by Jim Butcher
Marcus waited for Sha to finish speaking, then shoved Khral roughly away, releasing his ear. Khral babbled incoherently in Canim, and it sounded like he was trying to cling to Sha.
Marcus heard Sha’s saw-toothed tool leave its sheath, heard it strike with a meaty thump. Khral let out a scream. An instant later, Marcus smelled bile and sewage. Sha had gutted the ritualist.
Marcus put his hand on the earthen wall again and willed the tunneling to begin moving again. Khral began to babble in greater panic as the sphere of air moved away from him, left him behind. He kept on babbling and screaming until, a few seconds later, his voice abruptly vanished.
Sha let out a satisfied growl but otherwise made no comment.
They emerged where they had entered the tunneling, with Marcus checking warily before they climbed out—but he found that no one was paying any attention. The horns were still blowing. Marcus swept his gaze around as best he could and spotted winged black forms high overhead, flying up from the south. Vordknights.
“Come on!” Marcus growled to Sha as he clambered back up onto the sheet ice.
Sha came out hard on Marcus’s heels and let out a snarl.
“Aye,” Marcus said in reply. “We’re under attack.”
CHAPTER 23
Marcus hadn’t run twenty feet when Antillus Crassus came soaring out of the open sky on a roaring column of cold wind, landing beside him and dropping into a run with him. “First Spear! Captain wants you!”
“Where?” Marcus called back. Drums and horns continued sounding, and everywhere Canim and Alerans alike were running back toward their ships. Flags were being run up masts—the green pennants that were the signal to continue on course at full speed.
Instead of answering, Crassus dragged one of Marcus’s arms over his shoulders, clamped onto him with an iron grip, and both of them were lifted off their feet by a surge of gale winds. The ice below receded as they arched sharply into the air, and Marcus found himself fighting not to cling to the young Tribune for dear life. He hated flying, hated being utterly at the mercy of another’s talent and judgment. They swept over two dozen tall-masted ships swarming with activity, and all the while, the distant forms of the flying vord grew closer.
The flight was a brief one—more like an excessively long jump than Marcus’s previous experiences with flight. They came down directly onto the deck of the Slive, sending a pair of coiled lines slithering over the deck and earning a glare of reprimand from Captain Demos. Crassus clapped Marcus on the shoulder and bounded back into the air, soaring up to join the fliers of the Knights Pisces already in the air. They were spread out into a covering formation around the Slive.
Marcus spotted the captain up near the prow, speaking intently with Maestro Magnus. The Ambassador stood with him, wearing a mail shirt, the only armor he’d ever seen her wearing. Maximus and two of the First Aleran’s Knights Ferrous loitered nearby, and Marcus noted that all of the Slive’s most skilled swordsmen, some of them capable of being Knights Ferrous themselves, were doing their jobs in the areas nearest the captain.
Marcus strode to the front of the ship, stepping over a pair of heavy, loose poles on the way—replacement spars for the rigging, probably—and banged his fist to his heart in salute. “Captain.”
“Marcus,” the captain replied. He frowned and nodded down at Marcus’s armor. “What happened?”
Marcus glanced down. He hadn’t seen any blood splatter on his armor aboard Khral’s ship. It must have happened during the tunneling, when Sha had gutted the scheming ritualist. The speckles of blood had been smeared by the wind of his short flight, but fortunately that helped to thin it out, disguising its true color. Canim blood was darker than Aleran, but spread thin over the surface of his armor, it looked almost the same. “Just one crowbegotten thing after another, sir,” he answered.
“Tell me about it,” the captain said. He squinted up into the grey sky and nodded at the incoming enemy. “Tell me what you see, First Spear.”
Marcus grunted and turned to look as well. His eyes weren’t what they used to be, but he could make things out well enough to understand what the captain meant.
“That’s not an attack force, sir,” he said after a moment. “There’s not enough of them, and they’re spread too thin.”
The captain grinned as the wind began to gust harder than it had all morning. “That was my thought as well.”
