Codex Alera 06 - First Lord's Fury

by Jim Butcher

  She clenched her fists instead, forcing away the emotion. Later. She could let herself feel it later, she promised, when signs of panic among the command staff wouldn’t deal gaping wounds to the legionares’ morale.

  She didn’t know how long she held herself there, rigid and still. Only moments, surely, but they felt like hours—hours of nightmare, suddenly broken by distant, crackling reports from the night sky overhead.

  Amara snapped her gaze up to see fire-spheres blossoming there in balls of grass green, arctic blue, and glacial purple. Black shapes like swarming moths flickered near and around the flaming spheres—vordknights, thousands of them. “Bernard!”

  Bernard glanced at her, then up, then grinned suddenly, and the explosion of another massive salvo from the mules cast his face in a feral, almost blood-thirsty combination of light and shadow. “Trying to sneak over the wall to take out the mules in the dark, when we couldn’t see them coming,” he said. “But the Placidas and the northerners found them first.” He pursed his lips for a moment, then said, “Glad they aren’t directly overhead.”

  As if to punctuate Bernard’s statement, the corpse of a vordknight, missing its head and two-thirds of the surface of its wings, plunged down and landed on the ground beside one of the crewmen of the mules. The crewman jumped and let out a shriek of surprise, before falling onto his rear, earning a round of frantic-edged belly laughs from his crewmates.

  More vordknights appeared, beginning to dive upon the crews of the mules—but each team of Knights Flora had retreated from the wall to its assigned war engine, and they began providing their mule crews with a deadly shield of withering archery. Vordknights fell from the skies and smashed to the earth like rotten fruit. One of them came down on the small ammunition wagon of fire-spheres behind one of the mules, and it exploded in a sudden angry bellow of fire that roared out and consumed the vordknight, the wagon, the mule, its screaming crewmen, and the archers who had been protecting them. Deadly shards of wood from the shattered wagon flew out in every direction, wounding more men on either side, and Amara saw one shard no less than four feet long completely transfix one legionare’s thigh, sending the man screaming to the floor of the battlements.

  Amara made a gesture to the trumpeter, and the man sounded the call for an aerial attack. With a roar, hundreds of Citizens and Knights Aeris rose into the skies to do battle with the enemy in the darkness overhead. The sound of their windstreams was like the roaring of the sea crashing against stone cliffs. Each unit of Knights was led by Counts and Lords, many of them gifted in multiple disciplines of furycraft, and the number of exploding firecraftings overhead doubled and redoubled, a soaring panoply of brief-lived, swollen stars in every color imaginable. Roaring windstreams rose and fell in pitch and tone, making oddly musical harmonies amidst the flashes of chromatic fire.

  Every eye in the whole of the Calderon Valley not being used to fight for survival was glued to the beautiful, deadly display.

  “And now that our attention is on the sky,” Bernard said, “it’s time for the surprise attack. Your Lordship, if you would be so kind as to light the field.”

  Lord Gram stood nearby and grunted acknowledgment. Though the Princeps had put Bernard in charge of the defenses, Amara’s husband had also served Gram for many years as one of the first Steadholders placed in the then-Count’s service. Now Gram was a Lord (granted, his lands had been overrun by the enemy, but he was still a Lord), and her husband had made an extra effort to show Gram courtesy, despite his pained jaw. Gram didn’t need it, Amara thought, and would have been perfectly comfortable following a simple order—but even in the face of ruin, Bernard had the presence of mind to be considerate. She supposed that, in a way, that sort of grace was symbolic of a great deal of what they were fighting for; the preservation of unnecessary beauty.

  Gram stepped forward, lifted his hand, and casually held it out, palm up. Fire kindled in his cupped fingers, until a moment later a tiny form hovered there, just above the surface of his hand—a little feathered figure, its wings blurred into invisibility with their speed. The hot wind washing from them stirred Amara’s hair. Gram whispered something to the little fire fury, and flicked his wrist. The fiery hummingbird shot off into the night, gathering speed and brightening in intensity as it flew.

