by Jim Butcher
She never consciously decided to shout, but she suddenly felt her voice rising, trumpet-clear in the morning light, as she cried out her scorn and defiance toward the enemy, a simple howl of, “Alera!”
The echoes of her voice rolled over the silent land.
Sudden thunder shook the stones of the wall, shook the ground itself, as every soul on the wall, every single defender now standing against that dark tide, added their own terror and fury to the air. There was no one theme to the shout, no one word, no single motto or cry—but the Legions spoke in a single voice that sent a violent elation through Amara’s limbs and made the sword in her hand feel lighter than the air she mastered.
That shout of defiance crashed into the vord lines like a physical blow, and for an eyeblink the enemy advance slowed—but then it was answered with a mind-splitting storm of shrieking vord cries, painful to the body, the mind, and the soul. The enemy rushed forward at a full sprint over the last several hundred yards of ground before the wall, blackening the earth as far as the eye could see, their cries answering the defenders.
And born of that primal, furious thunder, the last battle of the war, perhaps the last of the Realm, began.
CHAPTER 36
The Legions screamed their defiance of the vord, and Ehren couldn’t keep himself from joining them, out of nothing but raw reflex and naked terror. On some level, he was fairly sure that not many of the vord would be intimidated by the way his voice cracked, but it wasn’t as though he could control that. Fear might not have been strangling him, precisely, but it had apparently caused his throat to revert to puberty.
Somewhere nearby, a centurion bellowed something that went completely unheard in all the noise. Fortunately, the legionares knew their work well enough without any such command. As the enemy closed, an Aleran-borne shadow passed over the ground before the wall, and more spears than a body could count in a week flew out to come sailing down into the front ranks of the vord. The spears weren’t particularly deadly, in and of themselves. They might have scored one kill in fifty, by Ehren’s estimation, one kill in thirty, tops—but every vord struck by one of the heavy weapons staggered in pain. Even if the wound was not fatal, the vord’s pace faltered, and it was swiftly trampled by the warriors rushing along behind.
The volley was devastating to enemy cohesion, and an old standard Legion tactic.
But, this being a battle plan Tavi had a hand in, it didn’t stop there.
The artisans of the Calderon Valley hadn’t been able to provide every single legionare on the wall with one of the modified javelins—only the most skilled man of each spear of eight had been given the new designs. More often than not, the spears that had killed a vord outright had been thrown by those men—and every single one of the new spears contained a small sphere of glass, nestled into the cup of the javelin’s iron head, where the wooden shaft joined it. Whether the javelins missed and struck the earth or hit home, thousands of tiny glass spheres shattered, unleashing the furies that had been bound within.
Ehren himself had field-tested the firestones, furycrafted devices developed from the coldstones used to keep food chilled in restaurants and wealthy households around the Realm—another innovation sprung from the tricky, twisty labyrinth Octavian had for a brain. The glass spheres could contain even more heat for their size than the first generation of stones could, and they were far easier to make.
Destruction was almost always easier to manage than something useful, Ehren reflected.
The fire-javelins exploded together in a roar, each bursting into a sudden sphere of flame the size of a supply wagon. It wasn’t the white-hot fire of a Knight Ignus’s attack, but it didn’t have to be. The fire engulfed the front two ranks of the enemy and sucked so much air in to feed its short-lived flame that Ehren’s cloak was drawn up against his back and legs, snapping as if he stood with his back to a strong wind. Greasy black smoke billowed out, the smell indescribably foul, and for a few instants, the vord line was thrown into complete disarray.
Ehren cried out and slapped Lord Antillus on the shoulder. There was no need for the signal. The large, athletic man was already throwing himself forward along with the Placidas and Phrygius.
The most powerful and dangerous High Lords of Alera rose together in a sudden column of wind and plunged through the black cloud and out over the enemy force, moving almost too quickly to be seen, and vanished behind a windcrafted veil as they went. Ehren clenched his hands into fists and stared after them, trying to see through the mass of legionares in front of him. Their mission had been his idea. He bore a measure of responsibility for its outcome.
