by Jim Butcher
Besides, that was the least of her worries.
How was she going to be able to face Bernard and tell him that for the sake of the Realm, she had chosen to leave his sister’s fate in enemy hands?
CHAPTER 17
Tavi stood at the prow of the Slive and stared ahead of the fleet as it raced across the long strip of ice laid out upon the north side of the Shieldwall. The ride was not a gentle one. Extra ropes and handholds had been added all over the ship, and Tavi only stayed standing by virtue of holding on to one supporting rope with each hand.
He had grown used to the sound of the runners screaming as they glided over the ice, a sort of endless squeal-hiss that went on and on and on. The ship juddered and shook as it raced before the unnaturally steady northwestern wind, sails rigged to catch it to best advantage. The Slive creaked and groaned with every shudder and thump. Those of her crew not terrified for dear life were frantically running up and down the ship, making constant efforts of woodcrafting to keep her timbers from shivering apart under the strain.
“There it is,” Tavi called back, pointing ahead to where a Legion javelin with a green cloth tied across its butt had been thrust into the ice. Crassus and his windcrafters had been racing ahead of the fleet, ensuring that the frozen path the Icemen had created for them remained smooth and safe.
Well. Relatively safe. The pace of the ships was faster than any travel Tavi had ever heard of, short of actual flight. They had covered the full day’s marching distance of a Legion on a causeway in the first three hours. At that speed, a patch of bare earth within the ice could catch a ship’s keel, and sheer momentum would send it tumbling end over end down the length of the vessel. The Tiberius actually had struck such a bare spot, where the ice hadn’t had time to harden properly.
Tavi had watched in helpless horror from a hundred yards away as the vessel wavered, its wing-runners snapping off, and began to tumble, its masts snapping like twigs, its planks splintering into clouds of shattered wood—its crew being tumbled before and among the juggernaut mass of the doomed ship.
Three other ships had foundered as well, overbalanced by the wind, or by mismanagement of their sails, or by simple foul luck. Like the Tiberius, they had come to pieces. Tavi thought himself a bit cowardly for feeling relieved that at least he hadn’t actually seen it happening with his own eyes: When an ice-sailing ship went down at full speed, no one survived the wreckage. Canim and men were simply crushed and broken like limp, wet dolls.
Now the fliers were marking any spots that might cause another such accident. It was a simple precaution that had already guided them around two more potentially lethal patches of ground. Any idiot could have thought of it ahead of time, but Tavi hadn’t—and the lives of the crews of four ships, Canim and Aleran alike, now hung over him.
“The way remains smooth!” Tavi called, noting the next green-flagged javelin beyond the first. “Keep the pace!”
“Giving orders to keep doing what they’re already doing,” drawled Maximus from a few feet down the handrail. “Well, they say never issue an order you know won’t be obeyed, I suppose.”
Tavi gave Max an irritated glance and turned back to face forward. “You want something?”
“How’s your stomach?” Max asked.
Tavi clenched his teeth and stared out over the land ahead of them. “Fine. It’s fine. It’s that slow rolling that really does me in, I think.” The ship struck a depression in the ice, and the entire vessel sank, then rose sharply into the air, its runners actually clearing the ice for a fraction of a second. Tavi’s heels flew up, and only his hold on the safety ropes kept him from being slammed violently to the deck or off the ship completely.
His stomach gurgled and twisted in knots. One fine thing about being up in the prow was that the ship’s sails hid him from view of the stern. He’d already lost what little breakfast he’d had over the rail with no one the wiser. And, with the Slive running out in front of the two columns of ships sailing in neat lines behind them, the reputation of the invincibility of the House of Gaius was neatly preserved.
“See?” Tavi choked out a moment later. “Little bumps like that pose no problem.”
Max grinned easily. “Demos sent me up to tell you that he suggests we stop for a meal in the next hour or so. His woodcrafters are getting tired.”
“We don’t have time,” Tavi said.
“There will still be plenty of time to break our ships into tiny bits of kindling before we get to Phrygia,” Max said. “No sense in doing everything the first day.”