  It swept over the battlefield, a globe of white daylight several hundred yards across. It zipped over countless mantis warriors, and at one point blew entirely through the torso of a vordknight that had flown down to intercept it, not even slowing down.

  “Bad idea,” Gram said, shaking his head, “getting in Phyllis’s way like that.”

  “Phyllis?” Bernard asked.

  “Keep those teeth together, Calderon,” Gram said testily. “Named her for my first wife. Hotter than any torch, couldn’t sit still, and you didn’t want to get in her way, either.”

  Amara smiled at the exchange and tracked Phyllis’s progress—and within moments, she spotted the oncoming special units, exactly where Invidia had said they would be.

  “Bloody blighted crows,” Gram breathed, as if barely able to summon enough wind to speak.

  Amara understood the feeling.

  The oncoming vord were huge.

  They weren’t huge on the same order as a gargant. They were huge on the same order as buildings. There were half a dozen of them, each the size of three or four of the largest merchant ships. They moved on four legs, each thicker than the trunk of any tree Amara had ever seen. Their vaguely triangular heads ended in a jagged, black chitin beak that rather reminded her of that of an octopus, except large enough to hold three or four hogshead barrels. The creatures had no eyes that she could see, and their beaks simply seemed to flow up into their skulls, and from there into enormous arching fans of the same material, spreading around the titans’ heads like shields. Every stride carried them a good twenty feet, and though they looked ponderous, their pace was, like a gargant’s, swifter than one would expect. Dozens of mantis warriors could run beneath them at a time, and though a mantis could run faster than some horses, they passed the enormous bulks of moving black chitin only slowly.

  A word from Gram halted Phyllis above the nearest bulk, and everyone on the walls who could be spared from fighting could only stare. Centurion Giraldi stepped up to the battlements beside Bernard and Gram. He stared at the bulks for a moment, and breathed, “Sir? I’d like a bigger wall now.”

  In the same instant, all six of the bulks raised their opened maws and let out basso bellows. They did not sound loud, precisely, but the sound shook the wall and Amara’s bones with unnerving intensity.

  The mules loosed another volley, which landed all around the leading bulk, exploding into fiery destruction. The great beast did not react. It just kept coming on, as vast and unstoppable as a glacier. As the bulks passed through the fires, Amara saw vord behemoths and mantises crouched upon their glossy, armored backs, as tiny as parasite-birds on the backs of gargants.

  Amara could see the idea behind the creatures at once. They would roll forward and smash through the wall like so much rotten fencing. Anyone that attacked them would be forced to deal with the defenders riding upon them.

  Amara started as a sudden presence intruded close upon her, but looked over to find that Doroga had arrived and made his way to them on the wall. The slab-shouldered Marat looked calm and interested as his eyes traveled along the walls, through the skies, then down to the field out in front of them. He, too, stared at the bulks for a slow count to seven before pursing his lips, and saying, “Hungh.” After a moment, he added, “Big.”

  “Bloody crows,” Gram said. “Bloody crows. Bloody crows.”

  “We got a problem, Count,” Giraldi said.

  “Bloody crows.”

  Bernard nodded. “Possibly.”

  “Bloody crows,” said Gram. “Blighted bloody crows.”

  Giraldi’s hand was resting on his sword. “I’d say get some archers and go for the eyes. But they ain’t got any eyes.”
/>   “Mmmm,” Bernard said.

  “Bloody crows,” said Gram.

  “Sir?” the centurion asked. “What do we do?”

  “We be quiet for a moment, so that I can think,” Bernard said. He stared at the oncoming bulks. They were bellowing almost constantly, and signs of panic had begun to spread along the wall. A nervous gargant, somewhere nearby, let out its own coughing roar, and Bernard glanced over his shoulder in irritation—and then his eyes locked onto Doroga. They narrowed once, and the wolfish smile reappeared.

  “We don’t go for the eyes, centurion,” Bernard said. “We go for their feet.”

  Doroga looked at Bernard, then barked out a harsh laugh, one that sounded rather remarkably like the one that the gargant, probably Walker, had just loosed.

