by Jim Butcher
The young man’s eyes widened. “Um? Sir? Captain Miles is afraid that the enemy will turn our flank. There’s nearly a quarter mile of open ground at the end of the wall before it reaches the flank of the mountain.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“Sir!” the courier protested. “The wall isn’t finished, sir!”
Bernard bared his teeth in a wolfish smile. The leading wave of the vord was now dressing its ranks and preparing to charge. “The wall is exactly what it’s supposed to be, son.”
“But sir!”
Bernard paused to give the young man a hard look.
The courier wilted visibly.
Bernard nodded. “Return to Captain Miles, give him my compliments, and inform him that he is to stand fast. An allied contingent has been placed to support him should he need it.” He paused and looked at the young man. “Dismissed.”
The courier swallowed, saluted, then dived off the side of the tower. He managed to call up a windstream just before he hit the ground, then raced away to the north.
Amara looked at Bernard, and said, “Couldn’t you have told him more?”
“The fewer who know, the better.” He rested his hands on a merlon and nodded calmly as the vord began to move forward in unison. “Giraldi. Signal the mules to stand ready. Section leaders will give the command to begin.”
Giraldi’s voice bellowed down the wall as the ground began to rumble with the vord’s charge. The order was picked up and relayed down the line.
Bernard lifted his hand over his head and watched the oncoming enemy. Once again, as the vord closed to within a few yards, they let out a vast shriek that shook the walls, and once again, their cries clashed with those of the legionares upon the battlements. Bernard stood watching the nearest legionares intently as they lifted their javelins, and when the first of them threw, he snapped his arm forward, and screamed, “Loose!”
The mules went to work.
Each of the contraptions was built around a boxlike frame. Wooden support struts rose above it, to support a long wooden arm with a shallow bowl at its end. Amara wasn’t familiar with the details of the devices, but each arm was drawn back by a crew of two men, who used raw strength and very minor woodcrafting to pull the arm all the way to a horizontal position. A pin, placed in the device, locked the arm back—and when it was removed, the arm snapped forward with startlingly energetic violence. When it did, it carried so much power with it that the entire framework jumped up off the ground at one end, like a cantankerous mule kicking out with its hind legs.
When Bernard dropped his arm, a hundred mules placed in ranks behind the walls kicked up off the ground, sending the contents of their bowls, dozens and dozens of small glass spheres, soaring up over the walls. They leapt up into the air and spread out into a glittering cloud that caught the light of the lowering sun, throwing back sparkles of scarlet, orange, and gold.
Then the fire-spheres struck the earth and burst into globes of hungry fire, hundreds of them all at once, spread out over a wide swath of land.
“Bloody crows!” screamed a nearby legionare.
The fire seemed to ripple out in a long ribbon as each group of mules unleashed its projectiles. Each mule’s deadly payload devoured scores and scores of the enemy in clouds of sullen flame, spread out over an area fifty yards across. Indeed, if anything, the mules had been spaced too near one another—there were ample areas of overlap, where the spheres from multiple mules detonated in the same area. Thousands of vord died in the flames, and thousands more were scorched and disabled, wailing and running in circles, mad with pain, lashing out at anything that moved.
Amara stared in purest shock as she realized that she had just watched the world change, radically and forever.
That overwhelming hammerblow upon the vord had not been delivered by an exalted High Lord. No group of Citizens or Knights Aeris had unleashed their wrath upon the vord. Crows, it wasn’t even the result of standard Legion battlecrafting. The engines had been shaped here, in the workshops of the holders of the Calderon Valley. Most of the people on their crews were simple holders—nearly half of them were children, young men too young to have served their term in the Legions. The spheres, intended only for a single use, rather than the long-term function of the food-cooling coldstones, had been manufactured in the Valley as well, each of them representing perhaps an hour’s effort by someone gifted with a modest affinity for firecrafting—and much more quickly by someone with a more substantial gift.
