Princeps Fury

CHAPTER 40

For the first time in history, Alera Imperia braced herself for war beneath a canopy of wheeling crows.

Ehren stood on a southward-facing balcony of the First Lord’s citadel, where Gaius was the center of a swarm of activity while the Legions prepared to defend the city. From there, he could overlook all the prepared defensive positions, descending through the city’s defensive rings.

Alera Imperia had been built to withstand a siege-originally, at any rate. Her avenues ran in concentric, descending circles around the citadel, with cross streets laid out in straight lines from the city’s heart, like the spokes of a wheel. Each avenue was approximately fifteen feet above the next level of the city, and the stone buildings lining each avenue had been reshaped by Legion engineers, so that their outer edges had become defensive walls. The streets had been sealed, except for a single avenue between each level, alternating on opposite sides of the city. Now, the only way to the citadel was a long corridor of streets faced with stone walls, so that even if the enemy took one gate, they would be faced with another and another before they reached the citadel itself.

Against conventional tactics, Alera Imperia could theoretically hold against an attacker almost indefinitely.

Against the Vord… Well. They would soon find out.

“… and Third Rivan will also be on the first tier,” Aquitainus Attis was saying, nodding to the city gates behind the actual, massive walls of battlecrafted stone, far below the citadel. “First and Third Aquitaine, Second and Third Placidan, and the Crown Legion are camped on the north side of the city, outside the walls.”

“I cannot agree with this measure,” muttered a man Ehren recognized as the senior captain of the Rhodesian Legions. “We may not be able to open and close sally ports to get your men back inside when the Vord arrive.”

“It’s the right move,” Captain Miles said. “A mobile force can exploit any opening they leave us as they approach the city. They could inflict more damage than months of fighting from defensive positions.”

Lord Aquitaine gave the Rhodesian captain a very level stare.

“Of course,” the man said, averting his gaze.

Aquitaine nodded once and continued speaking as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “Further reinforcements from Forcia, Parcia, and Rhodes are unlikely at best, though they may be able to strike into the enemy’s flanks in the Vale.”

Which, while it could prove important in the long run, would not help them now, Ehren thought.

The First Lord cleared his throat and spoke in a quiet, clear tone. “What is the status of the civilian evacuation?”

“The last of them are leaving now, sire,” Ehren supplied. “All who were willing to leave, at any rate. The Senatorial party offered their personal armsmen as a security force.”

“I’m sure,” Gaius murmured. “The southern refugees?”

The people who had already fled so far from their homes had been heartbroken when they were told that the capital held no safety for them. Many of them were too sick, weary, hungry, or wounded to keep running. “We made sure those who were worst off were given space on wagons, sire,” Ehren said. “We also gave them all the food they could carry.”

Gaius nodded. “And the food stores?”

“We’ve enough to feed the Legions for sixteen weeks at normal rations,” Miles responded. “Twenty-four if we immediately begin cutting them.”

No one responded to that, and Ehren was fairly sure he knew why: none of the men there felt confident that they had sixteen weeks remaining to them, least of all the First Lord.

The voices of the circling crows were harsh.

Ehren entered the First Lord’s private chambers and found Gaius Caria at the liquor cabinet.

“My lady,” he said quietly, surprised. He paused to bow his head to her. “Please excuse me.”

Caria, Gaius’s second wife, was tall and lovely and fifty years younger than the First Lord, though the natural appearance of a skilled watercrafter kept her looking even younger than that. She had long hair of dark chestnut, narrow, clean features, and wore a blue silk dress of impeccable style and cut. “I should say so,” she said in a calm, cold voice. “What are you doing here?”

“The First Lord ran out of his tonic. For his cough,” Ehren said, all but stammering. Whether or not he’d had legitimate business here, he wasn’t comfortable with the concept of being alone with another man’s wife in his own bedroom. “He sent me for another bottle.”

“Ah,” Caria said. “And how is His Majesty?”

“His physician is… concerned, my lady,” Ehren said. “But of course, he is handling the matter of the defense of the Realm quite well.”

Her voice gained the faintest hint of a sharp edge. “Of course he is. Duty before all.” She stepped aside from the cabinet, then turned to walk out of the First Lord’s chambers.