  Amara looked at Doroga, blinking, and suddenly understood. Years before, during the first vord invasion in this very valley, they had spoken with Doroga after a battle, while the Marat took care of his gargant’s enormous padded paws:

  “Feet,” the Marat had rumbled. “Always got to help him take care of his feet. Feet are important when you are as big as Walker.”

  It made sense. Those creatures, whatever they were, had to be of fantastic weight—all of it settling upon four relatively small feet. Something that large could not easily manage its own mass, Amara was sure. A crippled foot might prevent the beast from moving at all.

  Of course, the thousands of mantises running in a living river around and sometimes upon those feet could make it a bit difficult to reach the target. One of the High Lords might make short work of it, but they were mostly engaged above, and the Legion firecrafters had already exhausted themselves.

  Of course . . . one didn’t really need to hurt the bulks. They only needed to stop them, before they breached the wall and left gaps into which the vord swarm would pour, running down the retreating Legions before they could reach Garrison.

  “Bernard,” Amara said, her own voice thready. “Riva.”

  “Hah,” Bernard said. He turned to Giraldi. “Centurion, signal arrows. One: Lord Riva to report to me. Two: General call for engineers at this location.”

  Signal arrows were bright enough to be seen for miles. The message would get to Riva within a moment. It would take him little longer to fly back to the front, but Amara was not sure how much time they actually had.

  It seemed to take forever, and the bulks pressed ever closer. The mantises seemed to go mad with eagerness as they did, as if the bulks were pushing out some kind of psychic bow wave. One breach appeared atop the wall, and another, and Bernard dispatched reserves to reinforce the weakened areas.

  There was the roar of a nearby windstream, and Riva, dressed in trousers and a loose, unbuttoned shirt, his hair a wildly tossed mess, looked blearily around the wall. He spotted Bernard and moved to him, lifting his fist in a salute and glancing out at the bulks as he did. He froze. “Bloody crows.”

  “Bloody crows,” agreed Gram.

  “We need water,” Bernard said to Riva. “My lord, we need to water that ground, and we need to do it now.”

  Riva opened and closed his mouth a few times, then seemed to shake himself. “Oh, of course. Bog them down. We’d need a river to do it in time.”

  “The Rillwater,” Bernard said. “It isn’t far from here. Maybe a quarter mile southwest.”

  Riva lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “Possible, perhaps. Engineers?”

  “Assembled below.”

  “Aye, aye,” Riva mused. “Just like irrigating a field. Only more so. Ex cuse me.”

  Riva leapt from the wall to the courtyard below, braking his fall with windcrafting, and turned to the engineers. He began issuing rapid orders. The men gathered in ranks and knelt to place their bare hands against the earth. Riva, at the front of the group, did the same, and several hundred experienced engineers, led by Riva, began to make the earth quiver.

  It didn’t take long. There was a moment where nothing changed, then the charging mantises began to appear with their lower extremities covered in mud. The mud splatters began to go farther and farther up their legs—but the ground before the walls had been superheated several times over the last day, and had baked into something almost like hardened clay.

  “More!” Riva shouted. “More, crows take you!”

  The strain upon the furycrafters was enormous. One of the engineers let out a strangled squeak and abruptly fell onto his side, thrashing and clutching at his left shoulder. Two others simply collapsed, dead or unconscious.

  Rushing water abruptly spread over the ground beneath the walls, rolling across it like a vast mirror that reflected the deadly glory of the ongoing aerial battle.

  They waited, while the engineers kept up the effort of redirecting the little river. Men collapsed every few moments. Lord Riva’s face became strained, with blotches of color on his pale cheeks. The water rose.

  Then one of the vordbulks let out a higher-pitched bellow as one of its feet slid out from beneath it, sliding on the smooth clay surface made slippery by water and by the dust and grains of dirt churned up by the passing of so many mantis feet. It listed far to one side, like a ship wallowing between swells, but then slowly, slowly righted itself. A moment later, it took another step and resumed its advance

  “Close!” bellowed Bernard back toward Riva over his shoulder. “Can you give them a shake?”