The vord recovered their momentum in seconds, those coming behind the first wave leaping over the slain and wounded. Their scythes gouged the stone of the wall, creating pitted spots that their insectlike legs could use to climb, and they swarmed fearlessly up the wall and into the swords of the Legions.
Men and vord shrieked and howled. Swords flashed in the sun. Vord scythes plunged. Blood, both red and dirty green, spattered the wall, which might have been a fallen log for all the attention the vord paid to it—but it did prevent them from employing their reach or their downward-stabbing scythes to the best effect. They came on in endless pressure, while the legionares fought on, with men forward on the wall fighting with shield and sword, their comrades behind them thrusting with longer spears. The vord would gain the wall, in places, only to be pushed back savagely by the Legions.
More and more of the creatures poured in, like a deadly, living tide, rushing in over the ground to wash against the wall. Wave after wave broke upon the low siege wall, upon Legion steel and Aleran blood. And, like an oncoming tide, the pressure only grew. The vord were climbing over one another in their eagerness to reach the legionares, and the growing number of bodies below the wall were forming ramps up to the top.
The breaking point was near. Within a few moments more, the vord would gain a foothold on the wall, somewhere, and would begin pouring over it in the thousands. The enemy sensed it as well. More and more of the vord pressed closer to the wall. Ehren could have stepped off the wall and walked a mile without touching the ground.
It was time.
He turned and nodded to the armored old Citizen on his left. “Now?”
Lord Gram had been watching the attack with his helmet off. His hair had been bright red in his youth, but was now mostly grey, with only a few lone, defiant sprigs showing a ruddy hue. He nodded and took his helmet from beneath his arm and settled it onto his head. “Aye. Pack them in any closer, and they’ll overflow the wall.”
“Should we send up the signal?” he said. Once a signal went up, it would propagate along the wall from one firecrafter to the next.
Gram grunted, scowling. “Wait for the order, boy. All we’re looking at is what’s right in front of us. That’s our job. Bernard is looking at the whole picture. That’s his job. He’ll give the order when it’s time.”
A vord gained the wall not twenty feet away, a screaming legionare skewered on one of its scythes. It batted away a second legionare like a toy, then died under the massive maul wielded by a Knight Terra who rushed to plug the breach—but three of its companions had reached the top of the wall in the time that took to happen and drove outward. More vord would join them in a few seconds.
“Lord Gram?” Ehren called. His voice cracked again.
“Wait!” Gram thundered back.
Count Calderon would wait to signal the next phase of the plan until as many of the enemy as possible were in position. Ehren knew that. He also knew that as a commander of a battle this critical, Calderon would be willing to sacrifice the lives of some of the defenders if necessary. He had to be. That was the entire reason to have battle commanders in the first place—so that one man could balance the advantages of logic and reason against the emotional, insane demands of close battle.
It was just that, at the moment, with three vord having mounted the wall and with, oh dear, one of them looking directly
at him, it did not seem to Ehren like a sound approach to warfare. He also suddenly thought that it would have been a fine idea to have accepted the set of lorica he had been offered yesterday. Thirty or forty pounds of steel over his fragile flesh (which had seemed impossibly cumbersome for the use of a man who was essentially a glorified rapid-messenger boy, a few hours before) suddenly sounded splendid.
A fourth vord appeared at the top of the wall, and Ehren realized that it was too late for the Aleran counterstroke to save them, even if it happened at that instant. They had to retake the wall, and right now, or the vord would kill the men all around him—and quite likely Ehren himself. Worse, they would kill Gram, one of only a few firecrafters with the capability to craft a flame hot enough for the counterstroke. His death was unacceptable.
A block of legionares followed the Knight Terra in an attack on the first two vord to reach the top, but the third swept a legionare from the wall and into the sea of scythes below it. The man’s screams were swallowed as abruptly as if he had fallen into water. The vord’s glittering eyes locked onto Ehren, and the mantis-form warrior scuttled forward, scythes flashing.
