by Jim Butcher
Isana stared at Invidia. She had heard Amara’s descriptions of the creature clinging to Invidia’s torso, its bulbous body pulsing in a rhythm like a slow heartbeat. But seeing it happening, seeing the blood that seeped weakly from where the creature’s head thrust into the woman’s chest, was a different matter altogether. Invidia had been many things to Isana—ally and manipulator, mentor and murderess. Isana had ample reason to hate the former High Lady, she supposed. But looking at her now, she could summon forth nothing more than pity.
And revulsion.
“That is a matter of viewpoint,” Isana replied to the vord Queen, her eyes never leaving Invidia. “I am attempting to understand you. I am attempting to enable you to understand us more clearly.”
“Knowledge may make you more able to prevail against me,” the Queen said. “It is a sensible course of action to pursue. But the reverse is also true. Why would you seek to allow me to understand your kind better?”
Invidia stepped forward. “Isn’t it obvious?” she asked, her voice calm. She looked nowhere but at Isana. “She senses the emotions in you, just as I do. She hopes to draw them out of you, to use them to influence your actions.”
The Queen’s mouth twisted into a chill smile. “Ah. Is that true, Isana?”
“From a certain point of view,” Isana replied. “I hoped to reach out to you. To convince you to cease hostilities.”
“Invidia,” the Queen said, “how would you evaluate her skills at watercrafting?”
“As the equal of my own,” Invidia replied smoothly. “To be cautious, I would say that she was my equal at least.”
The vord Queen absorbed that for a moment. Then she nodded. “In your judgment, is there anything she could directly accomplish by this method?”
“Only to learn how pointless it is to try,” Invidia replied, her voice tired.
“There is without question emotion like our own inside you. But you do not feel it in the same way we do. It does not influence your decisions or judgment.” She stared at Isana without any emotion showing on her face or in her manner, and said, “Believe me. I’ve tried. It is already over, Isana. If you would reduce the pain and suffering our people experience, you should advise them to surrender.”
“They would not listen,” the Queen said dismissively. “And besides, I’m not letting her go.”
Invidia frowned. “Then I see no value in keeping her—or her lover—alive.”
“Let us say that it is for the good of the Aleran people,” the Queen said.
Isana jerked her gaze from the treacherous High Lady to the Queen. “What?”
The Queen shrugged a shoulder, a gesture Isana found somehow familiar and intensely uncomfortable. “The Aleran people suffer because they fight. They will never surrender the fight so long as Gaius Octavian is alive. Gaius Attis might give them the ability to resist, for now—but he is a pretender, and your people know it. So long as the true heir to the House of Gaius walks the land, there will always be many who will fight. He must be dealt with.”
The Queen pointed a clawed fingertip at Isana. “Octavian’s mother is in my control. He will be forced to come to me in an attempt to preserve her life. However, by all accounts she has demonstrated irrational resolve in the past. She might destroy herself to prevent Octavian from coming after her—which is why I need the male alive and unharmed. So long as he remains so, she will retain the hope that both of them might escape this place together.”
Isana tried to prevent herself from shivering at the cold, detached calculation in the Queen’s voice, at the calm precision of her logic. She couldn’t.
“I have her,” the Queen said. “Having her will give me Octavian. When he is dead, the rest of Alera will crumble and yield. Better for me and my children. Better for them.”
“Kill them both,” Invidia suggested. “Revenge may draw him to you as surely as concern.”
The vord Queen bared her green-black teeth in a smile. “Ah. His progenitor’s progenitor waited nearly twenty-five years to take his vengeance when the time was right. That bloodline does not seek to redress such imbalances in . . . what is the phrase? In fire?”
“In hot blood,” Isana said quietly.
“Exactly,” said the vord Queen. She turned to Invidia. “Why are you not in the field?”
“Two reasons,” Invidia said. “First, our spies in Antillus report that Octavian and his Legions marched to the north nearly two days ago.”
“What?” the Queen said. “Where are they now?”
