First Lord's Fury

CHAPTER 32

Tavi wondered if he was about to make a very large, very humiliating, potentially fatal mistake.

He frowned, and spoke to that doubting part of himself in a firm tone of thought: If you didn’t want to take the big chances, you shouldn’t have started screaming about who your father was. You could have moved quietly across the Realm and disappeared among the Marat, if you had wanted to. You decided to fight for your birthright. Well, now it’s time to fight. It’s time to see if you can do what you have to do. So quit whining and bring down that gate.

“Warmaster Varg will have operational command while I deal with the gate,” Tavi said.

The Legion command staff had been briefed on Tavi’s intention the day before. They hadn’t liked it then. Today, though, they simply saluted. Good. Varg’s part in the opening skirmish of the battle (itself but a skirmish for what was to come), had convinced them of the Cane’s ability.

“Tribune Antillus!” Tavi called.

After several signals were exchanged, Crassus came cruising down to the ground and landed beside Tavi’s horse. They exchanged salutes, and Tavi said, “I’ll be moving forward with the Prime and the Battlecrows. I want you and the Pisces hovering over my shoulders.”

“Aye, sir,” Crassus said. “We’ll be there.”

“On your way,” Tavi said.

Crassus took off, and there was nothing left but for Tavi to break down a defensive structure prepared for decades if not centuries to resist precisely what he was about to attempt. He glanced over his shoulder, at Fidelias. Valiar Marcus would have been waiting stolidly, his expression hard and sober. Though his features hadn’t changed whatsoever, Tavi could feel the differences in the man, the more flexible, somehow leonine nature of him. To any casual observer, Fidelias would have appeared exactly like Valiar Marcus. But Tavi could sense that the man was aware, somehow, of his fear.

His perfectly reasonable fear. His very well-advised fear. His quite mature and wise fear, even.

Shut up and get to work, he thought firmly.

Acteon, the long-legged black stallion Tavi rode, tossed his head and shook his mane. The horse had been his, and in the care of the First Aleran Legion, since shortly after he had been forced to take command—a gift from Hashat, the Marat clan-head of the Horse. The Marat stallion had greater agility and endurance than any Aleran horse Tavi had ever seen, but he wasn’t a supernatural beast.

He wouldn’t save Tavi from anything he didn’t handle himself.

“Standard-bearer,” Tavi said quietly. “Let’s go.”

Hoofbeats came up beside him, and Tavi looked aside at the dappled grey mare Kitai rode. His eyes went up to her rider, and he smiled faintly at Kitai, who was wearing her Legion-issue mail. It didn’t offer the same protection as the heavier steel plates of his own lorica, but though she was more than strong enough to wear the heavier armor, she disdained it, preferring the greater flexibility of the mail.

“I suppose you’re going to ignore me if I tell you to wait here,” he said.

She arched an eyebrow at him and settled her grip on the standard. The misty wisps of faint scarlet, drifting outward from the standard like strands of seaweed, seemed to whisper to the mists around them, gathering them closer. Kitai had not picked up the royal standard of the Princeps, the plunging eagle, scarlet upon blue. Instead, she bore the original standard of the First Aleran. It had once been a blue-and-scarlet eagle, wings spread as if in flight, its background also scarlet and blue, halved, contrasting the colors of the eagle. The first battle the Legion faced had left the eagle burned black, and the First Aleran’s “battlecrow” had never been replaced.

Tavi had carried the standard into an extremely dangerous situation himself… had it been only three, almost four years since the Elinarch? It felt like a hundred.

Kitai met his eyes and lifted her chin, a small smile on her mouth. Her message was clear. He had triumphed at that meeting. He would do so again at this one. Something quivering and tight went out of him, and his hands and mind felt a great deal steadier.

“I suppose so,” he said.

He made no gesture, but the pair of them started out together at the same instant.

Tavi rode through the fog. Acteon’s hooves clopped on the ground. The track to the nearest of the city’s gates was obvious before him, littered here and there with the remains of the battle the rest of Alera had fought there days before. Here a splash of scarlet Aleran blood, now brown and buzzing with flies. There, a gladius, broken six inches from the hilt, the results of hasty construction or shoddy maintenance. A legionare’s bloodstained helmet lay on its side, its crown bearing a puncture mark shaped much like the profile of a scythe of a new warrior-form vord they had fought that very day.

But there were no corpses, either of fallen legionares or of any vord beyond those slain that very hour. Tavi shivered. The vord did not let fallen meat go to waste—not even that of their own kind.

The leashed thunder of the storm came with them. Tavi could hear the steady windstreams that kept the Knights Pisces aloft nearby, within a couple of hundred yards, above and behind them. The nearest of their number, probably Crassus, hovered almost directly overhead, only just visible in the cloud.

The walls of Riva loomed suddenly out of the mist, along with the city gates. They stood forty feet high, with the towers on either side rising twenty feet beyond that. Tavi felt the muscles in his back tightening, and his heart began to beat faster.

He was about to announce his identity to anyone who was watching.

