Chapter 51

Tavi and Kitai waited with the aerial contingent of the attack. Sir Callum and the other members of the First Aleran's Knights Pisces were restless. They couldn't lift off until the ground forces had begun their assault, for fear that the hollow roar of two dozen windstreams would alert the vord to their presence.

Then someone, probably Fidelias, let out a bellowed command to move out, and the host was on the march. It took them less than half an hour to reach the ruined steadholt, then, at another signal, the trumpets sounded the charge, and Aleran and Canim cavalry went roaring down onto the steadholt while the infantry marched at double speed in their wake.

"Right!" Tavi said. "Let's go!" He summoned up his windstream and lifted off. He was clumsier about it than most of the Knights Aeris there, but at least he managed it without hurting himself or fouling the efforts of the man beside him. Kitai took up position beside him on his left, while Sir Callum flew on his right, and the other Knights Aeris spread out into a v-shaped wing behind him.

Tavi led them forward, soon overflying the Aleran infantry, the slowest troops on the field. Their goal was the ruined steadholt itself, the nearest target, while their Canim peers, being much faster on their feet, swept to the east and around the steadholt, to strike into the fields of sleeping vord.

The other side included the cavalry, Canim and Aleran alike. The taurga were at least twice the weight of a horse, and they couldn't outrun one. As Tavi cruised up, the first Aleran cavalrymen were starting through the vord field, sa bers lowering to flash left and right, in almost exactly the same motions and timing as their practice drills. They rushed down the columns of hibernating vord, wreaking havoc. Nearly eight hundred horsemen running at full speed through the field dealt the vord hideous wounds.

But they didn't hold a candle to the slower taurga.

The Canim beasts were enormously powerful, individually speaking - bigger and stronger than any beast Tavi knew of short of a gargant. But the taurga were omnivores with vicious tempers. Even if they hadn't been urged by their riders, they would have smashed vord left and right as they ran through them - while upon the beasts' backs, the Shuaran warrior Canim struck lazy-looking blows with long-handled axes that simply sheared through whatever they hit. They wreaked four or five times the damage the Aleran cavalry had done - which was only reasonable, since there were nearly five thousand of the bloody things.

Shrieks began to go up, here and there, the warning trills of wax spiders who had recognized that something wasn't right. The mantis warriors in the steadholt began streaking about, a couple of hundred of them at least, as the battle lines of the Aleran Legions closed on the steadholt.

Then a single alien voice rose over the noise of battle, a bone-chilling shriek that made Tavi feel cold to the bottom of his belly. For a second, he felt as if he had simply forgotten how to think, as if such civilized frippery as logic and the ability to form words had become deadweight he needed to cast off. His flight faltered a bit.

Beside him and below him, Tavi saw exactly the same reaction from all of the host, from Alerans, Canim, and their beasts alike - sudden hesitation, flashes of panic, wildly rolling eyes. Even Kitai shuddered. Worse, the sleeping vord seemed to have heard that voice and responded to it. Starting with the nearest vord, the mantis warriors slowly began to stir.

Tavi had heard cries like that before, and knew what they meant: The vord Queen had taken the field.

"See!" Kitai hissed, pointing. "There she goes!"

A shadowy form, hardly visible behind a windcrafted veil, burst through the thick stone wall of the barn as though it had been made from rotten wood. It shot off along the ground, visible only through the disturbance its violent windstream raised from the ground. As it passed over the hibernating vord, it screamed again, and more of the warriors began to stir.

The Aleran command sent out signals by trumpet, but not signals to re-form the ranks or to retreat. The trumpets rang out in pure, clear defiance of the sleeping swarm: attack, attack, attack.

"Go high!" Tavi snarled, and flung himself after the Queen. He dived for the ground to pick up speed and pulled himself out of the dive only seven or eight feet above the earth. He dodged around two Narashan warriors and half a dozen joyously destructive taurga before streaking out ahead of the entire host, closing distance on the fleeing, shrieking disturbance. As he went, even more warriors began to stir, and once a reaching scythe-limb came near to ripping his belly open more or less by pure providence. He batted it aside with his sword, closing to within a few yards of the Queen, and hit upon an inspiration. Concentrating intently, he reached forward with a windcrafting and closed it around the vord Queen in a bubble - a simple privacy crafting. Her voice cut off in midscream.