Whatever happened, if Alera survived its latest foe, it could not return to what it had been before. Not when the holders had wielded the power of Citizens. Alera’s laws protected freemen to some degree, but they were clearly made to protect the interests of Citizens first and foremost. More than once, Aleran Counts and Lords and even High Lords had faced rebellions from angry freemen—rebellions that were inevitably put down by the superior furycraft of the Citizenry. That was a constant, an immutable fact of Aleran history. The Citizenry ruled precisely because they had access to greater power than any freeman, or any group of freemen.
But that all changed the instant the holders of the Calderon Valley dealt the enemy a blow worthy of the assembled High Lords themselves.
And, less than a minute later, they did it again.
The vord warriors came hurtling forward, shrieking their brassy cries and hammering at the base of the wall. Their scythes slashed down onto the smoothed granite, but unlike the stone of the first wall, this wall’s material resisted their assault tenaciously. Legionares upon the walls took ruthless advantage of the enemy’s inability to scale it to meet them. Great cauldrons of boiling oil, water, or scalding-hot sand were poured down onto the mantis warriors. Where such containers were not available, the legionares resulted to a more primitive and reliable measure: They simply dropped large rocks onto the enemy.
After the first three massive volleys, the mules began lighter work. Their loads were smaller, and they threw less often. It was the only way they could make the limited supply of fire-spheres last. The resulting attacks were smaller, if no less devastating to the vord hit by them.
It took several minutes for the vord to rush over the havoc the mules had caused in the field before the wall. At first, they arrived in scattered, irregular bunches, easily focused on and destroyed by the wall’s defenders. It didn’t last. Though an ongoing slaughter was being wreaked upon the vord by Octavian’s mules, the vord’s strength of numbers seemed undiminished. Soon, they were pressing against the wall again, and if they could not easily create footholds in the wall, their own dead began to pile up into ramps that grew closer and closer to the ramparts.
Bernard watched another flight of fire-spheres go sailing over the wall and nodded his approval. “Great furies, if it didn’t work,” he said. He shot his wife a quick, fierce grin. “Tavi said they would work when he sent me the plans.”
“When was that, again?” Amara asked.
Bernard scratched at his chin, then leaned his forearms on a merlon, casually crossed, like a man gossiping over a stone fence. The pose was intentional, Amara knew. The men around him were looking at him for indications of his state of mind every so often, and he showed them a mask of calm, almost casual confidence. “Three, four months after the Elinarch, I reckon. But I didn’t look at them again until he wrote about his idea to use the fire-spheres as ammunition for the mules. So I had Giraldi build one and test it and . . .” He spread his hands demonstratively.
“I know you said they’d be effective, but . . .” Amara shook her head. “I had no idea.”
“I know,” Bernard said.
“This . . . this is going to change everything.”
“Hope so,” he said fervently. “Means there’s something left standing to change.”
Amara looked steadily at him for a moment while his eyes shifted back to the battlefield. He knew. She could see it in his face. He knew what the mules represented. Not in and of themselves, of course, but as a symbol f
or the collective strength of the freemen of Alera—strength that could now be given deadly expression, if need be, now that someone had shown them the way.
The battle raged. Gargants fitted with huge baskets shambled up and down the walls, carrying more stones to the legionares. Legionares with spears began to fend off the vord as they came within reach of the longer weapons. Occasionally, a Knight Ignus would melt a corpse-ramp into a bubbling pool of slagged, stinking chitin, or a Knight Terra would simply cause it to sink into the soft earth. But they were holding. By the great furies, they were holding.
Another flight of fire-spheres went whispering overhead to bring down raging fire on the heads of the mantis warriors, when there was a sudden tremor in the ground, and a distant sound, a roar that rose up like some great beast voicing a warning.
