Chapter 55
Fidelias struggled to pull some semblance of order out of the battle's chaos. Granted, battles were never orderly, tidy, or easily managed - but this one was worse than most.
With only minutes to prepare, and his army broken into separate elements, each of them too small to challenge the main body of the vord alone, he had done the only thing he could do. He'd marched the First Aleran out of the ruined steadholt and deployed them in an arching line around the steadholt's exterior, while ordering the healers, wounded, and medical personnel into the relative safety of the steadholt's great hall. He'd placed the Free Alerans on the steadholt's flanks, intending to let his veteran troops take the brunt of the coming assault, while the less-experienced freemen handled any stragglers or enemy probes. While he was screaming those orders and getting his legionares into position - at times laying about him with his fists rather than a baton - the Windwolves had nonchalantly swept down with their wind coaches as if this was simply another day in Alera Imperia.
Fidelias directed Aldrick ex Gladius to the hive and left him to get the First Lady and company out of this disaster before the vord swallowed them whole. He had just returned to the improvised command post on the roof of the great stone barn, when someone screamed, "Vord!"
They came rushing along the ground and buzzing through the sky, all of them moving with an unsettling, sinuous sort of rhythm.
Fidelias immediately appropriated every single Knight Aeris from the Free Aleran - all three of them - with instructions to, "Keep those bloody bug men off my roof." The Legions, without the defenses to which they were accustomed when fighting against such odds, locked shields in tight formation and waited to receive the mantises' charge. The vord flung themselves forward, filling the air with their whistling shrieks.
Men started dying.
The vord all but climbed over one another in a desperate need to attack the Aleran forces and showed none of the hesitance they generally did before attacking a shieldwall. They simply rushed forward, one vord paying the price to break the cohesion of the lines while two others took advantage of the disruption to strike. The First Aleran was giving at least as well as it got, Fidelias thought, but that was a ruinous rate of exchange in the current market.
Footsteps made him look over his shoulder, and he found the First Lady approaching with an escort of hard-bitten types wearing mail and the black sashes of the Windwolves. Aldrick ex Gladius, a large, brawny man with cold eyes and a black beard, walked on Isana's left, opposite the gleaming figure of Araris Valerian. Aldrick's madwoman, Odiana, trailed along behind him with one finger hooked into the back of his belt. She was beaming at the battle all around them.
"My lady," Fidelias said, scowling, "you need to leave the area at once. I insist that you take to your wind coaches now."
"We cannot," Isana replied steadily. "There are too many enemy fliers overhead. They'd swarm the coach before it could pick up speed if we tried to leave."
Fidelias glanced up at the sky above. It was filled with vordknights, more of them than he could easily count. For the most part, they seemed willing to hover overhead, though a few score were harassing the infantry, streaking down to rake at them with their scythe-limbs when they thought they had an advantage. At least two dozen kept trying to sweep down onto the rooftop, but the Free Aleran Knights Aeris were handily swatting them off target with blasts of wind, working with excellent coordination.
He considered the idea of passing them over to the First Lady to cover her escape but dismissed it. The Windwolves already had more than enough Knights Aeris to manage that trick. Men blasting away with wind from solid ground was one thing. Hurling extraneous windstreams around while Knights Aeris were trying to keep a wind coach aloft was something else entirely.
"How can I help?" Isana asked.
Fidelias grimaced and looked from her to her two immediate escorts. Aldrick ex Gladius looked completely unconcerned. The big swordsman was one of the most unreadable individuals he'd ever met, and it was entirely possible that the man wasn't sane. He might actually not feel any genuine anxiety about today's outcome. Araris, though, was scowling and eyeing Fidelias as though he expected him to Do Something About That Woman.
On the ground below, the vord broke open an enormous hole in the shieldwall, and only the efforts of the First Aleran's Knights Terra managed to close it again. Crows, but he didn't need another problem to solve. "You can get out alive, and take my wounded Citizens with you. They might be needed."
"I told you... Marcus, isn't it? There are simply too many vord in the air."
"Take Antillus Crassus," Fidelias said. "He can probably veil the whole lot of you, if you flew in close enough formation. He can't walk, but he can sit in a coach. Antillar Maximus and Ambassador Kitai are down there, too, unconscious."