“Scouts,” Marcus said.
The captain nodded. “Maybe spread all up and down the Shieldwall.”
With a grinding sound, the vessel nearest the Slive began to move, her sails bellying out before the cold wind. Up and down the line, other ships were getting under way, though the Slive’s sails were still furled.
“Why?” Marcus asked.
“Looking for us, naturally,” the captain replied. “I think odds are good that the vord knew we left Antillus marching north. And even though this idea has worked out, it wouldn’t take a genius to deduce that the only major structure north of Antillus might play a role in whatever we had planned.”
Marcus grunted. It made sense. The vord could spare a few thousand fliers for scouting duties, and barring the windcrafters enslaved by the enemy, the vordknights were the fastest troops they possessed. More ships passed the motionless Slive. “What is the plan, sir?”
“Oh, we run,” the captain said offhandedly. “They’re flying against the wind, and we’re with it. They can’t maintain the pace as easily as we can. They’ll tire, and we should lose them within a few hours.”
Marcus nodded. “Yes, sir.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not a sailor, sir, but don’t we need to use the sails if we’re going to leave the vord in our wake?”
Behind the captain, Ambassador Kitai grinned wolfishly.
“I don’t want to take unnecessary losses in a general skirmish,” the captain said. “We are going to remain behind. If they see a lone ship, potentially unable to run, I believe the vordknights will see it as an opportunity to attack.”
“You want to stop them from running off to tell their Queen about us,” Marcus said, nodding.
The captain spread his hands. “That, and I need to explore a few theories. It might be better to test them now than when we reach the enemy’s main body. I’d like you to coordinate efforts with Captain Demos and make sure he has someone who can advise him on how he and his crew can best work in tandem with our Knights.”
Marcus saluted. “Of course, sir.”
“Thank you,” the captain said. “Demos is on the aft deck, I believe.”
Marcus checked his weapon and armor as he marched down the length of the ship to Demos, an old soldier’s habit long since become something very near a reflex action. As he walked, he watched the ships of the fleet gliding gracefully around the Slive and proceeding to the east. He went up several short, steep stairs to ascend from the deck to the raised afterdeck, and noticed his legs shaking with fatigue. The tunneling had taken a great deal more out of him, physically, than he had anticipated. The realization seemed to spark a general revolt of his limbs, with muscles and joints each voicing distinct and unique complaints.
Marcus gritted his teeth and exchanged nods with Demos and the bosun.
“First Spear,” Demos drawled. As usual, the sword-slender captain of the Slive was dressed in plain, well-made clothing, all of it in black. He wore a long dueling blade at his side, its handle plain and worn. “You all right?”
Marcus grunted. “Starting to think that maybe I’m getting too old for all this running around.”
“Maybe you should retire,” Demos said.
“Soon as the work is done.”
“Work’s never done,” Demos said.
“Hngh. Maybe I’ll get lucky and catch an arrow in the eye.”
Demos’s bland face barely showed a shadow of a smile. “That’s the spirit.” He turned his eyes to the sky and pursed his lips. “Octavian was right.”
Marcus squinted up to see that the scattered line of vordk
nights were gathering into a more cohesive swarm. “How many?”
“Ninety, maybe a hundred,” Demos said.
Marcus drummed his fingers on the hilt of his sword. “And how many on your crew?”
“Twenty-seven,” he replied calmly. “And me. And you. And the Princeps. And Antillar. Plus young Antillus and his flyboys overhead. Enough.”
“Assuming the enemy isn’t bringing something new to the fight.”
Demos showed his teeth. “Don’t go all giddy on me.”
“If the world were a giddy place, it wouldn’t need men like me,” Marcus said.
Demos nodded. “Me, either.” He squinted speculatively. “Wonder if Octavian’s going to stretch his muscles.”
“As far as I know, his talents are still rather limited.”