Ehren hurried over to liquor cabinet and found its door unlatched.

That meant nothing, in itself-but Ehren knew Gaius. He was not the sort of man to leave doors unlatched behind him. He opened the cabinet and found the various bottles inside standing in neat rows-except for one. The full bottle of the First Lord’s tonic was askew, and the cork that sealed it was improperly seated.

But who would have tampered with the First Lord’s…

Ehren turned and was across the room in several long strides, seizing Lady Caria’s wrist, and spinning her toward him. He dug his fingers into her wrist, twisting, and a small glass vial fell from her fingers and to the floor. Ehren released her and snatched it up.

“How dare you!” Caria snarled, and fetched him a backhanded blow that fell on his chest and flung him back across the room.

Ehren managed to fall correctly, or he might have broken something on the marble floor. Even so, the fury-assisted blow had driven the breath from his lungs.

“How dare you lay a hand upon me, you arrogant little slive,” Caria snarled. She turned one palm upright, and fire kindled between her fingers. “I should burn you alive.”

Ehren knew that his life was in very real danger, but he could barely move his arms and legs. “The First Lord,” he wheezed, “is expecting me with his medicine.”

Caria’s eyes flicked down to his chest and back up to his face. Her expression twisted in something like frustration, and she clenched her fist, snuffing the fire that had sprung there.

Ehren glanced down as well. The silver coin on his necklace, the unofficial sign of a Cursor working personally for the First Lord, had fallen free of his tunic.

“I suppose it hardly matters now,” Caria said, her tone positively vicious. She turned with haughty deliberation and began walking away again.

Ehren looked down at the vial in his hand. It was stoppered tightly, with perhaps half a fingertip’s width of grey-white powder at the bottom. Poison, almost certainly.

“Why?” he croaked. “Why do this now, of all times?”

Caria paused at the doorway and looked back over her shoulder, a small smile on her lips. “Habit,” she murmured in a velvet voice.

Then she left.

“Helatin,” Sireos said in a firm tone of voice. The physician sat at a table in an antechamber next to Gaius’s command center, a dozen glass vials of colored liquid in wire racks in front of him, along with the now-empty vial Ehren had taken from Caria. “More specifically, refined helatin.”

Ehren shook his head. “I don’t understand. I thought that was a medication.”

“Medicine and poison are separated by quantity and timing,” Sireos responded. “Helatin is a stimulant, in small quantities. It’s part of his tonic, in fact. The body can process a small amount without harm. Larger amounts, though…” He shook his head.

“This would have killed him?” Ehren asked.

“Not at all,” Sireos said. “At least, not alone. Helatin taken in larger amounts is deposited in the brain, the spine, and the bones. And it stays there.”

Ehren breathed out slowly over a sick sensation in his stomach. “It accumulates over time.”

“And degrades the body’s ability to restore itself,” Sireos said, nodding. “Eventually to the point where-”

“Where organs begin dying,” Ehren said bitterly.

Sireos spread his hands and said nothing.

“What can be done?”

“I believe the penalty for poisoning is death by hanging,” Sireos responded. “Of course, that’s always been after a trial before a committee appointed by the Senate.”

Ehren blinked at the physician. “What happened to ‘first, do no harm’?”

“I love life,” Sireos said, his eyes hard. “I do not revere it. Caria was once my student at the academy. She used that knowledge to hurt another human being, and has earned the retribution of the law. I’d tie the rope.”

“But that won’t help Gaius,” Ehren said.

Sireos shook his head. “The damage helatin does takes years to build up, and it is subtle. I’d have to have been looking for it specifically, and unfortunately the poison’s effects look a great deal like the effects of simple age.”

“Wouldn’t Gaius have noticed it?” Ehren asked.

“Because he’s grown old before, and should know what it feels like?” The physician shook his head. “Part of what the helatin did would have reduced Gaius’s ability to detect it for himself. Even if he was a young man, the best we could hope for would be to manage it. As things are…”

“Habit,” Ehren said bitterly. “How long has it been going on?”

