by Jim Butcher
The instant of hesitation gave Renzo a chance to react. He flicked a hand, and the earth surged up around Tavi, as if to bury him alive.
Tavi recovered his balance and immediately drew strength from the earth—specifically, from the earth trying to smother him, weakening the furies responding to Renzo’s command. He waded forward, through the failing power of those furies, and, with an instant of razor-sharp focus, cut cleanly through Renzo’s hastily raised blade, the steel collar about the huge man’s neck—and the neck beneath it. Renzo’s body dropped like a slaughtered hog’s, still quivering.
Time slowed.
There was little blood. The blazing sword in Tavi’s hand had cauterized the cuts even as he made them. The courtyard bully’s broad hands twitched and spasmed. His head had fallen facedown, and Tavi could see his mouth moving for a few seconds, as if to spit out the dirt upon his tongue. That didn’t last long. A heartbeat, two, then there was stillness.
Renzo had been an appallingly petty evil from the last days of Tavi’s childhood.
Tavi felt sick at how easy it had been to murder him.
His thoughts and focus were, for a few seconds, entirely shattered, and so, when the vord Queen exploded from the earth behind Renzo’s corpse, she nearly killed him in the first instant of their meeting.
Tavi seized upon a windcrafting, weak though it was down in the sinkhole, to speed his perceptions. Even with the crafting, there was time for no more than a bizarre, flash impression of a beautiful face, glittering black eyes, a tattered old dress—and then there was a flicker of motion as a shadowy blade darted toward his heart.
Tavi had enough time to think, I didn’t feel it coming, it’s not made of metal. Fortunately, his reflexes hadn’t had any metalcrafting to rely upon when he first trained with a weapon, and they hadn’t needed the advance warning. His own burning blade caught the dark weapon in the vord Queen’s hand, defeated the Queen’s disengage, then suddenly slipped and wobbled as the resistance of the other weapon vanished. The dark blade curled in her hand like a striking serpent and drove into his belly. It pierced his armor as though it were made of soft cloth instead of battle steel, and he felt himself thrown back hard against the layers of a stone shelf lining the pit wall behind him.
The vord Queen came at him, her eyes shining with a terrible intensity, but he responded with the instant, deadly reflexes of a man who had been wise enough to embrace the cold, insensible strength of his armor and weaponry, who felt no pain though his body was trapped against the rough wall, impaled upon a deadly blade. The vord Queen was swift enough to avoid having her head taken from her shoulders, but only just. Tavi’s burning sword left a wound in her scalp and seared away a mass of thin white hairs. She blurred away from him, letting out a metallic shriek, and simply bounded up out of the pit.
An explosion of light and furious sound bright enough to hurt his eyes—odd, that metalcrafting didn’t seem to offer any protection from that source of pain—made the shape of the disappearing Queen a silhouette and left her profile burned onto his eyes in bright color as the rest of the world went dark.
Every instinct in him screamed to get out of the hole, get into action, move, move, move. But he didn’t. When the Queen had leapt from the pit, she hadn’t been holding a sword. Whether he could feel the pain or not, given the rock at his back it was almost certain that there was a preternaturally sharp weapon still thrust into his belly, sunk into the stone behind him like a nail into wood. If he simply tore his way free, he could all but cut himself in half.
He held the blazing sword uncomfortably close to his own body, squinting down with his light-dazzled eyes, and confirmed it. There was a bar of gleaming, green-black material still thrust through the plates of his lorica. He touched a hand to it, lightly, and found that it was double-edged and as sharp as a scalpel. The lightest touch had opened flesh with a horrible, delicate ease. It looked like vord chitin and, for all that he knew, it was. When the blood from his fingers touched it, the weapon quivered, sending silver shocks of sensation through his body, though his metalcrafting kept him from experiencing it as pain.
Bloody crows. The thing was alive.
Outside the pit, the vord Queen shrieked again, the sound a brassy challenge. Explosions of fire thundered outside. People screamed. Steel rang on steel.
