First Lord's Fury

CHAPTER 48

“Bloody crows, Frederic,” Ehren complained, as they moved into the hall. “You don’t have to carry me. I can walk.”

The hulking young Knight Terra grunted as the little Cursor elbowed him and stepped a bit away. “I’m sorry,” he said, “It’s just that Harger said—”

Frederic was interrupted as Count Calderon rounded the corner at a brisk walk and slammed into the young man. Frederic let out a grunt at the impact and fell backward.

Count Calderon scowled ferociously. “Frederic! What the crows are you doing in the citadel?” He looked at Ehren. “And you. You’re…” His eyebrows went up. “I thought you were dead.”

Ehren leaned on his cane and tried not to let too much wince leak into his smile. “Yes, Your Excellency. And so did Lord Aquitaine. Which was the point.”

Bernard drew in a slow breath. “Get up.”

The young Knight Terra hurried to obey.

“Frederic?” Bernard said.

“Yes, sir?”

“You’re not hearing any of this.”

“No, sir.”

Bernard nodded and turned to Ehren. “Amara said that he suspected you had manipulated him into that stunt at Riva.”

Ehren nodded. “I didn’t want to be within reach when he figured it out. And the best way to do that was to be tucked safely into a grave.” He shifted his weight and winced at his injuries. “Granted, I hadn’t intended my exit to be quite that… authentic. The original plan was for Frederic to find me at the end of the battle.”

“Wait,” Frederic blurted, his eyes almost comically wide. “Wait. Count, sir, you didn’t know about this?”

Count Calderon narrowed his eyes and eyed Ehren.

Ehren smiled thinly. “Sir Frederic, Tribune Harger, and Lord Gram may have been operating under the impression that they were acting under your direct and confidential orders, sir.”

“And what would have given them that impression?” Calderon asked.

“Signed orders!” Frederic said. “In your own hand, sir! I saw them!”

Calderon made a rumbling sound in his chest. “Sir Ehren?”

“When I was learning forgery, I used to use your letters to Tavi for practice, Your Excellency.”

“He gave you those letters?” Calderon asked.

“I burgled them, sir.” Ehren coughed. “For another course.”

Calderon made a disgusted sound.

“I—I don’t understand,” the young Knight said.

“Keep it that way, Frederic,” Calderon said.

“Yessir.”

“Leave.”

“Yessir.” The brawny young Knight saluted and hurried away.

Calderon stepped closer to Ehren. Then he said, very quietly, his voice hard, “You’re telling me, to my face, that you conspired to murder a Princeps of the Realm?”

“No,” Ehren said, just as quietly, and with just as much stone in his voice, “I’m telling you that I made sure a man who absolutely would have killed your nephew could never hurt him.” He didn’t let his gaze waver. “You can have me arrested, Your Excellency. Or you could kill me, I suppose. But I think the Realm would be better served if we sorted it out later.”

Count Calderon’s expression didn’t waver. “What,” he said finally, “gave you the right to deal with Aquitaine that way? What makes you think one of us wouldn’t have handled it?”

“He was ready for any of you,” Ehren said simply. “He barely looked twice at me until it was too late.” He shrugged. “And I was acting under orders.”

“Whose orders?” Bernard demanded.

“Gaius Sextus’s orders, sir. His final letter to Aquitaine contained a hidden cipher for me, sir.”

Calderon took a deep breath, eyeing Ehren. “What you’ve done,” he said quietly, “orders from Sextus or not, could be considered an act of treason against the Realm.”

Ehren arched an eyebrow. He looked down at the stone floor of the fortress beneath him and tapped it experimentally with his cane. Then he looked up at Calderon again. “Did you have orders from Gaius Sextus, sir?”

Bernard grunted. “Point.” He exhaled. “You’re Tavi’s friend.”

“Yes, I am, sir,” Ehren said. “If it makes it easier for you, I could just vanish. You wouldn’t have to make the call.”

“No, Cursor,” Bernard said, heavily. “I’ve reached the limits of my tolerance for intrigue. What you did was wrong.”

“Yes, sir,” Ehren said.