“Six years, at the least,” Sireos said. “Given the idiocy of that business in Kalare, I’m frankly surprised that he’s alive right now, much less on his feet.”

“For some reason,” Gaius said quietly, “I find it comforting to know that growing old isn’t this painful for everyone.”

Ehren looked up to see the First Lord standing in the doorway. He coughed, a wheezing sound, and pressed his hand to his chest with a grimace. “In my tonic, you say?”

Sireos nodded. “I’m sorry, Sextus.”

Gaius took this news without expression. “How much time did she take from me, do you think?”

“There’s no way to be sure.”

“There seldom is,” Gaius said, his voice slightly harder. “How long, Sireos?”

“Five years. Maybe ten.” The physician shrugged.

A small smile quirked the corners of the First Lord’s mouth. “Well. I suppose that makes the two of us even, then.”

Ehren turned to him. “Sire…”

Gaius waved a hand. “I’ve taken as much from her, and better years, at that. She was a child, caught up in games she had no way to understand or avoid. I’m not willing to waste what time remains to me on the matter.”

“Sire. This is murder.”

“No, Sir Ehren. This is a footnote. There is no time for arrests, investigations, and trials.” Gaius reached out to a weapons stand that was set up beside the door and buckled on his sword belt. “I’m afraid the Vord have arrived.”

Gaius stood on the broad balcony, looking down as the Vord came for Alera Imperia. At his murmured word, the edges of the balcony had become one enormous windcrafting, focusing the view into a greatly magnified image whenever one stood at the rail and looked down. All Ehren needed to do was stand at the railing and stare at a particular portion of the lower city, and his view of it would suddenly rush forward, showing him the outer walls, more than a mile away, in crystalline clarity.

It was a little disconcerting, and gave him an odd, spinning sense of vertigo. This must be how the Princeps felt aboard a ship. Ehren reminded himself to be somewhat less cavalier about Tavi’s discomfort in the future.

If there was a future.

“Ah, I thought so,” Gaius said. “Look.”

Ehren came to the First Lord’s side and stared in the direction he indicated-south, over the plains surrounding the capital. The Vord had crested the most distant ridge that could be seen from the Citadel in a solid black line, like a living shadow that rolled steadily forward. Most of the ground troops were the four-legged creatures that they had seen before, but for every dozen or so of them, there walked a single creature shaped something like an enormous ape. The behemoths had bandy legs and enormous apelike arms, and they rolled forward using their forelimbs as well as their feet for locomotion. They were huge, better than twelve feet tall, and covered in plates of Vord armor that looked inches thick.

“Siege units,” Gaius murmured. “They’ll use them for breaching gates and walls, and probably to spearhead assaults.”

Ehren stared at the behemoths and shivered. “Look behind them.”

Gaius fell silent for a moment as he studied what Ehren had noticed.

Behind the first wave of Vord came an enormous line of Alerans.

They weren’t alive, of course. Thanks to the windcrafting, Ehren could see that much. Their skin was mottled with postmortem bruising, and in some cases their bodies bore disfigurements or injuries that would have rendered any human immobile. The taken holders-and the vast majority of them were obviously holders, dressed in common clothing-walked without any expression whatever on their faces, their eyes focused on nothing.

“Where are the vordknights?” Ehren murmured.

“Staying out of sight, massing for an attack, most likely,” Gaius said. “They can’t have much fight left in them.”

“They’ve been harassing us all the way here,” Ehren said.

“Exactly,” Gaius said. “It takes an enormous amount of power for them to keep themselves aloft. They must eat like gargants to be able to sustain the muscle they’d need for that sort of activity-and even with the patches of croach that they planted in secret, ahead of their advance, we’ve yet to discover one more than an acre in size.” The First Lord shook his head. “Badly supplied infantry can fight on to some degree. But I think the vordknights are more like cavalry. Short cavalry of supplies, and they become ineffective far more rapidly. She’ll save them for a critical stroke.”

“The queen, you mean?” asked Ehren.

Gaius nodded. “She is the key to the entire battle.” He fell silent again as they watched the Vord swarm over the plains toward the capital.

“So many of them,” Ehren breathed.

