by Jim Butcher
“A scout!” Bernard hissed, kicking his horse into motion after it. “We have to stop it.”
Amara blinked for a second, but then slapped her mount’s neck with the reins, left and right, and sent it after Bernard’s mount. “Why?” she called.
“We’ve killed one Vord queen,” Bernard shouted back. “I’d rather whichever one was commanding this force didn’t learn that we were in the area, and set out to actively hunt us down.”
Amara lifted a hand to shield her face as branches slapped against her. “Useless,” she spat. “I’m going high!”
“Go!”
Amara seized her bow and quiver. She slipped her feet from the stirrups, lifted them to the saddle, then smoothly rose, and all as part of the same motion, leapt into the air. At her silent bidding, Cirrus rushed into the space beneath her, catching her up and sweeping her skyward. Her wind fury brushed aside tree branches from her path until she shot up into the open air over the ridge and wheeled south, to follow the path of the fleeing Vord scout. She spotted Bernard at once, and focused ahead of him until she caught a flash of racing motion perhaps thirty or forty yards in front of him.
The taken grass lion was not running the way a true grass lion would. Such a beast, running through the trees and brush, would have been all but invisible, even to Amara, moving with lithe, silent grace through its natural habitat. Possessed by the Vord, though, the grass lion simply ran in a straight line. It smashed through thickets, heedless of brambles and thorns. It tore through brush, shouldered aside saplings, and altered course only to avoid the trees and boulders it could not plow aside or leap across.
For all that it lacked grace, it was fast, though. A true grass lion was not a cross-country runner, even if it could move very swiftly over short distances. Taken by the Vord, it ran at its best speed, tirelessly, and it was steadily leaving Bernard’s horse behind.
Stopping the scout was up to Amara. Bernard was right in that—their mission was already dangerous enough. Should the Vord learn that they were in the area and dispatch even a relatively small portion of their forces to hunting Bernard and Amara down, that mission would become impossible. As Amara had demonstrated to Bernard only that morning, if the Vord knew more or less where they were located, no amount of stealth would provide protection for long.
Amara gained a little more altitude, the better to look ahead, and saw that the fleeing Vord’s straight-line path crossed a clearing in the woods, up ahead. That would be the best place to strike. She was a fair hand with a bow, for someone without any appreciable skill at woodcrafting, but hitting a target racing among the trees while she herself rode a gale-force wind was out of the question.
Of course, one would have to be mad or desperate to stand in the path of a fleeing grass lion armed only with a medium-weight hunting bow—much less that of a Vord-possessed grass lion. Amara supposed she qualified as at least one of those things, though she did not care to examine too closely which one. She poured on the speed, flashing ahead to the clearing, and touched down in the open grass.
She had little time. She drew two arrows from her quiver, thrusting one into the earth at her feet and setting the other to her string. She took a deep breath to steady herself, raised her bow, and the Vord scout came crashing out of the brush.
She called upon Cirrus to borrow from the wind fury’s swiftness, and time seemed to slow, giving her ages and ages to aim the arrow.
The possessed lion ran with its half-rotted tongue hanging out. Its ears, which would normally have been stiff and upright, flopped and wriggled like wilted leaves of lettuce. There was some kind of greenish mold or lichen growing on its fangs. Its shoulder struck the edge of a windfall as it came into the clearing and a small shower of woodchips exploded into the air with the sheer power of the impact, ripping the insensate flesh with no noticeable effect whatsoever.
Amara loosed the arrow. It leapt gracefully over the forty yards between her and the grass lion, struck its skull just over the brow, and glanced off the hard bone to bury itself in the powerful, hunched shoulders.
The Vord scout did not so much as twitch.
Amara snatched up another arrow.
Clods of earth flew up from beneath the lion’s feet, propelled by the raw power of its legs. Amara tried not to think of what would happen if a battering ram of four hundred pounds of rotting meat and hard bone slammed into her at the rate the beast was moving. She set another arrow to string as the lion’s passage startled a covey of birds from the grass, sending them up in a slow-motion panic of feathers and beating wings and glassy eyes.
