by Jim Butcher
Lord Gram stood nearby and grunted acknowledgment. Though the Princeps had put Bernard in charge of the defenses, Amara’s husband had also served Gram for many years as one of the first Steadholders placed in the then-Count’s service. Now Gram was a Lord (granted, his lands had been overrun by the enemy, but he was still a Lord), and her husband had made an extra effort to show Gram courtesy, despite his pained jaw. Gram didn’t need it, Amara thought, and would have been perfectly comfortable following a simple order—but even in the face of ruin, Bernard had the presence of mind to be considerate. She supposed that, in a way, that sort of grace was symbolic of a great deal of what they were fighting for; the preservation of unnecessary beauty.
Gram stepped forward, lifted his hand, and casually held it out, palm up. Fire kindled in his cupped fingers, until a moment later a tiny form hovered there, just above the surface of his hand—a little feathered figure, its wings blurred into invisibility with their speed. The hot wind washing from them stirred Amara’s hair. Gram whispered something to the little fire fury, and flicked his wrist. The fiery hummingbird shot off into the night, gathering speed and brightening in intensity as it flew.
It swept over the battlefield, a globe of white daylight several hundred yards across. It zipped over countless mantis warriors, and at one point blew entirely through the torso of a vordknight that had flown down to intercept it, not even slowing down.
“Bad idea,” Gram said, shaking his head, “getting in Phyllis’s way like that.”
“Phyllis?” Bernard asked.
“Keep those teeth together, Calderon,” Gram said testily. “Named her for my first wife. Hotter than any torch, couldn’t sit still, and you didn’t want to get in her way, either.”
Amara smiled at the exchange and tracked Phyllis’s progress—and within moments, she spotted the oncoming special units, exactly where Invidia had said they would be.
“Bloody blighted crows,” Gram breathed, as if barely able to summon enough wind to speak.
Amara understood the feeling.
The oncoming vord were huge.
They weren’t huge on the same order as a gargant. They were huge on the same order as buildings. There were half a dozen of them, each the size of three or four of the largest merchant ships. They moved on four legs, each thicker than the trunk of any tree Amara had ever seen. Their vaguely triangular heads ended in a jagged, black chitin beak that rather reminded her of that of an octopus, except large enough to hold three or four hogshead barrels. The creatures had no eyes that she could see, and their beaks simply seemed to flow up into their skulls, and from there into enormous arching fans of the same material, spreading around the titans’ heads like shields. Every stride carried them a good twenty feet, and though they looked ponderous, their pace was, like a gargant’s, swifter than one would expect. Dozens of mantis warriors could run beneath them at a time, and though a mantis could run faster than some horses, they passed the enormous bulks of moving black chitin only slowly.
A word from Gram halted Phyllis above the nearest bulk, and everyone on the walls who could be spared from fighting could only stare. Centurion Giraldi stepped up to the battlements beside Bernard and Gram. He stared at the bulks for a moment, and breathed, “Sir? I’d like a bigger wall now.”
In the same instant, all six of the bulks raised their opened maws and let out basso bellows. They did not sound loud, precisely, but the sound shook the wall and Amara’s bones with unnerving intensity.
The mules loosed another volley, which landed all around the leading bulk, exploding into fiery destruction. The great beast did not react. It just kept coming on, as vast and unstoppable as a glacier. As the bulks passed through the fires, Amara saw vord behemoths and mantises crouched upon their glossy, armored backs, as tiny as parasite-birds on the backs of gargants.
Amara could see the idea behind the creatures at once. They would roll forward and smash through the wall like so much rotten fencing. Anyone that attacked them would be forced to deal with the defenders riding upon them.
Amara started as a sudden presence intruded close upon her, but looked over to find that Doroga had arrived and made his way to them on the wall. The slab-shouldered Marat looked calm and interested as his eyes traveled along the walls, through the skies, then down to the field out in front of them. He, too, stared at the bulks for a slow count to seven before pursing his lips, and saying, “Hungh.” After a moment, he added, “Big.”
“Bloody crows,” Gram said. “Bloody crows. Bloody crows.”
