Captain's Fury ca-4

by Jim Butcher

  Shadows began to fall as Bernard led the horses north, off the trail and into the thickening forest. He turned east, toward the mountains, in a gradual arc, and all the while the horns of the Immortals sounded in the gloom around them.

  Evening turned to dusk turned to twilight. Terrain that had been difficult in dim light became treacherous in the dark, and Bernard slowed them down, allowing the horses to pick their way forward. The night began to turn cold. The strain of all the travel, of the run, of her ongoing furycraft to support the stretcher began to tell on Amara, and she found herself shuddering with cold and exhaustion.

  She very badly wanted to sleep. She very badly wanted to fall off the horse and lie still. But she clung grimly to the saddle and stayed upright for what felt like a week. Then a month. Then a year.

  And then the horses emerged from the pines, and Bernard let out a grunt of satisfaction.

  Amara lifted her eyes. In the starlight, she could see very little, despite the hours her eyes had been given to adjust. It was as if half the stars were simply blotted away-or, she realized, overcast with clouds. She wearily hoped that it wasn't about to start raining, too.

  Then she realized what she was looking at, and her heart leapt.

  The Kalare Mountains. They rose above them in silent, stark majesty, their enormous peaks casting a shadow over half the starry sky.

  Bernard murmured in the darkness, "There's not enough flora for me to veil us along that trail. From here on out, if we're seen, we're out of options. You want to do this fast or slow?"

  Amara's teeth were chattering, but she managed to say, "Fast. I'm almost done."

  Bernard took a deep breath, nodded once, and said, "Here we go."

  Then he kicked his weary horse forward into a listless canter, and Amara followed suit. They hurried up the trail in the dark, and Amara began to feel nervous again. It took her several moments, until they were riding over a level patch of trail that must have been the first pass through the mountains, to realize why.

  The Immortals' hunting horns had ceased to blow.

  Light hit them first, painful in the mountain night. The horses, too tired to truly panic, threw back their heads and danced nervously. Amara raised a hand, trying to block the painful glare-the great furylamps sometimes used in sieges, surely-and felt Cirrus suddenly falter.

  The First Lord's stretcher crashed to the ground.

  She sagged in her saddle, saw someone approaching on her right side, and kicked weakly with her right leg. She hit something, but a grip like stone seized her ankle and dragged her off the horse and to the ground.

  Bernard roared, and she heard his'bow hum. She turned her head enough to see an Immortal stricken cleanly through one lung with her husband's arrow. The man never slowed his pace, seizing Bernard's belt and hauling him to the ground. Bernard turned as he fell, and seized the Immortal, reaching for his throat with fury-borne strength.

  The Immortal seized Bernard's hands…

  … and slowly, steadily forced them away.

  Bloody crows.

  Immortal Knights.

  Bernard's eyes widened, and he clenched his teeth in desperate effort, but to no avail. The Immortal twisted suddenly and threw Amara's husband face-first to the ground, rapidly secured a lock on one of his arms, and dislocated his shoulder with a single savage motion.

  Bernard screamed.

  Amara became aware of more men, then, all fully armored, all bearing the shining steel collar of the Immortals. She looked around dully. Indeed, the light had come from enormous furylamps which must have been moved up by teams of horses long before. Armored men were everywhere. Not twenty, or thirty, or fifty, but hundreds. All of them Immortals-and led by Knights.

  Footsteps crunched over the cold, stony ground. Several gauntlets banged to armored chests. A pair of boots appeared before Amara's eyes, and she looked up.

  A young man stood over her. He was a little taller than average, very thin, and dirty. There was something ugly in his eyes, lurking behind contempt and rage and a certain amount of petulance. It took Amara's stunned and weary mind a moment to place the young officer-Kalarus Brencis Minoris, the High Lord Kalarus's son and heir.

  "I can't believe this," the young man said. "This is the elite team of soldiers First Lord Has-Been sent down with the north wind? This is what Father's had me slogging all over the bloody swamps for?"

  Brencis shook his head with disbelief and, almost idly, struck Amara across the face with his mailed hand. Pain made her world go white. She felt her neck wrench as it twisted sharply to one side under the force of the blow.

