by Jim Butcher
He gathered her up with his left arm and all but crushed her to his chest. Amara clutched him back, feeling the warmth and strength of him against her. “It’s about time,” she whispered.
“I leave you alone for an hour, woman,” he said, his voice shaking. “And I find you running around with a younger man.”
She let out a choking little laugh that threatened to bring out more sobs and held him for another few heartbeats. Then she pushed gently at him, and he rose, lifting her to her feet. “We c-can’t,” she said. “There are more of them around.”
The dull cough of a nearby firecrafting thudded through the air in punctuation. There was an extended roaring sound, and a cloud of dust began to emerge from farther in the city, joining the smoke and fire.
“More of the crafters the vord took?” Bernard said. “Why are they here?”
“They came for the Citizens,” Amara said. “At least one of them was nearby under a veil. He hit me hard enough to let the other catch up with me.”
As she finished speaking, there was a howl of wind above them, and a pair of dark forms streaked by, firelight flickering on steel, showers of sparks exploding irregularly between them. Two others darted after the first pair, converging on them from different angles and altitudes. A few seconds later, far overhead, multiple spheres of white-hot fire burst into life in a rapid line of explosions. Distant, staccato thumps followed. Then a series of deep blue streaks answered the spheres, flashing in the other direction. A hissing drone, like a rainstorm hitting a hot skillet, followed a few moments later.
“Bloody crows,” Bernard breathed. “This is not a smart place to be.”
“No,” Amara said. “Those are good signs.”
Bernard frowned at her.
Amara gestured wearily at the sky. “The enemy crafters must have been working in stealth, picking off our Citizens as they tried to help the city. They had probably been doing it for half an hour or more before I ever arrived. If there’s open battle now, it means that those stealthy operations ceased to be useful to the enemy. Lady Placida must have gotten the word out to her fellow Citizens.”
Bernard grunted. “Maybe. Or maybe half of the enemy crafters are making a big show of it while the rest lurk and wait for a chance to ambush distracted Citizens.”
Amara shivered. “You are a devious man.” Then she glanced down at the plaza and back to Bernard. “What are you doing up here?” she asked.
“Watching Aquitaine,” he said. His voice was quiet and completely neutral. “His singulares got torn up something terrible by that bull fury. The ones who could walk had to drag out the ones who couldn’t. Left him there all alone.”
“Watching him,” Amara said quietly. “Not watching over him.”
“That’s right.”
Amara bit her lip. “Despite the loyalty a Citizen owes to the Crown and its heirs.”
The fingers of her husband’s blood-encrusted right hand clenched into a fist. “The man’s directly responsible for the deaths of more than four hundred of my friends and neighbors. Some of them my own bloody holders. According to Isana, he makes no secret of the fact that he may someday deem it necessary to kill my nephew.” He stared out at the lone figure in the plaza, and his quiet voice burned with heat without growing louder, while his green eyes seemed to gather a layer of frost. “The murdering son of a bitch should count himself lucky I haven’t paid him what he’s owed.” His lips pressed together, staring at Attis’s motionless, focused form amidst half a dozen enormous furies. “Right now, it’d be easy.”
“We need him,” Amara said.
Bernard’s jaw clenched.
Amara put a hand on his arm. “We need him.”
He glanced aside at her, took a slow breath, and made a motion of his head that was so miniscule that it could hardly be recognized as a nod. “Doesn’t mean I have to like—”
His head whipped around, and his body began to follow before Amara heard the light tread upon the stone roof. She turned to see a faint blur in the air, someone hidden behind a windcrafted veil and approaching with terrifying speed. Then there was a sound of impact and Bernard let out a croaking gasp, doubling over. The blur moved again, and Bernard’s head snapped violently to one side. Teeth knocked loose from his jaw rattled onto the roof like a small handful of ivory dice, and he crumpled to the floor beside them, senseless or dead.
