by Jim Butcher
As the fire-lance met the first of the windmanes, it bowled the feral furies aside—doing them no harm, but sending them wailing and spinning from Tavi and Kitai’s path. Trees at the base of the mountain began to crack and shatter as that vast weight came down, and the darkness grew until only the lance of fire lit their way. Hundreds of terrified birds flew with them, darting shapes in the sole light of the fire-lance.
They shot into the open sky as the mountain smashed down onto the ground below, trees snapping and popping as they were crushed to splinters, stone grinding upon stone. A vast cloud of dust billowed out after them, and Kitai accelerated and climbed to avoid being engulfed by it and having her own windstream suffocated.
Tavi released the fire from his sword and looked down at himself. The high-speed passage upon Kitai’s windstream had scoured much of the dust from him, and a second’s experimentation brought up more than enough wind to sustain his own flight. He tapped Kitai’s fingers, and she released him to fly on his own. He steadied himself, then pulled up beside her, flying with his body almost touching hers, their windstreams merging smoothly.
“Did you kill her yet?” Kitai called, her voice high and tight with excitement and fear.
“Not quite,” Tavi said. He jerked a thumb back at the monstrous form behind them. “I was doing that.”
She gave him a look that managed to blend respect, disgust, and a touch of jealousy. “This is how you show me you want me to be your mate?”
“It’s a big decision,” he returned blandly. “You can’t expect me to make it in an hour.”
Kitai stuck her tongue out at him, and added, “Watch out.”
They both rolled away to the left as Garados’s vast hand swept down at them, as if to knock them from the air. They evaded it by yards, but the wind of its passage was almost more dangerous to them. They were spun violently about and in different directions. Tavi actually watched as a windmane was spawned from the swirling vortexes the blow created.
“Where is she?” Kitai called to him.
“Last time I saw her was up near the . . . chest, I think.”
She nodded, and without speaking the pair altered their flight paths to begin soaring up the enormous, slow-moving mountain fury. More windmanes came at them, these seeming to be random attacks rather than results of some deliberate malevolence—but there were so many of them around the vast earth fury that it hardly mattered. Each windmane had to be countered with windcrafting, driven away, and Tavi found himself thinking that it had really been a great deal less strenuous for him to deal with windmanes when he hadn’t had any furies and had relied upon a pouch of rock salt to discourage them.
Of course, using salt while maintaining his own windstream was problematic in any case—and he didn’t think he’d care to find a spot to land on Garados and craft some salt out of the ground. So he gritted his teeth and concentrated on swatting windmanes out of his path, discouraging the sinister furies from coming too close.
Vast sound shook the air around them twice—Garados, roaring in frustration or simple anger or some other emotion completely alien to such ephemeral beings as Tavi and Kitai. Perhaps he could ask Alera about it later. If there was time. The great fury’s arm swept by, this time much farther away. Pine trees stood up on the forearm like a mortal man’s hairs, and on the same approximate scale. Rain began to fall, heavy and cold.
They soared up past a distorted belly and over the great fury’s chest without seeing the vord Queen—but as they reached the level of Garados’s shoulders, they entered heavy storm clouds. Thick grey haze settled over them, and lightning flickered through the darkness. The wind surged and howled, then died away to a whisper at random—but as they kept going, Tavi was sure he could hear an actual voice in those whispers—a voice that promised torment, pain, and death.
There was another vast sound—and abruptly, the great fury stood completely still. The change was startling. Rock stopped grinding against rock. Tons and tons of earth and stone ceased their rumbling, and only the sound of a few falling stones, bouncing their way down to earth, remained behind. Almost simultaneously, the howling wind within the storm clouds died. The air went still, until they and the raindrops were the only things moving. The flickering lightning began to come less frequently, and the colors changed from every wild hue imaginable to one color: green.
Vord green.
“Aleran?” Kitai called, her eyes flicking around them.
“Bloody crows,” Tavi whispered. He turned to Kitai, and said, “She’s trying to claim them. The vord Queen is trying to claim Garados and Thana.”
