by Jim Butcher
The Calderon Valley was ready to fight.
“There’s a dent in it somewhere,” growled Antillus Raucus, slapping one paw back at the ornate lorica covering his right shoulder. “It isn’t moving right.”
“You’re imagining things,” High Lord Phrygius answered. “There’s no bloody dent.”
“Well, something’s not right.”
“Yes,” said High Lord Placida in a patient tone. “You slept in it again. You aren’t young enough to keep doing that, Raucus. You’ve injured your shoulder joint, likely.”
“I’m young enough to toss your short ass right off this wall,” Raucus snapped back. “We’ll see whose joint gets injured.”
“Boys, boys,” Placidus Aria said. “Please don’t set a bad example for the other children.”
Ehren, standing well behind the High Lords, was too self-contained to smile. But he rocked back and forth on his heels in silent amusement before turning his head to cast a wink at Amara.
She rolled her eyes at him in response and stepped up to stand beside Lady Placida. They stared out at the wide-open plain rolling out of the mouth of the Calderon Valley, a sea of gently rising and falling green. The sun had risen bright, the day fair. Crows had been wheeling overhead for days, first in dozens, then hundreds, and now in thousands. They cast a steady stream of flickering shadows over the earth. The enemy had used them to drop takers into Aleran defensive positions before—now any such attempt would be thwarted by the earth furies on constant patrol among the Aleran forces, which had created a side benefit of all but exterminating the rats, slives, and other vermin that tended to haunt garbage piles around a Legion position.
Let the vord try to use the crows against them again. Calderon was ready.
“Countess,” Lady Placida said. “I believe I heard Lady Veradis tell you to sleep for at least twelve hours.”
“Which is ridiculous,” Amara replied. “It was just a broken wrist.”
“And several injuries from Riva, I believe,” Lady Placida said.
“She only told me twelve because she knew I needed six,” Amara said.
“A most excellent rationale.”
“Thank you,” Amara said gravely. After a moment, she said, “I have to be here. He still can’t talk very clearly. Interpreting for him could be important.”
“I understand,” Lady Placida said. She turned to face Amara, her lovely face calm and hardly showing the weariness Amara knew she had to be feeling. “Countess . . . should we win this battle, not all of us are going to survive it. Should we lose, none of us will.”
Amara glanced away, out at the plain, and nodded.
Lady Placida took a step forward and put a hand on Amara’s shoulder. “I am just as mortal as anyone else. There is something I would say to you, in case there’s not another chance.”
Amara frowned and nodded.
“I owe you my life, Countess,” Aria said, simply. “It has been my honor to have known you.”
Tears stung Amara’s eyes. She tried to smile at the High Lady, stepped closer, and embraced her. “Thank you. I feel the same way.”
Lady Placida’s hug was nearly as strong as Bernard’s. Amara tried not to wheeze.
Lord Placida had approached as they spoke, and he smiled briefly as they both turned to him. “In point of fact, dear, all of us owe her our lives.”
Aria arched an imperious eyebrow. “You are not going to hug the pretty little Parcian girl, you goat.”
Placida nodded gravely. “Foiled again.”
From perhaps twenty feet down the battlements, a legionare pointed to the southwest, and cried, “Signal arrow!”
Amara turned to see a tiny, blazing sphere of light reaching the top of its arc and beginning to fall. Thousands of eyes turned to follow the firecrafting on the arrow, blazing so bright that it could be seen clearly even under the morning sun. No one spoke, but sudden tension and controlled fear lanced up and down the length of the wall like a lightning bolt.
“Well,” Antillus Raucus said. “There it is.”
“Brilliant last words,” Phrygius said beside him. “We’ll put them on your memorium. Right next to, ‘He died stating the obvious.’ ”
“Ah,” Lord Placida said. “It begins.”
“See?” Phrygius said. “Sandos knows how to go out with style.”