One of the deadly weapons plunged down at Ehren, who hopped back out of reach, and shouted, “Gram, watch out!” He put a shoulder into Gram’s hip and shoved him roughly back from the oncoming warrior.
The movement cost him precious instants and inches. He did not quite evade the mantis warrior’s reach, and a darting scythe plowed a bloody furrow down one shoulder blade, skipped a bit where his body arched in instinctive pain and reaction, then bit into him again as it sliced along one buttock.
Ehren staggered and went to one knee, knowing instinctively that he could not possibly remain there and sure that he could not escape the reach of the mantis. The legionares were coming, as eager as he had been to close the breach, but they were an endless second away.
Ehren flung himself backward, toward the vord, tucking his body into a roll as he went. He felt the scythe flash down at him and miss, digging into the stone of the wall.
Ehren stopped underneath the body of the vord, which began dancing about, trying to thrust its scythes beneath it, but unable to reach him. Ehren reached out a hand toward a fallen legionare’s spear, which lay nearby. His woodcrafting was nothing to write home about, but it was more than sufficient to bend the haft of the spear a little, and when he released it, to allow its elastic spring to send it clattering into the reach of his hand.
He seized the spear, rolled to one side very quickly, and barely dodged the scythe that plunged down at him from the vord now mounting the wall beside his opponent. Scuttling like a limping crab, Ehren stayed beneath the vord warrior, grasping the spear and once more reaching out for his woodcrafting, until he had bent its shaft into a quivering bow that would have enclosed most of a circle. Then he took a second to decide where to strike and how to aim, grounded the spear’s butt against the stone of the wall, and released the woodcrafting.
The spear straightened again, with vicious energy. The sharp tip of the weapon skittered along the vord’s armored underbelly—but then the tip bit into the joint between two plates of chitin and plunged into the vord with such force that it lifted its forequarters off the ground. Dirty green-brown blood geysered from the wound, and the vord fell off on the Aleran side of the wall, thrashing in its death throes.
Ehren let out a whoop—but it turned into a scream as something that felt red-hot slammed into his lower back. There was a thumping sound, and his body jerked, and a muscle behind his right shoulder blade went into a sudden, vicious cramp. He tried to move, but something held him fast to the ground. It might have been gravity. He felt very heavy.
He looked over his shoulder, itself an agonizing motion, and saw that the next vord up the wall had leapt onto him as its less fortunate relative fell to the ground. He couldn’t see the scythes or where they had pierced him. Thinking about it, he decided, he really didn’t want to. The pain was bad enough. He didn’t need a visual image to go with it.
He couldn’t breathe. He just wanted to take a good, deep breath. But he couldn’t inhale at all. That didn’t seem fair. He laid his cheek on the stone.
There was a bright light, and something warm passed over him, and a vord shrieked.
“Healer!” bellowed Gram.
Ehren blinked open his eyes and looked to the south. There, hovering in the air, was a single brilliant spark of bright red fire.
“No, you idiot, don’t pull them out of him,” Gram snarled at someone. “He’ll bleed out right here.”
“But they’ve got him spiked to the bloody wall,” protested someone with a deep, resonant voice.
“Use your head for something besides finding things to smash with that maul, Frederick,” Gram answered. “Earthcraft the wall enough to get them loose.”
“Oh. Right. Just a second . . .”
Gram was leaning over him, and there were legionares back on the wall around them. They must have closed the breach. That was good. Ehren lifted his hand. It shook more than it should have, he thought. “Gram,” he gasped, pointing. “Signal.”
The old Lord looked back over his shoulder, growled, then rose. He looked up at the sky, took a deep breath, then lifted his hand and sent what looked like a small blue star blazing into the air.
All up and down the wall, other stars answered.
A second star pulsed out from the command post, this one burning white-hot, almost painful to look at even in broad daylight.
