by Jim Butcher
None of her captors spoke, and the surface beneath their feet deadened their footfalls to silence. Eerie sounds drifted in the air around her, muffled by the hood. Clicks. Chitters. Once, there was an ululating call that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Very faintly, she could hear booming reports, like distant thunder. She swallowed. Somewhere far away, Alera’s firecrafters had begun their work, filling the skies with their furies.
The ground suddenly sloped down, and a rough hand pushed her head forward, her chin to her chest. She bumped her head against what felt like a rocky outcropping in any case, and it stung momentarily. Then the sounds all faded to silence, and the noise of her captors’ breathing changed subtly. They must have brought her inside or underground.
One of her guards pushed her roughly to her knees. A moment later, he removed the hood, and Isana blinked her eyes against the sudden invasion of soft green light.
They were in a cavern, a large one, its walls too smooth to have been formed by nature. The walls, the floor, and a pair of supporting pillars were all covered in the croach. The waxy green substance pulsed and flowed with unsettling light. Liquids flowed beneath its surface.
Isana craned her neck, trying to find Araris, her heart suddenly hammering against her ribs.
A second pair of guards dragged him into Isana’s line of view. They jerked the hood from his head and dropped him in a heap to the cavern floor. Isana could see that he’d suffered a number of abrasions and contusions, and she felt a physical burst of pain in her heart to see the bruises, the blood—but he had sustained no obvious critical trauma. He was breathing, but that was no guarantee of his safety. He could be bleeding to death internally even as she stared at him.
She never made a conscious decision, but she found herself suddenly straining against her captors, trying to go to Araris. They pushed her brutally to the floor. Her cheekbone dimpled the croach.
It was humiliating, how casually, how easily they had taken away her choice. She felt a blaze of anger, suffered a sudden urge to respond in earnest through Rill. She fought the impulse down. She was in no position to resist their strength. Until she had a better chance—until she and Araris had a better chance—to succeed in escaping, it would be wisest not to resist. “Please!” she said. “Please, let me see to him!”
Footsteps, softened by the croach, approached her. Isana lifted her eyes enough to see a young woman’s bare feet. Her skin was pale, almost luminous. Her toenails were short, and the glossy green-black of vord chitin.
“Let her up,” the Queen murmured.
The men holding Isana down withdrew at once.
Isana didn’t want to look farther up—but it seemed somehow childish not to, as if she was too frightened to lift her face from her pillow. So she pushed herself from the floor until she was kneeling, sitting back on her heels, composed her wind-raveled dress along with her own equally frayed nerves, and lifted her gaze.
Isana had read Tavi’s letters describing the vord queen he had encountered beneath the now-lost city of Alera Imperia, and had spoken to Amara regarding her own experience with the creature. She had expected the pale skin, the dark, multifaceted eyes. She had expected the unsettling mixture of alien inconsistency with everyday familiarity. She had expected her to bear an unsettling resemblance to the Marat girl, Kitai.
What she had not expected, not at all, was for another achingly familiar face to appear, contained within the canted eyes and exotic beauty of Kitai’s visage. Though the Queen resembled Kitai, she was not identical. There was a subtle blending of the features of her face, as parents’ faces would combine in the face of their child. The other face within the Queen’s was one Tavi had never seen—that of his aunt, Isana’s sister, who had died the night he was born. Alia.
Isana saw her younger sister’s face in the vord Queen, muffled but not subsumed, like a stone lying quietly beneath a blanket of snow. Her heart ached. After all this time, she still felt Alia’s loss, still remembered the moment of awful realization as she stared at a limp bundle of muddy limbs and ragged clothing on the cold stone floor of a low-roofed cavern.
The vord Queen’s distant expression suddenly shifted, and she jerked her head back from Isana as though she had smelled something vile. Then, an instant later, seemingly without crossing the space in between, the vord Queen’s eyes were immediately in front of hers, her nose all but brushing Isana’s. She took a slow, seething breath, then hissed, “What is it? What is that?”
