Chapter 35

From the beginning of the Vord War, the enemy had, time after time, attacked positions that were not ready to defend against a threat of the magnitude they represented. Despite the desperate attempts to warn Alera of what was coming, no one listened, and as a result, the vord had driven the Alerans from their fortresses and cities alike, one after the next. Time after time, the lightning-swift advance of the vord or the inhuman tactics they used had overwhelmed the insufficiently prepared defenders. Time after time, the light had dawned upon a world more and more thoroughly dominated by the invaders - but this dawn was different.

The Calderon Valley was ready to fight.

"There's a dent in it somewhere," growled Antillus Raucus, slapping one paw back at the ornate lorica covering his right shoulder. "It isn't moving right."

"You're imagining things," High Lord Phrygius answered. "There's no bloody dent."

"Well, something's not right."

"Yes," said High Lord Placida in a patient tone. "You slept in it again. You aren't young enough to keep doing that, Raucus. You've injured your shoulder joint, likely."

"I'm young enough to toss your short ass right off this wall," Raucus snapped back. "We'll see whose joint gets injured."

"Boys, boys," Placidus Aria said. "Please don't set a bad example for the other children."

Ehren, standing well behind the High Lords, was too self-contained to smile. But he rocked back and forth on his heels in silent amusement before turning his head to cast a wink at Amara.

She rolled her eyes at him in response and stepped up to stand beside Lady Placida. They stared out at the wide-open plain rolling out of the mouth of the Calderon Valley, a sea of gently rising and falling green. The sun had risen bright, the day fair. Crows had been wheeling overhead for days, first in dozens, then hundreds, and now in thousands. They cast a steady stream of flickering shadows over the earth. The enemy had used them to drop takers into Aleran defensive positions before - now any such attempt would be thwarted by the earth furies on constant patrol among the Aleran forces, which had created a side benefit of all but exterminating the rats, slives, and other vermin that tended to haunt garbage piles around a Legion position.

Let the vord try to use the crows against them again. Calderon was ready.

"Countess," Lady Placida said. "I believe I heard Lady Veradis tell you to sleep for at least twelve hours."

"Which is ridiculous," Amara replied. "It was just a broken wrist."

"And several injuries from Riva, I believe," Lady Placida said.

"She only told me twelve because she knew I needed six," Amara said.

"A most excellent rationale."

"Thank you," Amara said gravely. After a moment, she said, "I have to be here. He still can't talk very clearly. Interpreting for him could be important."

"I understand," Lady Placida said. She turned to face Amara, her lovely face calm and hardly showing the weariness Amara knew she had to be feeling. "Countess... should we win this battle, not all of us are going to survive it. Should we lose, none of us will."

Amara glanced away, out at the plain, and nodded.

Lady Placida took a step forward and put a hand on Amara's shoulder. "I am just as mortal as anyone else. There is something I would say to you, in case there's not another chance."

Amara frowned and nodded.

"I owe you my life, Countess," Aria said, simply. "It has been my honor to have known you."

Tears stung Amara's eyes. She tried to smile at the High Lady, stepped closer, and embraced her. "Thank you. I feel the same way."

Lady Placida's hug was nearly as strong as Bernard's. Amara tried not to wheeze.

Lord Placida had approached as they spoke, and he smiled briefly as they both turned to him. "In point of fact, dear, all of us owe her our lives."

Aria arched an imperious eyebrow. "You are not going to hug the pretty little Parcian girl, you goat."

Placida nodded gravely. "Foiled again."

From perhaps twenty feet down the battlements, a legionare pointed to the southwest, and cried, "Signal arrow!"

Amara turned to see a tiny, blazing sphere of light reaching the top of its arc and beginning to fall. Thousands of eyes turned to follow the firecrafting on the arrow, blazing so bright that it could be seen clearly even under the morning sun. No one spoke, but sudden tension and controlled fear lanced up and down the length of the wall like a lightning bolt.

"Well," Antillus Raucus said. "There it is."

"Brilliant last words," Phrygius said beside him. "We'll put them on your memorium. Right next to, 'He died stating the obvious.' "

"Ah," Lord Placida said. "It begins."

"See?" Phrygius said. "Sandos knows how to go out with style."

"You want to go out with style, I'll strangle you with your best silk tunic," growled Antillus.