Demos gave Marcus a deadpan look. “We’re sailing down a smooth, flat sheet of ice, which is staying cold in the middle of spring, running in front of a wind coming in from a good angle to move us that hasn’t wavered or fluttered for two days.” He looked back up at the oncoming vord. “That isn’t luck. There isn’t that much of it in the whole world.”
Marcus had long suspected that the captain’s talents had begun to blossom, and Demos had a point. If he was unsure of his abilities, the captain might well decide to test them upon a real foe in some controlled fashion—somewhere out of sight of the rest of the fleet, in the event that things did not proceed well.
The last of the fleet’s ships went gliding past, and Demos watched its stern speculatively. “There they go.”
“Might want to get your men out of the rigging,” Marcus said. “Vord’ll be here shortly. The flyboys will be making it too breezy for them to come down on us all at once.”
Demos nodded laconically and gestured to the bosun. He started bellowing sailors down out of the rigging. Though they often went about armed with knives, today Demos’s crew were all wearing armored jacks and carrying blades and other instruments of martial mayhem. Demos ordered the sails furled, taken down, and stowed, so that they would not become victims of combat. He’d also ordered the decks wetted, and the crew had been slopping laboriously melted water over the entire ship for the past quarter of an hour. Despite the wind and cold air from the north, the temperature was not quite sufficient to refreeze the water on the deck, and the Slive’s timbers soaked it up as if the ship herself was thirsty to return to the sea.
Marcus could hardly fault Demos’s caution. Firecrafting could be dangerously unpredictable in a battle, even when used by experts. If the captain had decided to try his hand at it, Demos’s precaution was entirely sensible. They had just finished when one of the sailors cried out, “Here they come!”
Marcus turned his head to see the group of vordknights alter course and go into a steep dive toward the motionless ship. As they came down, perhaps a score of them split off from the main body, diving ahead of the rest to engage Antillus Crassus and his Knights Aeris.
Tribune Crassus made a broad circling motion over his head with his left arm to gain his Knights’ attention, and flashed a quick series of hand signals. Half a dozen of the Aleran fliers streaked up to meet the contingent of vordknights, falling into a v-shaped formation as they went. The others, including Crassus, remained behind to guard the ship.
Marcus had time to see the enemy vanguard engage the Knights. The six men of the First Aleran simply bowled through their more numerous opponents, with the lead flier diverting his windstream, slewing it around in wide arcs that scattered the vordknights like dandelion fluff. The two men on either side of the leader closed in to catch his arms and prevent him from falling, while the other three struck at a number of vordknights whose efforts to regain control of their flight had brought them within striking distance of a weapon. One of the Alerans’ blades struck home, and a vordknight went spiraling off on an odd angle, leaking a spray of green-brown blood, a severed wing fluttering down more slowly above him.
Then the main body of the vord drove through the Aleran vanguard to fall upon the ship.
At another signal from Crassus, tempest winds suddenly howled, and vordknights began to veer off, forced away from the ship by the violence of the gale. The first thirty or forty of the enemy were driven off, but there were simply too many of them for the Knights Aeris to reach them all. A few managed to wing down through the winds, and as the attack went on, the vord forced away earliest began to circle and fall upon the ship from every direction. Weapons flashed in the light, and someone screamed.
A vordknight landed on the deck not six feet from Marcus, and sent a lightning flash of terrified energy through his body.
The enemy was a few inches shorter than he, and roughly man-shaped. Its body was covered in chitinous armor, layered in bands that almost seemed to resemble a legionare’s lorica. Its head was roughly the shape of a helmeted Aleran’s though there was no opening where the mouth should have been—only smooth skin. Its eyes were multifaceted and greenly reflective, like a dragonfly’s, an impression echoed by the four broad, translucent wings upon its back, now slowing from the blurring shape they had been in flight and folding in upon the vordknight’s back.
Those alien eyes turned to Marcus, and the vord rushed him. Both of its arms ended in scything blades rather than hands, and its weapon-limbs were upraised and ready to strike.
