by Jim Butcher
But this time Crassus had seen her.
Crassus’s eyes burned. “Didn’t tell me.”
“She asked me not to,” Tavi said quietly.
Crassus squeezed his eyes shut, as if in agony. Given his injuries, there was every chance that he was—even without other considerations. “Get away from me, Octavian.”
“Rest,” Tavi said. “We’ll talk, later, when this is all—”
“Get out!” Crassus snarled. “How could you? Get out.”
He dropped back down, wheezing, and was asleep again, or unconscious, within seconds.
Tavi sat down on the stool Dorotea had vacated, shaking. He lowered his head to his hands and just sat there for a moment. Crows take it. He had never wanted this. And yet, it had been such a small worry among so many others. Truth be told, he’d barely thought about it. And now, the lie he’d felt he had no other choice than to make might have cost him the love and respect of a friend.
“Such a small concern, for a man with your problems,” said Alera quietly.
Tavi looked up to see the great fury, appearing as she usually did, but this time also covered in a misty grey cloak and hood that hid all of her features but her face. Her gemstone eyes were calm and gently amused.
“I don’t have so many friends that I can’t be worried about losing one,” Tavi said quietly. He looked at Max, silent and still in his tub. “Or more.”
Alera regarded him steadily.
“I saw Foss die. I saw what was going to happen seconds before it did, and I just wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t stop the Queen. He died. She killed so many people. And they died for nothing. She escaped. I failed them.”
“She is most formidable. You knew that.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Tavi said quietly, his voice growing harsh. “It was my responsibility. My duty. I know not everyone survives a war, but by the furies, I will not see my men give their lives for nothing.” His throat tightened, and he bowed his head. “I . . . I wonder. I wonder if I am the right man for this work. If I had . . . if I had learned more, if I had been given more time to practice, if I had practiced harder . . .”
“You wonder if it would have made a difference,” Alera said.
“Yes.”
She considered the question gravely. Then she sat down on the floor beside the stool, folding her legs beneath her. “There’s no way to be certain of things that never took place.”
“I know.”
“You agree. Yet you still feel that way about it.”
Tavi nodded. They were both silent for a time.
“Good men,” she said quietly, “must feel as you do. Or they are not good men.”
“I don’t understand.”
Alera smiled. “A good man, almost by definition, would seriously question any decisions he made that led to such terrible consequences for others. Especially if those others trusted him. Would you agree?”
“Yes.”
“Would you agree that you are fallible?”
“I feel it is manifestly obvious.”
“Would you agree that the world is a dangerous and unfair place?”
“Of course.”
“Then there you have it,” Alera said. “Someone must command. But no one who does so is perfect. He will, therefore, make mistakes. And, since the world is dangerous and unfair, it is inevitable that some of those mistakes will eventually have consequences like those today.”
“I can hardly dispute your reasoning,” Tavi said quietly. “But I do not see your point.”
“It is quite obvious, young Gaius,” Alera said, smiling, her eyes wrinkling at the corners. “The logic is indisputable: You are a good man.”
Tavi lifted his eyebrows. “What has that to do with anything?”
“In my experience?” she asked. “A very great deal. Perhaps Kitai will explain it to you later.”
Tavi shook his head. “You saw the battle?”
“Of course.”
“Is the Queen as strong as you believed her to be?”
“Not at all,” Alera said.
“Oh?”
“She is stronger,” the great fury said calmly. “And she handles herself almost as well as you do. Someone has been giving her lessons.”
Tavi nodded ruefully. “I noticed.” He shook his head. “I . . . I can’t believe anything could be so powerful. So fast.”
“Yes,” Alera said. “I warned you about that.”
“Then you see why I must question my place here,” Tavi said quietly. “If I can’t outwit her, anticipate her, overcome her . . . why am I attempting to lead these men at all? Can I take them forward with me, knowing that . . . that . . .”
“That you quite likely take them to their deaths,” Alera said.