  “Aye!” Riva panted, his jaw set. Then he closed his eyes again, speaking to the engineers, and suddenly the earth itself groaned. It jerked and quivered once. Then it lurched abruptly to one side, and Amara staggered against Doroga, who caught her and prevented her from falling.

  Out on the field, two more vordbulks, no more than two hundred yards from the walls, screamed and slipped, falling awkwardly. They pitched over toward their sides in motions that were rendered slow-looking by sheer scale. It took them what seemed like seconds to fall, letting out bone-shaking basso calls of distress as they did. They hit the ground hard, driven by their own vast weight, sending tons of water and mud flying into the air with the impact. Dozens, if not hundreds, of vord were crushed beneath each of the monstrous creatures, whose weight was sufficient to leave a deep impression even in the baked clay. They thrashed, their limbs crushing more vord, and moaned out low calls that made the surface of the shallow water around them quiver.

  “Good enough,” Bernard said. “Good enough. It’ll have to be.” He looked at Giraldi, suddenly sweating. “Centurion, the stone.”

  Giraldi reached into his pouch and retrieved a smooth, oblong stone of the same color as the wall. He passed it to Bernard, who placed it upon the ground, and said, “Prepare to sound retreat.”

  The trumpeter looked nervously out at the field and licked his lips.

  Bernard took a deep breath, then drove the heel of his boot down onto the stone, shattering it.

  A pulse of cold wind seemed to flow out from the broken stone, raising dust and smearing fresh blood into new streaks. Seconds after it did, one of the merlons, the large blocks of stone atop battlements, suddenly quivered and groaned, its form twisting into a new shape. What looked like a Phrygian sled dog seemed to come shuddering out of the block of stone as if digging its way from a snowbank.

  It promptly turned, lunged forward, and crushed a vord warrior against the opposite merlon, splattering the mantis to shards of broken chitin and smears of green-brown blood.

  All along the walls, the canine gargoyles came to life and began smashing into the vord with implacable ferocity—and once all of them were free of the merlons, the stone beneath that recently vacated place began to quiver and heave, and more gargoyles began to emerge.

  “Sound retreat!” Bernard ordered.

  The trumpet began sounding the signal, and the Legions moved back instantly, as if Bernard’s voice had carried to each and every one of them. Amara joined her husband and the rest of the command staff as they turned to abandon the walls, while all around them more and more canine gargoyles tore their way free of the s
tone that made the wall and began killing vord with what looked like ferocious glee, their upcurved stone tails wagging.

  The mules and their teams were already on the move, and as Amara reached the Valley floor again, she noticed—the ground was growing soft even on this side of the wall. Riva stayed where he was, gasping, both hands on the ground.

  Amara rushed to Riva’s side, and said, “Your Grace! We’ve got to go!”

  “In a minute!” he panted. “Ground on this side of the wall is all loose earth. Watering it will slow them down even more.”

  “Your Grace,” Amara said, “we do not have a minute.” She turned to the engineers and snapped, “You men heard the signal. Retreat.”

  Exhausted, only a few of them had enough energy to salute, but they all groaned to their feet to begin shambling away from both the steadily shrinking wall and the steadily growing numbers of gargoyles.

  Amara looked wildly around her. Everything was flashing colored lights and screams and confusion. Here and there, vord broke through the living wall of angry gargoyles. Knights Terra and Ferrous would close in on each of them, slowing their progress to give the tired legionares more time to retreat. Men dragged the wounded toward safety. Horses screamed in panic. Vordbulks continued their vast, deep bellowing while the mantises shrieked and screamed fit to pierce Amara’s eardrums.

  She couldn’t see Bernard and the command group.

  “My lord!” she screamed. “We must go! Now!”

  Riva let out a short, hollow-sounding gasp and sagged to one side, throwing out an arm to catch himself. It was too weak to hold him up, and he crumpled to the steadily dampening ground.

  “Get up!” Amara shouted. She knelt and pulled one of the man’s shoulders over hers. “Get up!”

  Riva blinked and stared at her with glazed eyes.