Amara reached for Cirrus and her weapon simultaneously, but their attacker flung out a nearly invisible arm and a handful of salt crystals struck her, sending the wind fury into disruptive convulsions of ethereal agony. Her sword was not halfway from its sheath before a thread of cold steel, the tip of a long, slender blade, lay against her throat.
The blade shimmered into visibility, then the hand behind it, then the arm behind the hand, and suddenly Amara found herself facing the former High Lady of Aquitaine. Invidia stood clad all in black chitin, and that same horrible, pulsing parasite-creature was locked about her torso. Her hair was dark and unkempt, her eyes sunken, and her skin had an unhealthy pallor.
“And to think,” Invidia said. “I’ve spent the last half an hour scouring this entire plaza looking for the singulares I was sure Attis had hidden. Quite unlike him to use nonexistence as camouflage, though I suppose it did make them impossible to find. Hello, Countess.”
Amara shot her motionless husband a glance, swept her eyes over the plaza below, and clenched her teeth. “Go to the crows, traitor.”
“Oh, I have,” Invidia said lightly. “They’d begun to peck at my eyes and lips when the vord found me. I am disinclined to repeat the experience.”
Amara felt a chill smile stretch her lips. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”
“Come, Countess,” Invidia replied. “It is far too late for any of us to seek redemption for our sins now.”
“Then why haven’t you killed me and had done?” Amara replied, lifting her chin to bare more of her throat to Invidia’s blade. “Lonely, are we? Missing the company of our fellow human beings? Needing some scrap of respect? Forgiveness? Approval?”
Invidia stared at her for a moment though her eyes looked through Amara as though she weren’t there. A frown creased her brow. “Perhaps,” she said.
“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you began murdering us all,” Amara spat. “You aren’t wearing a collar, like the others. They’re slaves. You’re free. You’re here by choice.”
Invidia let out a harsh laugh. “Is that what you think? That I have a choice?” Amara arched an eyebrow. “Yes. Between death and destroying your own kind. You could defy the vord and die of the poison still in you—die horribly. But instead you’ve chosen to let everyone else die in your place.”
Invidia’s eyes widened, and her lips peeled back from her teeth in an unnatural grimace.
“The truly sad part,” Amara said, naked contempt ringing in her voice, “is that in the end, it will make no difference. The moment you are more of a threat than an asset to them, the vord will kill you. You selfish, petulant child. All the blood on your hands has been for nothing.”
Invidia’s jaws clenched, and spots of color appeared high on her cheeks. Her whole body began shaking. “Who,” she whispered. “Who do you think you are?”
Amara learned into the blade and met Invidia’s eyes with her own. “I know who I am. I am the Countess Calderonus Amara, Cursor of the Crown, loyal servant of Alera and the House of Gaius. Though it cost me my life, I know who I am.” She bared her own teeth in a wolfish smile. “And we both know who you are. You’ve chosen your side, traitor. Get on with it.”
Invidia stood motionless. The many fires blew a hot wind over the rooftop. Somewhere, there was a roar of collapsing masonry as a building succumbed. Distant thumps of firecrafting pulsed irregularly through the night. The distant desperation of the trumpets and drums of the embattled Legions remained a constant, hardly noticed music.
“So be it,” Invidia hissed.
And then the rooftop exploded in
to motion.
Amara called upon Cirrus, and the wounded fury flooded into her, lending speed and agony alike as time seemed to slow down. Amara surged forward, bobbing down, and ducked under the quick cut that Invidia flicked at her neck. Given the fury-born strength of the former High Lady, had the blow landed, Amara had no doubt that it would have killed her. She coiled her knee up against her chest as she moved, then, one hand coming down to rest lightly on the rooftop, she drove her leg out, all the strength of her hips and legs behind it, the power driven with brutally concentrated force through her heel and into Invidia’s hip.
Invidia’s armor absorbed much of the bone-breaking power of the blow, but it struck her with such speed that its force drove her back through the air. The incredible strength conveyed by furycraft did nothing to add to her body’s mass, after all, and Amara’s kick had moved with such raw speed that even had she possessed the superior strength of an earthcrafter, it would have been all but redundant.