“And smooth,” Bernard said. “Very smooth. There’s nothing to link his death to you but a dying man’s babbling suspicions. And only Amara and I know about that.”

Ehren waited, saying nothing.

“Sir Ehren,” Bernard said, slowly. He took a deep breath, as if readying himself to plunge into cold water. “What a relief that your injuries were less serious than we believed. I will, of course, expect you to resume your duties at once. Right beside me.” He growled, beneath his breath, “Where I can keep an eye on you.”

Ehren almost sagged with relief. The only thing that prevented it was that it would have hurt a very great deal. The injuries to his body had been closed and stabilized, but it would be weeks before he could move normally again. “Yes, sir,” he said. He found his eyes clouding up, and he blinked them several times until they were clear again. “Thank you, sir.”

Bernard put an arm on his shoulder, and said, “Easy, there, young man. Come on. Let’s get to work.”

The view of the battle from the little citadel’s tower was spectacular, even at night. Large furylamps, on the walls and towers of both the defensive ramparts and the citadel, illuminated the Calderon Valley for half a mile. Originally, the Valley’s trees and brush had grown up to within a bowshot of the old fortress at Garrison, but they had long since been cleared, for the expanding little city, then cleared back more, to the edge of the range of the mules. It left the ground utterly devoid of features an attacking force could use for cover.

The vord covered that ground like a turbulent black sea. Despite the efforts of the firecrafters and the crews of the mules, which had been spread out on rooftops behind the first wall, the vord had finally covered the ground and were fighting their way up the walls, hacking out climbing holds and coming up in lots of a dozen creatures at a time, until the Legion engineers could earthcraft the holds out of the wall’s surface, returning it to unbroken smoothness. Men fought and bled atop the wall, but nowhere near so ruinously as they had only a day or two before. The frontage of the entire fortification was less than three-quarters of a mile, and the sides of the Valley were no wider, there. The vord had to pack themselves in to reach the walls, to the point where their advantage of numbers did them the least amount of good.

Though, Ehren reflected, that was quite a bit different than counting for nothing.

Even though the Legions could face the vord at a point of maximum concentration, where the firecrafting of the Citizens and the freemen’s mules could do the most harm, the Aleran Legions remained badly outnumbered. Ehren watched as one segment of the wall rotated weary legionares out for a fresh cohort. The vord needed no such cooperation. They simply kept coming, an endless tide. Ehren counted, out of habit, noting that only six men of the eighty-man century had been lost during their hourlong rotation on the walls. And yet it was entirely possible that their losses, proportionately, were worse than those being inflicted upon the vord.

The hollow booms of firecraftings continued to rumble irregularly through the night, accompanied by the scattered popping sounds of the occasional launch of fire-spheres from a mule, but even those were infrequent. Ehren asked Count Calderon about it.

“The firecrafters are resting in rotation,” he said quietly. “They’re exhausted. There are just a few of them on duty to prevent any breaches of the wall. And we’re running low on ammunition for the mules. Right now, there are workshops being established in the refugee camp east of the city to manufacture more fire-spheres, but it isn’t coming along as fast as we’d like.”

“How fast would we like it?” Ehren asked dubiously. A stray sphere from the last mule launch had come down inside the ramparts, and a supply wagon was burning enthusiastically.

“Twelve million of them an hour would be ideal,” Calderon replied.

Ehren choked. “Twelve mil—An hour?”

“That would be enough for one hundred mules to loose two-hundred-shot loads at their maximum rate of fire, nonstop,” Bernard said. He squinted out at the battle. “With that, I could kill every vord in this swarm without losing a man. We’re going to have to figure out a way to manufacture these things more quickly.”

Ehren shook his head. “Seems so unbelievable. When Tavi showed me the sketches for this idea, I thought he’d gone insane.” He paused. “More insane.”

Two more mules launched their payloads, and a column of fire brought more vord screams to the predawn darkness.

Suddenly there were sharp, high-pitched whistles drifting down from the bluffs on either side of the little city. Bernard looked up sharply and swallowed. “There. Here it comes.”