She dropped to one knee, drew the arrow to full extension, and held it, waiting, timing each plunge of the taken lion’s ruined body, tracking its motion, waiting for the timing to be perfect.
Twenty yards. Fifteen. Ten.
When it was ten feet away, she loosed her arrow and flung herself flat to one side.
The shaft stabbed out and vanished into the lion’s open mouth, its broad point plunging into the back of its throat.
The lion’s front limbs suddenly went loose, and its jaws and muzzle snapped down, smashing violently into the earth, plowing a shallow furrow as its momentum carried it forward. Its spine and hindquarters twisted and flipped up and over, then came smashing down onto the earth as well, forcing Amara to jerk her knees up to her chest, lest her legs be crushed underneath the beast’s descending weight.
The impact ruptured the grass lion’s innards, and an explosion of noxious fumes washed over her. Her stomach twisted in revulsion, and she scrambled away as it began to empty itself.
She looked back at the lion several unpleasant seconds later, to see it still twitching, and realized that she could hear . . . something, making a tinny, wheezing sound of pain. The Vord taker. When one of them inhabited a body, it was usually somewhere inside the skull. The arrow must have wounded the thing.
The job wasn’t done. The grass lion had never been the danger—the taker was. It could not be allowed to return to the rest of the Vord.
She looked around until she spotted a stone a little smaller than her head. She took it up, steeled herself against the stench, and walked back over to the still twitching corpse of the grass lion. She lifted the stone and, with all her strength, brought it smashing down on the grass lion’s skull.
The wheezing scream of pain stopped.
She looked up to see Bernard plunge from the trees and draw his horse to an abrupt halt, bow in hand. He stared at her for a moment. Then he simply slid his bow back into the holder on his saddle and nudged his horse into a walk again. Her own mount had followed his horse once she had left it, and came following along.
She walked over to meet him and get out of the stench.
He passed her a flask of water. She rinsed and spat the bad taste out of her mouth, then drank deeply.
He studied the grass lion gravely. “Nice shooting.”
From him, it was no idle comment. “Thank you,” she said.
He clucked to her horse, who docilely came over to his outreached hand. He collected the reins and offered them to Amara. “We’d better get moving. Where there’s one scout, there will be more.”
“Bernard,” she said, staring at the corpse. “I don’t want to end up like that. I don’t want them to use me against my own people. I’d rather die.” She turned her face to him. “If it comes to that, I want you to make sure of it.”
“It won’t,” Bernard said.
“But if it does—”
His eyes hardened. “It won’t,” he said, with harsh finality, and all but threw the reins at her chest. “No compromises, Countess. Not for anyone. Including the Vord.”
CHAPTER 14
“The art of diplomacy is the art of compromise,” Lady Placida said calmly, as the wind coach began its descent to the Shieldwall. “The key here is finding the compromise that will satisfy everyone involved.”
“That presumes that everyone involved is willing to compromise,” Isana replied. “The Iceme
n have been at war with Alera for centuries. And I can’t imagine that the lords of Antillus or Phrygia will be particularly inclined to be gracious, after generations of combat with the northern tribes.”
Aria sighed. “I wasn’t presuming. I’d hoped you hadn’t realized it. I thought perhaps that a positive attitude on your behalf might put everyone sufficiently off-balance enough to allow you to get something accomplished.”
Isana smiled faintly. “What can you tell me about Antillus Raucus?”
“He’s a great fighter, probably the most accomplished tactician in Alera, almost unquestionably the most practiced battlecrafter in the Realm. He’s won significant battles against—”
Isana shook her head, frowning as the air grew noticeably colder. She drew her cloak tighter around herself. “Not that,” she said gently. “That isn’t what I need to know. Tell me about him.”
Aria closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head in self-recrimination. “Of course. I’m sorry, I’ve been thinking in military terms for most of the trip. How to make sure I can keep getting food and supplies to my husband and his men, that sort of thing.”