Tavi closed his eyes. “Yes.”
Alera’s voice turned wry. “How many more would have died had you done nothing, young Gaius? How many more would have died had you perished with the Queen’s first strike? Do you not see what this attack means?”
He opened his eyes and frowned up at her.
“She cannot have many Citizens left to her,” Alera said. “Yet she attacked this camp with more than fifty strongly gifted earthcrafters, knowing that it was a suicide mission. She told you she’d only come to weaken you.”
“That . . . doesn’t make any sense,” Tavi said. “To waste such a valuable resource merely to weaken an opponent? Why would she do such a thing?”
“Indeed, why?” Alera asked.
“Because she thought it was worth the sacrifice,” Tavi murmured. “But that doesn’t make sense. Our losses were . . .” His lips tightened bitterly. “Light.”
“She didn’t come here to kill you, young Gaius. Not yet. She came here to bleed you.”
“But why?” Tavi asked. “If she’d waited until the Legion was closer, she could have hit us with overwhelming support rather than losing her collared Citizens. It isn’t rational! It’s . . .”
He suddenly stopped speaking. He blinked twice.
“It isn’t rational,” he said softly. “It’s the kind of mistake a young commander makes when victory is threatened. He forgets to be disciplined. He decides that doing anything is a better idea than doing nothing.” Tavi’s eyes widened. “She was afraid of me.”
Alera inclined her head and said nothing.
A moment later, Tavi snorted. “Well. I think I must have cured her of that mistaken impression.”
“And yet,” Alera said quietly, “she ran. You didn’t.”
“Of course she ran. It prevented us from concentrating forces on her. It allowed her to control the pace of the fight . . .” His eyes widened.
Defeating the vord Queen was not about simple bloodletting. It was not about tactics, about furycraft, about organization or technique or ranks of shining armor.
It was about minds. It was about wills.
It was about fear.
Tavi felt himself shoot up off the table. “The horde,” he said. “Where is it now?”
Alera considered the matter for a moment, then said, “They are about to attack the second defensive wall of the Valley. I do not think there is a reasonable chance of the Legions holding the wall.”
“They aren’t supposed to,” Tavi said. “The vord have no chance of overcoming Garrison unless they are directed. To control them, the Queen must be within twenty-five or thirty miles—well beyond the second wall. That’s near Bernardholt. I know that region, and there are only so many places where she could set up a defensive position around her hive.”
Alera tilted her head thoughtfully. “You’ll have the advantage of knowing the terrain.”
“Yes,” Tavi said, showing his teeth. “And if she’s afraid of me interfering, it means that I can.” He nodded firmly. “Every important fight I’ve ever been in was against someone bigger and stronger than me. This is no different.”
Alera’s gemstone eyes glittered. “If you say so, young Gaius.” And she was gone.
Tavi stalked ou
t of the healer’s tent.
Twenty legionares snapped immediately to attention. Another sixty, within the immediate circle of light, came hustling off the ground, some of them rousing from (fully armored, fully uncomfortable) sleep to do it. Every legionare in sight bore the symbol of First Aleran, the eagle upon the field of scarlet and silver—but the design had been blackened and subtly altered into the shape of a crow. The Battlecrows had been the cohort who had followed Tavi into the horrible business at the end of the Battle of the Elinarch, and ever since they had maintained a reputation for discipline, absolutely deadly efficiency on the battlefield, and reckless disregard for danger. In most Legions, men sought to gain promotion to the Prime Cohort, traditionally the cohort composed of the Legion’s most experienced (and highest-paid) soldiers. In the First Aleran, men strove very nearly as hard to be accepted into the Battlecrows, the cohort that most often followed the captain into the deadliest portions of the battlefield.
Eighty men slammed their armored hands into their armored chests at the same instant, like a report of mortal thunder.
“Schultz,” Tavi called quietly.