“Here what comes?”

“The enemy’s flanking attack. It’s the weakest part of this position, defending against an attack from the west.” Bernard gestured at the two bluffs. “The vord are going to try to take the heights, then come down on us.”

“The Marat are stationed there, I believe,” Ehren said.

“Yes,” Calderon said. “But if the vord have reinforced their flankers…” He bit his lip and beckoned Centurion Giraldi. “Signal the Marat.”

Giraldi saluted and stomped off to dispatch a messenger as the battle upon the bluffs resumed, with the screams and howls and cries of the Marat, their beasts, and their foes echoing down into the Valley.

“It would be nice to be able to see what’s happening up there,” Ehren said.

“Probably why they did it at night,” Calderon replied. “Show up with a much larger force and try to hammer through before anyone realizes there are a whole lot more of them this time.” He shook his head. “Did it ever once occur to whoever is in charge over there that they aren’t the only ones who can furycraft a decent trail up onto the bluffs?”

Ehren turned with the Count in time to see three bright white signal-fire arrows launched into the air over each bluff. There was a brief pause, then the sounding of horns somewhere out on the plains.

And then there was a low, rumbling thunder.

As Ehren listened, it began to grow closer—and much, much louder. He hurried to fumble a farseeing into existence between his hands, to let him look out east onto the plains beyond Garrison. And there he saw, surging toward the west, an enormous mass.

Horses.

Thousands and thousands of horses, and pale barbarians armed with spear and axe and bow and sword riding upon their backs.

“Hashat would have killed me if I hadn’t let her in on the fun,” Calderon confided. “And it was something of a challenge to work out a battle plan that included a reasonable use of cavalry in a bloody wall battle.”

The horses split into two columns, flowing around Garrison like a river, then surged up what sounded like plank-lined earthworks leading onto the bluffs on either side of the city. Moments later, Marat cavalry horns caroled brazenly through the dark, and the sounds of thundering hooves and fighting continued on the heights. For a few moments, there was nothing but noise and confusion, but then the trumpets started calling more excitedly and from farther west upon the bluffs—the Marat were again driving the enemy back.

Bernard nodded once in satisfaction, and said, “My Valley.”

And then a low, throbbing bellow rolled through the air and made the soles of Ehren’s feet vibrate. A second one, from vaguely the other direction, rose and slowly fell again as the first call died away.

“Bloody crows,” Bernard snarled. “Signal Knights Aeris,” he called to Giraldi. “I need lights on those bluffs!”

It took only a few moments for the orders to be relayed and the Knights Aeris and Citizens to overfly the bluffs, dropping spherical firecraftings in clusters of blazing light. Count Calderon stood watching as they fell, and the light illuminated the vast, shadowy mass of vordbulks, one of them upon each section of high ground, so heavily surrounded with vordknights that they resembled animated carcasses surrounded by buzzing flies.

Ehren stared at them for a second, unable to believe his own eyes. “Those,” he heard himself say through a dry mouth, “are quite large.”

Giraldi spat. “Bloody crows. But those things can’t attack us from up there, can they?”

“They don’t have to attack us,” Bernard replied. “They just have to walk up and fall on us.”

“Oh, dear,” Ehren said.

“We have to hold them off,” Bernard breathed. “Slow them down. If we can slow them down…” He gave himself a shake. “Giraldi. Tell Cereus to concentrate his forces on the northern bluff. Set the trees on fire, create spines of stone to wound their feet—whatever he can think of. Kill them if he can, but he is to slow that bulk down.”

“Yes, sir!” Giraldi snapped, and went about carrying out Bernard’s orders.

“Slow them down?” Ehren said, bewildered. “Not kill them?”

“It’ll be worse if they arrive simultaneously. And they’re so heavily armored—and just so crowbegotten big—that I’m not sure if we can kill them,” he replied. “But I think we just have to hold a little longer.”

“Why?” Ehren asked, blinking. “What difference is it going to make if they’re here in half an hour instead of ten minutes?”

“Because, Sir Ehren,” Calderon said, “like your own demise, not everything here is as it seems.”