Tavi was having a hard time getting enough breath. It couldn’t be the lungs themselves. The chitin blade’s thrust had been far too low. He glanced at his fingers and saw them smeared with something tarry and green. It smelled vile. Lovely—poison, which must have been shutting down his breathing.
Tavi grimaced. The chitin blade didn’t have a guard or a tang. It simply . . . segued, from a long, lightly curved blade to an oblong, rounded handle. He couldn’t walk forward and off the impaling blade. The handle would never fit through the relatively small hole the blade had made, and widening the wound himself seemed . . . counterproductive.
Stars thickened in his vision. His body was running out of air.
Tavi debated simply striking the sword, snapping it with his own burning blade, but there were excellent reasons not to. The blow might not break the vordblade, in which case it would just cut through him with all the power of his own strike. If he tried to burn through, it would heat the blade and cauterize the wound, rendering it all but untreatable by watercraft. Simply seizing it and breaking it with earthcrafted strength was a fool’s game as well—the blade would nip off his fingers all the more neatly because of the supernatural power backing the attempt.
More screams, human and vord, came from above. Incoming windstreams howled, and a Cane let out a furious roar. He began to feel dizzy.
The soil around him, all over his clothes, his boots, his armor, was loose, fairly sandy.
That would do.
Moving carefully, he gestured with one hand, and a long pseudopod of sandy earth rose up from beneath him. He scooped up a handful, and mused that his own blood had made it sticky and clumpy. He caked it around the vordblade. He did that twice more, until a thick clump of bloody, sandy mud clung to it.
Then he ground his teeth, held out his sword, and poured fire from the glowing blade down onto the mud, shaping it with his thoughts and will. It enveloped the mud in a swift, sudden, short-lived flash of fire that brought up blisters on his hands and face—and when the light had faded, the sand glowed dull red with heat, clinging gelatinously.
A second pass of the sword allowed him to draw the heat back out of the sand again, before it could spread up the blade and into his vitals, and the vordblade was suddenly encased in an irregular lump of glass.
Tavi seized it, took a steadying breath, and drew on the weapon. It didn’t move at first, but he didn’t dare turn this into an exercise of brute strength. He increased the pressure slowly, gently, until the weapon abruptly slid free of the stone behind him. It raised sparks from his armor as Tavi pulled it carefully from his flesh.
He gave the vordblade a little toss so that it landed on the far side of the pit. Then he focused on his own body, finding the wound, a narrow and reasonably minor injury in its own right. But the tissues around the wound, all the way through his body, were swelling as though they meant to burst.
Tavi ground his teeth, focused his will, and stopped them from growing any worse. To some degree, the swelling was an advantage—it kept him from bleeding too hideously, for the moment. But he could feel his body’s own unwitting rebellion in progress, a toxin-induced physical frenzy in his blood that would kill him in minutes if allowed to run its course.
Minutes suddenly seemed an endless amount of time. If he could move fast enough, he could end the Vord War in seconds.
Tavi reached for more strength from the earth beneath him and used it to spring from the pit in a single leap, taking in his surroundings as he did. There was a circle of blackened, smoking earth around the top of the pit, the ground glazed to dirty glass, presumably from the firecrafting launched at the Queen when she appeared. There were dozens of
other pits in sight, and the sounds of desperate struggle. Corpses, clad both in chitin and Legion armor, littered the ground. The earthcrafters had attacked like ant lions, opening a sinkhole beneath their targets and drawing them down into close combat, where the enslaved Citizens would have all the advantages. The loose soil would slow Tavi’s people and make them vulnerable to the vicious physical strength of the attackers. Old Maestro Magnus stood on his wooden stool, beating frantically at his beard, which had somehow been set on fire—but, rendered invisible to the subterranean attackers by his precarious perch, he was thus far unhurt.
Tavi landed lightly, on his toes, just as a chitin-armored man wielding an enormously oversized sword swept it in a deadly arc toward Varg.