A centurion strode out of the ranks, a soldier younger than Tavi himself. Schultz had come a long way since the Elinarch. He’d grown half a foot, for one thing, and added sixty pounds of muscle to the frame of a youth. His face and armor both bore scars, and he had discarded the helmet crest that denoted him as something other than a legionare, but he walked with erect pride and carried his baton beneath his arm in the best tradition of Legion centurions. He snapped off a precise salute to Tavi. “Sir.”
“We’re leaving,” Tavi said.
Schultz blinked. “Sir? Do you want me to round up the command officers for you?”
“We’re not waiting that long,” Tavi said. “The vord Queen knows where we are, and we’re going to be somewhere else as soon as possible. I need runners, Schultz, to go to each cohort’s Tribune and bear my personal command to break camp. I want to be on the road in no more than an hour. Anyone who can’t be ready to go will be left behind. Understood?”
Schultz looked dazed. “Ah. Yes, sir. Runners to each Tribune, your personal command to break camp, moving in an hour or left behind, sir.”
“Good man,” Tavi said. He turned to the assembled century of men and raised his voice. “The Legions have a long tradition, boys. You march hard and fast and show up in places where no one expects you—and then you go to work.” He grinned. “And you do it all carrying a hundred pounds of gear made by whoever did it for the least coin—but every one of those slives gets paid better than you! It’s tradition!”
A growl of laughter went around the group of soldiers.
“This march,” Tavi said, “is different.”
He let silence sit over the men for a moment.
“In a moment, you’re going to go out and give the orders to move out. And you’re going to tell the men this: No packs. No tents. No blankets. No spare boots. They don’t matter anymore.”
The silence thickened.
“We have to move, fast and hard,” Tavi said. “There are millions of lives at stake, and the enemy knows where we are. So we’re not going to be here. We’re going to be in Calderon by tomorrow, a full day before we’re expected. And then we’re going to find the vord Queen and pay the bitch back for what she did tonight.”
Eighty men raised their voices in a sudden, furious roar of approval.
“Schultz will give you your assignments,” Tavi said. “Get it done.”
Another roar went up, and Schultz began striding down the ranks, striking each man lightly on his armored shoulder with his baton and issuing the name of an Aleran or Canim officer he was to contact. The men went sprinting into the dark, and within minutes trumpeters were sounding the signal to prepare to march.
“Sir,” Schultz said, after he’d sent the last of the men off, “we might make Calderon that fast. But the Canim can’t, sir, nor their beasts. There’s no way.”
Tavi showed the legionare his most Canish smile. “Faith, Schultz,” he said. “Where there’s a will, there is a way. And my will is for us all to be in Calderon by the sunrise after next.”
Schultz blinked. “Sir?”
“Get the rest of the ’Crows ready to move out, Schultz,” he said. “That’s your job. Getting all of us there? That’s mine.”
CHAPTER 45
The vord came precisely when Invidia said they would. Sunrise was still four hours away, and once the moon had vanished behind the mountains to the south, the night turned as black as the inside of a coffin.
Amara was on the wall, waiting to see if Invidia had spoken the truth. There was no warning whatsoever. In one moment, the night was completely silent and still. In the next, there was a single flicker of movement at the very edge of the ground illuminated by the wall’s furylights, then the gleaming black chitin of the horde exploded from the night, rushing across the ground in the rumble of millions of feet striking the still-scorched earth.
They must have moved slowly and silently until they reached the edge of the lights, Amara thought. No Aleran Legion could possibly have moved stealthily in such vast numbers—but it hadn’t done them any good. The legionares on the walls were ready and waiting.
Hundreds of Citizens brought up the flickering curtain of fist-sized fire-spheres that had first been used at Riva. It proved just as deadly to the foe here as it had at the great city. Vord surged into the burned zone before the wall and were slain in blasts of fire and superheated air, a million deadly fireflies barring their way. The horde died by the hundreds, then the thousands, but as they had at Riva, the weight of numbers began to let the vord grind their way forward, scrambling over the corpses of their fallen comrades, laying a road of death and twitching limbs for those coming behind them.
