Codex Alera 06 - First Lord's Fury

by Jim Butcher

  Amara rushed down toward Lady Placida, who tossed her long braid of red hair over her shoulder and turned to face her before she had come within a hundred feet, her sword in hand.

  Amara slowed, lifting both hands, until she had come close enough for Lady Placida to see her features in the light cast by the glowing falcon.

  “Countess Amara,” Lady Placida said. She returned the sword to her side with fluid grace. Her voice was roughened by smoke and exertion. Her eyes turned back down to the escaping wagon below, and she waved at the elderly man coaxing its overburdened mule, gesturing for him to continue. “What can I do for you?”

  “Did you know that there is no longer an aerial curtain over the city?” Amara called.

  Lady Placida’s eyes widened, noticeable even in the half-light against her smoke-stained face. “What? No, no it’s been complete madness here.” She looked around her, clearly calculating. “But that would mean that . . . bloody crows. We’re vulnerable.”

  Amara nodded. “Where is Aquitaine?”

  “The southern plaza. Probably still there.” Lady Placida flicked her wrist and sent the little fire falcon hurtling up into the night. “Countess, apprise the Princeps of the situation. I will warn the Citizens—behind you!”

  Amara immediately redirected Cirrus, and shot twenty feet down, to her left, and behind her. She turned over as she went, and had a brief vision of a man in black chitin-armor, long blade in hand, plunging toward her and compensating for her dodge. She twisted and arched her back in midair, and the sword swept by not two inches from the end of her nose.

  With a mental hammerblow of recognition, Amara realized that she knew the young man wearing the collar and armor of the vord. His name was Cantus Macio, a young Forcian Citizen who had attended the Academy in one of the same two-year terms she had been there. His dark blond hair was shorter than she remembered, his face and body heavier with maturity, but she remembered him. He’d shared several of her classes and been one of the minority of Citizens who would treat the relatively small number of freemen at the Academy with courtesy and respect—and had been one of the more capable furycrafters in his class.

  Macio’s eyes showed no similar recognition. They were wide and empty. Amara quickly changed her course to a reciprocal of his, which would buy her the largest lead before he could alter his own path of flight, dodging lightly around a column of smoke so that Macio wouldn’t be able to see her immediately.

  Above Amara, three more vord-armored forms had plunged down upon Lady Placida. She bobbed lightly in the air, left and right, then drew her slender sword and struck in the same motion. A shower of bright green sparks flared up, and the enemy flier she’d struck went soaring past her into an uncontrolled spin, trailing a bright scarlet spiral of blood. He slammed into a wall with sickening force, as Lady Placida shot straight upward, turning to engage the other two vord-taken Citizens.

  As the leading foe closed on her, Lady Placida reached out with one hand, and a wooden banner pole thrusting from the side of a tower suddenly twisted in place and lashed out like a club, striking one of the enemy fliers in the hip and sending him tumbling. The second flier closed to sword range, and sparks lashed out in emerald fountains as his blade met Lady Placida’s, chiming half a dozen times as the two swept past one another.

  Lady Placida spun in the air to face Amara, blood coursing from a cut on one cheek. “Countess!” she cried. “Find the Princeps!” Then she spun again, her lips locked in a defiant snarl, as the pole-struck Citizen swept past her, blade in hand. The light and steely music of the clash of powerful metalcrafters rang through the fire-choked night.

  Amara stared up at Lady Placida for a heartbeat, torn, but her duty was clear. Even more than its most capable furycrafters, the Realm needed leadership. Princeps Octavian might be on his way, but he was not here. Princeps Attis was. If Alera lost him now, in these chaotic circumstances, the confusion of sorting out who would take command could mean the destruction of the Legions as well as the civilians they fought to protect. They might never reach the fortifications at Calderon.

  She turned and willed Cirrus to plunge them both into the nearest plume of smoke, the better to hide from any pursuit, and rushed southward through the city’s towers. The route was treacherous, deadly. Slender stone bridges arched between some of the towers, and she nearly took her head off on one of them, concealed as it was in smoke and shadow. Banner poles and stone carvings thrust from the towers, too—but she dared not fly at street level. Below, where the refugees and lower-class civilians had dwelt in numbers, laundry lines frequently crisscrossed the streets. Hitting one at flight speed would be lethal.