“You want to go out with style, I’ll strangle you with your best silk tunic,” growled Antillus.
Amara found herself letting out a breathless laugh, very nearly a giggle, despite the fear running through her. The fear didn’t go away, but it became easier to accept. Her husband, his holders, the legionares assigned to him and, over the last months, some of the most powerful members of the Dianic League had been working to prepare this place for this very morning.
Time, then, to make it all worthwhile.
“I must join my husband,” Amara said firmly. “Good luck, Aria.”
“Of course,” Aria replied. “I’ll try to keep the children here from fighting each other instead of the vord. Good luck, Amara.”
Amara called upon Cirrus, stepped off the wall, and rose into the air. She glided a swift mile down the wall, over a river of men clad in steel, morning light flashing off the polished metal as surely and brightly as if from water. Drums below began rattling the signal to stand ready, so many of them that it sounded to Amara like the rumble of a distant thunder.
Other couriers and messengers were darting up and down the wall, in the air and mounted upon swift horses. Amara narrowly avoided a collision with another flier, a panicked-looking young Citizen in armor too large for him, who called a hasty apology over his shoulder as he struggled to maintain his own windstream. She did not think he looked old enough to attend the Academy, much less serve as a courier in a war.
But he could fly, and the vord had taken away the Alerans’ ability to spare their young from the deadly realities at hand. At least he’d been given a duty he could perform rather than simply being relegated to the ranks of Knights Aeris.
Amara arrowed neatly down to the command group, positioned at the center of the wall’s north-south axis. Her landing hardly stirred the capes of the elite Knights Ferrous and Terra serving as bodyguards for the command staff. Evidently, word of how she had dealt with the young idiot outside the Princeps’ tent had spread, at least enough to ensure that she would be readily recognized. The leader of the contingent was waving her past before she’d settled her weight completely onto her feet again.
Amara brushed past them with a nod, settling her own sword a little more comfortably on her hip. She had declined the offer of a suit of lorica. A body had to be conditioned to bear its weight over the course of months of effort, and Amara had not had that kind of time to spare. Instead, she wore a far-more-comfortable leather coat lined with small plates of light, strong steel. It would almost certainly preserve her hide against an arrow or the slash of a scalpel-edged dueling blade.
Pity the vord didn’t fight with either of those weapons.
Amara strode forward to the low observation platform built upon the wall in lieu of an actual tower and mounted the steps to it rapidly.
“I’m simply saying that it’s the sort of thing that one can’t take too seriously,” High Lord Riva was saying. The rather dumpy Lord of Riva looked a bit out of place in Legion lorica, finely made as it might be. “Bloody crows, man,” he sputtered. “You’ve built a bloody campaign fortress right in my own backyard!”
“Good thing I did, too,” Bernard said mildly, through his stiffened jaw.
Lord Riva scowled, and said, “I never even appointed you. Bloody Sextus did it, interfering old busybody.”
“Mmhmm,” Bernard agreed. “Good thing he did, too.”
Riva gave him a harsh look that faded quickly as he let out an exasperated sigh. “Well. You tried to warn us about the vord, didn’t you?”
“We’re all trying to do our best to serve the Realm and our people, sir,” Bernard said. He turned and smiled at Amar
a as she joined them. “My lady.”
She smiled and touched his hand briefly. “Shouldn’t we sound battle positions?”
“Enemy isn’t here yet,” Bernard said, his voice placid. “Men stand around with swords in their hands for a few hours, they get nervous, tired, start wondering why some fool gave the order for no reason.” He winced and touched his fingertips to his jaw as the effort of so many words pained him. “Won’t hurt to wait. Excuse me.”
Bernard turned to walk down the wall to the elderly man in Legion armor and a centurion’s helmet, his trousers emblazoned with not one, but two scarlet stripes of the Order of the Lion. He muttered a couple of words, and old Centurion Giraldi, out of retirement and back in his armor, nodded stolidly and began dispatching couriers.
