was thoughtful of you, Kitai.”

“We want the gates down,” she said. “What matter who brings them down or when?”

Octavian nodded. “Most considerate,” the Princeps said.

Kitai’s scowl darkened. “Do not say it.”

“Say what? It’s the thought that counts?”

She slapped his leg lightly with the ends of her reins.

A Marat with furycraft in the same general vicinity as the Princeps of the Realm. A Princeps who had never demonstrated his skills beyond the most basic, rudimentary uses of the craft—except when he had apparently executed furycraftings so large that they could hardly be recognized as such. Fidelias himself, a proven and confessed traitor to the Crown, an assassin for the Princeps’ enemies, riding openly at the Princeps’ left hand, under an assumed face and a sentence of death, willingly staying where he was. Meanwhile, in the host behind them, following the Princeps’ banner were thousands of the finest troops of Alera’s oldest enemies—never mind another enemy, Ambassador Kitai, who quite clearly shared a great deal more than affection with Octavian. And all of them were about to assault an Aleran city overrun by a foe no one had even heard of ten years ago.

The world had become a very strange place.

Fidelias smiled to himself.

Strange, yes. But for some reason, he no longer felt like a man too old to face it.

It was not long before horns began to blow, and Aleran scouts appeared in the mists ahead, woodcrafted veils unraveling around them as they approached the column. The Princeps pointed at one of the men, and said, “Scout, report!”

“They’re coming, sir!” the man reported. “Skirmish line, maybe a cohort’s worth, coming at us hard, sir! And they’re ugly, big as they were in Canea, not those swamp-lizard things. Looks like they’ve got a hell of a reach on them, too.”

Octavian grunted. “Looks like the Queen changed them to better handle a shieldwall.”

Fidelias nodded. “Like you said she might. I’m impressed.”

The Princeps coughed. “It was a guess. I wasn’t certain about it. Just seemed reasonable.”

Fidelias frowned, and said quietly, “Piece of advice, sir?”

“Hmm?”

“Next time, just nod. People like it better when the Princeps seems to know something they don’t.”

The Princeps made a quiet, snorting sound and raised a hand, signaling the trumpeter waiting nearby. “Sound advance to the Canim. Let’s see what these vord think about meeting a few thousand Narashan warriors instead of a Legion shieldwall.”

“And see if the Canim will be willing to take your orders, eh?” Fidelias murmured, beneath the clear notes of the signal trumpet.

Octavian grinned, and responded, quietly, “Nonsense. I have no doubts whatsoever in the solidity of our alliance.”

“Excellent, sir,” Fidelias said. “That’s more like what I was talking about.”

The shrill, brassy cries of vord warriors came drifting through the mist, different than any Fidelias had heard before but unmistakable. He had to keep himself from shuddering. For the sake of the rest of the Legion, he was still playing the part of Valiar Marcus, relegated to the role of advisor to the young captain by advancing age. Valiar Marcus would not show fear before the enemy. No matter how bloody terrifying they were to anyone with half a mind.

A double column of Canim warriors, several hundred strong, came rolling up to the front of the host, led by Varg himself. Their loping pace was swift, and Varg stopped to confer briefly with the Princeps. He nodded to Octavian, then gave a few orders in the snarling tongue of the wolf-warriors, and his troops fell into a curved double line that arched out in front of the rest of the host like a legionare’s shield.

Fidelias could clearly see only the nearest of the Canim, at the center of the line—Varg and the warriors closest to him. The lean, powerful bodies of the Canim moved in a fashion that was both completely nonuniform and fluidly coordinated, each armored warrior occupying precisely enough space to move and use his weaponry, with his companions on either side maintaining a precise distance, seemingly without any conscious effort.

The Canim were soldiers, sure enough, clearly moving in coordinated discipline, but their methods and tactics were utterly alien to those used by Aleran legionares. Fidelias didn’t even want to think of the pure shocking power of a Canim shieldwall. If they used such infantry tactics, an Aleran Legion would not be able to survive the clash of close combat.

Then again, the few times Alerans had clashed with Canim of the warrior caste, the battle had never gone in their favor in any case. At best they had attained a draw, during several brief clashes during the two years of combat around the Elinarch and in the Vale. In the worst cases, the warrior caste had handed the Alerans their heads.

The vord shrieked their alien cries again, this time from closer, and Fidelias felt his heart laboring harder. He straightened his back and forced his expression to Marcus’s closed, prebattle discipline. He heard the Princeps giving rapid orders beside him—sending the scouts back out to the army’s flanks and front, and ordering Maximus’s cavalry to come up to anchor both ends of the Canim lines, to be ready to help if needed.

One Canim element to one Aleran, Fidelias noted. Even when fighting together, the Princeps was showing caution against his allies, who would see it as a reassurance and a mark of respect. The Princeps had been the first to understand the way the wolf-warriors thought, and he had applied that knowledge ably to both the battlefield and the conference table with undeniable success. Rarely had Octavian attained an overwhelming victory against the Canim, and yet at day’s end, he had always managed to hold the most vital terrain or gain another mile of ground—and now his former enemies let out a howl and engaged the vord as they appeared out of the mist.