Invidia’s mouth curled into a chilly little smile. “We know nothing more. Your horde arrived at Antillus several hours ago. It has enfolded the city and is taking losses at more than triple the rate of any other besieged city.”
The Queen’s black-jewel eyes narrowed. “Canim conscripts fighting alone cannot put up such resistance.”
“Nasaug’s conscripts have an unusually high degree of training and experience. They are considerably more formidable than the conscripts in Canea,” Invidia said. After the slightest of pauses, she added, “As I warned you.”
The vord Queen’s eyes flashed with silent anger. “Octavian must have some plan for the Shieldwall. It is the only significant structure north of Antillus. I will dispatch airborne warrior forms to patrol the Wall and locate him.”
“The second reason I am here,” Invidia continued, “is because while you have been chatting with the woman who cannot directly harm you, your attention has wavered from the battle. The High Lord and Lady of Placida and my former husband have been freed from the press of the fight to redirect the feral furies we loosed upon them. They have nothing like overt control, but they have driven most of the ferals out of Riva and away from the fleeing civilians. Our own troops are now suffering at least as heavily from their attentions as are the Legions.”
The vord Queen’s eyes widened, and she whirled to stare at Isana.
“I was also hoping,” Isana said mildly, folding her hands in front of her, “to distract your attention from the fight. I thought it might weaken the coordination of your creatures if you weren’t constantly overseeing them.”
The vord Queen’s eyes blazed for a moment, flickering with odd motes of brilliant green light. Then she whirled and strode back into the area from which she had stared at the battle before. “Get back out there. Take my singulares. Find and destroy any High Lord or Lady you can isolate. I will see to it that their attention is directed elsewhere.”
Invidia lifted her chin. “It might be better to accept our losses and plan for the next—”
The Queen whirled, her face suffused with rage, and shrieked in a voice like tearing metal, “FIND THEM!”
The sheer volume of the scream slammed against Isana like a fist, and she staggered back against the wall. She sagged there for a moment, her ears ringing, and felt a trickle of heat upon her upper lip; her nose had begun bleeding.
In the stunned seconds of silence after, she found herself blinking dully, staring at the unmoving Araris, his scarred face slack, his eyes opened and focused—
Isana froze.
Araris met her eyes for an instant, gazing through a murky half inch of croach. Then his eyes flicked down, and back up to hers. Isana glanced down.
She had not before noted that Araris stood with one hand behind his back—where he was, she abruptly realized, clasping the solid steel handle of the dagger secreted beneath his wide belt. Steel, which might be shielding his mind against numbness, against pain, against the disorientation of any toxins within the alien substance, just as it had utterly hidden his emotional presence from Isana’s own senses—and presumably from those of the vord Queen and Invidia Aquitaine.
Araris Valerian, arguably the greatest swordsman of his generation, was not yet out of the fight.
He met her eyes for a breath, winked at her once, then closed them again.
Isana straightened her spine slowly and made sure her emotions and expression were under control as she turned back to face Invidia an
d the vord Queen.
Invidia was smiling at the Queen, her expression, beneath its chill veneer, balanced between terror and glee. Then she inclined her head and swept out of the chamber.
The vord Queen said, to Isana, “This will only cause more pain.” Then she lifted her face again, and the walls and ceiling of the chamber began to glow once more. “In the end it will change nothing. I will kill Octavian. I will kill you all.”
In the silence that followed, Isana suppressed a surge of fury. How dare she? How dare this creature threaten her son?
No, Isana thought to herself, grimly. No, you won’t.
CHAPTER 20
Riva burned, illuminating the moonless night.
“There’s always a fire,” Amara said, her tone dull. “Why is there always a fire?”
“Fire’s a living thing,” Sir Ehren replied. He stared at the city as Amara did, looking up at it from the plain on its northern side. Refugees streamed past them in a dazed, shambling river, directed by elements of the Rivan civic legion, and flanked by the legionares of Riva. “If you don’t control it, it looks for food, eats, and grows. It’s in every house in the city, and it just takes a moment’s carelessness to set it loose.” He shrugged. “Though I imagine all the feral furies had something to do with it, too.”