"First Spear," Isana said. "You need such talents here. Or better yet, helping my son."
"They were helping your son," Fidelias growled. "That's how all of them wound up in healing tubs in the first place."
A trio of vordknights came zipping in from one side, with the risen sun behind them, and the Knights Aeris on the roof didn't redirect their windstreams in time. Fidelias moved on pure instinct, grabbing the First Lady and taking her down to the stone of the roof with as much speed and as little harm as possible. He stayed there, shielding her body, as the swords of Araris, Aldrick, and half a dozen Windwolves leapt clear of their scabbards.
Bits and pieces of vordknight, divided in perfectly neat lines, scattered to the roof around them.
Fidelias lowered his voice for Isana's ears alone, and said, "My lady. We cannot hold the position. We do not have much time. Do you understand?"
Isana's eyes were a little wide, but her expression was controlled. She took in a deep breath as Fidelias rose and Araris helped her up.
"Captain Aldrick," she said.
Aldrick gave a slight bow of his head, "My lady?"
"This Legion is short of their company of Knights. I wish you to deploy your men to support them."
Aldrick said nothing for a moment. His eyes shifted, left and right, toward the waiting wind coaches and the vord outside the steadholt, respectively.
The fingers of his right hand, his sword hand, flexed slowly, as though being loosened up for action. Fidelias had a flash of insight. Though Aldrick might be a mercenary, he wasn't inhuman. None of them were. And no Aleran could look at the vord destroying their world without realizing that there was no way to remain safely out of this fight. You could only decide whether to make a stand beside your fellow Alerans - or delay the moment of reckoning until you faced the vord alone.
"Say yes," Odiana said, her lovely eyes eerily bright. "Oh, say yes, my lord. I've been waiting ever so long to see you kill vord."
The mercenary glanced over his shoulder at Odiana, then turned to Isana with a second bow of his head. "Aye, my lady," Aldrick growled.
Wolfish smiles spread through the men behind him, along with growled words of agreement.
Aldrick stepped forward to overlook the battle below, and Araris went with him.
Aldrick grunted. "Earthworks?"
Araris nodded. "Little elevation will make a big difference."
"Odiana," Aldrick said.
She was still hanging on to his belt. "Who?"
"Antillar and his brother. We need them."
The woman turned and hurried from the roof.
"Where is she going?" Fidelias asked.
"Wake up your sleepers," Aldrick replied.
Fidelias shook his head. "You can't watercraft someone back to consciousness."
"She can."
Isana stepped forward. "It is possible. But it's somewhat insane."
Aldrick almost smiled. "Sanity. Huh."
Isana frowned after Odiana. "It's dangerous. For patient and healer alike."
Aldrick shrugged. "Dangerous for the vord to run those scythes through you a few times while you're lying there unconscious, too."
Isana's mouth compressed, and she nodded once. "I'll go with her."
Fidelias touched her arm as she began to turn. "Lady," he said quietly, "you need not do this."
She blinked at him as if surprised. "Of course I must. Excuse me, First Spear."
She left the rooftop to follow Odiana, and Fidelias turned to Aldrick. "The Antillan brothers could get us a ditch around this place - it's mostly soil here. I assume that's what you had in mind?"
Aldrick nodded. "Get your best seven or eight engineers, too. We'll give them each a Knight Ferrous escort to cover them."
Araris nodded. "It would be best if there was some way your Knights could drive them back for a moment," he added. "Buy the earthcrafters a few seconds in the clear."
Fidelias nodded slowly. Then he turned to the courier stationed on the roof near him, and said, "Ask Master Marok if he would please come speak to me."
In the five minutes it took to line up the desperate plan, the First Aleran suffered more losses than it had during the entire campaign in the Vale and Canea combined. Men screamed and were dragged back to badly overworked healers. Men fell and were dragged out into the horde. Swords shattered. Shields were rent asunder. Vord died by the hundreds but never relented.
On the flanks, the Free Aleran fared little better, for all that they were in what amounted to a backwater, in terms of enemy presence. Perhaps a double tithe of the vord in the battle wrapped around to the sides of the beleaguered Legions, but the Free Alerans' inexperience meant that they were hard-pressed. The only thing that kept some of the cohorts from bolting was the certain knowledge that there was no escape. Only victory - or death.