“Countess,” Riva greeted her, “when a lord raises a great fortress in his liege lord’s hinterlands, it’s perfectly reasonable to be suspicious. Look what happened at Seven Hills. I don’t think I’m out of line, here.”
“Under most circumstances, you wouldn’t be, Your Grace. But given our situation, I’d say that this is something we can discuss when this is all over. We can even have a hearing over it. Assuming any legates survive.”
Riva grunted, rather sourly, but conceded the point with a nod. He stared out to the southwest, his gaze following the line of the causeway that led back to Riva. “My city taken. My people fleeing for their lives, dying. Starving.” He looked down at his armor, at the sword on his belt, and touched it gingerly. When he spoke again, he sounded like a very tired man. “All I’ve ever wanted for my lands was justice, prosperity, and peace. I’m not much of a soldier. I’m a builder, Countess. I was so pleased with how many folk were moving through the lands to trade, with how much good work you and your husband had done in Calderon. Increasing trade. Building goodwill with the Marat.” He looked at her mildly. “I assumed that you were saving the money you were making, after taxes. Or investing it, perhaps.”
“Oh, we were investing it, my lord,” Amara said, smiling faintly. “In this morning.”
Riva pursed his lips and nodded. “I suppose I can hardly argue with that. How did you do all this? How did you keep it hidden?”
“The walls?” Amara shrugged. “Most people who pass through the valley never leave the causeway. Anything out of sight of the causeway is not difficult to conceal. For the walls, most of the work, as I understand it, is preparing the earth beneath, first. Gathering the proper stone and so on. Once that is done, the raising of the walls is much simpler.”
Riva frowned and nodded. “True. So you aligned the proper stone over time and only brought them up as you needed them.”
“Yes. The Dianic League was most useful in helping us with that, as well as with some of the more serious stone-moving craftings.” She gestured out at the land before them. “And the walls are only the beginning of the defenses, of course. A skeleton, if you see what I mean.”
Lord Riva nodded. “It’s . . . all quite irregular.”
“My lord husband and his nephew have been exchanging ideas for it by letter for quite some time. Gaius Octavian has a rather irregular turn of mind.”
“So I have gathered,” Riva said. He looked at Bernard, and said, “I have to admit, I think he’s probably the right choice for running the defenses here. He knows them better than anyone else in the Realm, after all.”
“Yes, he does,” Amara said.
“Rather remarkable man, really. Do you know, he’s never once said, ‘I told you so.’ ”
“He isn’t the sort to think such things are important,” Amara said, smiling. “But, Your Grace . . . he told you so.”
Lord Riva blinked at her, then let out a rueful chuckle. “Yes. He did, didn’t he?”
“Riders!” cried a lookout at the corner of the tower, pointing.
The Aleran pickets who had been watching for the approach of the vord appeared at the top of a distant hill, riding their horses hard down its slope and onto the open plain. Vordknights swarmed over them like night insects around a furylamp, sweeping down to strike and rake, while arrows leapt up from the scouts, with only limited success in warding away the attackers.
“Those men are in trouble,” Riva said.
Bernard raised his fingers to his lips and let out a piercing whistle. He lifted his hand to the Knights Aeris waiting behind the wall and gave them the flier’s hand signals for “lift off,” “escort,” and with a slashing movement of his wrist indicted the direction they were to travel.
In a roar of wind, thirty Knights Aeris swept into the sky and shot toward the riders, to begin herding the vordknights from the fleeing horses with the blasts of their windstreams. They sent the enemy fliers tumbling for a moment or two, not closing to weapons range when they could simply scatter the enemy through the sky like so many dry leaves. They took up position over the scouts, circling protectively above them in an airborne carousel.
Bernard grunted satisfaction. “Like what Aquitaine did at Ceres. No reason to fight the bloody things and lose valuable Knights Aeris. Just get them out of the bloody way.”