“Is it possible?”
“For you or me?” Tavi shook his head. “But Alera told me that her power has a broader base than ours does. Maybe. And if she does . . .”
Kitai’s face turned grim. “If the Queen claims two great furies, it won’t matter who remains to stand against her.” She eyed Tavi. “And you led her to them.”
He scowled at her, and said, “Yes.”
They both increased their speed.
“And you woke her up in the first place.”
Tavi clenched his teeth. “Yes.”
“I simply wished to be sure I correctly understood the way things are.”
Tavi suppressed a sigh, ignored his growing fatigue, and pushed ahead harder, until the roar of their windstreams precluded conversation.
They found the vord Queen atop the frost-coated crown of Garados’s head. She simply stood there, half-burned and naked, her head bowed and her hands spread slightly apart. Above her was what looked like a motionless vortex, where terrible winds had borne up crystals of ice and snow into a glittering spiral.
The vord Queen opened her eyes as they came into view of her. Her lips curved up into a smile that no longer looked like a mimicked expression. It contained as much bitterness, hate, and malevolent amusement as Tavi had ever seen on anyone.
“Father,” the Queen said. “Mother.”
Kitai’s spine stiffened slightly, but she didn’t speak. Moving in time with Tavi, she touched down on the rocky ground facing the Queen. The three of them made the points of an equilateral triangle.
Eerie silence reigned for several seconds. Heavy, cold drops of rain fell upon stone. Their breaths all turned to steamy mist as they exhaled.
“You’re here to kill me,” the vord Queen said, still smiling. “But you can’t. You’ve tried. And in a moment, it won’t matter what kind of forces you might be able to—”
“She’s stalling for time,” Tavi said, and reached for his windcrafting to speed his movements. His own voice sounded oddly stretched and slowed as he continued to speak.
“Hit her,” he said, and slung out the hottest firecrafting he could call.
The Queen began to dart to the left—but the Marat woman hadn’t needed Tavi’s direction to begin the attack with him. The Queen slammed into the sheet of solid rock Kitai had called up in a half circle around her. The vord smashed through, but not before Tavi’s firecrafting had scored on her, driving a shriek of pain from her lungs.
The ground trembled and lurched as she screamed.
Tavi darted forward, sword in hand. The Queen flung a sheet of fire at him, but again he trapped the blaze within the steel of his blade, heating it to scarlet-and-sapphire flame. Somewhere behind him, Kitai wrought the stone beneath the Queen into something the consistency of thick mud. One foot sank ankle deep into it, pinning her in place. Her blade swept out as Tavi closed, and their swords screamed as they crossed, a dozen times in the space of a heartbeat, a blizzard of sparks filling the air—so thickly that Tavi didn’t see the Queen’s foot lashing toward him until it was too late.
The kick hit him in the middle of his chest and threw him twenty feet, to fetch up against an outcropping of rock. His head slammed against it, and he bounced off to fall to the ground, his arms and legs suddenly made of pudding. He couldn’t breathe. There was a deep dent in the frontal plates of his lorica.
Kitai closed on
the vord Queen in a blur of shining mail and damp white hair, wielding a gladius in each hand. She waded into the fight with an elemental brutality and primal instinct that was nothing like the formal training Tavi had received, but which seemed no less dangerous. Violet and emerald sparks warred with one another as the Marat woman met the vord Queen’s steel.
“This is pointless,” said the Queen calmly, her alien eyes bright as she parried and cut, repelling Kitai’s attacks. “It was too late when you arrived. Kill me now, and Garados and Thana both will be entirely unleashed upon the land. Do you think what Gaius Sextus did at Alera Imperia was destruction? And he had but one great fury to unleash. I have two, and more ancient, less tamed ones at that. Garados and Thana will kill every living thing on half a continent. Phrygia, Aquitaine, and Rhodes will be laid waste—as will Garrison, and the gathering of refugees there, and the barbarian tribes who have raised their hands against me.”