A windmane swept out of the night, letting out a whistling shriek as it dived toward the pair of Cursors speaking at the side of the causeway. Amara idly lifted a hand and made an effort of will. Cirrus flung himself at the hostile fury in a rush of wind, and as the two met, Amara’s fury was outlined in ghostly white light, a specter of a long-legged horse. Like a dozen others in the past hour, the clash was brief. Cirrus’s lashing hooves rapidly drove the windmane away.
“Countess,” Ehren said. “I understand that you were in the city.”
Amara nodded. She felt oddly detached from the events of the night, smooth and unruffled. She wasn’t calm, of course. After what she had seen, only a madwoman would be calm. She suspected it was more like going numb. The terrified, wounded flood of humanity in front of her would have been heart-wrenching if she hadn’t seen so much worse within Riva’s walls as the feral furies overran them. “For a while. I was bearing messages back and forth between Riva and Aquitaine.”
Ehren studied her intently for a moment. Then he said, “That bad?”
“I saw an earth fury that looked like a gargant bull knock down a building being used to shelter orphaned children,” she said in a level tone. “I saw a pregnant woman burned to black bones by a fire fury. I saw an old woman dragged down into a well by a water fury, her husband holding her wrists the whole way. He went with her.” She paused, musing over the placid, inflectionless calm of her own voice, and added, “The second minute was worse.”
Ehren folded his arms and shivered. “I hate to think what would have happened if the High Lords hadn’t been able to return to the city to drive some of the ferals away.”
“True,” Amara said.
“Countess. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Perfectly.”
The little Cursor nodded. “And . . . the Count?”
Amara felt herself grow more distant. She thought it was likely the only reason she wasn’t weeping hysterically. “I don’t know. He was part of Riva’s command staff. He wasn’t there.”
Ehren nodded. “He . . . doesn’t seem the sort of man to stay indoors when something like this is happening.”
“No. He isn’t.”
“If I had to guess,” Ehren said diffidently, “I’d say he was probably assisting in the evacuation. And that you’ll see him as soon as he’s gotten everyone he can out of the city.”
“It wouldn’t be out of character,” Amara agreed. She took a deep drink from a flask of water she’d forgotten she was holding. Then she passed it back to Ehren. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” he said. “Where are you going now?”
“I’m to help provide an air patrol over the refugee column,” Amara said. “Princeps Attis thinks that their aerial troops will be in position to attack us farther down the causeway.” She paused, then asked, “And you?”
“I’m consolidating the food and supplies of the column,” Ehren said with a grimace. “Which closely resembles bald theft—especially to everyone whose food I order taken away.”
“There’s no choice,” Amara said. “Without rationing, most of these people won’t have the strength to reach Calderon.”
“I know,” Ehren said, “but that doesn’t make it any more palatable.” They both fell quiet and watched the refugees shuffle past. “Crows.” He sighed. “Hard to believe that this could have been worse. Give the Princeps his due. He reacted quickly. He’s light on his feet.”
Amara felt a thought stirring, deep down beneath the numbness. She frowned. “Yes,” she said. “The presence of the High Lords in the city made the difference . . .” She drew in a sharp breath as the thought crystallized in her head. “Sir Ehren. The vord will strike at them.”
“I wish them good luck,” Ehren snorted. “The High Lords are more than capable of handling an attack from any of the vord we’ve seen in this battle.”
“What about from their fellow Citizens?” Amara asked. “Such as the ones who took Lady Isana.”
Ehren’s mouth opened slightly. “Ah,” he said. “Oh dear.”
Amara spun on her heel, leapt into the air, and let Cirrus lift her aloft. She gathered speed and was shortly hurtling like an arrow toward the burning city.
Amara soared up toward the High Lord’s citadel, the tallest of many towers in the great city. Several times, she had to bank around columns of thick black smoke. The air was turbulent as fires spread below.