Tavi glanced back at him wryly. He took a deep breath, thinking, and nodded. “Very well. At his discretion, Demos will signal the fleet to heave to for a rest.” He squinted ahead against the glare of daylight on ice and snow. “How far have we come?”
Max held up his hands and crafted a farseeing before his eyes, peering at a Shieldwall tower they were passing. A number was carved into its stone side, over the entry door for the troops stationed there. “Five hundred and thirty-six miles. In seven hours.” He shook his head, and said, his voice wistful. “That’s the next best thing to flying.”
Tavi glanced back at Max, thoughtfully. “Better, really. We’re moving more troops than every flier in Alera could carry. Think of what it could mean.”
“What?” Max said. “Moving troops around faster?”
“Or food,” Tavi said. “Or supplies. Or trade goods.”
Max lifted both eyebrows, then lowered them, frowning. “You could move freight from one end of the Wall to the other in a few days. Even on causeways, it’s a six-week trip to Phrygia from Antillus. You have to go all the way down to Alera Imperia, then . . .” His voice trailed off, and he coughed. “Um. Sorry.”
Tavi shook his head, forcing a small smile onto his mouth. “It’s all right. No use pretending it didn’t happen. My grandfather knew what he was doing. I probably would have done the same.”
“Taurg crap,” Max said scornfully. “No. Your grandfather killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, Tavi.”
Tavi felt a hot surge of anger in his chest, and he glowered at Max.
Max faced him, one eyebrow raised. “What?” he asked in a reasonable tone. “You gonna fight me every time I tell you the truth? I’m not scared of you, Calderon.”
Tavi gritted his teeth and looked away. “He died for the Realm, Max.”
“Took a good many people with him when he went, too,” Max replied. “I’m not saying he didn’t do what needed doing. I’m not saying he was a bad First Lord. I’m just saying that you aren’t much like him.” He shrugged. “I’m thinking that your solutions wouldn’t look much like his did.”
Tavi frowned. “How so?”
Max gestured at the front of the ship. “Old Sextus never would have had his ship up front, where disaster could hit it if our fliers got sloppy or unlucky. He’d . . .” Max scrunched up his eyes thoughtfully. “He’d have positioned two or three of either his worst captains or his best up here. His worst to get rid of the deadweight if another ship went down, his best because they’d be the ones most likely to challenge his authority.”
Tavi grunted. “No good. I need all my captains. And Demos is the best captain in my fleet.”
“Don’t let Varg hear you say that,” Max said. “And speaking of taking pointless risks . . .”
Tavi rolled his eyes. “I had to. If the ritualists had been given time to whip the Canim into a frenzy over the two makers we killed, Varg wouldn’t have dared to leave them back at Antillus for fear he’d lose control. By changing the issue to a question of Varg’s personal honor, it brought the whole thing to a screaming halt. Varg is the dead makers’ champion now, not the ritualists. He’s still in control.”
“So when he kills you, it will be orderly,” Max said.
“It won’t come to an actual duel,” Tavi said confidently. “Neither one of us wants that. We’re only doing it to force the ritualists to hold back, rather than urging other Canim to take action and may
be remove Varg from power. But if Varg can pull the ritualists’ fangs, a duel won’t be necessary. We’ll resolve it before it comes to bloodshed.” After a hesitation, he added, “Probably.”
Max snorted. “What if he doesn’t? He brought the ritualists with him, you know.”
Tavi shrugged. “I doubt they all want me dead, Max. And they’ve got experience fighting the vord. He’d be a fool to leave them behind. He’ll handle them.”
“All right. But what if he doesn’t?”
Tavi stared out at the path ahead of them for a silent moment, and said, “Then . . . I’ll have to kill him. If I can.”
They hung on to the safety lines while the Slive bucked and shimmied over the ice. After a moment, Max put a hand on Tavi’s shoulder, then made his way carefully aft, to relay the heave-to command to Captain Demos.