Amara turned her face to the north and looked at the enormous, bleak grey mountain that loomed there, like some unimaginably huge bastion positioned to hold the Legions’ flanks. As she watched, she saw clouds of dust billowing forth from the mountain. An entire face of the mountain’s slope had apparently given way, causing a rockslide so enormous that it beggared the imagination.
The roll of the land kept her from seeing any details, but it wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened. The vord had circled around the end of the second wall, probably hoping to come at the Legions from the rear, or even to proceed toward the civilians back near Garrison. Instead, they had discovered what anyone who lived in the Calderon Valley knew from the time they were old enough to understand speech—that the mountain’s name was Garados, and that it did not tolerate visitors.
Amara had known the murderous fury was dangerous, but when she imagined what that meant, she hadn’t gotten the right scope of its overwhelming, malevolent power. Clearly, it would seem that Garados was the next best thing to a great fury itself, if not a full-blown superpower in its own right.
“Unbelievable,” she murmured.
“Bloody mountain has been a worry and an almighty trial to me for most of twenty-five years,” Bernard growled. “About time the thing started pulling its weight.”
A few minutes later, a new cry abruptly went up from the vord, a long slow wail that rose and fell in a steady cycle every few seconds. Amara tensed and leaned forward onto the merlon beside her husband, watching the enemy intently.
The vord rushed about, swirling in ranks past and through one another, falling into some sort of unthinkable, alien order and . . .
And withdrew.
“They’re running!” screamed a legionare.
The men on the wall went berserk with defiance and triumph, screaming imprecations after the retreating vord and raising their weapons into the failing light of the sun. While they did, the vord continued to fall back, and within a few moments, they had all vanished back in the direction from which they had come. A minute later, the only movement on the open field consisted of the still-twitching limbs of slain vord and the black wings of crows swooping down to feast upon the fallen.
“Giraldi,” Bernard said. “Sound stand down. Get a rotation going to get the men food, water, and rest.”
“Yes, sir,” Giraldi said. He saluted and went about his duties.
“That goes for the rest of you, too, people,” Bernard said to his command staff on the roof of the tower. “Get something in your bellies and find a spot to get a nap.”
Amara waited until they had all departed to say, “You did it.”
Bernard grunted and shook his head. “All we did was make them take us seriously. Before today, the vord had never had much in the way of tactics. They just threw more warriors at every problem.” He rubbed at one eye with his forefinger. “Today they tried to turn our flank. Tomorrow . . .” He shrugged. “They pulled back because someone over there is busy thinking of a way to bring us down. The next time we see them, they’ll have something nasty prepared.”
Amara shivered. He took a step closer and put his arm around her. The movement was awkward in his lorica, but Bernard managed.
“The important thing,” he said, “is that we’re still here. Once we fall back to Garrison, we should be able to hold out for weeks, if need be. We’ve successfully bought time.”
“For what?” Amara asked.
“For the boy to get here,” Bernard said.
“What good will that do us?” she asked. “No one’s sighted the Queen yet.”
Bernard shook his head. “He’s got something tricky in mind. Count on it.”
Amara nodded. “I hope so,” she said. “Love, you should have some food and rest, too.”
“Aye. In just a moment.” His fingers absently stroked her hand. “Pretty sunset, isn’t it?”
“Beautiful,” she replied. She leaned her head on his shoulder.
The sun was nearly gone, its ruddy light glaring into their eyes. Shadows spread long across the Valley’s floor.
And off in the distance, the shrieks of angry vord whispered from the Valley’s walls.
CHAPTER 40
“Let me deal with this,” Invidia snarled. “Give me our earthcrafters and the behemoths, and that wall won’t last five minutes.”
“No,” said the Queen. She paced back and forth beside the pool of water, staring down at it. Her tattered old gown rustled and whispered. “No, not yet,” she said.
“You saw the losses they inflicted.”