And then something, he was sure, would happen—and he doubted it would be anything he would enjoy.

Tavi focused on the gates. They were made of stone sheathed and woven with steel. They weighed tons and tons, but they were balanced so perfectly on their hinges that a single man, unassisted by furies, could push them open when their locks were not engaged. Even so, they were stronger than the stone siege walls that framed them. Fire would not distress them. A steel ram could batter them for days with no effect, and the swords of the finest Knights Ferrous in the Realm would shatter upon them. The thunderbolts held ready by the First Aleran’s Knights would do little more than scar the finished steel surface. The earth itself could not be shaken around them.

In Tavi’s experience, though, very few people had sufficient respect for the destructive capacities of the gentler crafts.

Wood and water.

He had a come a long, long way from the Calderon Valley, from being the scrawny apprentice shepherd without the ability to so much as operate a furylamp or an oven. In that time, he had known peace and war, civilization and savagery, calm study and desperate application. As a boy, he had dreamed of finding a life in which he proved himself despite the fact that he had no furycraft at all—and now his furycraft might be all that kept him alive.

Life, Tavi reflected, seldom makes a gift of what one expects or plans for.

But some part of him, the part that was little enamored of walking the more prudent avenues of thought, was quivering with excitement. How many times had he suffered at the hands of the other children at Bernardholt for lacking furies of his own? How many childhood nights had he lain awake, attempting simply to will himself the ability to furycraft? How often had he shed private, silent tears of shame and despair?

And now, he had those abilities. Now he knew how to use them. Fundamentally speaking.

No matter how much danger he knew he was in, there was a part of him that wanted simply to throw back his head and crow defiant triumph at those memories, at the world. There was a part of him that wanted to dance in place, and was wildly eager to show his strength at last. Most of all, there was a part of him that wanted to face his enemies for the first time upon his own talent and strength and no one else’s. Though he knew he was untested, he wanted the test.

He had to know that he was ready to face what was to come.

So it was with both wary tension and absolute elation that Tavi reached out to the furies spread about the world before him.

Almost immediately, Tavi could feel the craftings seething over and through the great gates, running like living things within the great constructs—fury-bound structures, as potent as gargoyles but locked into immobility, focused into stasis and into maintaining that stasis absolutely. Tavi had as much chance of commanding those furies to cease their function as he had of commanding water not to be wet.

Instead, he turned his thoughts down, beneath them. Far, far below the surface, beneath the immeasurable mass of the furycrafted walls and towers of Riva, he felt the flowing water that sank into the rocks beneath the city, that had seeped through them year after slow, steady year, and pooled into a vast reservoir far below. Originally intended as an emergency cistern for the lonely little outpost of Riva, it had sunk beneath year after year of added construction as the city grew, until it had been forgotten by everyone but Alera herself.

By now, the little cistern had become something far larger than its creators—probably Legion engineers, back in the days of the original Gaius Primus—had ever intended.

Tavi focused his will upon that long-forgotten water and called out to it.

At the same time, he reached out to the earth beneath his feet, to the soil and dust lying before the city’s walls. He felt through the soil, felt the grass growing beneath his horse’s hooves. He felt clover and other weeds and flowers, beginning to grow, not yet brought down by the groundskeepers of Riva. There was a plethora of different plants there, and he knew them all. As an apprentice shepherd who had grown up not far from Riva, he’d been made familiar with virtually every plant that grew in the region. He’d had to learn which the sheep could eat safely and which he should avoid: which plants might trigger problems in a member of the flock and which might be used to help support the animal’s recovery from illness or injury. He knew Rivan flora as only someone who had been raised there could.

He reached out to all of them and extended his thoughts to the plants, the seeds, numbering and sorting them in his thoughts. He focused his will and whispered, beneath his breath, “Grow.”

And beneath him, as if the earth were letting out a long breath, the grass began to grow, to surge with green life. Blades lengthened, and were suddenly outstripped by the quick-growing weeds and flowers. They opened in a mute riot, sudden color flushing along the surface of the earth, and within a few seconds more, grass and flowers alike burst into seed.

Joy and fierce pride assaulted him in a distracting surge, but Tavi let the emotions wash by him and focused upon his task.

Such growth could not happen without plenty of water to nourish it, and as the sudden growth began to leach all the water from the ground, the water from the deep well began to arrive, rising through the layers of earth and stone. At an absentminded motion of his hand, a gentle stream of wind curled along the ground and sighed up over the gates and towers beside it.

Tavi opened his eyes long enough to see tiny seeds, some of them little larger than motes of dust, begin to drift up through the air, to where a thin film of water had begun to cling to the surface of the gates, the towers, courtesy of the cloud around them.

He closed his eyes again, focusing on those seeds. This would be much harder, without the gentle nourishment of the soil around them, but again he reached out to the life before him, and whispered, “Grow.”

Again, the earth around him sighed fresh green growth. Weeds and small trees began to rise above the grass—and the walls of the great city began to flush a steady shade of green. Bits of grass grew from cracks so tiny they could barely be seen. Moss and lichen spread over the surface as quickly as if they had been spread by raindrops in a steady shower.