The battle was brief, elemental, and savage.

The vord warrior forms slowed for a few steps upon seeing the Canim ready to meet them, but then hurtled forward with shrill wails and whistles. Horrible scything limbs plunged at the wolf-warriors with the kind of power that would leave Aleran legionares screaming or dead without extraordinary skill or luck.

Against the battle line of Canim in full armor, it was… insufficiently impressive.

Varg simply struck the scythes from his opponents’ limbs as they swept toward him, his red steel blade flashing in the strobes of blue-white light from the powers leashed above them. A third strike took the head from the vord, and a heavy kick both crumpled the black chitin of its armored torso and sent it sprawling back to die on the ground, thrashing uselessly. Varg’s sword whipped one way and struck a supporting limb from one vord, then reversed itself and removed a scythe from the vord on the other side, which had been wetted in Canim blood, saving a stunned warrior’s life.

Varg let out a roar of rage and what seemed to Fidelias like pure, joyous enthusiasm, struck down a second vord, and covered the fallen warrior as he rose and retrieved his weapon. Varg then broke to his right, while the recovered Cane went to his left. Both darted through the line of battle, and the Canim in the second rank followed them, so that the vord on either side of the hole Varg had created found themselves surrounded by warriors, cut down from the front and from behind.

The gap in the vord line widened, as each fallen vord’s opponent pushed through and went after the flanks and rear of another foe, so that the battlefield in front of Fidelias and the rest of the command group seemed to break into two halves and part to the left and right, like two curtains opening onto a stage—one littered with the bodies of broken vord warrior forms. The battle raged off into the mist to the left and right, and out of their immediate view.

At some point, the vord shrieks turned to a new, urgent pitch—a retreat?—and Maximus’s cavalry horns began to sound the charge, already receding into greater distance.

“Ah, they’ve broken,” said the Princeps, his teeth bared in a wolfish smile. He clenched one hand into a fist. “Max is after them. They’re running. By the great furies, they’re running!”

He never turned or raised his voice above simple conversational volume—nor could he, as the image of the calm, controlled Princeps of the Realm—but Fidelias judged that Valiar Marcus would be more than happy to do it for him. “They’re running, boys!” he bawled out in a training-ground bellow. “Varg and Antillar were too much for ’em!”

A thunder of cheers and Canim roars bellowed out for several seconds before Fidelias passed a cutoff signal back through the line to the cohorts, where Aleran centurions and Canim huntmasters began snarling and growling orderly quiet back into the ranks.

Moments later, the first returning Canim began to appear, walking back toward the ranks in the same arching battle line in which they’d begun the fight. Several were walking only with assistance—but there were no breaks in the line. On the flanks, the Aleran cavalry was returning to its original position in the order of battle. Antillar Maximus came riding in a moment ahead of Varg and saluted the Princeps, slamming his fist into his armor, over his heart.

Varg rolled to halt in front of them and nodded to the Princeps as well. “Not much of a fight.”

“It seems that they do have a breaking point, if the will of their Queen isn’t driving them,” the Princeps said. “Your warriors found it.”

Varg let out a pleased growling sound of agreement.

“I hope you will do us the honor of allowing our healers to treat your wounded. There’s no sense in having them out of action when we can put them back into top condition.”

“That would please me,” Varg replied. “I will request it of them.”

Octavian inclined his head to the Canim leader and returned Antillar’s salute. “Let’s have it.”

“A few of them managed to get out of the close fight,” Antillar Maximus said. “None of them made it out of the fog. The scouts reported other vord like these falling back to the city. They went right up the wall. They’re inside now, maybe a thousand.”

“And those are just the ones we saw,” Octavian said. “We can’t leave them in a fortress at our backs, growing a supply of croach to feed reinforcements they move into the area. This one will be up to us, I believe. Signal the Prime Cohort and the Battlecrows. I want them to be the first through the gates. Both cavalry elements are to take up positions around the city, to catch any others who try to run.”

Antillar blinked. “Those gates aren’t exactly made of paper and glue, Calderon,” the Tribune said. “The High Lords were probably reinforcing them for months, this winter. You know how to run the figures. Any idea of the kind of power it will take to bring them down?”

The Princeps considered Antillar’s words. Fidelias eyed Antillar and Varg alike, but he didn’t think either of them could see how nervous Octavian was. Then the Princeps nodded, and said, “A considerable amount of force.”

“I don’t think we have it,” Max said.

“I think you’re wrong, Max,” Octavian said calmly.

The Ambassador’s eyes narrowed in anticipation, all but glowing green, and her smile somehow made Fidelias take more note of the points of her canine teeth than any of the others.

The Princeps grinned at her in reply, almost unsettlingly boyish, and said, “Let’s find out.”