Amara found herself letting out a breathless laugh, very nearly a giggle, despite the fear running through her. The fear didn't go away, but it became easier to accept. Her husband, his holders, the legionares assigned to him and, over the last months, some of the most powerful members of the Dianic League had been working to prepare this place for this very morning.

Time, then, to make it all worthwhile.

"I must join my husband," Amara said firmly. "Good luck, Aria."

"Of course," Aria replied. "I'll try to keep the children here from fighting each other instead of the vord. Good luck, Amara."

Amara called upon Cirrus, stepped off the wall, and rose into the air. She glided a swift mile down the wall, over a river of men clad in steel, morning light flashing off the polished metal as surely and brightly as if from water. Drums below began rattling the signal to stand ready, so many of them that it sounded to Amara like the rumble of a distant thunder.

Other couriers and messengers were darting up and down the wall, in the air and mounted upon swift horses. Amara narrowly avoided a collision with another flier, a panicked-looking young Citizen in armor too large for him, who called a hasty apology over his shoulder as he struggled to maintain his own windstream. She did not think he looked old enough to attend the Academy, much less serve as a courier in a war.

But he could fly, and the vord had taken away the Alerans' ability to spare their young from the deadly realities at hand. At least he'd been given a duty he could perform rather than simply being relegated to the ranks of Knights Aeris.

Amara arrowed neatly down to the command group, positioned at the center of the wall's north-south axis. Her landing hardly stirred the capes of the elite Knights Ferrous and Terra serving as bodyguards for the command staff. Evidently, word of how she had dealt with the young idiot outside the Princeps' tent had spread, at least enough to ensure that she would be readily recognized. The leader of the contingent was waving her past before she'd settled her weight completely onto her feet again.

Amara brushed past them with a nod, settling her own sword a little more comfortably on her hip. She had declined the offer of a suit of lorica. A body had to be conditioned to bear its weight over the course of months of effort, and Amara had not had that kind of time to spare. Instead, she wore a far-more-comfortable leather coat lined with small plates of light, strong steel. It would almost certainly preserve her hide against an arrow or the slash of a scalpel-edged dueling blade.

Pity the vord didn't fight with either of those weapons.

Amara strode forward to the low observation platform built upon the wall in lieu of an actual tower and mounted the steps to it rapidly.

"I'm simply saying that it's the sort of thing that one can't take too seriously," High Lord Riva was saying. The rather dumpy Lord of Riva looked a bit out of place in Legion lorica, finely made as it might be. "Bloody crows, man," he sputtered. "You've built a bloody campaign fortress right in my own backyard!"

"Good thing I did, too," Bernard said mildly, through his stiffened jaw.

Lord Riva scowled, and said, "I never even appointed you. Bloody Sextus did it, interfering old busybody."

"Mmhmm," Bernard agreed. "Good thing he did, too."

Riva gave him a harsh look that faded quickly as he let out an exasperated sigh. "Well. You tried to warn us about the vord, didn't you?"

"We're all trying to do our best to serve the Realm and our people, sir," Bernard said. He turned and smiled at Amara as she joined them. "My lady."

She smiled and touched his hand briefly. "Shouldn't we sound battle positions?"

"Enemy isn't here yet," Bernard said, his voice placid. "Men stand around with swords in their hands for a few hours, they get nervous, tired, start wondering why some fool gave the order for no reason." He winced and touched his fingertips to his jaw as the effort of so many words pained him. "Won't hurt to wait. Excuse me."

Bernard turned to walk down the wall to the elderly man in Legion armor and a centurion's helmet, his trousers emblazoned with not one, but two scarlet stripes of the Order of the Lion. He muttered a couple of words, and old Centurion Giraldi, out of retirement and back in his armor, nodded stolidly and began dispatching couriers.

"Countess," Riva greeted her, "when a lord raises a great fortress in his liege lord's hinterlands, it's perfectly reasonable to be suspicious. Look what happened at Seven Hills. I don't think I'm out of line, here."

"Under most circumstances, you wouldn't be, Your Grace. But given our situation, I'd say that this is something we can discuss when this is all over. We can even have a hearing over it. Assuming any legates survive."