He was breathing harder, but could not stop now. “Grow,” he whispered.

Trees as tall as a man arose around him, before the wall. The air grew heavier and heavier with a damp coolness. The flawless shine on his armor began to cloud over with fine, cold mist. Green subsumed the gates and the walls alike. Ivy wound up over the walls as rapidly as a snake could slither up a branch.

Tavi clung to his saddle with one hand, refusing to slump, his teeth clenched, and snarled, “Grow!”

From the gates and walls of Riva erupted a chorus of snaps, cracks, of the snarl of tearing stone. Green swallowed the walls, lapping up from the earth beneath in a tangled, living tide, a wave of growth. Small trees sprang from cracks in the walls, and from one upon the gates. More ivy wound everywhere, along with every other form of wild growth one could imagine.

Tavi nodded in satisfaction. Then he lifted his fist and snarled, to the water coming up from below, “Arise!”

There was the sound of an ocean wave crashing onto a rocky shore as the water leapt up and washed over the walls, over the green, sank into the minute cracks in the walls—and in that instant, Tavi reached out for fire, for the little warmth that remained in the frigid water from far below, and yanked it clear of the water.

There was a hiss, and a cloud of heavy mist and puffing vapor swallowed the gates and the walls. Ice crackled and screamed.

Panting, Tavi slid off Acteon’s back. He tossed the reins back up over the saddle’s crest and slapped the beast on the flank, sending him running back toward the Legion, crashing through the heavy brush and small trees that had grown up behind him. He heard Kitai’s mare let out a squeal, then follow the big black.

Tavi did not let go of the craftings in front of him. This would be the hard part.

He reached out to the water again and called to fire, sending it coursing back into the ice with a wordless cry. Steam exploded from the walls, from the cracks, in screaming whistles.

“Arise!” he called again, and again the water crashed up from the ground.

And again, he pulled the warmth from the water that had sunk even deeper into cracks that were slightly wider. And he sent heat washing back in a few seconds later.

“Arise!” he called, and began the cycle again.

“Arise!” he called again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Ice and steam hissed and cracked. Stone screamed. Thick white vapor billowed out from the walls, denser than the veiling cloud, all but opaque.

Tavi fell to one knee, gasping, then slowly lifted his eyes to the gates, his jaw set.

They were coated in a layer of ice six inches thick.

Metal groaned somewhere in the gates, a long moan that echoed from empty buildings and through the mists.

“Right,” Tavi panted. He pushed himself back to his feet, looked over his shoulder, and nodded at Kitai. “Here we go.”

She smiled at him, and said, “Clever, my Aleran.”

He winked at her. Then he slowly drew his sword. He extended it deliberately to his side and concentrated.

The metal seemed to hum—and then fire kindled and rushed down the length of the blade, a white-hot wreath. Tavi reached down into himself, focusing, using the fire along the blade as a starting point, gathering heat and preparing to unleash it.

He extended the sword toward the gate with a scream, and fire and a sudden hammer of wind rushed forth toward the frozen gates. The white-hot firebolt slammed into the gate with a force as real as any ram, the ice sublimating in an instant to steam, and the gates, strained beyond measure by the flexing of water and ice and new life growing within them, shattered.

So did the towers beside the gate.

And a hundred feet of the city’s wall, on either side of the towers.

All of them roared away from the fury of that fiery blast, screaming as they flew into pieces, bursting into their own heat and wild motion as the overstrained furies within were finally pushed past the limits of the physical materials they inhabited and vented their frustrated rage on the matter about them. Stone and metal—some of the pieces were the size of a Legion supply wagon, or as long and as sharp as the largest sword—went flying and spinning away, sent crashing through half-burned buildings and crushing the bases of the outer ring of towers by the will of Gaius Octavian.

Secondary collapses followed, buildings that were torn to shreds by the destruction of the gates falling in beneath their own unsupported weight. And when those structures fell, they claimed others that stood alongside them.

All told, it was nearly four full minutes before the roar of collapsing stone and masonry quieted.

Tavi winced. The damage had been… a little more widespread than he had expected. He’d have to pay Riva for the blocks he’d ruined.

“Aleran,” Kitai breathed in awe.

He turned to face her and tried to look as though he’d meant to do that. He focused on the positive; at least the duration of the collapse had given him a little time to catch his breath and somewhat recover from the effort to cause it.

The silence that settled around them was oppressive, pregnant with anticipation. “Ready,” Tavi told her. “Stand ready.”

“You still think she will respond?” she asked quietly.

He nodded tightly and resettled his grip on his fiery blade. “She has no choice.”

Within heartbeats, as though driven by his words, the vord gave them an answer.

A strange cry began to rise from dozens of points around the city—it was a sound Tavi had never heard from the vord before, a particular, ululating wail that flickered from its lowest tone to its highest in a swift, chattering trill.

And the city exploded with vord.