For an instant, the First Lord’s eyes glittered with a wild, fey light. “Aren’t there, though.” He nodded and turned to one of the Legion trumpeters at hand. “Signal the first attack.”

The courier nodded and raised his trumpet. Its call sounded clear over the quiet city, and in its wake the Legions roared.

Thousands of Citizens stood among their ranks, called forth to fight for their land, to demonstrate the obligation that went with the privileges of their title. Among the Citizenry, earthcrafting was by far the most common talent, and now those Citizens unleashed their furies upon the Vord.

Just ahead of the Vord ranks, the ground erupted, swelling into hillocks and blisters of stone that burst to disgorge furies of the earth. Gargants, wolves, serpents, great dogs, and nameless things-both beautiful and hideous-came bounding and slithering and charging out of the very soil of the land, to fall upon the first wave of the alien horde.

The battle that ensued had a ghastly sort of beauty to it. The Aleran furies, like statuary come to frenzied life, slammed into the Vord. Furies of the earth, though not swift, were viciously strong and difficult to actually harm-and the Vord were packed in close to one another as they came for Alera Imperia. Ehren watched as a bear made of black-and-grey marble slammed its paws down with methodical precision, crushing a Vord at every blow. A gargant of flint and clay thundered into the Vord ranks without being noticeably slowed, leaving destruction in its wake. A great sandstone serpent wound swiftly around one Vord after another, crushing the howling creatures in its coils and slithering on. The earth furies broke Vord quadrupeds like toys, and shrugged off blow after blow in response.

The behemoths, though, proved tougher than the Vord-lizards. Ehren saw one of them accept a pair of hammerblows from the great bear without flinching, and in response it simply bent and heaved the fury’s form up off the ground. The granite was riven and shattered, and a few seconds later, the “crack” of protesting stone reached the citadel. The behemoth smashed the bear-form down to the ground, where it crumbled into motionless rubble.

Gaius winced.

“Are you all right, sire?” Ehren asked at once.

“Just feeling sympathy for whoever called out that bear fury,” the First Lord replied. “That sort of thing… leaves a mark.”

Ehren turned his eyes back to the battle and watched for several moments more as the Vord reached the earth furies and simply enfolded them, pouring around them, all but ignoring their presence as dozens of their fellows were crushed. Earth furies could only focus on a task for as long as the one who compelled them, and as the earthcrafters who called them forth began to grow more weary, their furies began to move more slowly and with less purpose. Here and there, a behemoth would meet a fury-those battles ended only one way. The enormous Vord had to be possessed of absolutely awesome strength, to so deal with beings of living stone.

“Enough,” Gaius said. “Sound the recover.”

Again, the trumpet blast rang over the city, and at once the earth furies began to recede into the stone. Down on the walls, Ehren saw exhausted earthcrafters dropping down to sit with their backs against the battlements, while Legion runners brought them water-and while medics hauled away no few Citizens who had collapsed, presumably of exhaustion or because their furies had been ravaged by the behemoths.

Thousands of the enemy had been slain-but they poured forward, unaffected and unslowed, on the last several hundred yards of their approach to the city walls, through the rough wooden buildings and shanties that surrounded them.

“Fire it,” Gaius said calmly.

At another signal, flame bloomed up in a hundred places at once, and a wind sighed down from above and began to blow more and more strongly. Within a minute, fire had leapt up to raging proportions within the wooden outlying buildings, and completely engulfed the leading elements of the Vord advance. Smoke and heat and flame made it impossible to see what was happening within, but Ehren could vividly imagine the damage that the inferno was wreaking among the Vord.

The horde suddenly stopped in its tracks-by the tens of thousands, they simply ceased moving forward at the precise same instant. A moment later, the closer elements of the enemy force withdrew slightly from the flames.

And waited.

“Mmm,” Gaius said, nodding. “The queen is nearby, to so control them. Let’s see if she’ll send her captured crafters to deal with the problem.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the horde continued to advance behind the front ranks, spreading out to the sides, slowly filling in along the outer edges of the ring of flame. It took only moments for their easternmost elements to reach the banks of the Gaul, the river that flowed past the capital. Then the Vord focused on expanding their lines to the west. The enormous black force was slowly engulfing the city.