And victory was nowhere in evidence.
Marok stood with Fidelias calmly, looking out over the battle. Then he said, "You never asked me to lower the mists. I expected you to do so."
"Nothing to be gained by it," Fidelias said. "Except to show us exactly how many of the bloody vord are out there. The men fight better when it isn't hopeless."
Marok nodded. "As do our own warriors. But if I lowered the mists, the Canim units would see our plight."
"The mission wasn't for them to come rescue us. It was to kill sleeping vord. All of them. As long as we have the vord coming for us here, there are that many fewer in the field to oppose the others. They can kill twenty helpless vord in the time it takes to down one of the things while awake. It's worth it."
"Even if it means the death of everyone here?"
"That's right." Fidelias glanced aside as the courier waved a hand at him. The man gave him a thumbs-up. "They're ready."
Marok nodded slowly, and said, "The more vord attack your people, the fewer attack my own. Let us keep their attention."
Then he lifted his dagger and cut deeply into his left forearm. Blood began to patter to the stone roof. The Cane growled, then began chanting something full of snarls and coughing growls. A moment later, Fidelias saw the mist about five feet in front of the first rank of legionares begin to thicken. As he watched, it darkened, becoming opaque, and a moment later the shrieks of dying vord began to echo across the Legions. A hideous stench filled the air.
Teams rushed out in pairs, each with one of the Legion's best earthcrafters. Antillar Maximus looked hungover, but he wore his armor and moved under his own power. Beside him, the silver-skinned Araris Valerian kept pace, his eyes alert. Aldrick ex Gladius came after them, escorting a burly medico who had strapped Antillus Crassus to his back. Other Windwolves paced beside the engineers of the First Aleran, as they all hurried to spread themselves out equally within the defensive ring.
Marok kept on snarling and muttering to himself. The old Cane's eyes were closed. His blood ran steadily.
Even before the earthcrafters all reached their positions, those who had gotten there began their work. The earth swelled and heaved like an ocean before the wind. Then it began to fold upon itself. Fidelias was reminded of the way a sheet would ripple and fold when one snapped it to get it spread out over a mattress.
Within moments, the crafting was complete. The earth rose slightly in a short ramp before the Legion lines, rising perhaps eighteen inches - but the far side of the ramp sloped down sharply, to a ditch seven or eight feet deep and twice as wide. Centurions began to shout orders to their units, and the Legions advanced to the lip of the ditch, dressing their ranks and changing out weaponry, to ply their spears against the vord as they tried to climb out. It was not by any means an ideal defensive structure - but it was also far, far better than nothing.
"They've got it," Fidelias said.
Marok let out a slow exhale and allowed his snarling chant to trail off. The bloodspeaker slumped down to the stone of the roof and dropped heavily onto his side. His left arm was still extended, blood running from it. Fidelias turned to him with an alarmed intake of breath.
"Do not concern yourself for me, demon," Marok said. "Bandages. My pouch."
Fidelias found the bandages and began wrapping Marok's arm to stanch the flow of blood.
"I thought you said clouds of acid were for amateurs," Fidelias remarked.
"That was not a cloud. It was a wall." He closed his eyes, and muttered, "Whining demon. You are welcome."
Fidelias was about to order Marok taken to the healers when Ambassador Kitai stormed out onto the roof, looking around wildly. She spotted Fidelias and stalked toward him. "Where is he?"
"Not here," Fidelias replied. "He dropped you off and left. The Queen went after him."
Kitai ground her teeth, and said, "I might have known he would do something like this."
Fidelias arched an eyebrow. "The healers said you had a bump the size of an apple on the back of your head."
Kitai waved her hand impatiently. "I must go to him."
Fidelias leaned toward her. "He's alive?"
Kitai glanced aside, her eyes focused on nothing. "Yes. For now. And... pleased with his own cleverness, may The One help us." She blinked and looked back at Fidelias. "Quick. What is the absolute worst place in this Valley one could go? The most insanely suicidal place to be found? The place where only a great fool would venture - and only an insane fool would follow?"
Fidelias responded at once and found himself speaking in chorus with the Ambassador as they both said, "Garados."
"He is there," Kitai said. And without another word she turned, leapt into the air, and vanished behind a veil as she raised a windscreen and shot off into the open sky. Half a dozen vordknights dropped into her flight path, hoping to intercept her even though they couldn't see her.