Isana leaned back, away from the Queen. “I… I don’t understand.”
The Queen let out a low hiss, a boiling, reptilian sound. “Your face. Your eyes. What did you see?”
Isana struggled for a moment to slow her racing heart, to control her breath. “You… you looked like someone familiar to me.”
The Queen stared at her, and Isana felt a terrible, invasive sensation, like a thousand worms writhing against her scalp.
“What,” the vord Queen hissed, “is Alia?”
Rage struck Isana without warning, cold and biting, and she flung the memory of that cold stone floor against the sensation upon her scalp as though she could crush the worming caress with the very image. “No,” she heard herself say, her voice flat and cold. “Stop that.”
The vord Queen twitched, a motion that moved her entire body, like a tree swaying in a sudden wind. She twitched her head to one side and stared at Isana, her mouth open. “Wh-what?”
Isana felt the creature abruptly, her presence coalescing to her watercrafting senses like a suddenly rising mist. There was a sense of complete, startled surprise in her, coupled with a child’s flinching pain at rejection. The vord Queen stared at Isana in wonder for an instant—an emotion that segued rapidly toward something like…
Fear?
“That is not yours to take,” Isana said in a hard, firm tone. “Do not try to do so again.”
The vord Queen stared at her for an endless moment. Then she rose with another eerie hiss and turned away. “Do you know who I am?”
Isana frowned at the vord’s turned back. Do you? she wondered. Why else would you ask?
Aloud, she said only, “You’re the first Queen. The original, from the Wax Forest.”
The vord Queen turned to give her an oblique look. Then she said, “Yes. Do you know why I am here?”
“To destroy us,” Isana said.
The vord Queen smiled. It was not a human expression. There was nothing pleasant in it, no emotion associated with it—only a movement of muscles, something performed in imitation rather than truly understood. “I have questions. You will answer them.”
Isana returned her smile with as blank and calm an expression as she could find. “I fail to see why I should do so.”
“If you do not,” the vord Queen said, “I will cause you pain.”
Isana lifted her chin. She found herself smiling, very slightly. “It would not be the first time I have felt pain.”
“No,” the Queen said. “It would not.”
Then she turned, took two long strides, seized Araris by the front of his mail coat, and lifted him into the air. With a motion of perfectly unfiltered speed and violence, she spun and slammed his back against the croach-covered wall. Isana’s heart caught in her throat, and she waited for the Queen to strike him, or rake him with her gleaming, green-black nails.
But instead, the vord Queen simply leaned into the unconscious man.
Araris’s shoulders slowly began to sink into the glowing croach.
Isana’s throat tightened. She had read reports, spoken to holders who had seen their family or loved ones trapped beneath the croach in a similar fashion. Those so entombed did not die. They simply lay passively, as if they had drifted into a light sleep in a warm bath. And, as they drowsed, the croach slowly, painlessly ate them down to bones.
“No,” Isana said, shifting forward into a crouch, lifting one hand out. “Araris!”
“I will ask questions,” the vord Queen said slowly, as if chewing the words
to test them for flavor, while Araris sank into the gelatinous substance. She released him after a few moments, though he continued to be drawn slowly into it, until only his lips and nose remained free of the croach. She turned, and her alien eyes glittered with something that Isana could sense as a kind of raw, uncaring fury. “You will speak with me. Or I will cause him pain you cannot imagine. I will take him away from you, little by little. I will feed his flesh to my children before your eyes.”
Isana stared at the vord Queen and shuddered, before lowering her eyes.
“You are a momentary curiosity,” the vord Queen continued. “I have other concerns. But understand that your fate is mine to decide. I will destroy you. Or I will allow you to live out your days in peace with those other Alerans who have already seen reason. Live it with your intended mate—or without him. It means little to me.”
Isana was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “If what you say is true, young lady, then I cannot help but wonder why you are so angry.”