After a quarter of an hour had passed, Gaius murmured, “Apparently not.” He turned to a nearby Knight, and murmured, “Inform Lord Aquitaine of the disposition of the enemy.”

The man saluted and took to the air at once, flying toward the north side of the city, on the far side of the horde.

Ehren swallowed. “What are we going to do, sire?”

“The same thing they are, Cursor,” Gaius said calmly. “We wait.”

It took the rest of the day and the first three hours of night for the outbuildings to burn down. Smoke hung in a haze over the city below them, and if that wasn’t enough, fog had begun to roll up off the river. The citadel almost seemed to float among clouds-clouds lit hellishly from below by the burning buildings of the capital. The crows wheeled overhead all the while, chuckling and croaking to one another in the darkness.

Gaius had retired to the antechamber, where Sireos did what he could to fortify the dying First Lord. At Ehren’s insistence, he’d eaten another meal and was dozing on a couch when horn calls blared up from the unseen city below, ghostly in the mist.

The First Lord snapped awake at once-and from his seat nearby, Ehren saw Gaius’s face contort with pain. Then the old man closed his eyes, took in a determined breath, and pushed himself up off the couch to stride toward the balcony. Ehren rose at once to follow him.

Gaius listened to the horn calls for a moment and nodded to himself. “They’re coming through. Here is where we force their hand, Cursor.” He pointed at the trumpeter without looking back at the man, and said, “Sound the attack.”

The clarion call of the charge, universal among the Legions, rang in Ehren’s ears, and was answered by hundreds of horns in the city below.

Gaius raised his hand and cried out, and the chilly northern wind rose to an abrupt gale that threatened to throw Ehren from his feet. The wind roared down over the city, and carried away the pall of smoke and fog-while fanning what was left of the fires to vicious life.

Ehren paced the balcony at Gaius’s side, and saw that the Vord had surrounded nearly half the circumference of the city-and were surging forward in a unified attack.

Once more, earth furies rose to battle, among the fires and ruined buildings, disdaining the heat. In addition to that, spheres of white-hot fire began to erupt among them, some of them large enough to engulf a behemoth and the Vord-lizards all around it. Knights Aeris erupted into the skies all around the city, and teams of the men streaked along over the outlying buildings, using their windstreams to fan fires and to topple ruined buildings upon the foe.

The Vord advance was slowed-not because they had begun to waver, but simply because the Alerans were killing them faster than they could run forward. Ehren stared at the naked destruction in awe and terror. The ground itself was being rent by the fires unleashed by the Citizens of Alera, gouging out chunks of earth as easily as one might scoop butter from its container. The Vord shrieked and writhed and died, and Ehren could hear their cries even from atop the balcony.

The First Lord was staring hard around the city, though, his eyes searching. “Bloody crows,” he muttered beneath his breath. “Bloody crows take that arrogant slive. Where is he?”

“Who, sire?”

“Aquitaine,” Gaius growled. “This is the moment to strike them, when they are all focused forward on the walls. He had plenty of time to move into position. Where is he?”

No sooner had Gaius said the words than the mighty Gaul suddenly convulsed. The great river, shining silver beneath an almost-full moon, rose from its banks and flowed abruptly toward the rear of the Vord positions, the water cutting smoothly across the plain outside the city, spreading in the midst of the Vord ranks, driving some forward and others back.

Then, impossibly, trumpets sounded from the suddenly empty riverbed, and with a sea-crash roar of furious voices, the full strength of five Legions came charging out of the trench where the river had flowed. They smashed into the flanks and rear of the enemy horde, their flank secured by the new course of the river, and began driving hard into the Vord lines.

“Bloody crows!” Ehren all but screamed.

Even the First Lord arched his eyebrows at the sight. “He must have used his watercrafters to convince the river to flow over and around his troops. Windcrafting to keep the air in the bubble fresh. Earthcrafting to solidify the silt so they could march on it.” Gaius shook his head. “Impressive.”

