First Lord's Fury

CHAPTER 33

In an instant, Kitai was at his back, and a glance up showed him Crassus hand-signaling frantically, requesting permission to attack. Tavi flashed him the sign to stay in place and turned just as the nearest vord mantis flung itself at him.

There was no time for thought, or for fear. A series of thoughts so rapid that they seemed almost a flowing, single idea within his mind’s eye gathered furies of the earth, of fire, of steel, and Tavi’s flaming blade split the creature cleanly into two frantically twitching parts in a single diagonal, upward-sweeping stroke.

Another mantis came hard on the heels of the first—metaphorically speaking, anyway, since Tavi wasn’t sure that the things actually had feet, much less heels. A flick of his wrist sent a howling column of wind and fire into its center of mass with such violence that the crafting tore two of the creature’s long legs from its body.

Tavi checked over his shoulder. Kitai had been rushed by no less than four mantises. One was frantically trying to tear itself from the grasp of a pair of slender young trees, a side product of Tavi’s crafting, which had bent in place at a gesture from Kitai and trapped the vord. The other three were struggling to surge forward through tall grass that writhed like serpents and seized their every limb in a thousand soft green fingers—more of Kitai’s crafting.

Tavi turned back and left them to her. The sudden, focused, coordinated attack, its strength doubled upon what would appear to be the weaker of the pair to most observers, suggested the appearance of some sort of guiding intellect—perhaps even the Queen herself. The vord had moved with direction and purpose, not with the blind aggression of a creature defending its territory, as the first group of mantis-forms had done.

Or maybe they were getting smarter.

An instinct drew his face up and to one side in time to see a pair of vordknights blurring toward him. They swept past, scythe-limbs positioned to sweep his head from his shoulders as if he’d been a dandelion and they the groundskeepers. He ducked beneath it, his hand seizing the hem of Kitai’s mail shirt with a jerk, warning her, and she dropped into a low crouch that took her safely beneath the passing scythes.

He turned and pointed his sword. A lance of fire burst from it, swelling to engulf the two vordknights as they passed, burning their wings to shriveled, blackened strands. The two crashed to the ground with horrible force, their chitin-armor snapping and cracking audibly, even over the noise. His head whipped around toward the city as he rose again, and saw more vord rushing over the fallen rubble, hundreds of mantis-forms and thousands of the wax spiders with their eerie, semitransparent bodies, all of them trilling the new wail of alarm.

The real attack, the one he had dreaded, the one that had truly compelled him to come forward all but alone, came in the instant after he turned to see the enemy numbers, the river of deadly foes rushing his way, while his eyes were still widening.

He heard it, a rippling set of crackling snaps, as if a thousand mule skinners had begun popping their whips in rhythm.

“Kitai!” he called.

There wasn’t time for anything more. He raised his arms and called to the wind, and it answered him with a howl, spinning into a sudden, hysterically powerful circle around him and Kitai. The vord-wasps began to hammer into that whirling shield, their chitin-stings like tiny scalpels and arrowheads at the same time. They collided with the nearly solid air in half a dozen angry swarms, each striking from a slightly different direction, their arrow-straight flight suddenly becoming a wild spin as they were thrown aside.

By some chance of fate or pure luck, a few of the wasps made it through. Tavi dispatched them with swift, sure movements of his sword, using its fire to brush them out of the air just as he had the vordknights.

The stream slackened for a breath, and Tavi looked up through the open roof of the whirling column of wind and flashed signals to Crassus. Six targets, attack them.

Crassus dropped a swift gesture of affirmation toward Tavi and began signaling his men. A pair of seconds later, the first caged lightning bolt was loosed, and flashed across the sky from the cloud above Tavi and Kitai to the city. A large green-and-black lump, where a patch of the croach high upon a wall seemed to bulge with some half-formed hulk of armor, suddenly exploded into white light and fury. Fragments went flying in every direction, and the half shape that was left seemed to gout fire for several seconds before settling into a more conventional bonfire.

And the stream of deadly arrow-wasps from that horrible hive abruptly vanished.

Tavi swatted several more wasps down, and noted that Kitai had manipulated the spinning force of the winds Tavi held around them, directing several thousand arrow-wasps into the vord still trapped in the grasses. Tavi doubted that the poison coating the wasps’ stingers would prove dangerous to the mantis-forms, but their stingers punched through vord chitin with great effectiveness, and each drew its individual trickle of blood. In very short order, no mantis-forms remained standing. Kitai turned her attention to the spiders and mantis-forms rushing from the city, and the vord arrow-wasps sliced and cut into their own kind, helpless before the vast winds.

Thunder rolled overhead, accompanied by blinding-bright flashes of light. Three, four, five, six. Each time Crassus brought one of the captured bolts forth, he destroyed another hive—and after the sixth, the flow of arrow-wasps rushing into the wind shield abruptly ceased, just as the mass of the enemy body came rushing toward Tavi and Kitai.

“I think that went well,” Kitai called.

“I’ll take it,” Tavi said. Then they both leapt upward, and the whirling shield compressed and gathered beneath them, lifting them both up into the skies and out of the reach of the vord below.

Either Crassus had been passing information by hand signal back to the command group, or else Varg had had his fill of waiting. Drums sounded, and the Legion came into sight. Varg had placed Tavi’s leading cohorts in the center and flanked them with the taurg cavalry, while a fresh group of warriors stood ready to support any weak points in the line.

“Sir?” Crassus shouted toward him, gesturing at what lightning remained. “What do we do with the rest of it?”

Tavi pointed a finger at the collapsed section of wall, where the vord were pouring out.

Crassus nodded and over the next several minutes dumped all the energy they’d captured from the morning’s thunderstorm into the relatively narrow opening. Lightning bolts blew craters in the earth and left the smoldering wreckage of vord forms lying on the blasted ground.

