First Lord's Fury ca-6

by Jim Butcher

  He reached out to all of them and extended his thoughts to the plants, the seeds, numbering and sorting them in his thoughts. He focused his will and whispered, beneath his breath, “Grow.”

  And beneath him, as if the earth were letting out a long breath, the grass began to grow, to surge with green life. Blades lengthened, and were suddenly outstripped by the quick-growing weeds and flowers. They opened in a mute riot, sudden color flushing along the surface of the earth, and within a few seconds more, grass and flowers alike burst into seed.

  Joy and fierce pride assaulted him in a distracting surge, but Tavi let the emotions wash by him and focused upon his task.

  Such growth could not happen without plenty of water to nourish it, and as the sudden growth began to leach all the water from the ground, the water from the deep well began to arrive, rising through the layers of earth and stone. At an absentminded motion of his hand, a gentle stream of wind curled along the ground and sighed up over the gates and towers beside it.

  Tavi opened his eyes long enough to see tiny seeds, some of them little larger than motes of dust, begin to drift up through the air, to where a thin film of water had begun to cling to the surface of the gates, the towers, courtesy of the cloud around them.

  He closed his eyes again, focusing on those seeds. This would be much harder, without the gentle nourishment of the soil around them, but again he reached out to the life before him, and whispered, “Grow.”

  Again, the earth around him sighed fresh green growth. Weeds and small trees began to rise above the grass—and the walls of the great city began to flush a steady shade of green. Bits of grass grew from cracks so tiny they could barely be seen. Moss and lichen spread over the surface as quickly as if they had been spread by raindrops in a steady shower.

  He was breathing harder, but could not stop now. “Grow,” he whispered.

  Trees as tall as a man arose around him, before the wall. The air grew heavier and heavier with a damp coolness. The flawless shine on his armor began to cloud over with fine, cold mist. Green subsumed the gates and the walls alike. Ivy wound up over the walls as rapidly as a snake could slither up a branch.

  Tavi clung to his saddle with one hand, refusing to slump, his teeth clenched, and snarled, “Grow!”

  From the gates and walls of Riva erupted a chorus of snaps, cracks, of the snarl of tearing stone. Green swallowed the walls, lapping up from the earth beneath in a tangled, living tide, a wave of growth. Small trees sprang from cracks in the walls, and from one upon the gates. More ivy wound everywhere, along with every other form of wild growth one could imagine.

  Tavi nodded in satisfaction. Then he lifted his fist and snarled, to the water coming up from below, “Arise!”

  There was the sound of an ocean wave crashing onto a rocky shore as the water leapt up and washed over the walls, over the green, sank into the minute cracks in the walls—and in that instant, Tavi reached out for fire, for the little warmth that remained in the frigid water from far below, and yanked it clear of the water.

  There was a hiss, and a cloud of heavy mist and puffing vapor swallowed the gates and the walls. Ice crackled and screamed.

  Panting, Tavi slid off Acteon’s back. He tossed the reins back up over the saddle’s crest and slapped the beast on the flank, sending him running back toward the Legion, crashing through the heavy brush and small trees that had grown up behind him. He heard Kitai’s mare let out a squeal, then follow the big black.

  Tavi did not let go of the craftings in front of him. This would be the hard part.

  He reached out to the water again and called to fire, sending it coursing back into the ice with a wordless cry. Steam exploded from the walls, from the cracks, in screaming whistles.

  “Arise!” he called again, and again the water crashed up from the ground.

  And again, he pulled the warmth from the water that had sunk even deeper into cracks that were slightly wider. And he sent heat washing back in a few seconds later.

  “Arise!” he called, and began the cycle again.

  “Arise!” he called again.

  And again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Ice and steam hissed and cracked. Stone screamed. Thick white vapor billowed out from the walls, denser than the veiling cloud, all but opaque.

  Tavi fell to one knee, gasping, then slowly lifted his eyes to the gates, his jaw set.

  They were coated in a layer of ice six inches thick.

  Metal groaned somewhere in the gates, a long moan that echoed from empty buildings and through the mists.

  “Right,” Tavi panted. He pushed himself back to his feet, looked over his shoulder, and nodded at Kitai. “Here we go.”

  She smiled at him, and said, “Clever, my Aleran.”

  He winked at her. Then he slowly drew his sword. He extended it deliberately to his side and concentrated.

  The metal seemed to hum—and then fire kindled and rushed down the length of the blade, a white-hot wreath. Tavi reached down into himself, focusing, using the fire along the blade as a starting point, gathering heat and preparing to unleash it.

  He extended the sword toward the gate with a scream, and fire and a sudden hammer of wind rushed forth toward the frozen gates. The white-hot firebolt slammed into the gate with a force as real as any ram, the ice sublimating in an instant to steam, and the gates, strained beyond measure by the flexing of water and ice and new life growing within them, shattered.

  So did the towers beside the gate.

  And a hundred feet of the city’s wall, on either side of the towers.

  All of them roared away from the fury of that fiery blast, screaming as they flew into pieces, bursting into their own heat and wild motion as the overstrained furies within were finally pushed past the limits of the physical materials they inhabited and vented their frustrated rage on the matter about them. Stone and metal—some of the pieces were the size of a Legion supply wagon, or as long and as sharp as the largest sword—went flying and spinning away, sent crashing through half-burned buildings and crushing the bases of the outer ring of towers by the will of Gaius Octavian.

  Secondary collapses followed, buildings that were torn to shreds by the destruction of the gates falling in beneath their own unsupported weight. And when those structures fell, they claimed others that stood alongside them.

  All told, it was nearly four full minutes before the roar of collapsing stone and masonry quieted.

  Tavi winced. The damage had been… a little more widespread than he had expected. He’d have to pay Riva for the blocks he’d ruined.

  “Aleran,” Kitai breathed in awe.

  He turned to face her and tried to look as though he’d meant to do that. He focused on the positive; at least the duration of the collapse had given him a little time to catch his breath and somewhat recover from the effort to cause it.

  The silence that settled around them was oppressive, pregnant with anticipation. “Ready,” Tavi told her. “Stand ready.”

  “You still think she will respond?” she asked quietly.

  He nodded tightly and resettled his grip on his fiery blade. “She has no choice.”

  Within heartbeats, as though driven by his words, the vord gave them an answer.

  A strange cry began to rise from dozens of points around the city—it was a sound Tavi had never heard from the vord before, a particular, ululating wail that flickered from its lowest tone to its highest in a swift, chattering trill.

  And the city exploded with vord.

  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 fla
ming 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 o
f 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.”