First Lord's Fury

CHAPTER 54

Tavi rolled to his right on pure instinct, and an instant later the Queen’s sword sliced through the empty space he had occupied. Her windstream was enormous, violent, and the vicious turbulence that followed her was nearly enough to send him spinning from the sky.

By the time he regained his balance, the Queen was not in sight. The Canim-wrought mist had long since cloaked the ground from view, and at the speeds they were traveling, they would only be visible to one another for a flashing instant through the haze. But Tavi could hear her, or at least her presence. The dull, empty howl of her overpowered windstream was rendered directionless by the mist and seemed to come from everywhere. But Tavi knew she was out there, somewhere, circling him.

Excellent.

Tavi drew himself into a steady hover, reached out a hand, and summoned three fire-spheres in rapid order. They appeared with a disproportionately loud boom and were followed by the hiss of mist being turned to steam. They never came anywhere close to the vord Queen. They weren’t supposed to.

The vord Queen let out another spine-shuddering shriek of hostility and rage—which grew louder as it went on. She was coming straight at him. Tavi swept his sword in a couple of swift circles and checked his pocket to be sure he was ready.

The Queen appeared: a sudden blur of white hair, glittering black eyes, and windblown cloak spreading like dark wings. She accelerated toward him with astonishing rapidity, and Tavi lifted his sword as though he meant to meet her blade to blade.

At the last second, he threw a firecrafting at her—even as she did exactly the same thing. The two craftings intercepted one another, and there was a deafening explosion of red and green flame. The vord Queen came plunging through it, the vanishing remnants of the explosion setting the edges of her cloak on fire in both colors. Her blade swept at his throat, but Tavi’s sword intercepted the strike neatly. A red, blue, and vord green explosion of sparks the size of a city market flew out from the impact, and the vord Queen shrieked again in furious disappointment as she shot past him and banked immediately, coming around to rush him again.

From somewhere below, Tavi heard the weird, ululating howl of a Cane, and the bloodstone in his pocket suddenly felt almost warm enough to blister his skin. Marok had heard his signal.

The mist all around them thickened, congealed, and dark shapes stirred within. Long, twining tendrils of reddish flesh lashed out from a dozen different directions, and Tavi’s heart lurched into his throat. No less than three of the Canim-called horrors had appeared all around him, and their questing tentacles slithered toward him, dripping a slime Tavi knew to be deadly acidic and poisonous to boot. He found himself all but holding his breath as the tendrils snaked all around him for several endless seconds… and abruptly withdrew. The protective power of the bloodstone talisman he carried had been enough to turn the beasts away—or at least enough to make them seek other prey.

The vord Queen had been swarmed by a dozen of the things.

Tentacles lashed out at her, flailing and grabbing. She eluded most of them but not all, and she shrieked in pain and anger as half a dozen dripping limbs left mild burn marks upon her seemingly vulnerable skin. The Queen spun madly in place, and her sword burst into flame as she began cutting her way free of the mist beasts.

Tavi didn’t give her a chance to get loose. He focused his concentration upon her and crafted the hottest and most violent fire-sphere he’d ever attempted. It burst upon the vord Queen in a brilliant flash of light and a deafening roar of thunder.

Tavi wasn’t trying to conform to the standards of a duel. He certainly had nothing to prove to anyone. And he’d seen too many battles to have any illusions about an honorable struggle; if he had his way, he would never engage in a fair fight ever again.

So he hammered the Queen with another fire-sphere. And another and another, as swiftly as he could throw them. The sound of her furious shriek provided a melody to the brutal percussion of the firecrafting.

He had her dead to rights for perhaps three or four seconds—but it couldn’t last. His firecraftings might have been scorching the Queen, but they were wreaking havoc on the mist beasts, burning away the tentacles that held the Queen in place. The second she was free of them, the Queen dropped her windcrafting and plummeted into the mist. Tavi had a quick glimpse of a naked body, white hair burned away, half-covered by black scorch marks, like a steak left too long over the fire. Then she vanished.

Tavi turned and streaked after her. He could not afford to let her escape.

Fire rose from nowhere as he dived, and he realized with a start that the Queen had veiled herself and slowed her fall. He lifted his sword as the flame enveloped him, drawing the heat into the blade and away from his flesh, igniting the sword once more. Then the Queen was diving toward the ground beside him, an apparition half-hidden behind a veil, only the green fire of her sword truly visible. Their weapons flashed and chimed a dozen times, and suddenly the ground was rushing toward them.

Tavi pulled up first, terrified for a second that he was already too near the ground to manage it, but he was able to turn his motion from vertical to horizontal, just above a stretch of open field. Tall weeds and bits of the previous year’s bracken scratched and hissed upon his armor, and he looked over his shoulder to see the vord Queen in pursuit, apparently none the slower for the damage wrought upon her flesh.

Crows. He’d been sure the Queen would be worse off than that after tangling with the Canim’s pet horrors. Still, it had to have taken something out of her. She wasn’t closing the distance on him nearly as quickly as he’d expected her to.

How many times had he been in this position, in front of someone much stronger than he was, knowing that only his wits would keep his skin in one piece. As a child in the Valley, and one who had never learned the knack of fading into the background, it had happened frequently with his playmates. But he had also dealt with thanadents and snow cats—crows, even the bloody sheep had been a great deal larger and stronger than he was, and the flocks’ rams had frequently chased him up trees. And all of that before he’d left the Calderon Valley.

He found himself grinning.

Though worry and terror and rage all burned away at his guts, Gaius Octavian was smiling.

This was a game he knew how to play.

He altered his course abruptly, shooting straight up into the air. The Queen came after him, her windstream a howling, cyclonic roar.

It took him only a moment to clear the ritualists’ mist, and he climbed out of it to find the sun coming up red on the eastern horizon under a heavily clouded sky, painting the Calderon Valley in the colors of blood. To his right, the Canim cavalry was engaged in wholesale slaughter of the sleeping vord, though Varg and the infantry were loping swiftly toward the vast bank of mist that hid the two Legions. Awakened vord ran amok by the thousands, and the comparatively small Aleran cavalry force was hitting any group of vord who thought they might attack the Canim infantry from the flanks while they marched. The sound of battle and the hollow coughs of medium-sized firecraftings drifted up to him, oddly attenuated by the mist.

The Queen emerged below him after several seconds. The unblackened part of her body sported fresh black-edged acid marks, and her speed seemed to have dropped even more, but her eyes glittered coldly, focused on Tavi and Tavi alone.

Tavi felt the grin spreading wider across his face. “All right. If you want the Calderon Valley so badly, the least I can do is give you the tour.”

He poured all his concentration and will into his windstream and shot off to the northwest, toward the thunderstorm-shrouded peak of Garados.