Riva grunted, rather sourly, but conceded the point with a nod. He stared out to the southwest, his gaze following the line of the causeway that led back to Riva. "My city taken. My people fleeing for their lives, dying. Starving." He looked down at his armor, at the sword on his belt, and touched it gingerly. When he spoke again, he sounded like a very tired man. "All I've ever wanted for my lands was justice, prosperity, and peace. I'm not much of a soldier. I'm a builder, Countess. I was so pleased with how many folk were moving through the lands to trade, with how much good work you and your husband had done in Calderon. Increasing trade. Building goodwill with the Marat." He looked at her mildly. "I assumed that you were saving the money you were making, after taxes. Or investing it, perhaps."

"Oh, we were investing it, my lord," Amara said, smiling faintly. "In this morning."

Riva pursed his lips and nodded. "I suppose I can hardly argue with that. How did you do all this? How did you keep it hidden?"

"The walls?" Amara shrugged. "Most people who pass through the valley never leave the causeway. Anything out of sight of the causeway is not difficult to conceal. For the walls, most of the work, as I understand it, is preparing the earth beneath, first. Gathering the proper stone and so on. Once that is done, the raising of the walls is much simpler."

Riva frowned and nodded. "True. So you aligned the proper stone over time and only brought them up as you needed them."

"Yes. The Dianic League was most useful in helping us with that, as well as with some of the more serious stone-moving craftings." She gestured out at the land before them. "And the walls are only the beginning of the defenses, of course. A skeleton, if you see what I mean."

Lord Riva nodded. "It's... all quite irregular."

"My lord husband and his nephew have been exchanging ideas for it by letter for quite some time. Gaius Octavian has a rather irregular turn of mind."

"So I have gathered," Riva said. He looked at Bernard, and said, "I have to admit, I think he's probably the right choice for running the defenses here. He knows them better than anyone else in the Realm, after all."

"Yes, he does," Amara said.

"Rather remarkable man, really. Do you know, he's never once said, 'I told you so.' "

"He isn't the sort to think such things are important," Amara said, smiling. "But, Your Grace... he told you so."

Lord Riva blinked at her, then let out a rueful chuckle. "Yes. He did, didn't he?"

"Riders!" cried a lookout at the corner of the tower, pointing.

The Aleran pickets who had been watching for the approach of the vord appeared at the top of a distant hill, riding their horses hard down its slope and onto the open plain. Vordknights swarmed over them like night insects around a furylamp, sweeping down to strike and rake, while arrows leapt up from the scouts, with only limited success in warding away the attackers.

"Those men are in trouble," Riva said.

Bernard raised his fingers to his lips and let out a piercing whistle. He lifted his hand to the Knights Aeris waiting behind the wall and gave them the flier's hand signals for "lift off," "escort," and with a slashing movement of his wrist indicted the direction they were to travel.

In a roar of wind, thirty Knights Aeris swept into the sky and shot toward the riders, to begin herding the vordknights from the fleeing horses with the blasts of their windstreams. They sent the enemy fliers tumbling for a moment or two, not closing to weapons range when they could simply scatter the enemy through the sky like so many dry leaves. They took up position over the scouts, circling protectively above them in an airborne carousel.

Bernard grunted satisfaction. "Like what Aquitaine did at Ceres. No reason to fight the bloody things and lose valuable Knights Aeris. Just get them out of the bloody way."

The vordknights retreated after a desultory pursuit in which they were simply cast back and completely neutralized by the windstreams of the fliers. The riders came thundering in through a gate crafted into the wall near the command platform. The leader of the riders, a man wearing a woodsman's green and brown and grey leathers, swung down from his horse and moved with quick purpose toward Bernard, throwing him a crisp Legion salute though he wore neither armor nor sword. Rufus Marcus had been part of the cohort of legionares who had first encountered the vord, years ago, as well as being a survivor of Second Calderon. Like Giraldi, he wore two stripes of the Order of the Lion on his breeches, though they had been so thoroughly muddied that one could hardly tell that they had originally been red.

Bernard returned the salute. "Tribune. What are we looking at?"

"Flyboys had it pretty well, sir," Rufus replied. "I make it better than three million of their infantry coming, and they aren't being subtle about it. They're in close order, sir, not like the packs they move in out in the countryside."

"That means... that means that this Queen of theirs is present," Riva said, looking back and forth between them. "Correct?"

"Aye, milord," Bernard said. "Or so we think."

"Sir," said the scout, "they've also got a good many of those giants they used for wall work during the campaign last year."

Bernard grunted. "Figured they would. Anything else?"