Kitai bared her teeth, stepping away for a moment. “Better that than to let you live, let you claim them as your own.”
“That presumes you have a choice, Mother.”
“I am not your mother,” Kitai said in a precise, cold voice. “I am nothing to you. You are less than nothing to me. You are a weed to be plucked from the earth and discarded. You are vermin to be wiped out. You are a rabid dog, to be pitied and destroyed. Show wisdom. Bare your throat. It will be swift and without pain.”
The vord Queen closed her eyes for a second and flinched from the words as she hadn’t from any of the blows. But when she opened them again, her voice was calm, eerily serene. “Odd. I was about to say the same thing to you.” She twisted her hips and casually ripped her foot from the earth, the rock screaming protest. “Enough,” she said quietly. “I should have dispatched you both at once.”
There was a blur in the air, and the two came together in a fountain of sparks amidst the chiming of steel.
Tavi ground his teeth. The feeling was starting to come back to his arms and legs, but it was apparently a slow, slow process. His head hurt abominably.
This wasn’t the answer. The Queen was simply too strong, too fast, too intelligent to be overcome directly. They’d had a small enough chance of killing her. Taking her alive, in order to prevent the great furies from being unleashed, was an order of magnitude closer to “impossible” than Tavi cared to attempt.
But how to beat her? With that added advantage, there was simply no way.
So, he thought, take that advantage away.
The Queen had begun to create a bond between herself and the great furies of Calderon, a task that Tavi felt was surely well beyond his own abilities. But in furycraft, like in everything else, it was far more difficult to create than it was to destroy.
“Alera,” he whispered. He had no idea if the great fury could hear him, or if she would appear if she did. But he pictured her intensely in his thoughts, and whispered again, “Alera.”
And then the great fury was simply there, appearing silently and without drama, the hazy shape of a woman in grey, blending into the cloud and mist, her face lovely but aging, weary. She looked around at the situation, her eyes pausing upon the motionless vortex longer than upon the spark-flooded battle raging between Kitai and the Queen.
“Hmmm,” she said calmly. “This is hardly going well for you.”
Tavi fought to keep his voice calm and polite. “Has the Queen truly bound the great furies to herself?”
“To a degree,” Alera replied. “They are both held motionless, fury-bound, and are . . . somewhat upset about it.”
“She can control them?”
“Not yet,” Alera said. “But the house of her mind has many rooms. She is accomplishing the binding even as she does battle. It is only a matter of time.” She shook her head. “Poor Garados. He’s quite mad, you know. Thana does all that she can for him, trying to keep your folk away, but she’s scarcely less psychotic than he is, the past few centuries.”
“I need to break her link to Garados and Thana Lilvia,” Tavi said. “Is it possible?”
Alera lifted her eyebrows. “Yes. But they are not mortal, young Gaius. They will take vengeance for being bound, and they will not show you the least gratitude.”
“Binding can be done even by someone like me,” Tavi said. “I mean, I could make Garados sit still if I had to. That’s what happened at Kalare and Alera Imperia—and with you, to a degree. Someone like me bound them not to act.”
“Correct,” Alera said.
“Then show me how to break the bond.”
Alera inclined her head and reached out her hand. Like the rest of her, it, too, was covered in opaque grey mist that one could mistake for cloth if one didn’t look too closely. She touched his forehead. Her fingertip was damp and cool.
The means simply appeared in Tavi’s mind, as smoothly as if it had been something remembered from his days at the Academy. And, like much of furycraft, it was quite simple to implement. Painful, he suspected, but simple.
Tavi touched the stone with one hand and stretched the other up to the motionless sky. The principal furycraft used in the binding was watercrafting. It formed the foundation of the effort, while the appropriate craft related to the fury was added atop it: earth for earth, air for air, and so on. But water was the foundation. He had to cancel the watercrafting with its opposite.