Amara felt her ankle snap, and the pain, added to Cirrus’s own agony, was enough to wash away her concentration on her windcrafting. The world returned to its usual pace, and Invidia crashed backward into the low stone rim that lined the edge of the roof. She hit with brutal force, and a cry was driven from her lungs. She shook her head and lifted a hand, her eyes blazing with sudden fury.
Then fire exploded directly upon her, the white-hot fury of a Knight Ignus’s fire-sphere, intensified by an order of magnitude. The bloom of scalding heat washed back over Amara in a flood that flung her ragged-cut hair straight back from her head, and she threw herself to the ground to shield the unmoving Bernard’s face from the scalding heat of that blast.
She looked back a moment later, her eyes still dazzled from the intensity, and found that half of the building’s rooftop, the part where Invidia had stood, was simply gone. There was no rubble, no fires, no dust—the building simply ceased to be in the area of a sphere the diameter of a couple of carriages. The places where the building had been devoured were cut as neatly as if with a knife, the very edge of the original material burned black and otherwise perfectly in shape. A terrible smell filled the air.
There was no sign of Invidia.
There was the sound of a very light impact on the rooftop nearby. Amara looked up to see another veiled, nearly invisible shape, standing ten feet away, facing the sterile destruction on the rooftop. “I do hope,” Gaius Attis murmured, “that you were not burned. I tried to contain the spread of the heat.”
“You used us,” Amara snarled. She jerked her furious gaze away from Attis’s veiled form. Sheer pain had all but blinded her with tears, but she found Bernard’s throat with her fingers. His pulse beat steady and strong, though he still wasn’t moving. His own fury-born strength had enabled him to survive Invidia’s blow to the jaw. Had such a strike landed on Amara, it would have broken her neck.
“It was necessary,” Attis replied evenly. He turned, scanning the smoke-and-fire skies over Riva. “Invidia would never have exposed herself to me if she did not think she could kill me easily, such as when I was distracted with those furies. And if she hadn’t found someone watching over me, she would have assumed my guard to be too well concealed, and not shown herself for fear of being taken by surprise. You and your Count are both capable enough that it was feasible you might have been entrusted with warning me of danger but vulnerable enough to be quickly overwhelmed by someone of Invidia’s caliber.”
“She might have killed us both,” Amara said.
“Quite,” Attis answered. “But not without revealing her presence.”
Amara stared at him hard for a moment, blinking tears from her eyes. “Those weren’t feral furies,” she said. “They were yours, disguised.”
“Obviously, Cursor. Honestly, do you think I would stand about completely unprotected when the slightest disturbance would result in my death? When a person with a great deal of dangerous personal knowledge about me is running about with the vord during an assault?” He paused reflectively. “I regret that I couldn’t tell you or your Count what I was doing, but it would rather have defeated the point.”
“You risked our lives,” Amara said. “Wounded some of your own bodyguards. And you didn’t even know that she would show herself.”
“Incorrect,” he replied. He knelt to begin picking up the unconscious Bernard. “Invidia has an acute talent for sensing weakness and exploiting it.”
There was a hissing sound, and a slender sword, its blade a shaft of vord green fire, abruptly emerged from the stone beneath Attis’s feet and thrust up into his groin. Attis screamed and flung himself away from the blade, which cut its way free of his body with a sizzling, hissing wail. He only barely managed to stumble aside as a three-foot circle of stone roof exploded upward and outward.
A figure emerged from below, all black chitin and scorched flesh, holding the blazing green blade in its hand. It was bald, its scalp burned black. Amara could scarcely have recognized Invidia if not for the quivering, pulsing, agonized movements of the badly scorched creature that clung to her over her heart. “I do know how to exploit weakness,” she hissed, her voice a rasping croak, “such as your insufferable tendency to gloat after a victory, Attis.”
Attis lay on the rooftop, white as a sheet. His right hand twitched in what seemed a complete lack of controlled movement. Both legs were limp. He wasn’t bleeding, but the white-hot blades the high Citizenry employed almost always cauterized wounds. Only the fact that he was propped up against the roof ’s stone rim prevented him from simply lying supine.