"Aye. We couldn't work around to the back, but I'm sure they had something coming along behind the main body. They weren't kicking up any dust with all the rain we've had of late, but they were drawing crows."

"Second force?" Bernard said, frowning.

Amara said, "A guess - a pack of prisoners that they plan to feed to their takers and use to counter our crafting, the way they did at Alera Imperia."

Tribune Rufus nodded. "Could be. Or it could be they called their fliers back together to have them in numbers. We've only seen a few. Maybe they're keeping them on the ground to prevent us spotting them."

"We'll be able to handle vordknights," Bernard said tightly. "It's probably best to assume that they're coming with something we haven't seen before."

The scout took a swig of water from a mostly empty skin. "Aye. Almost always a solid bet. I don't think the vord have much of a bluff. The way they're coming on, they think they've got themselves a good hole card."

"Do you still play cards, Tribune?" Amara asked, idly amused.

"Oh, aye." Rufus grinned. "Mostly why I stay in the Legions, Countess. When those townies and wagon guards lose, they figure they don't want to scuffle with me and five thousand other fellas."

Rufus finished the water in his skin, his eyes on the horizon from which he had recently appeared. A moment later, he grunted as if someone had punched him in the belly, and said, "Time to place our bets."

Amara turned to see the vord pour over the horizon.

Again she was struck by how much it was like watching the shadow of a cloud wash over the land. There were so many of the mantis-form warriors, moving together, that they seemed like a single entity, a carpet of gleaming green-black armor, of slashing edges and piercing points. Amara almost felt that she would cut her finger if she pointed at them.

The leading vord poured down over the hilltop - and the horde began to spread. More forms came rolling over every hilltop Amara could see, from horizon to horizon, all moving together, dressing their line as they went until, in the last mile, they all came rushing forward together, in a vast and single wall of terrible purpose. More eerie still, it happened in complete silence. There was not a shriek or a cry, no rattle of drum, no blaring of horns. They simply came on like the shadow of a cloud, and every bit as unstoppable. The silence was horrible. It made them seem somehow unreal in the bright light of morning.

Bernard stared at them intently, then nodded. Beside him and slightly to one side, old Giraldi raised his voice in a parade-ground bellow. "Draw steel!"

His voice carried up and down the wall in booming clarity in that perfect silence - and then more than one hundred and fifty thousand swords whispered from their sheaths. The sound of it, far more deadly than any rustling of leaves in the wind, which it resembled, flowed up and down the wall. Amara realized, with faint surprise, that her own weapon was in her hand.

They were ready, she realized.

They were ready.

She never consciously decided to shout, but she suddenly felt her voice rising, trumpet-clear in the morning light, as she cried out her scorn and defiance toward the enemy, a simple howl of, "Alera!"

The echoes of her voice rolled over the silent land.

Sudden thunder shook the stones of the wall, shook the ground itself, as every soul on the wall, every single defender now standing against that dark tide, added their own terror and fury to the air. There was no one theme to the shout, no one word, no single motto or cry - but the Legions spoke in a single voice that sent a violent elation through Amara's limbs and made the sword in her hand feel lighter than the air she mastered.

That shout of defiance crashed into the vord lines like a physical blow, and for an eyeblink the enemy advance slowed - but then it was answered with a mind-splitting storm of shrieking vord cries, painful to the body, the mind, and the soul. The enemy rushed forward at a full sprint over the last several hundred yards of ground before the wall, blackening the earth as far as the eye could see, their cries answering the defenders.

And born of that primal, furious thunder, the last battle of the war, perhaps the last of the Realm, began.

Chapter 36

The Legions screamed their defiance of the vord, and Ehren couldn't keep himself from joining them, out of nothing but raw reflex and naked terror. On some level, he was fairly sure that not many of the vord would be intimidated by the way his voice cracked, but it wasn't as though he could control that. Fear might not have been strangling him, precisely, but it had apparently caused his throat to revert to puberty.

Somewhere nearby, a centurion bellowed something that went completely unheard in all the noise. Fortunately, the legionares knew their work well enough without any such command. As the enemy closed, an Aleran-borne shadow passed over the ground before the wall, and more spears than a body could count in a week flew out to come sailing down into the front ranks of the vord. The spears weren't particularly deadly, in and of themselves. They might have scored one kill in fifty, by Ehren's estimation, one kill in thirty, tops - but every vord struck by one of the heavy weapons staggered in pain. Even if the wound was not fatal, the vord's pace faltered, and it was swiftly trampled by the warriors rushing along behind.