“Understandable,” Isana said gently. “Raucus?”
Aria folded her hands in her lap and frowned out the window for a moment. “Passionate,” she said, finally. “I don’t think I’ve ever known a man more passionate than Raucus. That’s partly what makes his firecrafting so strong, I think. He believes furiously in whatever it is he’s doing. Or only does whatever it is he believes in most furiously. I suppose it depends upon one’s point of view.”
“He’s loyal to the Realm?” Isana asked.
Aria took a slow breath. “He’s . . . loyal to the concept of loyalty,” she said finally.
“I’m not sure I see the distinction.”
“Raucus believes that every High Lord does, and should, owe fealty to the First Lord,” Aria said. “He can’t stand power-seekers like the Aquitaines, Rhodes, and Kalarus, and he will scrupulously adhere to what he sees as the ideal for how a High Lord should behave—but he detests Gaius. He’d rather gouge out his own eyes than show the least amount of voluntary personal respect for the man currently wearing the Crown, as opposed to the respect due the Crown itself.”
“Why?” Isana asked. “Not that Gaius hasn’t done a number of things to earn enemies in his time—but why Raucus?”
“He and Septimus were close when they were young,” Aria said. “Inseparable, really, after a year or so of initial difficulties. After Septimus died, Raucus stopped attending Wintersend, stopped writing to the Citadel, and refused to answer any letters from the First Lord directly.”
Isana felt her eyes widen. Septimus had not truly died in battle with the Marat, as the Realm at large had been led to believe. He had been killed during the battle as a result of the actions of a group of Citizens, a conspiracy of crafters powerful enough to neutralize Septimus’s furies and leave him vulnerable to the barbarians. In fact, the successful attempt had not been the first but merely the last in a series of half a dozen such incidents. Isana knew that Septimus had believed that he had puzzled out who were the ones behind the conspiracy—and that he had been in the process of gathering evidence when he died.
If Raucus had been close friends with Septimus, it was possible that her late husband had shared what he knew with the then-young lord of Antillus. “Great furies,” Isana breathed. “He knows something.”
Aria arched a red-gold eyebrow. “Knows something? What do you mean?”
Isana shook her head quickly. “Nothing, nothing.” She gave Aria a quick, apologetic smile. “Nothing I can share at the moment.”
Aria opened her mouth in a silent “ah” and nodded. She frowned and gathered her own cloak closer to her body. “Always so cold up at the Wall.”
Isana looked out the window, to see the Shieldwall, an enormous construction of dark stone, perhaps twenty yards below them. It was early evening, and a circle of lights marked a landing space on the wall. The countryside around, blanketed in snow, glowed with the eerie half-light of winter.
“Tell me this, Aria,” Isana said. “In your judgment—is he a good man?”
Aria blinked at Isana. She hesitated for several seconds, as if wrestling with a concept she had never encountered. “I . . .” She spread her hands helplessly. “I’m not sure how to answer. There have been days when I haven’t been proud of the things I’ve needed to do for the sake of duty.”
Isana smiled faintly. “I’ve had days like that as well,” she said quietly. “And it doesn’t change anything or make the question invalid. Ask your heart. Is he a good man?”
Lady Placida regarded Isana slowly for a moment, before a rather worn half smile appeared on her mouth, along with a sardonic little chuckle. “For a High Lord. Yes. He’s bullheaded and arrogant, his ego is bloated to the size of a mountain, he’s headstrong, often inconsiderate, more than occasionally rude, intolerant to anyone he doesn’t respect, and short-tempered with anyone who challenges him. And underneath all that—there’s more of the same, only better cured.” She shook her head. “But beneath that, yes. I sent my own sons to Antillus to train under him when they came of age. That is how much I trust Antillus Raucus.”
Isana smiled at her, and said, “Thank you, Aria. That’s encouraging. Perhaps we have a chance to make something work out after all.”
“Perhaps you didn’t listen to most of what I just said,” Aria replied, her tone dry.