The city’s defenders roared in defiance. As the endurance of the Citizenry below began to flag, the Vord began to reach the outer wall and legionares went to work with sword and shield upon the battlements. The enemy immediately began changing its formation, its westernmost elements turning to come in and support the threatened eastern half against Aquitaine’s Legions-but Alera Imperia was a large city, and they would have to travel miles to be of any assistance to their fellows.

The whole while, Aquitainus Attis and the Legions under his command would be cutting the Vord to bloody ribbons.

Ehren focused on the battle, hope surging in his heart, as the scarlet star of fire that marked the blade of the High Lord of Aquitaine flickered and flashed. Through the magnification of Gaius’s windcrafting, Ehren could see Aquitaine himself in the front ranks of his Legion, surrounded by heavily armored bodyguards. As Ehren watched, the High Lord braced a pair of behemoths.

With a flick of his hand, a tiny sphere of fire erupted upon the face of one of the huge beasts, and, while it roared in pain, Aquitaine dodged the thundering downswing of the second. In several dancelike steps, he struck an arm and a leg from the second behemoth, sending it crashing down, and in the course of returning to the ranks he slew the burned, screaming beast before it could recover from the pain. His men howled in a frenzy of rage and encouragement, and the entire force continued on inexorably, like a single, vast scythe cutting down wheat.

Then the Vord queen struck back.

The taken Alerans turned as one to charge Aquitaine’s lines. Even as they approached, fire and earth and wind erupted toward them, slaughtering the first several dozen to draw near.

But the hundred who came after them let out eerie screams, raised their hands, and turned fire and earth and wind back upon the Legion lines. Men died screaming in blasts of fire, or were hauled into the earth by hideous shapes, never to be seen again. Wind cast dust and ashes into their faces in thick clouds, and their formations began to falter. More and more taken Alerans arrived, and the furycrafted pressure against Aquitaine’s force doubled and doubled again, as each new taken seemed to feed upon the energies being unleashed, adding its own to the struggle.

“Knights Aeris to their aid,” Gaius said calmly. “Focus on the enemy crafters and take them with blades alone.”

Another courier screamed skyward, and within a moment several cohorts of Knights Aeris rose from the city and streaked toward the battle. It took them only seconds to land among the taken and attack, wielding steel alone. Aquitaine’s Legions realized what was happening as the pressure on them began to ease, and they surged forward in a desperate effort to reach the Knights Aeris before they were engulfed by the oncoming horde.

It was then that the vordknights pounced.

They suddenly burst up from the ground on the far side of the redirected river, where they must have slipped into position once the sun was down. They were barely a half mile from the battle, and they swept down upon the Knights Aeris of Alera like a swarm of bees. The Knights found themselves suddenly beset on all sides, and did what any of them with any sense would do-they called their furies and prepared to take to the air.

Until the taken began throwing salt at them.

Windcrafters screamed in agony as the salt crystals ripped holes through their furies, dispersing and weakening them. Several made it off the ground and managed to escape-but most didn’t. Though the Legions tried to push forward to shelter the exposed Knights Aeris, they had lost too much of their momentum to reach them in time. In seconds, the masters of Alera’s skies were all but drowned in armored bodies and hacking limbs.

And then the true death blow fell.

Crows by the tens of thousands suddenly plummeted into the capital’s streets, buildings, and rooftops. Several of the creatures even fell to the stones of the balcony upon which Ehren stood. The crows, upon landing, fluttered in bizarre spasms, then went still.

Ehren and the others stared around the balcony and out at the city, perplexed.

“Great furies,” Ehren breathed. “What was that about?”

Gaius’s pensive frown suddenly froze in place. His eyes widened slightly, and he said, “No. Cursor, ware!”

The bodies of the crows erupted with Vord takers.

They weren’t impressive things to look at. Each was about the size of a scorpion, and vaguely resembled one, except for dozens of flailing tendrils sprouting from all parts of its body. They were swift, though, as quick as startled mice, and half a dozen of the things scuttled toward those upon the balcony in a blur of green-black chitin.

Ehren spun and stomped a foot down upon one of the takers, and slapped a second from the back of his thigh. One of the couriers stomped at another one, missed, and lost his balance. Three takers swarmed up his body, and, as he cried out in surprise and revulsion, one of them plunged into his mouth.