The Legion closed in, with taurga simply crushing down vord that had spread out to the sides of the opening. Their riders never needed to lift their weapons. The Battlecrows and the Prime plugged the hole in the wall and began methodically slaughtering the vord. They were aided by a thin line of Varg’s warriors armed with balests, the heavy, steel-bowed, shoulder-fired weapons of the Canim. The warriors’ height allowed them to shoot over the Aleran lines without striking an allied legionare, and when one of the steel projectiles struck a vord, the creature fell, screaming, or simply expired outright.

The mantis-form vord were dangerous opponents: So were the most experienced and decorated cohorts in the First Aleran. Tavi watched as their centurions assessed the threat of the mantis-form scythes. The weapons really weren’t terribly different from the long-handled sickle-swords used by the Canim militia during the last battles against Nasaug’s forces in the Vale, but if adjustments weren’t made, they could take a toll on the cohorts.

Centurions all along the line came to similar conclusions at almost the same moment. At their roaring orders, the first rank dropped to fight in a low, defensive crouch while the second shifted to their spears, their shields held high and tilted up, to deflect or reduce the effect of any downward-plunging scythes toward themselves or their fighting partners in the first rank. The spearmen made long thrusts over the front rank’s shoulders and helmets to discourage the vord from pressing in too close, and any vord that seemed to gain an advantage was swiftly introduced to a heavy steel balest bolt.

Tavi watched the leading cohorts take light casualties. “Light” casualties, he thought. Only someone who has never cleaned the lifeblood from a fallen legionare’s armor thinks that “light” casualties are insignificant.

Men died, fighting at his command far below. But, he thought to himself, not nearly as many of them as if they had walked into the deadly hailstorm of arrow-wasps.

After half of a desperate hour, horns sounded again, and, with a roar, the warrior Canim went pounding toward the gap in the walls. Cohorts hastily re-formed their lines, opening gaps enough for the warriors to come through. Done in the heat of combat, the maneuver wasn’t as smooth as it might have been. Dozens of Canim wound up bowling straight through the ranks of a cohort, and dozens more who all kept to the narrow lanes between them wound up stumbling into one another in the narrow spaces. Still, the Canim hit the vord lines like an avalanche of dark red and blue steel. They hammered a salient into the mass of the enemy, and with a roar, fresh legionares, brought up from the Free Aleran, came marching to relieve their brother soldiers.

“Bloody crows,” Crassus called to Tavi. The young Antillan was staring at him. “I’ve never seen anyone do that much in one morning.”

“I’ve been practicing,” Tavi called back. He winked at Crassus.

The other man chuckled wearily and shook his head. “I was beginning to wonder if you had it in you, Your Highness.”

“Today was nothing, Tribune,” Tavi responded. “Nothing.” He inhaled deeply through his nose and nodded. “Nothing but a good start. The real test comes in a few more days.”

Crassus’s expression sobered, and he nodded. “Orders, sir?”

“The vord will have turned Riva into a larder for the dead,” Tavi replied. “You’ll probably find it in the citadel, but they could have put it anywhere. Take a fire team into the city, find the larder, and burn it.”

“Sir? Our dead, too?”

“None of them wanted to feed the vord,” Tavi replied. “Yes. We can’t leave them a food supply here.”

“The croach,” Crassus said.

“Aye,” Tavi said. “As we head for Calderon, I want sweeps out five miles on either side to spot any patches of croach that are forming. We’re going to burn it out between here and the Valley. All of it. But start with Riva. Move.”

Crassus banged out a rapid salute. “Yes, sir.”

“Crassus,” Tavi added. He hesitated, then said, “Be careful, all right? They like to leave surprises. And there might be more of those arrow-wasp nests.”

“If there are, I’ll burn them out, too, sir.” Crassus started signaling to the other Pisces in the air around him, and they all streaked back down toward the Legion lines.

Tavi watched the fight at the wall for another moment or two, but it was over. The vord were beginning to break, and the Aleran ranks moved forward with a steady, professional rhythm that silently declared their expectation of victory.

“Aleran?” Kitai asked quietly.

“I’m all right,” Tavi said.

She shook her head. “You succeeded today.”

“Hmmm?” He glanced at her. “Oh. The furycrafting.”

“Yes. Does this not make you happy?”

He nodded. “Oh, yes. I suppose. But now… Now it’s all on my shoulders. There’s no escaping that.”

“It always was, my Aleran,” Kitai said. “You were just too stupid to realize it.”

Tavi snorted out a laugh and smiled at her.

Kitai nodded in satisfaction. “Come. You need to get back to your wagon and rest. Varg has things well in hand.”

“I should stay,” Tavi said. “Watch. Who knows, there might be something here, some clue as to their weakness.”

Kitai looked at him with what looked like enormous patience that was nonetheless clearly being tried. “Aleran,” she said between her teeth, “you should rest. In your wagon. Your enclosed, covered wagon. While nearly everyone else is busy with the battle.”

Tavi blinked at her owlishly, then his eyes widened. “Oh,” he said. A sudden smile lifted his mouth. “Oh.”

And Kitai was suddenly pressed against him. There was a limited amount of sensuality available, given all the steel that was between them, but her kiss was so searing that Tavi felt in danger of having the armor melt from his back. She drew back from him, green eyes bright behind heavy lids. “You were smart today. You were strong. It suits you.” Her eyes smoldered brighter. “I like the way it looks on you.”

They kissed again, slow and heated. Then he smiled, and said, his lips brushing hers, “Race you there.”

Kitai’s eyes danced. Then she elbowed him aside, sending him into a brief, tumbling spin as she kicked out her own windstream behind her and dived for the camp.

Tavi laughed and sent himself rushing after her.