“We got a problem, Count,” Giraldi said.
“Bloody crows.”
Bernard nodded. “Possibly.”
“Bloody crows,” said Gram. “Blighted bloody crows.”
Giraldi’s hand was resting on his sword. “I’d say get some archers and go for the eyes. But they ain’t got any eyes.”
“Mmmm,” Bernard said.
“Bloody crows,” said Gram.
“Sir?” the centurion asked. “What do we do?”
“We be quiet for a moment, so that I can think,” Bernard said. He stared at the oncoming bulks. They were bellowing almost constantly, and signs of panic had begun to spread along the wall. A nervous gargant, somewhere nearby, let out its own coughing roar, and Bernard glanced over his shoulder in irritation—and then his eyes locked onto Doroga. They narrowed once, and the wolfish smile reappeared.
“We don’t go for the eyes, centurion,” Bernard said. “We go for their feet.”
Doroga looked at Bernard, then barked out a harsh laugh, one that sounded rather remarkably like the one that the gargant, probably Walker, had just loosed.
Amara looked at Doroga, blinking, and suddenly understood. Years before, during the first vord invasion in this very valley, they had spoken with Doroga after a battle, while the Marat took care of his gargant’s enormous padded paws:
“Feet,” the Marat had rumbled. “Always got to help him take care of his feet. Feet are important when you are as big as Walker.”
It made sense. Those creatures, whatever they were, had to be of fantastic weight—all of it settling upon four relatively small feet. Something that large could not easily manage its own mass, Amara was sure. A crippled foot might prevent the beast from moving at all.
Of course, the thousands of mantises running in a living river around and sometimes upon those feet could make it a bit difficult to reach the target. One of the High Lords might make short work of it, but they were mostly engaged above, and the Legion firecrafters had already exhausted themselves.
Of course… one didn’t really need to hurt the bulks. They only needed to stop them, before they breached the wall and left gaps into which the vord swarm would pour, running down the retreating Legions before they could reach Garrison.
“Bernard,” Amara said, her own voice thready. “Riva.”
“Hah,” Bernard said. He turned to Giraldi. “Centurion, signal arrows. One: Lord Riva to report to me. Two: General call for engineers at this location.”
Signal arrows were bright enough to be seen for miles. The message would get to Riva within a moment. It would take him little longer to fly back to the front, but Amara was not sure how much time they actually had.
It seemed to take forever, and the bulks pressed ever closer. The mantises seemed to go mad with eagerness as they did, as if the bulks were pushing out some kind of psychic bow wave. One breach appeared atop the wall, and another, and Bernard dispatched reserves to reinforce the weakened areas.
There was the roar of a nearby windstream, and Riva, dressed in trousers and a loose, unbuttoned shirt, his hair a wildly tossed mess, looked blearily around the wall. He spotted Bernard and moved to him, lifting his fist in a salute and glancing out at the bulks as he did. He froze. “Bloody crows.”
“Bloody crows,” agreed Gram.
“We need water,” Bernard said to Riva. “My lord, we need to water that ground, and we need to do it now.”
Riva opened and closed his mou
th a few times, then seemed to shake himself. “Oh, of course. Bog them down. We’d need a river to do it in time.”
“The Rillwater,” Bernard said. “It isn’t far from here. Maybe a quarter mile southwest.”
Riva lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “Possible, perhaps. Engineers?”
“Assembled below.”
“Aye, aye,” Riva mused. “Just like irrigating a field. Only more so. Ex cuse me.”
Riva leapt from the wall to the courtyard below, braking his fall with windcrafting, and turned to the engineers. He began issuing rapid orders. The men gathered in ranks and knelt to place their bare hands against the earth. Riva, at the front of the group, did the same, and several hundred experienced engineers, led by Riva, began to make the earth quiver.
It didn’t take long. There was a moment where nothing changed, then the charging mantises began to appear with their lower extremities covered in mud. The mud splatters began to go farther and farther up their legs—but the ground before the walls had been superheated several times over the last day, and had baked into something almost like hardened clay.