Tavi bowed his head, focused his will, and sent fire, fire spread so fine that it never came to life as flame, coursing down deep into the rock of Garados and up in a broad, slewing cone into Thana Lilvia’s misty presence. There was a flash of pain as the two forces collided, a kind of cognitive acid that felt like it was chewing clean the inner surface of his skull.
The Queen’s head snapped toward him as she backpedaled lightly from Kitai.
The reaction from Garados and Thana was immediate.
The ground shook and swayed, and the Queen and Kitai both staggered several steps in the same direction, their bodies slamming against a rock shelf as the mountain tipped back its head and let out a bone-shuddering roar. An instant later, the darkness grew until it was nearly as black as night, and a storm blew up that made the worst weather Tavi had ever seen feel like a gentle shower. The wind screamed through the rocks, howling in mindless rage. Sleet fell from the sky in half-frozen, stinging sheets. Lightning writhed everywhere, a dozen bolts coming down around them in the space of a few seconds.
Worst of all, Tavi’s watercrafting senses were abruptly overloaded with a single mindless, boundless, endless emotion—rage. It was an anger more vast than the sea, and it made the very air in his lungs heavy, hard to move in and out. And, he thought, it wasn’t even being directed at him. There was a bladed point to that spear of anger, and he had only been grazed by it.
“Are you mad?” cried the vord Queen, staggering before the onslaught of the great furies’ wrath. “What have you done? They will destroy us all!”
“Then we will have chosen our deaths!” Tavi screamed back, struggling through the horrible pain and confusion in his thoughts, through the unbearable rage of the great furies. “Not you!”
The Queen let out a shriek of frustration and terror and flung herself into the air. For a second, the wind of the storm seemed to rise to oppose her, only to relent. She hurtled forward, and in a flash of lightning, Tavi saw her pass into what looked like a great, fanged maw made of clouds of rain and sleet. The jaws of Thana Lilvia closed with a roar of wind, and Tavi saw the Queen spinning, spinning out of control, whirling down miles and miles of cloudy gullet lined with rings and rings of windmanes, their claws flashing and slashing.
Kitai struggled to reach him in the rocking fury of the storm and the mountain’s anger, finally throwing herself down next to him as a bolt of lightning hit a rocky ridge not twenty feet away. He gathered her in close, and said, “I’m going after her.”
Her head snapped up, and her green eyes were wide. “What?”
“We must be sure,” he said. “Alera is here. There must be a way to sooth
e the great furies, or at least to direct them somewhere else. Talk with her.”
“Chala,” Kitai cried. “You will be killed in this!”
He caught her hand in his, squeezing tight. “If she is not finished, there will never be a better time. And too much is at stake. It must be done. And I am the First Lord.” He drew her hand to his chest and kissed her mouth, swift and heatedly. Then he rested his forehead against hers, and said, “I love you.”
“Idiot,” she sobbed, her hands trembling as they framed his face. “Of course you do. And I love you.”
There was nothing else he needed to say. Nothing else he needed to hear.
Gaius Octavian rose and flung himself up and into the teeth of the storm.
Later, he would never remember that final flight as more than bits of frozen imagery, painted onto his eyes by flashes of lightning. The vord Queen as a tiny and distant dot, spinning in the fury of the storm. Windmanes, their eyes burning with unspent lightning, slashing at his armor, their claws like thunderbolts. Pain as the wind and water of the storm cut at him like knives. The great and terrible face of the fury, its anger lashing out at the Queen, hardly brushing him—and all but killing him even so.
Tavi found himself grasping at watercrafting to close cuts and soothe burns, even as he continued to fly on. The air around him seemed more water than not, in any case, and it was easier than he had thought it would be. He wondered idly, as he flew onward, pursuing the distant form of the Queen, if he could somehow watercraft the portion of his brain that had advised this idiotic course of action. Clearly, it was defective.
And then a great blackness came rushing up at him—the ground. He slowed enough to land with a great shock of impact to his legs, as opposed to his spine, and rose, fighting the blinding wind and sleet. Though he knew it was full morning now, the storm had left it as black as night.