  "I could have been sleeping in a bed," Brencis snarled. "And instead I'm out here frozen to the balls and bored out of my mind, setting up the trap, worried about a whole cohort of Knights sneaking in the back door, and for what?"

  Amara tasted blood on her tongue. She lifted her head dizzily.

  Brencis spat. It struck her cheek.

  "I'm here for this!" he snarled. He seized Amara by the hair, baring her throat, and drew his dagger in his other hand. "For two pathetic little sneaks? Two of you? Two!"

  Light hit them first.

  It washed over Amara's back and shoulders in a sudden wave of warmth and color, as if someone had convinced the setting sun to reverse its course and rise once again over the mountainside behind them. The light cast knife-sharp black shadows over the entire mountain, its luminance so brilliant that the glare of the enormous furylamps became utterly insignificant.

  Immortals, Knights, and infantry alike, cried out in surprise. Brencis turned white, took a step backward, and lifted a hand to shield his eyes, releasing Amara and letting out a low moan of fear.

  And then came a voice.

  A voice spoke in a gentle tone that resounded from the stone and the sky, a voice that rang with a depth and richness of power the mountains had not known since their fiery conception-a voice that contained a certain amount of biting amusement as it answered the heir of Kalare's question. Gaius Sextus, First Lord of Alera, murmured, "Three."

  Chapter 45

  Reverberations of Gaius's deep, mellow voice rolled through the mountains and echoed from the hills. Though he had spoken in a murmur, it emanated from the very stones, and Amara felt sure it could have been heard several miles away in every direction.

  In the wake of that voice, the brilliantly lit mountainside went totally still and silent. Hundreds of Immortals remained motionless in their tracks, shielding their eyes and crouching defensively. Brencis stared past Amara, his mouth gaping and working like that of a landed fish.

  The Knight holding Bernard had backed away when Brencis did, and the Count of Calderon slowly sat up, his face white with pain, his shoulder resting at an odd angle to the rest of his body. He traded a glance with Amara, but neither of them spoke, not daring to draw the attention of the enemy to themselves.

  It was odd, Amara thought, sitting there on the stony mountainside, exhausted, outnumbered hundreds to one by their foes-and yet for a single, endless moment no one moved, and no one spoke.

  And then Brencis let out a sound partway between a scream and a moan, and yelled, his voice cracking into a falsetto in midword, "Attack! Attack! Kill them all!"

  The moment was broken.

  Hundreds of collared Immortals let out a furious cry and steel rasped in a deadly chorus as they drew weapons. They surged forward, the sound of their boots a sudden thunder.

  Amara found herself at Bernard's side, unarmed and far too weary to take to the air. She felt his hand fumbling for hers, as the Immortals came for them, and she interlaced her fingers with his, squeezing tight.

  They both looked away from the charging Immortals, at one another, and that was how Amara saw the First Lord, in the corner of her vision, raise a hand and murmur another bone-deep word that rose from the very mountain beneath them.

  "No.".

  There was a sudden noise, lower than the cries of charging Immortals, more piercing than the tread of their boots. It
was a rippling staccato of a sound, somewhat like a saw going through wood.

  Amara turned to stare as every Immortal, every single Immortal on the mountainside suddenly convulsed. Their necks twisted sharply, and the snapping bones were the source of the strange sound.

  And then they fell dead.

  All of them.

  One second, a force the size of two or three Legion cohorts was howling for their blood. The next, the Immortals lay on the ground, twitching and dying, the strange metal collars now bent and misshapen, all deformed so sharply and suddenly that they had broken the necks of the men wearing them.

  Amara turned to stare.

  Gaius Sextus hovered perhaps ten feet above the mountainside, buoyed by a windstream so tightly controlled that it hardly stirred the dirt beneath him. He was wreathed in the orange-gold flame of an autumn sunset that turned his silver-white hair to bronze. The signs of strain and age that had come on as they traveled were gone. In his right hand was a sword of fire, and fire blazed on his brow in a blinding diadem. His eyes were bright and hard, his face hewn from granite, and such was the majesty and power of him that Amara found herself immediately bowing her head, her hand pressed to her hammering heart.