The vordknights retreated after a desultory pursuit in which they were simply cast back and completely neutralized by the windstreams of the fliers. The riders came thundering in through a gate crafted into the wall near the command platform. The leader of the riders, a man wearing a woodsman’s green and brown and grey leathers, swung down from his horse and moved with quick purpose toward Bernard, throwing him a crisp Legion salute though he wore neither armor nor sword. Rufus Marcus had been part of the cohort of legionares who had first encountered the vord, years ago, as well as being a survivor of Second Calderon. Like Giraldi, he wore two stripes of the Order of the Lion on his breeches, though they had been so thoroughly muddied that one could hardly tell that they had originally been red.
Bernard returned the salute. “Tribune. What are we looking at?”
“Flyboys had it pretty well, sir,” Rufus replied. “I make it better than three million of their infantry coming, and they aren’t being subtle about it. They’re in close order, sir, not like the packs they move in out in the countryside.”
“That means . . . that means that this Queen of theirs is present,” Riva said, looking back and forth between them. “Correct?”
“Aye, milord,” Bernard said. “Or so we think.”
“Sir,” said the scout, “they’ve also got a good many of those giants they used for wall work during the campaign last year.”
Bernard grunted. “Figured they would. Anything else?”
“Aye. We couldn’t work around to the back, but I’m sure they had something coming along behind the main body. They weren’t kicking up any dust with all the rain we’ve had of late, but they were drawing crows.”
“Second force?” Bernard said, frowning.
Amara said, “A guess—a pack of prisoners that they plan to feed to their takers and use to counter our crafting, the way they did at Alera Imperia.”
Tribune Rufus nodded. “Could be. Or it could be they called their fliers back together to have them in numbers. We’ve only seen a few. Maybe they’re keeping them on the ground to prevent us spotting them.”
“We’ll be able to handle vordknights,” Bernard said tightly. “It’s probably best to assume that they’re coming with something we haven’t seen before.”
The scout took a swig of water from a mostly empty skin. “Aye. Almost always a solid bet. I don’t think the vord have much of a bluff. The way they’re coming on, they think they’ve got themselves a good hole card.”
“Do you still play cards, Tribune?” Amara asked, idly amused.
“Oh, aye.” Rufus grinned. “Mostly why I stay in the Legions, Countess. When those townies and wagon guards lose, they figure they don’t want to scuffle with me and five thousand other fellas.”
Rufus finished the water in his skin, his eyes on the horizon from which he had recently appeared. A moment later, he grunted as if someone had punched him in the
belly, and said, “Time to place our bets.”
Amara turned to see the vord pour over the horizon.
Again she was struck by how much it was like watching the shadow of a cloud wash over the land. There were so many of the mantis-form warriors, moving together, that they seemed like a single entity, a carpet of gleaming green-black armor, of slashing edges and piercing points. Amara almost felt that she would cut her finger if she pointed at them.
The leading vord poured down over the hilltop—and the horde began to spread. More forms came rolling over every hilltop Amara could see, from horizon to horizon, all moving together, dressing their line as they went until, in the last mile, they all came rushing forward together, in a vast and single wall of terrible purpose. More eerie still, it happened in complete silence. There was not a shriek or a cry, no rattle of drum, no blaring of horns. They simply came on like the shadow of a cloud, and every bit as unstoppable. The silence was horrible. It made them seem somehow unreal in the bright light of morning.
Bernard stared at them intently, then nodded. Beside him and slightly to one side, old Giraldi raised his voice in a parade-ground bellow. “Draw steel!”
His voice carried up and down the wall in booming clarity in that perfect silence—and then more than one hundred and fifty thousand swords whispered from their sheaths. The sound of it, far more deadly than any rustling of leaves in the wind, which it resembled, flowed up and down the wall. Amara realized, with faint surprise, that her own weapon was in her hand.
They were ready, she realized.
They were ready.