She saw the vord Queen move—a blur of motion that she did not register in time to allow her to so much as flinch before the blow fell across her face. Isana fell back to the floor, fire burning her forehead, and wet, hot blood flowed down over her face, into one eye, half-blinding her. She did not cry out—at first because she was simply too startled to respond to the sheer speed of the assault, then because she forced herself to remain silent, to show no sign of pain or weakness before the alien being before her. She ground her teeth as fire spread over her forehead and face, and she made no sound.
“I will ask the questions,” the vord Queen said. “Not you. As long as you answer them, your mate will remain whole. If you refuse, he will suffer. It is that simple.”
She turned away from Isana, and a radiant green glow filled the chamber. Isana hunched her body uselessly against the agony as she lifted her hand to her forehead. A single cut perhaps four inches long ran along her brow, in an almost precisely straight line. The cut was open nearly all the way to her skull and bled freely.
Isana drew several deep breaths, focusing her effort through the pain, and called upon Rill. The work was harder, much harder than it would have been with even a modest basin of water, but she was able to watercraft the wound closed. A few moments later, she was able to reduce the pain somewhat, and between that and the cessation of bleeding, she felt dizzy, mildly euphoric, her thoughts clogged into muddled clumps. She must have looked a horror, half her face a sheet of red. Her dress was ruined. There was no reason not to use the sleeve to try to wipe some of the blood away, though her skin was tender, and she thought she probably succeeded in nothing but smearing it around a little more.
Isana swallowed. Her throat burned with thirst. She had to focus, to find a way to survive, for Araris to survive. But what could she do, here, with this creature facing her?
She looked up to find the cavern transformed.
Green light swirled and danced through the croach covering the cavern’s ceiling. Bright pinpoints of light, many of them, stood in slowly swaying ranks. Other lights darted and flowed. Others pulsed at varying rates of speed. Waves of color, subtle variations of shades, washed across the ceiling, while the vord Queen stared up at it, utterly motionless, her alien eyes reflecting pinpoints of green like black jewels.
Isana felt slightly nauseated by the seething, organic motion of the luminous display, but was struck by the impression that there was something about it, a kind of link between the luminosity and the vord Queen that she could not fathom.
Perhaps, she thought, her eyes simply were not complex enough to see what the vord Queen saw.
“The attack progresses well,” the vord Queen said, her tone distracted. “Gaius Attis, if that is what he is to be called now, is a conventional commander. An able one, but he shows me nothing more than I have seen already.”
“He’s killing your forces, then,” Isana said quietly.
The vord Queen smiled. “Yes. He has increased the efficiency of the Legions remarkably. The soldiers who escaped me last year are blooded now. He spends their lives well.” The vord Queen watched for a moment more before asking, calmly, “Would you give your life for him?”
Isana’s stomach twisted as she thought of Aquitaine wearing the First Lord’s crown. She remembered the friends of the entirety of her adult life she had buried because of his machinations.
“If necessary,” she said.
The vord Queen looked at her, and said, “Why?”
“Our people need him,” Isana said.
The vord Queen’s head tilted slowly to one side. Then she said, “You would not do it for his sake.”
“I…” Isana shook her head. “I don’t think so. No.”
“But you would do it for them. For those who need him.”
“Yes.”
“But you would be dead. How would that serve the attainment of your goals?”
“There are things more important than my goals,” Isana said.
“Such as the survival of your people.”
“Yes.”
“And that of your son.”
Isana swallowed. She said, “Yes.”
The vord Queen considered that for a time. Then she returned her eyes to the ceiling, and said, “You answered me clearly and promptly. As a reward, you may go to your male. Assure yourself of his health. See that I have not yet taken his life. If you attempt to escape or attack me, I will prevent you. And tear off his lips as punishment. Do you understand?”
Isana ground her teeth, staring at the Queen. Then she rose and walked to Araris. “I understand.”