Marcus sidestepped the first double blow of the deadly appendages, drawing his blade as he did. His first stroke clove into the chitin on the vord’s shoulder, and was nearly trapped there as the vord’s momentum carried him past. Marcus managed to jerk the weapon clear in time, leaving an ugly wound hacked into the vord’s flesh. The weapon came away stained with green-brown blood.
The vord spun to return to the attack—but there was a flash of steel and angry scarlet sparks, and the vordknight’s head jumped up off its shoulders as if propelled by the blood that jetted up in a fountain behind it.
The headless vordknight turned in place as if the blow had done nothing to inconvenience it, blades slashing. Captain Demos, long blade in hand, was forced to leap back from the foe, though his sword spat angry scarlet sparks again as it met one of the enemy scythes, and cut it cleanly from the vord’s body. Demos regained his balance, hacked the vord’s other scythe away with casual efficiency, then stepped forward and drove his heel into the thrashing creature’s belly. The kick sent it tumbling over the side of the ship.
Two more of the vordknights landed on the aft deck, rapidly followed by a third. Demos raised his left hand and made a twisting motion, and the railing around the stern side of the deck suddenly bowed, as if made of a supple willow switch, and snared one of the vordknights around the ankle.
Marcus charged the other pair before they could orient themselves and attack. He drove his blade into a gleaming eye, released it, and shoved the wounded vord away with all his strength. He ducked beneath the second vord’s blow and came in low, hitting the thing around the waist and getting his own body in too close to the vordknight’s to allow the creature to use its scythes on him. He was heavier than the vord by a very great deal. It weighed no more than a large sack of meal, and as his armored body slammed the vordknight to the deck, it crunched audibly.
He heard Demos’s light steps as the ship’s captain went past him, and sparks flared several more times somewhere at the edge of his vision. Marcus concentrated on the vord beneath him—the creature was tremendously powerful, easily more than a match for his own physical strength, and Marcus could not enhance it with furycraft this far from the earth beneath the ship, even if it hadn’t additionally been coated in six inches of ice.
Marcus stayed atop the vord, relying upon his weight instead of his strength, keeping as close to the vord’s body as possible, denying it any small bit of leverage with which it could employ the full power of its body. Marcus began to slam his helmeted head against the vord’s, one blow after another. After several such strikes, his own ears were ringing, but the vord’s struggles had lost cohesion.
A secon
d later, Demos’s blade hissed somewhere near Marcus’s back, and red sparks fell all around his head and bounced up from the vordknight’s face. Marcus rolled to one side as swiftly as he could and looked up to see Demos behead the scytheless vord. He carried Marcus’s gladius in his left hand and shifted his grip upon it to offer it back to him. Marcus took the sword with a nod and looked around, his heart pounding.
The crew had engaged the enemy. Evidently, Demos hadn’t chosen them first and foremost for their nautical skills. Though they fought in bands of two and three and four, they cooperated against the enemy with the tactical discipline of elite legionares. Several vordknights already lay dead on the Slive’s deck, most of them dismembered to boot. As Marcus watched, a grizzled sailor pitched a fishing net over a landing vordknight, entangling its wings in the net’s cords. Then he hauled the vord from its feet, while two other members of the crew went to work on the creature with axes.
Elsewhere, the burly bosun flailed desperately at three of the vordknights with his back to the mainmast, his short-handled bill keeping them back but doing them no harm. Marcus elbowed Demos, who stood at his back, and nodded toward the embattled bosun.
Demos growled under his breath and lifted his left hand again. The mainmast itself groaned and bent, and its two lowest spars swept down like a giant’s fist, hammering two of the three vordknights flat in a spray of disgusting fluids. The third vordknight leapt back in alarm, beginning to unfurl its wings, but the bosun didn’t give the creature time to flee. He closed in with the bill and all but split the vordknight in half with a single, downward-sweeping blow. The bosun kicked the stunned and dying vord over the side of the ship, glanced at Demos, and touched the brim of an imaginary hat.