The man screamed once, and then fell backward in convulsions, his eyes rolling back into his head. Another cry died as it was born-and then his eyes went flat, and swiveled toward the First Lord. He came to his feet and lurched at Gaius.

Ehren flung himself in between the First Lord and the taken courier. He seized the man’s tunic, and with a panicked effort of his entire body the young Cursor threw the doomed courier over the balcony railing.

There was a bright flash of light, a crackling snap, and the sharp smell of ozone. By the time Ehren was finished blinking the spots from his eyes, he realized that several takers lay curled up and dead on the balcony floor. The First Lord stood over them, his right hand out, flickers of lightning dancing between his spread fingers.

“Crows,” Gaius said simply, glancing up at the nearly empty sky. “I didn’t spare them a second glance.”

Screams began to echo up through the city. Not a minute later, a house or a garden one tier below the citadel level caught fire.

Outside the city, the Vord’s collared crafters came onto the field. They drove forward toward Aquitaine’s forces, and the redirected river began to waver and writhe like a vast, living serpent.

A scream of agony echoed through the halls of the Citadel, behind them.

“Never a second glance,” Gaius said, sighing quietly. Then he raised his voice to a tone of firm command. “Clear the balcony.”

Everyone there withdrew, except for Ehren. Gaius went to the balcony’s edge and stared down at Aquitaine’s desperate Legions. The High Lord had already realized his predicament, and his men were executing a fighting retreat, struggling to get away from the Vord before they were cut off, drowned, or overwhelmed.

Gaius bowed his head for a moment, then looked up again, and calmly took a pair of folded, sealed envelopes from his jacket. He passed them to Ehren.

Ehren blinked and looked down at it. “Sire?”

“The first is for my grandson,” Gaius said simply. “The second, for Aquitaine. There’s a tunnel concealed behind my desk in my mediation chamber in the deeps. It exits two miles north of the city, on the road to the Redhill Heights. I want you to take the messages and Sireos and go.”

“Sire,” Ehren said, “no, I couldn’t… We should all go. We can retreat toward Aquitaine or Riva and prepare a better-”

“No, Ehren,” Gaius said quietly.

Another scream echoed through the citadel.

“I’ll be dead before we can establish another stronghold-and the seat of my power is here,” Gaius said. “This is where I can hurt them the most.”

Ehren’s eyes stung and he looked down. “We’re to sound the retreat then?”

“If we do,” Gaius said quietly, “there’s no chance of the queen’s exposing herself. Their forces will disperse to pursue us, and the roads will become abattoirs.” Gaius turned haunted eyes toward the city’s defenders below. “I need them. If there’s to be any chance at all… I need them.”

“Sire,” Ehren breathed. Though it didn’t feel as if he was crying, he felt his tears falling on his hands.

Gaius put a hand on Ehren’s shoulder. “It was an honor, young man. If you should see my grandson again, please tell him…” The old man frowned slightly for a moment before his lips turned up in a sad, weary smile. “Tell him that he has my blessing.”

“I will, sire,” Ehren said quietly.

Gaius nodded. Then he untied the thong that bound the scabbard of his signet dagger, the symbol and seal of the First Lord, to his side. He passed the dagger to Ehren, and said, “Good luck, Sir Ehren.”

“And you, sire,” Ehren said.

Gaius smiled at him. Then he put his hand on the hilt of his sword and closed his eyes.

Gaius’s skin changed. At first, it became very pale. Then it began to gleam in the moonlight. Then it gained a silvery sheen, and within seconds it actually shone like freshly polished steel. Gaius drew his sword, and his fingers clinked against it, steel upon steel.

Ehren simply stared. He had never even heard of such a feat of crafting before, much less seen it.

Gaius took one look at Ehren’s face and smiled again. The motion made his shining steel visage moan like metal under stress, though his teeth looked normal, and his tongue seemed almost unnaturally bright pink. “It doesn’t matter,” he told Ehren. His voice was rough, oddly monotone. “I hadn’t planned on lasting much longer in any case.” The smile faded. “Now go.”

Ehren bowed to the First Lord. Then he turned, clutching the letters, and ran.