Up and down the wall, Ehren knew, firecrafters were doing precisely what Gram was. The old Lord had his eyes focused on the ground in front of the wall, and a pair of legionares was covering him from any enemy attack. He concentrated for a moment, then pointed a finger down at the ground below and spoke a single harsh, quiet word. “Burn.”
A sphere of white fire leapt from Gram’s fingertip to the ground below.
For a long minute, nothing happened.
Ehren closed his eyes and pictured it in his mind. Bringing siege walls up from the earth required the moving of quality, heavy stone. But that wasn’t the only thing that could be moved. The earth was full of all sorts of interesting minerals. Gold. Silver. Gems.
And coal.
And oil.
Over the past months, the entire plain before the first wall had been seeded with the latter two. Coal had been raised to within inches of the surface—and the much more easily manipulated oil had been brought up to the surface layers of earth, until the ground fairly squelched with it. It was hardly noticeable, given how soft and damp the regular rains had left the ground in the past few days, except for the smell. And the vord did not appear to be bright enough to recognize it.
Oil-filled tubes had been crafted throughout the coal undersurface, with air holes made in them every so often. Then the crafters upon the Aleran walls dropped the fire directly down and into the mouths of those tubes, flames rapidly licking down them.
Thirty seconds later, there was a roar of sound, as the fire fed upon the oil and the air expanded dangerously, rupturing the earth and shattering the flaky sheets of coal into gravel.
Fire screamed and rose, and somewhere above there was the howl of wind, wind, wind. The four Citizens who had taken off were providing the fire with enough air to be born—a veritable cyclone, really.
When it finally did leap up, it was in a roar, and a small cloud of earth and coal and blazing droplets of oil flew up so high into the air that, even lying down, Ehren could see the highest crown of it.
“Bloody crows!” cried a legionare, half in terror and half in joy.
Ehren could see it reflected in the young man’s eyes. A vast curtain of flame was being drawn across the entire width of the Calderon Valley. Vord were screaming. Vord were dying—hundreds of thousands of them, who had so willingly packed as closely into the wall as possible.
Ehren thought sundown had come remarkably early. Somewhere nearby, a horn was sounding the retreat.
They had never intended
to hold the first wall. It was simply too long to mount an effective defense. But the sacrifice and courage of the men who had bled and died at the first wall had let the Alerans cut a gaping wound into the vord’s advantage of numbers. Brave young legionares. The poor idiots. Thank goodness Ehren would never have passed muster for a Legion, between his size and his lack of useful furycraft. He’d been able to avoid all that nonsense. And he’d helped get some good work done today.
A little voice told him that the vord could afford the losses. Though many had just died, in numbers greater than those of all the Legions of Alera that remained, the vord still had an overwhelming advantage.
Which was why, he mused, there were more surprises waiting for them as they progressed into the Valley. Count Calderon was more than ready to welcome them. He might not be able to stop them—it was possible that no one could. But, by the furies, from listening to the man, they would pay for every breath they took of the Count of Calderon’s air before it was over.
Ehren found himself smiling. Then someone was moving him. He smelled the pungent aroma of a gargant. People talked, but he paid them little attention. He was too tired. He thought to himself that if he went to sleep, he might die.
Then again, as tired as he felt, if death was like sleep, how bad could it be?
Perhaps he’d try it for a little wh—
CHAPTER 37
Amara watched the vord’s first assault go up in flames.
It had all worked more or less according to plan. When the firecrafters had lit the oil-lined little tunnels, the flame had rapidly spread down them, out to a distance of about half a mile, creating a steady source of flame. Black smoke had begun oozing up through the air holes.
Then, when the concealed High Lords sent a vast gale of wind sweeping across the plain, they had exploded. The ground erupted with fire and gouts of shattered coal in long lines spaced about twenty yards apart. Oil had splattered everywhere, along with the coal, and within moments the whole plain had been devoured by fire.