  She found the southern plaza within moments—a broad, wide-open space of furycrafted stone that had been used as a market practically since Riva’s founding. A lone figure stood in the precise center of the plaza—and even from her elevation, Amara recognized the bearing and profile of Gaius Attis.

  In a circle around him, filling most of the rest of the plaza, stood more than a dozen feral furies, the smallest of them larger than a bull gargant. A serpent, its scales made of granite and obsidian, coiled upon itself, its back broader than a large city street. The deadly, wispy form of the wind-shark Amara had seen before came next, swirling and pacing in a circle all around Attis. A bull formed of knotted roots and hardwood boughs snorted and tossed its head, each of its horns longer than a legionare’s spear, while its cloven hooves scraped and scored the stone of the plaza.

  The air fairly shimmered with power, the energies of those enormous, aggressive furies thickening it until Amara felt that she could hardly breathe. She stared down for a few seconds, stunned. Furies of that size and strength were tremendously powerful, the sorts of beings that could only be mastered by the most powerful Citizens in the Realm. If anyone had commanded even one of these beings, it had been someone with the skill and power of a High Lord.

  And Gaius Attis was, quite calmly, holding a dozen of them in their places, like so many unruly schoolchildren.

  As she watched, he lifted one arm, his hand clenched into a fist, the gesture a beckoning, like a man hauling in on a heavy rope. The fury that faced him most directly, a long, lizardlike creature made of muddy water, arched as if in sudden agony and let out a howl like a thousand boiling teakettles. Then it simply flew into individual droplets of water, driven as if before a hurricane’s winds—directly toward Gaius Attis. His head dropped back and he let out a low cry of pain. Then, without a pause, he whirled toward the fire fury shaped like an animate, walking willow tree, flinging out his hand, and the water of the defeated lizard fury rushed toward the tree. As steam gushed forth, Gaius Attis jerked his arm toward him again in that same, beckoning gesture, and the steam and fire both rushed back toward him, swirling around him, and again he screamed.

  It hit Amara with a sudden shock—Gaius Attis was claiming new furies.

  She dared not approach him, not in that seething cauldron of raw power. Even if Cirrus hadn’t been loath to go near, she wouldn’t have tried it. Claiming furies was a dangerous business. Claiming furies of such size was . . . was practically lunacy. The energies unleashed by a struggling fury could bake a man to bones, rip him to shreds, and Amara did not have Gaius Attis’s formidable array of talents with which to insulate herself from harm.

  Instead, she landed on a nearby rooftop, gathered Cirrus to her, and sent him forth in a farspeaking crafting. They only functioned in a direct line of sight, and she didn’t know how badly the discharge of energies below would garble her message, but she could think of nothing else.

  “Your Highness,” she said, her voice urgent, “we’ve lost control of the local skies. Former Citizens are attacking the Citizens still attempting to aid the evacuation. It is imperative that you leave immediately.”

  Attis lifted his eyes and scanned the nearby rooftops until he spotted Amara. He grimaced and answered in a voice cut thin with strain. “A few moments more. I cannot permit these beings to run loose, Cursor.
They’ll leave this entire region uninhabitable for a thousand years.”

  “Don’t be a bloody fool, Your Highness,” Amara snarled back. “Without you, there might not be anyone left to inhabit it.”

  Attis snarled, his dark eyes smoldering for a moment with quite literal fire. “One doesn’t just drop everything and walk away from a business like this, Countess. You may note the eleven rather large and irate furies trying to kill me at the moment.”

  “How long will it take you to disengage?”

  Aquitaine gave a twitching shake of his head, then extended a hand toward the bull-shaped wood fury and ground his teeth. “Unknown,” he said, his voice strained. “Not long. If there are any survivors out here when they are freed, they won’t have a chance. If you would kindly cease jogging my elbow with this farspeaking . . .”