The volley was devastating to enemy cohesion, and an old standard Legion tactic.

But, this being a battle plan Tavi had a hand in, it didn't stop there.

The artisans of the Calderon Valley hadn't been able to provide every single legionare on the wall with one of the modified javelins - only the most skilled man of each spear of eight had been given the new designs. More often than not, the spears that had killed a vord outright had been thrown by those men - and every single one of the new spears contained a small sphere of glass, nestled into the cup of the javelin's iron head, where the wooden shaft joined it. Whether the javelins missed and struck the earth or hit home, thousands of tiny glass spheres shattered, unleashing the furies that had been bound within.

Ehren himself had field-tested the firestones, furycrafted devices developed from the coldstones used to keep food chilled in restaurants and wealthy households around the Realm - another innovation sprung from the tricky, twisty labyrinth Octavian had for a brain. The glass spheres could contain even more heat for their size than the first generation of stones could, and they were far easier to make.

Destruction was almost always easier to manage than something useful, Ehren reflected.

The fire-javelins exploded together in a roar, each bursting into a sudden sphere of flame the size of a supply wagon. It wasn't the white-hot fire of a Knight Ignus's attack, but it didn't have to be. The fire engulfed the front two ranks of the enemy and sucked so much air in to feed its short-lived flame that Ehren's cloak was drawn up against his back and legs, snapping as if he stood with his back to a strong wind. Greasy black smoke billowed out, the smell indescribably foul, and for a few instants, the vord line was thrown into complete disarray.

Ehren cried out and slapped Lord Antillus on the shoulder. There was no need for the signal. The large, athletic man was already throwing himself forward along with the Placidas and Phrygius.

The most powerful and dangerous High Lords of Alera rose together in a sudden column of wind and plunged through the black cloud and out over the enemy force, moving almost too quickly to be seen, and vanished behind a windcrafted veil as they went. Ehren clenched his hands into fists and stared after them, trying to see through the mass of legionares in front of him. Their mission had been his idea. He bore a measure of responsibility for its outcome.

The vord recovered their momentum in seconds, those coming behind the first wave leaping over the slain and wounded. Their scythes gouged the stone of the wall, creating pitted spots that their insectlike legs could use to climb, and they swarmed fearlessly up the wall and into the swords of the Legions.

Men and vord shrieked and howled. Swords flashed in the sun. Vord scythes plunged. Blood, both red and dirty green, spattered the wall, which might have been a fallen log for all the attention the vord paid to it - but it did prevent them from employing their reach or their downward-stabbing scythes to the best effect. They came on in endless pressure, while the legionares fought on, with men forward on the wall fighting with shield and sword, their comrades behind them thrusting with longer spears. The vord would gain the wall, in places, only to be pushed back savagely by the Legions.

More and more of the creatures poured in, like a deadly, living tide, rushing in over the ground to wash against the wall. Wave after wave broke upon the low siege wall, upon Legion steel and Aleran blood. And, like an oncoming tide, the pressure only grew. The vord were climbing over one another in their eagerness to reach the legionares, and the growing number of bodies below the wall were forming ramps up to the top.

The breaking point was near. Within a few moments more, the vord would gain a foothold on the wall, somewhere, and would begin pouring over it in the thousands. The enemy sensed it as well. More and more of the vord pressed closer to the wall. Ehren could have stepped off the wall and walked a mile without touching the ground.

It was time.

He turned and nodded to the armored old Citizen on his left. "Now?"

Lord Gram had been watching the attack with his helmet off. His hair had been bright red in his youth, but was now mostly grey, with only a few lone, defiant sprigs showing a ruddy hue. He nodded and took his helmet from beneath his arm and settled it onto his head. "Aye. Pack them in any closer, and they'll overflow the wall."

"Should we send up the signal?" he said. Once a signal went up, it would propagate along the wall from one firecrafter to the next.

Gram grunted, scowling. "Wait for the order, boy. All we're looking at is what's right in front of us. That's our job. Bernard is looking at the whole picture. That's his job. He'll give the order when it's time."

A vord gained the wall not twenty feet away, a screaming legionare skewered on one of its scythes. It batted away a second legionare like a toy, then died under the massive maul wielded by a Knight Terra who rushed to plug the breach - but three of its companions had reached the top of the wall in the time that took to happen and drove outward. More vord would join them in a few seconds.