“More!” Riva shouted. “More, crows take you!”
The strain upon the furycrafters was enormous. One of the engineers let out a strangled squeak and abruptly fell onto his side, thrashing and clutching at his left shoulder. Two others simply collapsed, dead or unconscious.
Rushing water abruptly spread over the ground beneath the walls, rolling across it like a vast mirror that reflected the deadly glory of the ongoing aerial battle.
They waited, while the engineers kept up the effort of redirecting the little river. Men collapsed every few moments. Lord Riva’s face became strained, with blotches of color on his pale cheeks. The water rose.
Then one of the vordbulks let out a higher-pitched bellow as one of its feet slid out from beneath it, sliding on the smooth clay surface made slippery by water and by the dust and grains of dirt churned up by the passing of so many mantis feet. It listed far to one side, like a ship wallowing between swells, but then slowly, slowly righted itself. A moment later, it took another step and resumed its advance
“Close!” bellowed Bernard back toward Riva over his shoulder. “Can you give them a shake?”
“Aye!” Riva panted, his jaw set. Then he closed his eyes again, speaking to the engineers, and suddenly the earth itself groaned. It jerked and quivered once. Then it lurched abruptly to one side, and Amara staggered against Doroga, who caught her and prevented her from falling.
Out on the field, two more vordbulks, no more than two hundred yards from the walls, screamed and slipped, falling awkwardly. They pitched over toward their sides in motions that were rendered slow-looking by sheer scale. It took them what seemed like seconds to fall, letting out bone-shaking basso calls of distress as they did. They hit the ground hard, driven by their own vast weight, sending tons of water and mud flying into the air with the impact. Dozens, if not hundreds, of vord were crushed beneath each of the monstrous creatures, whose weight was sufficient to leave a deep impression even in the baked clay. They thrashed, their limbs crushing more vord, and moaned out low calls that made the surface of the shallow water around them quiver.
“Good enough,” Bernard said. “Good enough. It’ll have to be.” He looked at Giraldi, suddenly sweating. “Centurion, the stone.”
Giraldi reached into his pouch and retrieved a smooth, oblong stone of the same color as the wall. He passed it to Bernard, who placed it upon the ground, and said, “Prepare to sound retreat.”
The trumpeter looked nervously out at the field and licked his lips.
Bernard took a deep breath, then drove the heel of his boot down onto the stone, shattering it.
A pulse of cold wind seemed to flow out from the broken stone, raising dust and smearing fresh blood into new streaks. Seconds after it did, one of the merlons, the large blocks of stone atop battlements, suddenly quivered and groaned, its form twisting into a new shape. What looked like a Phrygian sled dog seemed to come shuddering out of the block of stone as if digging its way from a snowbank.
It promptly turned, lunged forward, and crushed a vord warrior against the opposite merlon, splattering the mantis to shards of broken chitin and smears of green-brown blood.
All along the walls, the canine gargoyles came to life and began smashing into the vord with implacable ferocity—and once all of them were free of the merlons, the stone beneath that recently vacated place began to quiver and heave, and more gargoyles began to emerge.
“Sound retreat!” Bernard ordered.
The trumpet began sounding the signal, and the Legions moved back instantly, as if Bernard’s voice had carried to each and every one of them. Amara joined her husband and the rest of the command staff as they turned to abandon the walls, while all around them more and more canine gargoyles tore their way free of the stone that made the wall and began killing vord with what looked like ferocious glee, their upcurved stone tails wagging.
The mules and their teams were already on the move, and as Amara reached the Valley floor again, she noticed—the ground was growing soft even on this side of the wall. Riva stayed where he was, gasping, both hands on the ground.
Amara rushed to Riva’s side, and said, “Your Grace! We’ve got to go!”
“In a minute!” he panted. “Ground on this side of the wall is all loose earth. Watering it will slow them down even more.”
“Your Grace,” Amara said, “we do not have a minute.” She turned to the engineers and snapped, “You men heard the signal. Retreat.”