Within moments, the vord had paid the necessary toll, and the Aleran firecrafters who lined the walls began to crumple down, exhausted. As they did, they were replaced with every Knight Flora in the Legions, and every Citizen with the necessary skills to join them. Arrows began to leap from bows, their fury-enhanced limbs sending the shafts leaping forward with supernatural power.
Deadly arrows hissed through the night, with the Knights Flora working in teams of ten and twenty, sharing targets with shouts of coordination, each archer loosing as fast as he could. Hundreds of streams of arrows slewed back and forth across the vord lines, like the sprays of water used by fire wardens in cities all across Alera.
In many ways, Amara supposed, fighting the vord was a great deal more like battling a fire than an enemy. They rushed forward with the same implacable need to devour and spread. The streams of arrows would beat back the vord where their deadly skill touched them, but wherever a stream hadn’t swept for a few seconds, the vord surged forward again, like a blaze chewing through an old wooden building—just as determined, and just as unstoppable.
Amara licked her lips, her heart beating faster, as the first vord mantis reached the wall and began gouging out fresh climbing holds. Archer teams began withdrawing, leaving heavily armed legionares to take their places.
Standing beside her, Bernard nodded judiciously. “About now, I think.”
Amara nodded and turned to the trumpeter next to her. “Signal the mules.”
The man saluted and immediately began blowing a quick signal on his horn. In the dark on the ground behind the wall, the mules went to work again. Their arms made a creaking sound, followed by a distinct report of wooden arm striking wooden crossbeam, followed by a rattling, thumping sound as the mule rocked wildly back and forth before settling down again. A few seconds later, the ground outside the walls was illuminated by a blossoming wall of flame, incinerating hundreds more vord.
But they never slowed down.
Bernard watched a while more, until every archer team in sight was down from the walls and in their second position. The legionares fought on doggedly, throwing down the enemy with sword and shield, spear and fury. “Any sign?” he asked A
mara.
Amara swept her eyes over the sky. It was impossible to see even the stars of the moonless sky outside of the radius of the wall’s furylamps. “Not yet,” she reported.
Bernard grunted. “What about that reserve force?”
Amara looked up and down the walls for the telltale colored furylamps they were using to send messages. A flashing blue light would have indicated that someone had spotted the specialized troops Invidia had described. “Not yet,” Amara said.
Bernard nodded and continued watching the battle, unmoving, apparently unconcerned.
Amara knew it was a facade, for the benefit of the troops, and she tried to support it by appearing just as calm and steady as her husband—but despite her efforts, she bit her lip when she saw a young legionare, barely more than a boy, seized by a mantis’s scythes and tossed screaming into the swarm below. His companions in arms cut the vord responsible into quivering chunks—but they were too late for the youth. Wounded were being carried from the wall by field medicos every few seconds. Once more, the Marat and their gargants stood by, patiently waiting while dozens of wounded were loaded into their carrying harnesses, then turned to begin striding toward Garrison.
“This is getting tight,” Bernard muttered. “They’re pushing harder than they did before.”
“Should we sound retreat?”
Bernard stood calmly, looking down at the battle and giving no indication of his concern on his face or in his body language. “Not yet. We’ve got to know.”
Amara nodded again and struggled to control her outer self once more. It was difficult. Calm and composure in the face of personal danger was something she had been trained for, something she had mastered. Watching others carried away, screaming in agony—or worse, dying in perfect silence—in support of the plan she’d helped to shape and create was something else entirely. She hadn’t been ready for this. She’d had no talent whatsoever for watercrafting, and could barely make water roll across the bottom of a shallow pan, back at the Academy, when she’d been practicing hard. Now she wished she’d done even more. She would give anything to be able to let herself feel the horror that was hammering down on her without fearing that the sight of tears on her face might make things even worse.