"Lord Gram?" Ehren called. His voice cracked again.

"Wait!" Gram thundered back.

Count Calderon would wait to signal the next phase of the plan until as many of the enemy as possible were in position. Ehren knew that. He also knew that as a commander of a battle this critical, Calderon would be willing to sacrifice the lives of some of the defenders if necessary. He had to be. That was the entire reason to have battle commanders in the first place - so that one man could balance the advantages of logic and reason against the emotional, insane demands of close battle.

It was just that, at the moment, with three vord having mounted the wall and with, oh dear, one of them looking directly at him, it did not seem to Ehren like a sound approach to warfare. He also suddenly thought that it would have been a fine idea to have accepted the set of lorica he had been offered yesterday. Thirty or forty pounds of steel over his fragile flesh (which had seemed impossibly cumbersome for the use of a man who was essentially a glorified rapid-messenger boy, a few hours before) suddenly sounded splendid.

A fourth vord appeared at the top of the wall, and Ehren realized that it was too late for the Aleran counterstroke to save them, even if it happened at that instant. They had to retake the wall, and right now, or the vord would kill the men all around him - and quite likely Ehren himself. Worse, they would kill Gram, one of only a few firecrafters with the capability to craft a flame hot enough for the counterstroke. His death was unacceptable.

A block of legionares followed the Knight Terra in an attack on the first two vord to reach the top, but the third swept a legionare from the wall and into the sea of scythes below it. The man's screams were swallowed as abruptly as if he had fallen into water. The vord's glittering eyes locked onto Ehren, and the mantis-form warrior scuttled forward, scythes flashing.

One of the deadly weapons plunged down at Ehren, who hopped back out of reach, and shouted, "Gram, watch out!" He put a shoulder into Gram's hip and shoved him roughly back from the oncoming warrior.

The movement cost him precious instants and inches. He did not quite evade the mantis warrior's reach, and a darting scythe plowed a bloody furrow down one shoulder blade, skipped a bit where his body arched in instinctive pain and reaction, then bit into him again as it sliced along one buttock.

Ehren staggered and went to one knee, knowing instinctively that he could not possibly remain there and sure that he could not escape the reach of the mantis. The legionares were coming, as eager as he had been to close the breach, but they were an endless second away.

Ehren flung himself backward, toward the vord, tucking his body into a roll as he went. He felt the scythe flash down at him and miss, digging into the stone of the wall.

Ehren stopped underneath the body of the vord, which began dancing about, trying to thrust its scythes beneath it, but unable to reach him. Ehren reached out a hand toward a fallen legionare's spear, which lay nearby. His woodcrafting was nothing to write home about, but it was more than sufficient to bend the haft of the spear a little, and when he released it, to allow its elastic spring to send it clattering into the reach of his hand.

He seized the spear, rolled to one side very quickly, and barely dodged the scythe that plunged down at him from the vord now mounting the wall beside his opponent. Scuttling like a limping crab, Ehren stayed beneath the vord warrior, grasping the spear and once more reaching out for his woodcrafting, until he had bent its shaft into a quivering bow that would have enclosed most of a circle. Then he took a second to decide where to strike and how to aim, grounded the spear's butt against the stone of the wall, and released the woodcrafting.

The spear straightened again, with vicious energy. The sharp tip of the weapon skittered along the vord's armored underbelly - but then the tip bit into the joint between two plates of chitin and plunged into the vord with such force that it lifted its forequarters off the ground. Dirty green-brown blood geysered from the wound, and the vord fell off on the Aleran side of the wall, thrashing in its death throes.

Ehren let out a whoop - but it turned into a scream as something that felt red-hot slammed into his lower back. There was a thumping sound, and his body jerked, and a muscle behind his right shoulder blade went into a sudden, vicious cramp. He tried to move, but something held him fast to the ground. It might have been gravity. He felt very heavy.

He looked over his shoulder, itself an agonizing motion, and saw that the next vord up the wall had leapt onto him as its less fortunate relative fell to the ground. He couldn't see the scythes or where they had pierced him. Thinking about it, he decided, he really didn't want to. The pain was bad enough. He didn't need a visual image to go with it.

He couldn't breathe. He just wanted to take a good, deep breath. But he couldn't inhale at all. That didn't seem fair. He laid his cheek on the stone.