She could hear the battle raging south of the city. Drums rolled, pounding out messages. Horns blared. The huge, hollow thumps of the more traditional fire-spheres thrummed through the air, whumping irregularly against Amara’s chest. Though the screams of wounded legionares did not reach her, the shrieks of dying vord carried through the air, the distance removing the steely menace from their high-pitched cries. They rather sounded like a distant, enormous flock of birds.
Amara wasn’t far enough away to escape the pain and terror of the night, though. Human shouts and cries and screams came up from the city—the men of the civic legion, trying to rescue those trapped by fires, the wounded, the dying. She saw several vord as she overflew the city—solitary warriors, leaner and swifter-looking than those attacking the front lines, who had somehow made their way into the city during the night’s confusion. Teams of three and four armored men, probably Knights Ferrous, seemed to be hunting the vord in turn, stalking through the blazing, panicked maze of Riva’s dying streets.
Knights Aeris and Citizens with the ability to fly were everywhere above the city, pulling trapped civilians from the fires, and Amara fancied that from a distance they must all look like so many moths—dark silhouettes in the air fluttering around Riva’s flames.
Rogue furies roamed the streets and rooftops, constantly repelled by the efforts of a single Citizen or by groups of civilians working in concert. Amara herself had bowled several more windmanes out of her path on the way to the city. At least the feral furies were not as numerous or aggressive as they had been in the hours before, though they were still deadly dangerous to any who met them without sufficient furycraft to defend themselves.
Lights moved through the streets, furylamps carried by fleeing civilians: The wounded and young and elderly piled into the few remaining wagons and their legionare escorts, mostly. The fires cast lights on some of the streets, but the shadows in the others were all the deeper for them.
The High Lord’s tower was the sole island of order and calm within the city walls. Lights blazed all around it, reflecting from the shining armor of the singulares on duty there. The tower had a wide stone balcony winding around its entire exterior, from which the High Lord could look out over his city. As Amara approached, she could see Lord Riva’s entourage, ga
thered around the man himself, as he paced a steady circle around the balcony, delivering orders to messengers who came and went with desperate haste.
Far too much desperate haste, Amara realized. The havoc resulting from the vord assault had thrown the entire defense of the city into chaos; there was no visible air patrol over the High Lord’s tower. Doubtless, Riva was planning to leave the city within the next hour and had dispatched the majority of his fliers to escort the fleeing refugees. Most of the other fliers were even now saving the lives of those trapped behind burning buildings, much as Amara had done during a fire in the capital during her days in the Academy, starving fires of air on a small scale or using walls of wind to shield those the fires would have consumed. Any remaining fliers had doubtless been pressed into service as messengers, coordinating with Gaius Attis and the Legions.
Black shapes darted and flitted through the smoke and firelight and shadows that covered the city, seemingly moving at random through the crisis. Amara gritted her teeth. She and a class of first-year Cursors from the Academy could have flown into the city blowing trumpets and breathing fire without being noticed, much less stopped. Any of those swift-moving human forms could be enemy fliers.
Amara looked wildly around the city, struggling vainly to identify Gaius Attis or one of the High Lords or Ladies. She darted up several dozen yards to try to get a better view. Riva’s lofty towers—Great furies, what kind of crowbegotten competitive delusion infected this city’s architects, to build so many of the bloody things?—presented a dizzying aerial maze of cornices, arches, and spires. The fires below and the rising columns of smoke threw off every angle, made distances difficult to judge, and reduced every airborne figure to a featureless outline.
There, down near the street level. An avian shriek rose from below, and a falcon-shaped burst of white-hot flame soared down into an alleyway, plunging in a raptor’s strike. The light from the fire fury briefly illuminated one of the vord infiltrators, lurking not thirty feet from a laboring wagon heavily loaded with wounded civilians. The fire falcon exploded into a fireball that shattered and scattered the enemy horror, leaving behind half a dozen small fires and a large, greasy stain. Campfire sparks leapt from the smaller fires, swirling into a flowing stream that rushed up through the air and gathered upon the extended wrist of a woman dressed in legionare’s armor. The sparks congealed into the form of a small, almost delicate hunting falcon, and let out another whistling shriek that somehow conveyed a fierce sense of primal triumph.