The Cane caught the fury-assisted blow with a perfect deflection parry, redirecting the vast power of the strike, sliding it away at an angle instead of pitting the raw strength of his bloodred steel directly against the Aleran’s greatsword. The Cane flowed forward and to one side in the wake of the huge sword’s passing, graceful for all his tremendous size and weight, and struck cleanly, once.
The enslaved Citizen dropped dead in his tracks, his head attached to his body only by a scrap of muscle and flesh. Varg continued the motion, never stopping, his blade coming up to a guard that stopped a fraction of a second before becoming an attack directed at Tavi.
“Where?” Tavi demanded, in Canish.
Varg pointed with one clawed finger, then whirled and threw his great curved blade with a smooth contraction of what seemed like every muscle in the Cane’s lean body. It tumbled twice and buried itself in the back of one of two enemy earthcrafters attacking his son, Nasaug. The thrown weapon struck with so much force that it pierced the chitin-armor, but even if it hadn’t, Tavi saw the target’s head snap back at the violence of the strike, and clearly heard the brutal impact break the enemy’s collared neck.
Tavi looked in the direction Varg had pointed and spotted the vord Queen, vanishing into the mists that still surrounded the camp, courtesy of the ritualists. Kitai was pursuing her. That much Tavi had expected. He just hadn’t expected to see the two of them running along the tops of the standard Legion white canvas tents.
Legion tents were mostly of the northern design, made to shed water and snow. Two upright poles at either end supported a long cross-pole, which held up the line of the roof. The cross-pole was perhaps an inch and a half thick.
Kitai and the Queen sprinted along them as though they were as wide as the avenues of old Alera Imperia.
Tavi leapt into the air and roared aloft on a column of wind. Though Kitai and the vord Queen were moving more swiftly than any human could have without crafting, flight was faster still.
“Stay with the Princeps!” someone bellowed behind him, maybe Maximus.
A second roar of wind joined his, and Tavi glanced over one shoulder to see Crassus soaring after him, fresh blood dripping from his wetted blade.
Kitai bounded from one tent to the next, took a half stride from one end of the tent to the other, and leapt to the next tent, following the vord Queen. As Tavi began to close in, she narrowed the Queen’s lead to only feet, and their next leap between tent poles came at nearly the same instant. Kitai’s sword, seething with amethyst fire (how the bloody crows had she done that? Tavi’s fire always looked like . . . fire.) licked out and struck the vord Queen low on one calf—only a last-second convulsion of the limb prevented the blow from striking the tendon at the ankle. Kitai had gone for a crippling blow to slow the Queen and allow the rest of the First Aleran’s skilled furycrafters to catch up.
The Queen spun in midair, her body contorting with what could only have been the aid of windcrafting, and a clawed foot lashed out at Kitai’s face as the two of them soared through their leap. Kitai was not caught unawares by the attack, and intercepted it with her left arm—but away from the support of any earthcrafting, she was no match for the vord Queen’s sheer power. The kick broke bones and laid open flesh in a short spray of blood. Kitai cried out and lost her balance as she came down again, tumbling into the tent canvas and bringing the tent down. The vord Queen took a single, contemptuous step on the tent’s cross-pole before it could fall and continued without slackening her pace.
She met Tavi’s eyes for an instant, and her expression unsettled him. He had rarely seen any emotion at all displayed by a vord queen, and he had encountered several—but this Queen was not wearing a blank mask. She was smiling, a child’s gleeful grin of excitement and joy, an expression seen only in the midst of favorite games and birthday celebrations.
Bloody crows. The creature was having fun.
Tavi let out a cry of rage and flew faster, blade held ready for a cavalry-style passing stroke, but Crassus was surging steadily past him, his years of experience surpassing Tavi’s raw power at windcrafting. He had shifted his blade to his left hand, and was arrowing toward the fleeing Queen’s right side. The young Tribune clearly intended to occupy the vord’s attention and defenses while Tavi took the killing stroke on her left. Tavi altered his flight path slightly, the edges of Crassus’s violent windstream ripping his cloak to shreds. He braced himself and closed half an instant behind Crassus’s leading attack.