Their wings burst into flame, and they went plunging to their deaths on the ground below.
Fidelias exhaled slowly. Then he turned back to the business of battle, redeploying their new assets, though he knew that their position could not long be held against such numbers, not for more than a few hours.
But he had a feeling he had done all that he could.
His eyes drifted in the direction of Garados. Somewhere on the cold, hard slopes of that mountain, a young man was pitting all the strength and cunning and brilliance of a thousand-year dynasty against the intelligence and remorseless power at the heart of the world-eating vord.
And, like everyone else, all Fidelias could do was wait to see what happened.
Chapter 56
From a distance the mountain was undeniably beautiful: tall and imposing, crowned with snow and ice. But the closer one got to it, the more a sense of malevolent, hostile presence seemed to grow. Tavi had encountered the mountain's ire once before - and what he had felt that day had been nowhere near this oppressively bleak. Garados wasn't simply surly and resentful this time.
The vast fury was absolutely enraged.
The thunderclouds gathering around its peak were growing darker by the moment, as though they had drawn the night into themselves as it waned. Thana Lilvia, the vast wind fury that came sweeping down off the Sea of Ice and over the Calderon Valley, was making a show of force today, gathering her herds as usual near her husband. Flashes of lightning in wildly varying colors lashed constantly through the clouds, and even from miles away, Tavi could see the gliding, looping, sinister forms of windmanes, windmanes by the score, prowling the mountain's slopes.
A low thread of fear ran down Tavi's throat, and he swallowed it as manfully as he could. He had seen windmanes kill, and it had been terrifying. But for a stroke of good luck, they would have torn him to shreds as they had that luckless deer.
He ground his teeth. He didn't need to be rehashing his life's closest calls. He needed to be focused on the enemy behind him, a being more dangerous than a cohort of windmanes. He checked over his shoulder. The vord Queen had closed his lead to a scant two hundred yards or so.
Tavi plunged into the thunderclouds gathered at Garados's summit and let out a quick bark of mocking laughter.
A pulse of anger strong enough to destroy worlds flashed through the mist, and Tavi winced at the intensity of it. That wrath belonged to the vord Queen, and was being directed entirely at him. He banked left and reduced his speed, aware that the mountain was near but not sure of its precise location.
He almost found it with the end of his nose. The grey mist occluded the frosty grey stone of the mountaintop near perfectly, and Tavi had to shift course frantically to keep from smashing against it. He avoided disaster, steadied himself, and settled down to light gently upon a slope near the mountain's peak, crouching. The vord Queen's windstream roared on by. She had apparently lost track of him in the mist.
Tavi waited for a moment, but nothing happened. He stomped on the rocky ground beneath him a few times. Then he jumped up and down, feeling exceptionally foolish.
If that didn't provoke the enormous fury, he wasn't sure what would.
Without warning, the vord Queen's voice called through the mist, disassociated from any particular direction. "Where are you, Father?"
Tavi blurred the obvious direction of his own voice with a windcrafting over his mouth. "Why do you keep calling me that?"
"Because your blood gave me birth. Yours and that of my mother."
"So that was you," Tavi said. "You were the thing Doroga dropped that big rock on."
The Queen's voice buzzed with steely undertones. "Yes."
"Grampa Doroga," Tavi mused. "I am not your father. It means more than blood."
"You are close," the Queen said, her words clipped and sharp. "For all practical purposes, it is a fact."
The stone beneath Tavi's feet quivered. He focused some of his attention downward. Though Garados was deadly dangerous, it was not swift. He should be able to leap clear if he was paying attention.
"Not quite," Tavi said. "If I were your father, you'd be the heir to the Realm."
"I am already the heir of this Realm, and after that, this world," came her answer, from the mist. "All that is left is for you" - her voice suddenly changed, coming from immediately behind him - "is to die."
He spun and barely got his sword up in time. Steel rang on steel, and again sparks bellowed forth in a thundercloud of their own, illuminating the mist around them with flashes of red, blue, and green light.