CHAPTER 18
For Amara, the next several hours were a desperate blur.
She came down square in the middle of the Crown Legion, whose legionares had been stationed at Alera Imperia for years, and many of whom would recognize her on sight. She nearly skewered herself on a spear, and the startled legionare she’d half landed on nearly gave her a killing stroke with his gladius. Only the swift intervention of the legionare beside him kept him from plunging the wickedly sharp steel into Amara’s throat.
After that, it was a matter of convincing the men that only their centurion could deal with her, and that centurion’s Tribune would need to do the same, and so on, all the way up to the captain of the Crown Legion.
Captain Miles was a more formal-looking version of his older brother, Araris Valerian. He had the same innocuous height, the same solid, leanly muscled build. His hair was a few shades lighter than Araris’s, but then both of them were showing enough threads of silver to make the distinction a fine one these days. Sir Miles limped over to her, moving briskly, every inch the model of a Legion captain, his face darkening with wrath. No surprise, that. Amara couldn’t imagine a captain worth his salt who would be thrilled to have some kind of administrative matter thrust into his hands now, when the battle was freshly under way.
Miles gave Amara one look, and his face went absolutely pale.
“Bloody crows,” he said. “How bad is it?”
“Very,” Amara said.
Miles gestured curtly for the legionares holding Amara’s arms to release her. “I wish I could say it was good to see you again, Countess, but you’ve been a harbinger for confusion and danger a little too often for my taste. How can I help you?”
“How can you get rid of me, you mean,” Amara said, grinning. “I need to see Aqui—Gaius Attis. Now. Sooner if possible.”
Miles’s eyes narrowed, then a small, hard grin touched his mouth. “This should be interesting. If you will follow me, Countess Calderon.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Amara said.
He paused, and said, “Countess. I take it that you aren’t going to attempt anything, ah, ill-advised.”
She smiled sweetly at him. “Would you care to take my weapons, Sir Miles?”
He huffed out an annoyed breath and shook his head. Then he beckoned for Amara to follow him.
She walked through the blazing light of Legion standards, passing from the Crown Legion proper into a space opened between the single surviving Imperian Legion and the First Legion of Aquitaine. The space between them was filled with cavalry, including, it would seem, the command group around Gaius Attis.
As Amara approached, half a dozen men with long dueling blades—Aquitaine’s singulares, presumably—drew their weapons and immediately nudged their horses to stand between Amara and Lord Aquitaine.
“Relax, boys,” growled Miles. He turned to Amara, and said, “Wait here, Countess. I’ll speak to him.”
Amara nodded stiffly, and Miles pressed through the singulares and disappeared. She did not look at the bodyguards and stood with her weight far back on her heels, her hands in plain view. The very gentle slope of the land let her look down over the heads of the legionares between herself and the actual battle line, and she paused for a moment to watch the battle.
From far enough away, she thought, it looked nothing like a brutal struggle. The legionares looked like laborers in a field, all spread out in a line, their weapons rising and falling while trumpets blew and drums pounded. The shouts of battle blended into a single vast roaring noise, like wind or surf, individual cries swallowed up and made insignificant against the aggregate sound.
Amara murmured to Cirrus for a farseeing, then swept her gaze up and down the lines.
Last year, almost all of the enemy infantry had appeared as low-slung, swift-moving imitations of the vicious lizards of the Kalaran swamps called “garim.” Most of the rest had looked almost like nightmarish renditions of armored Alerans, their arms transformed into stabbing, chopping scythes, while great wings like those of beetles or perhaps dragonflies lifted them into aerial combat.
The vord had taken new forms.
Most of them, Amara saw, looked like some kind of enormous praying mantis, though squatter, more powerful-looking. They rushed across the ground on four legs, while the two lengthy forelimbs ended in more curving scythe blades. The reason for the change became apparent within seconds, when Amara saw one of those huge scythe-claws flash up, then down, at the end of the vord’s unnaturally long limb. Its point swept over the shieldwall of legionares of the Crown Legion, and plunged down with inhuman power, slamming through the top and rear of a luckless legionare’s helmet, slaying him instantly.