  Amara grimaced and recalled Cirrus and sensed the presence coming at her back as a ribbon of ice laid over her spine. She didn’t waste time looking back. She flung herself forward, off the five-story roof, and dropped like a rock.

  The stone edging of the roof behind her exploded into a cloud of gravel. One stone struck her hard in the back, another in the thigh. She grimly focused through the pain, calling upon Cirrus to cushion her fall, spun her body in midair, and, supported by the fury, landed in a catlike crouch. She leapt forward into a rolling dive, and an instant later a heavy boot slammed down onto the surface of the plaza with enough force to send cracks through the stone for ten feet in every direction.

  Amara drew her sword even as she came to her feet and raised it to a high guard position. She found Cantus Macio staring at her with blank eyes.

  “Macio,” she said, her voice shaking. “Hello. Do you remember me? From the Academy? Amara?”

  He tilted his head, watching her.

  Then he lifted his hand, and fire rushed at her in a swirling vortex.

  Amara called to Cirrus, raising a wall of wind to stop the onrushing fire, but Macio was simply far more powerful than she. The rush of wind shoved back against her with tremendous force as it tried to slow the onrushing firestorm, and Amara found herself tossed back like a leaf.

  Rather than fighting the motion, she spun into it, calling out to Cirrus again to take to the air—only to see the shimmer of something moving behind a windcrafted veil, and to feel a shock of stunning pain as an unseen fist slammed into her jaw.

  Amara staggered, her concentration upon maintaining flight shattered, and tumbled down. Fortunately, she’d had little time to gather altitude or speed, but even so, her landing upon the hard stone of the plaza was an acutely painful experience. Training let her turn her motion into a rolling one, but it still slammed her limbs brutally. Her weapon was knocked clear of her hand, and she counted herself lucky not to have wound up impaled on it.

  She struggled to push herself up, panicked. Speed was her only chance. She didn’t have the power she would need to confront Macio and his veiled ally directly. The only way she could survive would be to take the battle to the open skies. She found the wall of one of the buildings framing the plaza and used it to help herself stand.

  She had risen to her knees by the time Macio’s fist tangled painfully in her hair. He dragged her up with fury-born strength, lifting her flailing toes clear of the ground.

  Her arms felt like they’d been weighted with lead. She drew the knife from her belt and drove it up and back at the arm holding her. If she could cut the tendons, it wouldn’t matter how much earthcraft Macio knew—the mechanisms of his arm would be broken, and his grip would be gone. The cut slid off something rigid, probably the chitin-armor that encased Macio. Twisting her shoulders, she thrust one heel down at him, aiming for the knee. The blow struck home, but suspended as she was, it was weak. Macio grunted and shifted his weight, and her next two kicks hit what felt like this armored thigh, doing him no harm.

  Amara felt Macio’s arm surge with power and slam her into the stone wall behind her. Her teeth snapped together on her tongue as her back and shoulders hit the stone. The taste of blood filled her mouth. Stars clouded her vision, and her limbs hung limp and flaccid.

  Move. She had to move. Speed was her only chance.

  Macio drew his sword with a deliberate motion, frowning up at her as he did. Then he set the sword’s tip against her ribs, just beneath her left breast. It would be a thrust to the heart.

  “Amara,” he said, his voice that of someone who has recognized a former acquaintance at a dinner party. He nodded to himself, then said, “There’s no more Academy, you know.” His fingers tightened on the sword’s hilt. “I’m sorry.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Amara watched Macio’s eyes. They were clinically detached as he angled the blade for a thrust between the ribs and took a breath. In the instant before he pushed the weapon forward, she twisted to the side, drawing in her stomach as hard as she could. She could feel the edge of the sword burn a single hot line along her belly, but she was able to lash out with her fist and land an accurate, if weak, blow to the bridge of his nose.

  Macio rocked back from the strike, blinking involuntary tears from his eyes—and then abruptly turned his upper body, his sword sweeping up and back as though it had a will of its own. There was a crack of impact as something struck the blade, and a small cloud of spinning fragments of wood rose up from it.