Her speed was incredible. Even without furycrafting, the vord Queen moved with blinding swiftness. Tavi had drawn upon all the windcraft he could to expand his perceptions, and it was barely enough to allow him to defend himself. Similarly, her strength was unbelievable, easily greater than a large Cane's, and Tavi found himself forced to draw strength from the earth simply in order to meet her attacks with enough power to stop them.
In retrospect, he thought, it probably wasn't one of his most insightful tactical decisions.
Within seconds of Tavi's drawing upon the earth for strength, the mountain was wrenched with a spectacular thundercrack of sound, so loud that it knocked both Tavi and the vord from their feet. In front of Tavi's widening eyes, the peak of the mountain abruptly split, a sudden crack running from the summit down to Tavi and beyond him. Within a heartbeat, the crack had widened, with rock and stone grinding and screaming. Tavi rolled rapidly to one side, an instant before the crack - well on its way to becoming a crevasse - swallowed him whole.
The mountain groaned with an enormous basso voice, and rocks began to fall around them. Most of the falling material consisted of pebbles, but among many of those were other stones, more than large enough to kill a man if they fell on him. Tavi regained his feet and dodged a falling rock. From the corner of his eye, he saw the vord Queen simply bat a stone the size of an ale keg away with her free hand.
A red glow suddenly suffused the walls of the crevasse, the light welling up from within, and Tavi sucked in a sharp breath of surprise. He had not realized that Garados was a fire-mountain.
A medium-sized stone clipped his ribs, and though the armor absorbed the blow, he staggered and barely got out of the way of the next bounding stone. On the other side of the crevasse, the vord Queen turned toward him and crouched to leap, her sword held up and ready to strike - when a fountain of liquid fire shot forth from the crevasse, sending molten stone high into the air.
Tavi turned from that at once, bounded into the air downslope as strongly as he could, called up a windstream...
... and realized, an instant too late, that he was covered in a layer of dirt and dust.
The wind furies he managed to summon were far from strong enough to lift him into the air, and after an extra second or so of hanging at the apogee of his jump, he was on his way back to the ground - to the steeply inclined, stony ground of Garados. His heart leapt into his throat. If he should lose his balance, there was virtually nothing to stop him from bouncing all the way to the base of the mountain, while falling boulders and rocky outcroppings conspired with gravity to grind him to paste.
He planted his right boot on a stable bit of rock and pushed himself up into another leap, frantically calling the wind - not to bear him aloft this time but merely to nudge him a foot or so to one side, so that his left boot could land on the next piece of stable shelf he spotted. There was no time to think, only to react, and so Tavi found himself running at full speed down the precipitous slopes of the mountain, bounding like a mountain goat and accelerating with a rather alarming ease. It wasn't until a few seconds later that he realized that he was actually beginning to outrun some of the falling stones, and he rather felt that the entire situation was shaping up to be quite exciting all the way up to an abrupt, ugly sort of end.
Behind him, there was a sound. A sound so deep and enormous that he did not hear it so much as feel it shaking his teeth. It rose and rose until it topped out in a gargantuan, basso brass horn sound, and Tavi risked a glance over his shoulder to see what had made the noise.
It was Garados.
The mountain's entire top had lifted, rocks melting and collapsing and rearranging into the features of an enormous and ugly humanlike face. Burning red pits substituted for eyes, and its mouth was a great, gaping maw without visible lips or teeth. The entire mountain shook, and Garados twisted left and right, its vast, broad shoulders tearing free of the mountainside. Tavi's brain seemed to stutter and trip as he saw the great fury in motion. He simply could not believe he was looking at something so unthinkably large.
He barely turned back around in time to make his next step. A falling stone the size of his fist hammered his calf, and he cried out in pain - and kept bounding, guiding his leaps with his weakened windcrafting.
Garados lifted one leg clear of the mountain, and Tavi had to scramble to leap off what looked like a kneecap the size of a steadholt. A few steps later, a broad foot rose out of the mountain and came sweeping down toward Tavi as if he had been an annoyance, an insect to be smashed and never considered again.
Tavi bounded frantically down the slope, trying to get out from under the enormous foot, and suddenly felt that he had an entirely new appreciation of the word hubris. He heard someone laughing hysterically as a vast shadow fell over him, and recognized that the voice was his own and that he had an impossible half mile of ground to cover, at least, to be clear of the enormous fury's descending power.