Before they reached her, the Queen spun between one step and the next, a neat pirouette, and one pale arm moved in a swath across her body, spreading a small, arcing cloud of crystals into the air.
Crassus never had a chance. The salt crystals struck him before he could have registered the threat, tearing his wind furies to useless shreds. He fell with a short, frustrated cry into the sea of white tents beneath them, heavy poles snapping, heavy canvas tearing under the bone-shattering force of his speed.
Tavi rolled over and over to his own left, barely avoiding the spray of salt crystals, nearly losing control of his flight. A desperate thrust of wind sent him arcing up into the air instead of down into entangling tents, and the harsh, metallic laugh of the vord Queen mocked him. A motion of her arm gave birth to a sphere of fire that wiped away half a dozen legionares as they came pouring out of their tent, and with each step she cast more fire to the left and right, killing men as easily as a child crushed ants. Screams of terror and agony followed in her wake.
Tavi stabilized his flight and shook his head furiously. He could not afford to let his emotions control him. The Queen was deadly, and deadly rational. She wasn’t simply running along the tents for a lark. She had a goal in mind, a destination.
Tavi didn’t need to look ahead to know what was coming—and neither, he realized, did the vord Queen. The layout of a Legion camp was standard from one end of the Realm to another, established by centuries of practice, and he realized with a sudden chill that he had given the enemy some margin of advantage by adhering to Legion rote.
She was heading for the healer’s tents.
With a snarl, Tavi dropped his concentration on everything but his windstream and shot past her. He gained a fifty-, sixty-, seventy-yard lead, then had to come down at the most oblique angle he could, on his side in the air, his feet leading. The instant his boots hit the earth, he called upon it to shape itself to the line of his motion, to guide and slow him rather than simply kicking his feet out from beneath him and seeing to it that he broke his fool neck.
His boots tore up a furrow of turf as wide as his foot and six inches deep, sending a spray of soil, pebbles, and spring grass flying up in front of him in a bow wave for better than fifty feet and bringing him to a stop in the entrance to the main healer’s tent. He whirled, called fire back into his sword, and then the vord Queen slammed into his chest, driving him into the tent and through the large support post just inside the entrance.
Tavi slapped one speed-blurred, dark-nailed hand aside as the vord Queen swept it at his throat, dropped his sword, and seized her by the hair with his other hand, rolling as they both hit the ground and putting her in front as their momentum carried her into the side of a filled metal healing tub, slamming his own heavily armored body into her
slender form.
Water exploded up out of the tub as their impact crushed its nearer side flat against the other. The Queen let out a huff of expelled air. The pain he’d been holding off with metalcrafting until perhaps five or six seconds ago suddenly smashed into him in a wave, and he remembered that he had let go of the crafting that was slowing the toxin coursing from the agonizing wound in his belly.
She came rolling to her feet, never stopping her motion, bounding on all fours like something more feline than human. Fire-spheres charred half a dozen healers and two wounded survivors of Riva to so much meat. A young woman in healer’s garb and a silver discipline collar was the next target. But Foss threw himself in front of her, giving her a powerful shove that sent her tumbling head over heels away from him—and then he was enveloped in another blast that left little more than blackened bones and melted steel in its wake.
The vord Queen hissed and gestured again—but Tavi suddenly recognized the young woman Foss had died to protect as Dorotea, who, in another life, had been the High Lady of Antillus.
Collared by her own allies, commanded to do no harm, the woman had been serving as a healer in the Free Aleran since its inception. Her personal ambition had been a cancer that the collar had neatly amputated, and she had done more good in her months as a slave than she ever had as a Citizen. A watercrafter skilled beyond anything that a Legion could hope for, she had doubtless been called in to treat some difficult or delicate harm suffered by one of the survivors.