  Behind her, Amara heard Brencis sob in terror. And then she heard the unsteady rasp of a sword being drawn into a trembling hand.

  "Boy," Gaius said, his tone growing gentler, even compassionate, "you have a choice. You may choose to stand with your father against me. Or you may choose to live."

  Brencis let out a few small, breathless sounds. Then he said, "I'm not afraid of you."

  "Of course you are," Gaius said, "and should be."

  And with those words, a blue-white shaft of lightning roared down from the clear night sky. and gouged a hole the size of a grave in the solid stone not five yards from Brencis's feet.

  "I give you one final chance to live," Gaius said, and his voice was no longer gentle. "Choose."

  Brencis sobbed, and his sword clattered to the stony ground. He turned and fled, his boots sliding and scuffing over the mountainside, vanishing into the distance.

  Amara rose slowly, afterward, and had to help Bernard rise with her.

  "Well," Gaius said quietly. "That's a relief." And with that, he dropped without ceremony to the ground. The blazing light around him-and the light of the furylamps on the mountain-vanished in the same moment.

  "A relief, sire?" Amara asked.

  Gaius's voice, from the darkness, sounded calmly weary. "By all accounts, young Brencis is quite capable at his furycraft-and I have enough to do tonight without putting him down, too."

  "Sire?" Amara asked.

  "Surely," Bernard said, his voice strained, "after killing so many men, one more…"

  Gaius murmured something, and one of the furylamps began to give off a much-reduced amount of light, enough to let Amara dimly see the First Lord as a vague, tall shape, standing over one of the fallen Immortals. "These," he murmured. "These were not men. Men have wills, good Count. Men have choice."

  His eyes turned toward Amara for a quiet moment, pausing just long enough to give his last words a subtle weight.

  "Kalarus raised these creatures from childhood bound to these accursed collars," Gaius continued. "He took their wills, their choices, away from them. The men they could have been died long before tonight. These were animals.

  "What he did was terrible, yet I cannot help but wish he'd done it to more of his legionares. Today would be much simplified." The First Lord's voice tightened, quickened. "Let us count ourselves fortunate that Kalarus had the collars all made from the same batch."

  Amara blinked at him. "You mean… the Immortals could have…?"

  "Killed me?" Gaius asked. He shrugged a shoulder. "Perhaps. In some ways, I am no more powerful than any other High Lord."

  Amara blinked. "But, sire… what I saw a moment ago…"

  "One needn't be omnipotent to overcome every foe, provided one can appear that way in the enemy's mind." He smiled faintly. "True, I have the means to have slain them all-but accidents happen, and the weight of numbers could tell against me just as surely as they did against my's-" His voice broke. He closed his eyes, cleared his throat, and rasped, "My son."

  Amara faced Gaius, silent, watching his face. Not even his discipline could hide the pain in his features, and Amara suddenly ached for the old man.

  Gaius shook his head briskly and strode toward Amara and Bernard. He put one hand on her shoulder, another on Bernards. Bernard let out a hiss of discomfort-then there was a wrenching pop that dragged a muffled curse from his throat.

  "There," Gaius murmured. "Try to move it."

  Bernard did, rotating his wounded shoulder slowly. "Tender," he said after a moment. "But it will serve, sire."

  Gaius nodded and squeezed Amara's shoulder gently. In that simple gesture, relief and energy seemed to flood into her, weariness washed away before it. She shuddered at the pleasant sensation left when her aches and fatigue vanished.

  "Look there," Gaius murmured, and nodded to the east.

  Amara looked. Dozens, even hundreds of green streamers of light flickered through the sky, rising from the earth in wavering lines, almost like luminous smoke. They were spaced miles apart in a regular grid.

  "Kalarus's sentinel craftings," Gaius murmured. "He knows where I am. And I daresay he's deduced my goal. Right now, Kalarus is gathering every Knight under his command and ordering every legionare in his forces to intercept us, so we have little time."

  Amara jerked her head in a nod. "What would you have us do?"

  Gaius looked back and forth between them. "Guard my back. I should hate to make you walk all this way only to take an arrow in the kidneys when we've all but reached the finish line."

  Drums rumbled from farther up the pass. A low moan drifted through the rocks, the faint, basso precursor to a Legion marching song that must shortly follow.