He realized with a cool and practical certainty that he simply wasn't moving fast enough. There was no way he was going to get clear in time.
Ehren stood up slowly from his seat beside Count Calderon on the citadel's bench at Garrison. He watched as a mountain - as the mountain - rose from its resting place in the form of man, twice as tall as the mountain itself had been, unthinkably huge. Sheer distance clouded its features into haze, though Ehren could see that it was built heavily, disproportionately, a being of ugliness and spite and horrible power.
"Bloody crows," Ehren breathed, as he watched that far-distant form move, raising a foot as a man might to crush an insect. "What is that?"
Bernard stared at it and shook his head slowly. "Great furies, boy," he muttered. "Are you mad?"
The ground shook hard enough to slop water out of the improvised healing tubs that had been crafted from the stone floors in the old hall of the ruined steadholt. Amara steadied herself against a wall and hoped that the earthquake wouldn't bring the hall down on their heads. After a moment, the tremors subsided, but did not quite stop, and startled, incredulous cries were added to the din of cries of pain and agony.
Amara glanced over to where Isana and Odiana and the healers of Octavian's Legions labored on the wounded, too far gone into their own battles and crafting to take any note of their surroundings. Then she staggered to the door and met Lady Placida there. Placidus Sandos had been found beneath a mound of dismembered vord nearly eight feet deep, badly wounded but alive. Even now, he lay on the ground nearby, and this was the first time Aria had left his side.
She and Amara both stared out, at the incredible form rising from the mountain to the northwest, its brow crowned with thunder and lightning, its shoulders cloaked in storm clouds and rain, its vast and terrible shape blotting out miles of blue sky. Something like a mouth gaped open, and its roar shook the ground again. The two women had to grab at the frames of the doorway to stay standing.
"Great furies," Amara whispered.
"Aye," Lady Placida breathed, her eyes wide, her face pale. "Two of them."
Tavi managed his next bounding leap, useless as he knew it would be, frantically calling the wind for all that he was worth - and was suddenly hit in the back by something moving at incredible speed. Pale arms twined beneath his shoulders, preventing him from falling, and Kitai shouted, "Hold on!"
They accelerated as the mountain's foot fell toward them, blotting out the sky, darkening the morning to twilight. Kitai's windstream drove them faster and faster toward the rapidly dwindling strip of trees and sunlight at the mountain's base - and as they grew near, that passage to survival suddenly filled with a small legion of windmanes, their inhuman faces stretched into eerie howls, their claws reaching.
"That's cheating!" Kitai declared hotly - even as their forward pace increased in proportion to her outrage.
"Mind your eyes!" Tavi shouted back.
He lifted his right hand, noting with a touch of surprise that he still held his sword. An effort of will let the weapon burst into flame. He lifted the weapon awkwardly, still being held under the arms by Kitai, then shaped the familiar blade-shaped firecrafting into an elongated, white-hot lance, reaching out in front of them. The terrible speed of their passage didn't simply blunt the end of the lance; it spread the fire out into a concave disc a dozen feet across. The heat from the fire flooded back to them, distinctly uncomfortable, a hot wind that scorched exposed skin - and sent its own wind flowing out and upward from it.
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 soothe 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.
There was a hole gouged in the ground nearby, where the Queen had been flung to earth. She had climbed out of it, clearly. Windmanes in Legion strength scoured the land nearby. Lightning raked at the ground, each bolt lasting several seconds, carving great, long trenches into the soil. When the strike would fade, the land would be almost as dark as a moonless night.
And in that darkness, Tavi saw a flash of light.
He struggled toward it, noting signs of passage on the ground being swiftly obliterated by the rain. The markings, then, were fresh. Only the Queen could have made them. Tavi followed the trail, turning aside dozens of windmanes with windcraftings of his own, finally resorting to the use of a vortex that he set spinning about the blade of his sword, substituting windcrafting for the usual firecrafting that would ignite his blade. Once that was done, a single stroke was enough to send the deadly furies wailing away from him into the night, and he plodded forward, sinking ankle deep into the cold, muddy earth, struggling up a slight incline.
The warm light of furylamps spilled out onto the ground in front of him, abruptly, and Tavi sensed the presence of a structure, a great dome of marble the height of three men. Its open entryway glowed with a soft golden light, and above it, writ into the marble in gold, was the seven-pointed star of the First Lord of Alera.