The vord did not stop there. The creature dragged the legionare’s body forth from the line, swinging it left and right as it did so, battering the legionares on either side of the dead man. Other vord rushed toward the disruption in the lines, and more men died as the creatures stabbed down with their blades, or hooked a legionare’s shield with them, to drag another man out of the defensive advantage of the line.
The vord had developed new tactics along with their new forms, it would seem.
But then, so had Aquitaine.
Within seconds of the vord assault, a pair of men stepped out of the rear ranks wielding great mauls of preposterous size—Knights Terra. Drawing their power from the earth beneath them, they stepped forward with the heavy weaponry, shattering chitin and slaying vord with every swing. Within seconds, they had killed or driven back the vord nearby, after which they returned to their original positions. As they did, a centurion, bellowing until his face was purple, kicked his men into a semblance of order and re-formed the line.
Amara looked up and down the lines, counting heavy weaponry. She was shocked at how many Knights Terra she could see, waiting in supporting positions in the third or fourth rank of each Legion, ready to step forward and steady any weak points in the shield line. Standard tactical doctrine insisted that the power represented by Knights Terra should be concentrated in one place, hammered into a deadly spearpoint that could thrust through any foe.
Then she realized—in the current situation, standard tactical doctrine had been superseded by the desperation of the Realm’s defenders. Standard doctrine was based upon the assumption that the furycrafting talent of a Knight would be in short supply, for the excellent reason that they nearly always were. But here, now, the Citizens standing to battle outnumbered the Legions’ Knights by an order of magnitude. They could afford to place the normally rare assets into supporting positions in the line. There would be plenty of furypower left over.
The medicos labored feverishly, dragging the wounded and dead back from the line, where they would be sorted into three categories. First came the most severely wounded, who would need the attentions of a healing tub merely to survive. Next priority went to those men most lightly wounded—a visit to a healing tub and a comparatively minor effort from a watercrafter would put them back into the lines in an hour.
And then came . . . everyone else. Men with their bellies ripped open could not hope to return to the fight, but neither were they in danger of expiring
from their injury within the day. Men with shattered ribs, their wind too short to permit them to scream, lay there in agony, their faces twisted with pain. They were worse off than those who had lost limbs and managed to stop the bleeding with bandages and tourniquets. A man whose eyes were a bloody, pulped ruin sat on the ground moaning and rocking back and forth. Scarlet tears streamed down his cheeks in a gruesome mask.
The dead, Amara thought morbidly, were better off than all of them: They could feel no pain.
“Countess!” Miles called.
Amara looked up to see that Aquitaine’s bodyguards had opened a way between them, though they didn’t look happy about it. Miles was standing in the newly created aisle, beckoning her, and Amara hurried to join him.
Miles walked her over to where Aquitaine sat on his horse beside a dozen of his furycrafting peers—High Lord Antillus, High Lord Phrygia and his son, High Lord and Lady Placida, High Lord Cereus, and a collection of Lords who, through talent or discipline, had established themselves as some of the most formidable furycrafters in the Realm.
“Countess,” Aquitaine said politely. “Today’s schedule is somewhat demanding. I am pressed for time.”
“It’s about to get worse,” Amara said. After a beat, she added, “Your Highness.”
Aquitaine gave her a razor-thin smile. “Elaborate.”
She informed him, in short, terse sentences, of the horde of feral furies. “And they’re moving fast. You’ve got maybe half an hour before they reach your lines.”
Aquitaine regarded her steadily, then dismounted, stepped a bit apart from the horses, and took to the air to see for himself. He returned within a pair of minutes and remounted, his expression closed and hard.
Silence spread around the little circle as the mounted Citizens traded uneasy looks.
“A furybinding?” Lady Placida said, finally. “On that scale? Is it even possi—” She paused to glance at her husband, who was giving her a wry look. She shook her head and continued. “Yes, as it is in fact happening at this very moment, of course it is possible.”