There was a bright light, and something warm passed over him, and a vord shrieked.

"Healer!" bellowed Gram.

Ehren blinked open his eyes and looked to the south. There, hovering in the air, was a single brilliant spark of bright red fire.

"No, you idiot, don't pull them out of him," Gram snarled at someone. "He'll bleed out right here."

"But they've got him spiked to the bloody wall," protested someone with a deep, resonant voice.

"Use your head for something besides finding things to smash with that maul, Frederick," Gram answered. "Earthcraft the wall enough to get them loose."

"Oh. Right. Just a second..."

Gram was leaning over him, and there were legionares back on the wall around them. They must have closed the breach. That was good. Ehren lifted his hand. It shook more than it should have, he thought. "Gram," he gasped, pointing. "Signal."

The old Lord looked back over his shoulder, growled, then rose. He looked up at the sky, took a deep breath, then lifted his hand and sent what looked like a small blue star blazing into the air.

All up and down the wall, other stars answered.

A second star pulsed out from the command post, this one burning white-hot, almost painful to look at even in broad daylight.

Up and down the wall, Ehren knew, firecrafters were doing precisely what Gram was. The old Lord had his eyes focused on the ground in front of the wall, and a pair of legionares was covering him from any enemy attack. He concentrated for a moment, then pointed a finger down at the ground below and spoke a single harsh, quiet word. "Burn."

A sphere of white fire leapt from Gram's fingertip to the ground below.

For a long minute, nothing happened.

Ehren closed his eyes and pictured it in his mind. Bringing siege walls up from the earth required the moving of quality, heavy stone. But that wasn't the only thing that could be moved. The earth was full of all sorts of interesting minerals. Gold. Silver. Gems.

And coal.

And oil.

Over the past months, the entire plain before the first wall had been seeded with the latter two. Coal had been raised to within inches of the surface - and the much more easily manipulated oil had been brought up to the surface layers of earth, until the ground fairly squelched with it. It was hardly noticeable, given how soft and damp the regular rains had left the ground in the past few days, except for the smell. And the vord did not appear to be bright enough to recognize it.

Oil-filled tubes had been crafted throughout the coal undersurface, with air holes made in them every so often. Then the crafters upon the Aleran walls dropped the fire directly down and into the mouths of those tubes, flames rapidly licking down them.

Thirty seconds later, there was a roar of sound, as the fire fed upon the oil and the air expanded dangerously, rupturing the earth and shattering the flaky sheets of coal into gravel.

Fire screamed and rose, and somewhere above there was the howl of wind, wind, wind. The four Citizens who had taken off were providing the fire with enough air to be born - a veritable cyclone, really.

When it finally did leap up, it was in a roar, and a small cloud of earth and coal and blazing droplets of oil flew up so high into the air that, even lying down, Ehren could see the highest crown of it.

"Bloody crows!" cried a legionare, half in terror and half in joy.

Ehren could see it reflected in the young man's eyes. A vast curtain of flame was being drawn across the entire width of the Calderon Valley. Vord were screaming. Vord were dying - hundreds of thousands of them, who had so willingly packed as closely into the wall as possible.

Ehren thought sundown had come remarkably early. Somewhere nearby, a horn was sounding the retreat.

They had never intended to hold the first wall. It was simply too long to mount an effective defense. But the sacrifice and courage of the men who had bled and died at the first wall had let the Alerans cut a gaping wound into the vord's advantage of numbers. Brave young legionares. The poor idiots. Thank goodness Ehren would never have passed muster for a Legion, between his size and his lack of useful furycraft. He'd been able to avoid all that nonsense. And he'd helped get some good work done today.

A little voice told him that the vord could afford the losses. Though many had just died, in numbers greater than those of all the Legions of Alera that remained, the vord still had an overwhelming advantage.

Which was why, he mused, there were more surprises waiting for them as they progressed into the Valley. Count Calderon was more than ready to welcome them. He might not be able to stop them - it was possible that no one could. But, by the furies, from listening to the man, they would pay for every breath they took of the Count of Calderon's air before it was over.

Ehren found himself smiling. Then someone was moving him. He smelled the pungent aroma of a gargant. People talked, but he paid them little attention. He was too tired. He thought to himself that if he went to sleep, he might die.

Then again, as tired as he felt, if death was like sleep, how bad could it be?