The Queen’s glittering eyes flicked to her once more, then turned back to the ceiling. “Excellent,” she said. “I am glad that we have begun learning to speak to each other. Grandmother.”
CHAPTER 16
Amara watched the battle with the vord unfold from the air.
She had seen battles before, but mostly those joined between Alera’s Legions and her more traditional foes—the forces of rebel Lords and High Lords, smaller-scale conflicts with armed outlaws, and of course, the Second Battle of the Calderon Valley, fought between multiple factions of the Marat and the hideously outnumbered defenders of Garrison, at the valley’s easternmost end.
This battle bore little resemblance to those.
The vord approached, not like an army in the array of battle but like an oncoming wave, a tide of gleaming green-black darkness beneath the light of a weak moon. It was like watching the shadow of a storm cloud roll forward over the landscape—the vord moved with the same steady, implacable speed, with the same sense of impersonal, devouring hunger. It was an easy matter to track their progress: There was little light upon the lands of Riva, but where the vord walked, they consumed it all.
By contrast, the Legions were clothed in light. All up and down the Aleran lines, the standards of the individual centuries and cohorts blazed with furycrafted fire, each in the signature colors of their Legions and home cities. In the center of the lines, the Crown Legion was a blaze of scarlet-and-azure light, flanked by First and Second Aquitaine in a shroud of crimson fire. The right flank was centered upon the veteran forces of High Lord Antillus, burning with cold blue-and-white light, the left around the similarly veteran Legions of High Lord Phrygius, its standards sheathed in glacial green-and-white fire.
Other Legions, some from cities that no longer remained standing, all of them far less experienced than the northern veterans, had been interspaced between those three points and spread across the rich fields surrounding the plain south of Riva in a wall of solid steel and light.
Behind them, hidden from the vord by a wall of illumination, Amara could see the ranks of cavalry waiting for direction, for the battle captains of their Legions to decide where they could best be used. Rangy, long-legged coursers from the plains of Placida stood beside the hulking, heavily muscled chargers of Rhodes, who in turn stood next to the shaggy, hardy little northern horses that were barely taller than ponies.
>
Aquitaine was not content to rest behind the massive fortifications built around the city. The invaders had driven Aleran forces from one defensive position after another, and he had been strongly against Gaius Sextus’s defensive strategy from the beginning. Supported by the experienced Legions of the north, he was determined to carry the battle to the enemy.
The Aleran forces were in motion, moving forward.
From high above, Amara could sometimes see entire cohorts of Knights Aeris, black spots of shadow, far below, sharply outlined against the lighted columns of Legions on the ground. There were fewer than there should have been relative to the forces on the move. The Knights Aeris of Alera had taken hideous casualties in the battle to defend Alera Imperia. Their sacrifice had been one of the factors to help convince the enemy to commit the lion’s share of its forces to the final assault on the city itself—an assault that had resulted in annihilation for the attacking vord.
Gaius Sextus’s final, suicidal gambit had bought Alera the time the Realm needed to recover and prepare for this battle, but the cost had been grievous—and Amara feared that their comparative weakness in the skies would leave the Legions with a deadly weak point in their order of battle.
The leading edge of the vord tide rushed to within a quarter mile of the front ranks of the advancing Legions, and a flare of scarlet-and-blue light leapt skyward from the Crown Legion, Aquitaine’s signal to commence. Alera’s Knights and Citizens, after months of preparation and fear, after enduring more than a year of humiliation and pain inflicted by the invaders, were ready, at last, to give them an appropriate reply.
Even though she’d heard of the general theory behind the opening salvo of furycraft, Amara had never seen anything quite like it. She had witnessed the utter destruction of the city of Kalare by the wrath of the great fury Kalus, and it had been a horrible, hideous sight, vast beyond imagining, uncontrolled, horrible in its beauty—and completely impersonal. What happened to the leading wave of vord was every bit as terrible and even more frightening.