The Queen shrugged a shoulder, the motion elegant, at odds with the stained finery she wore. “Losses are to be expected. Especially here, at the last. They revealed hidden capabilities without destroying us, which we will overcome in our next encounter. That is a victory.” She looked up at Invidia sharply. “However, I do not understand why you did not warn me about the great fury in the mountain.”
“Because I didn’t know about it,” Invidia replied, her voice tight. “Obviously.”
“You said you had been here before.”
“To pick up Isana in a wind coach,” Invidia said. “Not to plan an invasion.”
The vord Queen stared at Invidia for a moment, as though she hadn’t quite understood the difference. Then she nodded slowly. “It must be another disparate Aleran experience.”
Invidia folded her arms. “Obviously. It wasn’t a part of the context.”
The Queen tilted her head. “But you intended to conquer Alera.”
“I intended to take it whole,” she said, “by co-opting its system of gover nance. The use of military force was never a preferred course of action. Certainly, there was little probability that I would ever have a need to attack this remote little valley. With the exception of providing a convenient and predictable place for the Marat to attack, it’s been of no historical importance whatsoever.”
At that, Isana looked up from where she sat, near the imprisoned Araris’s feet, and smiled.
Invidia’s presence became suffused with sudden rage, only slowly gathered back under control. The burned woman turned to the Queen, and said, “Every moment we spend here with our forces doing nothing brings complications.”
“They are not ‘our’ forces, Invidia,” the Queen said. “They are mine. And you still think like an Aleran. My troops will not desert in the face of starvation. They will not cast their allegiance with another. They will not hesitate to obey nor refuse to attack an enemy at my command. Do not fear.”
“I am not afraid,” Invidia said, her voice coldly precise.
“Of course you are,” Isana said calmly. “You’re both terrified.”
Invidia’s cold eyes and the Queen’s alien ones both swiveled to come to rest on her. Isana thought that such eyes looked like weapons, somehow, and dangerous ones at that. She further thought that by all rights, she should be frightened herself. But given the past days, she found herself having difficulty giving fear much credit. In her first days in captivity, perhaps fear would have moved her more strongly. Now . . . no. She was really rather more concerned with the fact that she’d not bathed in days than that her life might come to an end. Terro
r had worn into worry, and worry was an old companion to any mother.
Isana nodded to the Queen in mock deference, and said, “You’ve been dealt a harsh blow by the first Aleran force actually prepared to resist you. They didn’t have it all their way, of course, because you are unwholesomely powerful. But even so, the valley stands, and thousands of your warriors are no more. And they are ready to continue fighting. The fight seems hopeless to you, and yet they stand and fight and die—which makes you think that perhaps the fight is not hopeless. Yet you cannot see how that would be. You fear that you have overlooked some detail, some fact, some number that might change all of your careful equations—and that terrifies you.”
Isana turned to Invidia, and said, “And you. I almost feel sorry for you, Invidia. At least you had your beauty. And now even that is gone. The only haven left for you, your best hope, is to rule a kingdom of the childless, the aging, the dying. Even if you take your crown, Invidia, you know that you will never be admired, never be envied, never be a mother—and never be loved. Those who endure this war to live under you will fear you. Hate you. Kill you, I should imagine, if they can. And, in the end, there won’t even be anyone left to remember your name as a curse. Your future, no matter what happens, is a long and terrible torment. The brightest end you can hope for is a swift and painless death.” She shook her head. “I . . . do feel sorry for you, dear. I have good reason to hate you, yet you’ve served yourself a fate worse than any I would ever have imagined, much less wished upon you. Of course you’re afraid.”
She folded her hands in her lap, and said, calmly, “And both of you are now worried that I have realized so much about you both. About who you are. About what moves you. You’re both wondering what else I know. And how else I might use it against you. And why I have revealed what I know here, and now. And you, lonely Queen, wonder if you have made a mistake in bringing me here. You wonder what Octavian inherited from his father—and what came from me.”
Silence filled the hive. Neither of the two half women to whom she spoke moved.