Exhausted, only a few of them had enough energy to salute, but they all groaned to their feet to begin shambling away from both the steadily shrinking wall and the steadily growing numbers of gargoyles.
Amara looked wildly around her. Everything was flashing colored lights and screams and confusion. Here and there, vord broke through the living wall of angry gargoyles. Knights Terra and Ferrous would close in on each of them, slowing their progress to give the tired legionares more time to retreat. Men dragged the wounded toward safety. Horses screamed in panic. Vordbulks continued their vast, deep bellowing while the mantises shrieked and screamed fit to pierce Amara’s eardrums.
She couldn’t see Bernard and the command group.
“My lord!” she screamed. “We must go! Now!”
Riva let out a short, hollow-sounding gasp and sagged to one side, throwing out an arm to catch himself. It was too weak to hold him up, and he crumpled to the steadily dampening ground.
“Get up!” Amara shouted. She knelt and pulled one of the man’s shoulders over hers. “Get up!”
Riva blinked and stared at her with glazed eyes.
Amara wanted to scream in frustration, but she managed to get him mostly upright. The two of them began staggering away from the wall, lurching like a pair of drunks. Faster. They had to move faster.
There was a whistling shriek behind her, and Amara turned to see half a dozen mantises rushing her.
Fighting would be impossible. Instead, she flung up a veil around herself and the disoriented High Lord. The charge of the mantises slowed abruptly as it lost a focus, and they began to turn this way and that, each of the six darting forward after the first moving thing it saw.
Unfortunately for mantis number three, the moving thing it saw was Walker the gargant. Though the mantis charged with berserk aggression, Walker barely took notice of it. Instead, he simply lifted one big paw and brought it down in a simple, smashing arc that ended the vord’s offensive with abrupt and absolute finality.
“Amara!” boomed Doroga from Walker’s back. A pair of gargoyles went hurtling by in pursuit of the vord who had broken through. Walker tossed his head and snorted as Doroga continued to call out. “Amara!”
Amara dropped the veil. “Doroga! Over here!”
The Marat leaned forward, and said something to Walker, and the gargant began striding toward her. Doroga grabbed the saddle rope and swung partway down Walker’s side, holdi
ng out a hand. Amara guided Riva’s arm into the Marat’s grip. Doroga hauled the man up with a grunt and dragged him onto the saddle. Amara swarmed up the braided leather rope after them, and Doroga shouted something to Walker. The gargant whirled, both front paws coming up off the ground, and turned to the east. It started forward at a pace Amara had never seen in a gargant before—a kind of lumbering gallop that nearly threw her off its back every couple of steps and covered ground with impressive speed.
Doroga threw back his head in a howl of triumph, and Walker answered him. Amara looked over her shoulder. The wall of gargoyles was holding, but not perfectly. Hundreds of mantises were slipping through, and one of the vordbulks had reached the space where the wall had been, despite the treacherous footing. Walker was moving quickly, but not quickly enough to outrun the oncoming mantises.
But then, he didn’t need to.
A chorus of answering bellows came from ahead of them, and a moment later a long line of gargants came lumbering toward them out of the dark—Doroga’s tribesmen. Gargants, moving in trios and pairs, went smashing into the vord that had leaked through the gargoyles, crushing them before they could mount an effective pursuit of the fleeing Aleran Legions. The sound of battle began to recede behind them, and Amara felt herself shivering in reaction.
She wasn’t cold. She wasn’t even reacting to the fear though she’d certainly been afraid.
The chill that went through her did so because of what had happened.
Invidia had told them the truth. They hadn’t expected the sheer size of the vordbulks, but Invidia had certainly tried to tell them they were larger than gargants.
She’d been telling the truth.
If there was even a chance that she might actually be able to deliver on her promise of taking them to the vord Queen, of ending the war, they would have no choice but to take her up on the offer.
Amara looked overhead. The battle was winding down up there, and the fliers were coming down to support the Marat in holding off the oncoming vord. They would be the last troops to leave the battlefield—their speed meant that even if they kept fighting for two or three hours, they could potentially reach Garrison before some of the Legions.