  Wild hope surged through Amara, blazing through her body. The extra heartbeats the distraction had given her were time enough to sort out her terrified, stunned thoughts. She called upon Cirrus to lend her the fury’s speed and watched the world slow around her. Even as it did, she swept the knife up again in the strike she should have used in the first place, cutting not at Macio’s arm but at her own hair where he held her.

  The sharp knife parted her hair without slowing, and she fell free of his grip. She dropped to the ground and dived to one side. She saw his sword moving again, lazily graceful in the expanded time sensation of her windcrafting. A long, lean arrow fletched with green and brown feathers glided toward Macio’s head. The collared Citizen intercepted the arrow with his blade, and a second cloud of splinters flew out. Macio’s sword continued its plane of motion, driving toward Amara with almost-delicate grace. Her own body moved just as slowly, but she was able to slap the flat of the blade with her hand as its tip drove toward her abdomen, and the sword plunged past her to bite deep into the stone wall.

  Amara rolled over one shoulder, gathered her legs together beneath her as she did, and came to her feet with an explosive leap. Cirrus rushed into the air beneath her, bearing her up and away from Macio, avoiding the return sweep of his blade by the width of a finger.

  The plaza sat nestled deep between the high buildings of Riva, and she could feel Cirrus straining as her fury struggled to move enough stone-smothered air to take her into the open sky. The center of the plaza would have been a better location for a takeoff, but she could not possibly approach it through the ring of enormous furies still crouched there. Instead, trapped at the edge of the plaza, she lifted from the ground too slowly and was forced to stop trying to gain altitude before she struck the side of the building that was her goal.

  She grabbed a windowsill with one hand, drove the toes of her left foot against another, and, bolstered still by Cirrus, began to ascend the side of the building in an almost-spiderlike fashion.

  The presence of so much stone, which had limited Cirrus, would also have afflicted Macio’s wind furies—and the young man must have weighed nearly a hundred pounds more than she did. A quick glance over her shoulder showed her Macio sprinting toward her—but instead of employing windcrafting to pursue her, he let out a grunt and leapt explosively, drawing upon an earthcrafter’s strength to send himself hurtling up nearly three stories in a single bound. Eyes locked on Amara, he sank his fingertips into the stone as if it had been soft clay, and with earthcrafted power, he began scaling the building even more quickly than she could.

  Amara reached the top barely a breath ahead of Macio, caught her belly on
its edge, and struggled desperately to haul herself fully onto the roof.

  An iron grip settled on her ankle.

  She looked down, desperate, helpless against the power in Macio’s clutching hand—and prayed that she had correctly guessed from which building the earlier shots had come. Macio found purchase for one of his feet, and Amara knew that his next move would be simply to swing her by the ankle and smash her against the building’s side like an oversized porcelain doll.

  The wall three feet from the top of the building exploded outward with a resounding crack of shattering stone. A broad-knuckled hand snared the neck of Macio’s chitin-armor in an iron grip, and heaved back, smashing the young Citizen’s head against the side of the building. Macio let out a single, choking sound, then the hand gripping him slammed him to the stone again and again and again. Macio’s fingers slipped loosely from Amara’s ankle, and his blood spattered the wall. His neck snapped during the second or third impact. On the fifth, the wall actually gave way, and Macio’s body vanished into the interior of the tower. There were a few more ugly, heavy sounds of impact, of tearing flesh and breaking bone.

  Amara hauled herself wearily back onto the roof and lay there gasping with pain, exertion, and sheer terror. The horrible things she had seen that night came rushing back into her thoughts, and she found herself sobbing silently, clutching her belly as if to keep it from rupturing.

  Bernard’s hand touched her shoulder a moment later, and she opened her eyes to stare up at him. Her husband was covered in smoke stains, his face all but completely black. There was a fresh cut on one of his cheeks. Fresh blood, Macio’s blood, had splattered over his tunic, face, and neck. The dust and flakes of shattered stone, mixed to a paste with more blood, covered his right arm to the elbow. His Legion-issue gladius was at his side, opposite a wide-mouthed war quiver, and he held his heavy-limbed bow in his left hand.