His father's grave, the Princeps' Memorium.
Tavi staggered inside. Though outside the storm still raged behind him, within the Memorium, those sounds came only as something very distant and wholly irrelevant. The vast scream of the storm was broken here to near silence. Here in the dome there was only the slight ripple of water, the crackle of flame, and the sleepy chirp of a bird.
The interior of the dome was made not of marble, but of crystal, the walls of it rising high and smooth to the ceiling twenty feet above. Once, the scale and grandeur of the place had instilled in Tavi a sense of awe. Now, he saw it differently. He knew the scale and difficulty of furycraft it had taken to raise this place from the ground, and his awe was based not upon the beauty or richness of the structure but upon the elegance of the crafting that had created it.
Light came from the seven fires that burned without apparent fuel around the outside of the room, simulated flames that were far more difficult to create than the steady glow of any furylamp. That irregular, warm light rose through the crystal, bending, refracting, splitting into rainbows that swirled and danced with a slow grace and beauty within the crystal walls - crystal that would have long since cracked and fractured had it been wrought with anything less than perfection of furycraft.
The floor in the center of the dome was covered by a pool of water, perfectly still and as smooth as Amaranth glass. All around the pool grew rich foliage, bushes, grass, flowers, even small trees, still arranged as neatly as though kept by a gardener - though Tavi hadn't seen the place since he was fifteen. The woodcrafting needed to establish such a self-tending garden was astonishing. Gaius Sextus, it seemed, had known more about the growth of living things than Tavi did, despite the differences in their backgrounds.
Between each of the fires around the walls stood seven silent suits of armor, complete with scarlet capes, the traditional-style bronze shields, and the ivory-handled swords of Septimus's singulares. The armor stood mute and empty upon nearly formless figures of dark stone, eternally vigilant, the slits in their helmets focused upon their charge. Two of the suits were missing weapons - Tavi and Amara had taken them for protection on that night so long ago.
At the center of the pool rose a block of black basalt. Upon the block lay a pale shape, a statue of the purest white marble, and Tavi stared at the representation of his father. Septimus's eyes were closed, as though sleeping, and he lay with his hands folded upon his breast, the hilt of his sword beneath them. He wore a rich cloak that draped down over one shoulder, and beneath that was the worked breastplate of a somewhat ostentatious Legion officer rather than the standard-issue lorica Tavi had on.
Slouched at the base of his father's memorial bier was the vord Queen.
She was bleeding from more wounds than Tavi could count, and the water around her, instead of being crystalline, was stained the dark green of a living pond. She slumped in absolute exhaustion. One eye was missing, that side of her once-beautiful face slashed to ribbons by the windmanes' claws.
The other eye, still glittering black, focused upon Tavi. The vord Queen rose, her sword in her hand.
Tavi stopped at the edge of the pool and waited, settling his grip on his own blade.
The two faced one another and said nothing. The silence and stillness stretched. Outside, the storm's wrath was a distant thing, impotent. Light flickered through the crystalline walls.
"I was right," the Queen said, her voice heavy and rough. "There is a strength in the bonds between you."
"Yes," Tavi said simply.
"My daughter who lives in far Canea... she will never understand that."
"No."
"Is it not strange, that though I know her failure to see it is a weakness, though I know that she would kill me upon sight, that I want her to live? To prosper?"
"Not so strange," Tavi said.
The Queen closed her eye and nodded. She opened it again, and there was a tear tracking down her face. "I tried to be what I was meant to be, Father. It was never personal."
"We're beyond that now," Tavi said. "It ends here, and now. You know that."
She was still for a moment, before asking, very quietly, "Will you make me suffer?"
"No," he said, as gently as he could.
"I know how a vord queen dies," she whispered. She lifted her chin, a ghostly shadow of pride falling across her. "I am ready."
He inclined his head to her, very slightly.
Her rush sent out a spray of water, and she came at him with every ounce of speed and power left in her broken body. Even so badly battered, she was faster than any Aleran, stronger than a grass lion.
Gaius Octavian's blade met that of the vord Queen in a single, chiming tone. Her sword shattered amidst a rain of blue and scarlet sparks.
He made a single smooth, lightning-swift cut.
And the Vord War was over.