Ehren and Sireos exited the tunnel an hour later and began making their way to the causeway so that they could attempt to catch up with the fleeing civilian refugees. Most of another hour of running with the effortless ease of fury-assisted travel brought them into the hills north of Alera Imperia, the beginning of the Redhill Heights, and they paused there to look back.

The capital was burning.

Vord swarmed all over it, like some kind of gleaming mold. Aquitaine’s Legions had apparently made good their escape-though he had only three of them remaining, not the five he’d begun the operation with. They had managed to cross the Gaul, then bring it back into its normal course, and were withdrawing to the north.

White and violet fire like nothing Ehren had ever seen suddenly flashed from the top of the First Lord’s tower. Vordknights swarmed through the air toward it. Knights Aeris, presumably the enemy’s, rushed toward it upon gales that sounded hollow in the distance. A star of scarlet-and-azure light suddenly blazed upon the tower top-the First Lord’s sword, kindled to life.

Ehren held up his hands and brought the air between them into focus. His gifts at windcrafting were, at best, modest. He would not be able to see nearly so well through his visioncrafting as he had through Gaius’s. But it would have to do.

He couldn’t see much more than a gleam of silver and the blazing sword upon the top of the Citadel, but he knew that it had to be Gaius. Vordknights buzzed around the tower like moths around a lantern, so thickly that they sometimes obscured the light almost completely.

Lightning crackled down from the sky to strike the tower, but immediately flashed back upward again, bouncing off like light against a mirror. Vord began to scale the tower, hundreds of them, clawing their way directly up its sides.

Then the figure atop the tower raised both arms above his head, and the earth itself bucked and shook like a stallion at the bite of a horsefly. Ehren was thrown from his feet to the ground, and he lost his visioncrafting-but he could not look away.

The ground rippled like the surface of the sea, shattering buildings like so many toothpicks. The earth split open, great, yawning cracks spreading out for a mile in every direction from the citadel-and then those cracks began to glow with inner, scarlet light. The tremors stopped, and for an instant everything was perfectly silent, motionless.

And then fire like nothing Ehren had ever seen, rock so hot that it had begun to flow like liquid, erupted upward from the ground in a column that was literally miles across. The magma clawed for the sky like a fountain in a city square, and hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of winged forms erupted from the fiery spray, eagles which spread their great wings and streaked through the air, leaving blazing columns of fire in their wakes. The wind rose violently, the superheated air reacting to the eruption, and the fire-eagles swept and spun in great circles, crying out in shrieks made tiny by distance.

Fire filled the skies over Alera Imperia. Cyclones of flame spun away from the city, deadly funnels that seemed to lift everything they touched from the ground, only to incinerate them to ashes.

The ground beneath the city and for miles around began to buckle. Falling walls and buildings added their own gravelly screams to the night’s cacophony. The Vord died by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, devoured by insatiable flame and ravenous earth.

With a final scream, Alera Imperia collapsed into the earth, lowered like a corpse into its grave and consumed by the fires that raged there.

So died Gaius Sextus, First Lord of Alera, his pyre lighting the Realm for fifty miles in every direction.

Ehren sat numbly, staring at the end of the Realm. The three Legions who had escaped with Aquitaine had nearly reached them. Their outriders came pounding up the causeway on horseback, and one of the weary-looking men drew to a halt as he reached them.

“Gentlemen,” the outrider said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to get moving or else clear the road. The Legions are coming through.”

“Why?” Ehren asked quietly. “Why run now? Nothing could have lived through that.”

“Aye,” the outrider said in a subdued voice. “But there were some of those things that weren’t close enough to get burned up. They’re coming.”

Ehren felt sick to his stomach again. “So what Gaius did… it was for nothing?”

“Crows no, young man,” the outrider said. “What’s left ain’t half a tithe of their numbers-but we’ve only three exhausted Legions left to us and no strong defensive position. It’s more than enough for them to do for us.” He nodded to them, then kicked his horse up into a canter, riding on down the road.

“Sir Ehren?” asked Sireos wearily. “What do we do?”

Ehren sighed and bowed his head. Then he pushed himself to his feet. “We retreat. Come on.”