His left hand moved jerkily to his jacket, then emerged with a paper envelope. He flicked it weakly across the distance to Invidia, and it landed touching her feet. “For you. Love what you’ve done with your hair.”
Invidia bared her teeth in a smile. Blood ran from her burned lips. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes were eerie against the unbroken black scorching of her face. “And what is this?”
“Your copy of the divorce papers.”
“How thoughtful.”
“Necessary. I couldn’t legally be rid of you until I had served them.”
Invidia’s smile didn’t waver as she walked forward, sword hissing as its flames caressed the cool air. “You’re rid of me now.”
He inclined his head in a mocking bow, his face a mask of calm disdain. “And that not soon enough.”
“For either of us,” she purred.
There was a raptor’s cry and a small falcon of white-hot fire hammered into the rooftop at Invidia’s feet, spreading in an instant into a blazing wall between her and Attis.
Amara’s exhausted gaze rose to the skies, where half a dozen fliers, the weapons of each and every one of them ablaze with fire, were already stooping into a dive that would carry them down to the embattled rooftop. They dived in an irregular wedge, and Placidus Aria led the way, burning sword in hand, the hems of her skirts snapping and tearing in the speed of her flight.
Attis began to let out weak, choking, scornful laughter.
“Bloody crows,” Invidia snarled. She spun and flung herself off the back side of the building, vanishing from sight even as wind began to howl, carrying her into a heavy smoke cloud.
Amara clung to Bernard as three of the new arrivals settled on the roof while the other three stayed aloft. Old High Lord Cereus, his white hair orange in the firelight, came down beside the Lord and Lady of Placida, while Phrygius, his son, and High Lord Riva stood guard in the air.
“Aria,” Amara called. “The Princeps needs a healing tub, immediately.”
“Hardly,” Attis said, his tone calm. “That’s rather the point of firecrafting the sword’s blade, after all. It’s all but impossible to heal a cauterized wound.”
“Oh, be quiet,” Amara snapped. After clenching her jaws for a moment, she added, “Your Highness.”
Aria went to Gaius Attis, took a brief look at his injuries, and shook her head. “The city is lost. We’re rendezvousing with the Legions’ rear guard n
ow. We’ve got to move.”
“As you wish,” Attis said. “Thank you, by the way, for intervening. I’d hate to give her the satisfaction.”
“Don’t thank me,” Aria replied tartly. “Thank Amara. Without her warning, I might not be alive at all.” She bent over, grunted, and hauled the wounded man up and over one armored shoulder.
“Hurry!” called one of the men above them. “The vord have breached the wall!”
Without a word, High Lord Placida picked up Bernard. Cereus slipped one of Amara’s arms over his shoulders and lifted her to stand beside him, favoring her with a kindly smile. “I hope you don’t mind letting me do the honors, Countess.”
“Please,” Amara said. She felt quite dizzy. “Feel free.”
The six of them lifted off the roof in a roar of wind, and Amara saw little point in staying awake for what followed.
CHAPTER 22
The ice ships flew over the bitterly cold miles at a speed that, at times, beggared the wind that drove them. Marcus felt fairly sure that such a feat was mathematically impossible by any reasonable standard. The captain of the ship he rode upon had been to the Academy, or so he claimed. He said something about the momentum upon the slight downhill slopes gradually adding up, and that the pressure on the ships’ steel runners actually turned the ice immediately beneath them into a thin layer of water.
Marcus didn’t care about explanations. It all seemed awfully shady to him.
The fleet stopped every six hours, to make repairs that were inevitably made necessary by the battering the wooden hulls endured and to give ships that had been forced to stop for repairs a chance to catch up with the rest of them. Marcus savored the rests. The entire fleet had seen the wreckage of the ships that had overbalanced and failed, and there wasn’t a thinking being among them who hadn’t realized exactly what condition his corpse would be in should his own ship run afoul of bad fortune.