  "Sire," Bernard cautioned. "I'm not sure what I can do against numbers like that."

  "His forces are spread out in the field, and he has far fewer Knights and legionares at hand than he might," Gaius said. "Which was rather the point of this stealth business, yes?"

  "True enough, sire," Bernard said. "But fifty thousand or five thousand makes little difference to me."

  "I see your point. You need only concern yourselves with his Knights. The others will not be an obstacle."

  Amara drew in her breath suddenly. "I understand."

  Gaius nodded, eyes sparkling briefly. "You would."

  The marching song of a Kalaran Legion became discernible across the mountainside.

  Gaius turned to face upslope, narrowed his eyes, and raised his right hand above his head. There was a flash, and then a rippling tongue of fire licked up from his fingers. He closed his hand on the hilt of a sword made of stationary flame.

  Amara recovered her sword and hurried to his side. Bernard followed suit, setting an arrow to his bow.

  In the pass above, a second body of troops appeared-several cohorts of legiotiares, marching together in a swift, cohesive formation. The Kalaran Legion pressed forward at a quick step, moving steadily toward Gaius's blazing blade.

  "Stay behind me," Gaius cautioned them. "Directly behind me."

  And then, with a cry of challenge, the suicidally outnumbered First Lord and his retainers charged the oncoming Legion.

  Chapter 46

  In two years of fighting since the Battle of the Elinarch, Marcus and the First Aleran had never seen the Canim resort to the use of their bizarre sorceries. In the absence of other evidence, they had concluded that the enemy's ability to use them had died with Sari and the majority of his ritualist compatriots.

  The conclusion was incorrect.

  The first shock of the Canim charge was repelled by the massed ranks of the three Aleran Legions. The palisade wall was a light defensive emplacement, as such things were reckoned, but it was critical that the outer wall hold until the engineers could fortify the partial w
all remaining around the ruined town at the crown of the hill.

  "Now we know why they didn't fortify the ruin," Crassus murmured.

  "Why do our work for us?" Marcus grunted. He raised his voice, and shouted, "Third Cohort, dress those ranks!"

  The Canim had withdrawn in good order after their first charge, but a second and larger force of raiders was already in position. In two years, Nasaug had drilled his own conscripts into something that resembled an actual military force, and the mass movements of the raiders, which had originally been slow, confused, almost tidal, had become disciplined and precise.

  Their armament had changed as well, Marcus noted. They had taken the handheld scything swords (originally harvesting implements, for goodness' sake) the Canim raiders had used and mounted them on thick wooden shafts, effec-tively changing what had been a close-fighting implement into a weapon with far greater reach, one more suited to assaulting a defended position.

  Marcus watched the assault coming and felt his heart pounding in fear as the oncoming Canim let out howls and bellowed battle cries. The raiders smashed into the palisade like a living tide of muscle and steel. The Canim raiders fought with far more skill and tenacity than they had at the Battle of the Elinarch, and the new hafted weaponry proved deadly.

  Over and over, Marcus saw the same brief, hideous tableau repeated: A Cane raider would swing his hafted scythe overhead and straight down in a smashing, two-handed blow. The tip of the scythe would land hard against the top of a legionare's helmet, and with the power and weight and leverage of a full-sized Cane behind the blow, the tip of the simple weapon would pierce even Aleran steel, straight down through the top of the helmet and into the skull of the doomed legionare beneath.

  It was a deadly tactic. The foe could adjust his aim with relative ease, and there was no practical way for a legionare fighting in close formation to dodge the diving tip of the Canim scythes.

  Marcus brought his own shield up in time to catch the inner edge of a scythe falling toward his skull, and dropped to one knee. The scythe's edge managed to carve straight down through the steel of his shield, despite the strength of the standard Legion battlecraft that strengthened it. Marcus grunted, summoning strength from the earth to twist the shield, trapping the weapon, and with a powerful blow of his gladius, he parted the wooden haft from the scythe head, drove a wounding blow into the Cane before him, and fell back, trying to clear the weapon head from his shield while another legionare shouldered into his position-and was promptly felled by a falling scythe as the Cane Marcus had wounded was replaced just as swiftly as he had been.