The coach settled down with a gentle bump, and the winds died down. A second later, a Legion band began playing the Crown Anthem.
Isana grimaced.
“It is traditional,” Aria murmured.
“Yes, yes.” Isana sighed. “But the tune is ghastly. It sounds like a sick gargant dying. What precisely qualifies it to be the Crown Anthem?”
“Tradition,” Aria replied promptly.
“And tradition alone, apparently,” Isana said. “Though perhaps my taste in music is simply . . . uneducated.”
“Oh, no, not at all,” Aria said. “I am well versed in several musical traditions, and assure you that the Crown Anthem is perfectly hideous.”
Araris, who had sat silent and motionless through most of the trip—asleep, actually, though he’d dozed with that catlike lightness that could have come instantly to waking, had the need arose, opened his eyes as the Knights who had borne the air coach came to the door and opened it. “Ladies,” he murmured. “If you will excuse me.” He exited the coach first—as he insisted upon doing every time, these days—and a moment later leaned his head back inside and extended his hand to Isana. “Very well, ladies.”
Isana took Araris’s hand and left the coach, emerging into, not the light of furylamps, but instead raw torchlight atop the wall. It was far dimmer and, somehow, more primal than the tiny, clean, blue-white furylamps inside the wind coach. Red light and shadow lay heavily over everything, and she found herself instinctively becoming more wary of her surroundings.
Standing atop the Shieldwall was, Isana realized, more like standing upon a road or bridge than any building—or more accurately, like standing in the square of a small town. The wall was fifty feet wide, and a number of structures existed atop the Wall, within sight of where the cart had landed, framed by four towers that rose up from the Wall, standard Aleran ramparts rising another twenty feet above the surface of the already-towering Wall. Several knee-high stone walls rose up here and there around them, and Isana realized that they must be guard-walls around stairwells that sank down into the structure of the Wall itself. A moment’s estimate showed Isana that the area of the Wall they stood upon could have contained enough structures to comprise a town.
That might, she supposed, do something to explain the number of legionares assembled to meet the coach, despite the late hour. There was the better part of two full cohorts—or, she supposed the Legion’s Prime Cohort—turned out in ranks in front of the coach, while at least five times as many legionares were obviously on duty within si
ght of her position, on guard upon the battlements at the edges of the Wall, at each level of the ramparts, and at lighted positions up and down the length of the Wall, to either horizon, as far as she could see.
Every legionare’s breastplate bore the three scarlet diagonal bars of the Legions of Antillus—though upon several helmets and shields, Isana saw a more graphic representation of the heraldic design, evidently painted on by individual legionares: three ragged, bloody wounds, as if torn by the claws of one of the massive northern bears.
A man in the finer breastplate and elaborate helmet of a Tribune stepped forward and saluted. He was tall, clean-cut, and looked every inch the professional soldier. “Your Highness, Your Grace. On behalf of my lord, His Grace, Antillus Raucus, welcome to the Wall. My name is Tribune Garius.”
Isana inclined her head to him. The chill in the air made her shiver despite the warmer clothes and heavier cloak she had worn. “Thank you, Tribune.”
“May I ask, Tribune,” Aria said, “why Lord Antillus is not here to greet us personally?”
“He regrets that his duties prevented him from being here,” the man said smoothly.
“Duties?” Aria asked.
Garius stared at her levelly, his gaze unwavering, and gestured toward the southern side of the wall. “See for yourself, Your Grace.”
Aria glanced at Isana, who nodded, and the pair of them, accompanied by Garius and the silent Araris, walked to the southern side of the Wall. The first thing Isana noticed was that the temperature rose noticeably—by several degrees, at least—in the few short feet she traveled. The second, was that the ground on the far side of the Wall was brightly lit.
About a hundred men were spread out on the ground below, working by torchlight. They had, apparently, just finished building some kind of low wooden framework to support several score crates—and then, with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold of the season, Isana realized that the boxes weren’t crates.
They were coffins.