It took her several seconds to realize what Tavi had done to her. He thought he knew what tactic she would use next, and readied himself for it. Not two seconds later, the vord Queen suddenly shot twenty feet up, and her veil and windstream vanished altogether. She whirled, clearly visible in the predawn light, flinging open a small leather bag of fine salt.

But Tavi had anticipated the maneuver, and as the Queen shot up into the air, he did as well, dismissing his windcraftings an instant later. He sailed through the air and the cloud of fine salt on pure momentum, and didn't call back his windstream until he was sure he was past the salt.

He and the Queen regained their windstreams at almost the same instant, and she let out a shriek of frustration - cut off midway by another privacy windcrafting. She whirled on him, naked but for a cloak, her sword in hand, her eyes glittering. Then she reversed the direction of her windstream, slowing her forward momentum.

Just as her velocity came to an instant's standstill, there was the hiss of an arrow loosed from a bow in the darkness above Tavi. The sound gave the vord Queen more than enough time to react, and her sword rose to cut the arrow from the air. The missile splintered upon her blade.

The impact shattered the salt-crystal head of the arrow, and the Queen screamed as her wind furies were ripped and shredded by the weapon. Her windstream collapsed. She fell to the ground and landed on all fours, falling into an instant, inhumanly flexible roll that saved her from the swift sphere of white-hot fire Tavi called forth at the point of her impact.

Kitai and the Knights Pisces swept down and began strafing the Queen in twos and threes, flashing past and loosing arrow after arrow. She dodged with contemptuous speed and began shrieking once more to awaken the sleeping warriors - Kitai's arrow had disrupted Tavi's privacy windcrafting with the same vicious efficacy it had the Queen's windstream.

The nearby warriors stirred at once.

Tavi ground his teeth in frustration. If they allowed the Queen to fly, she would almost certainly waken all the sleeping vord, and odds were good that she might escape entirely - but using salt to keep her grounded also prevented Tavi from using the windcrafting that would prevent her from waking the other vord. If she managed to rouse enough of them, she could disappear into the swarm, and they might never be able to find her, much less bring lethal amounts of power to bear upon her.

Tavi glanced back. They hadn't flown for long, but it had taken them a mile or more away from the cloud-shrouded host. No help would be coming from there in time to do him any good.

She shrieked again, and, out of pure frustration, Tavi threw another fire-sphere at her. She darted out of it easily and slapped aside another arrow from one of the strafing Knights as she went. Tavi's strike missed her but caught half a dozen mantis warriors in its blast, charring them to twisted, skeletal shapes.

The vord Queen whirled to look at him, and Tavi felt the last thing he had expected: His watercrafting senses were pounded with an emotional assault - pure rage, the rage of a mother whose children are endangered.

Yes, he thought. This is what I needed.

"Aleran!" Kitai screamed.

He whipped his head up to see Kitai pointing toward the east. The sky, now the pale blue harbinger of sunrise, was thickly dotted with hundreds or thousands of dark shapes moving toward them - vordknights, they had to be. They would reach them in moments, and if that happened, there would be no way to bring enough power to bear upon the Queen.

The fliers of the First Aleran could not possibly stand against so many vordknights. Though their discipline and furycraft might make each Knight Aeris the equal of a dozen vord fliers, there were more than enough of the enemy on the way simply to overwhelm them. If he ordered them to stand against that, they would not survive. Their deaths would serve only to buy time.

But he needed the time.

He flashed the orders to Sir Callum by hand signal: Engage and hold the incoming enemy to the east.

By then, it was just light enough for Tavi to see the expression on Callum's face. He looked to the east and saw what was coming. He became pale, his expression twisting into a grimace of fear. He closed his eyes for a second and turned to Tavi. He banged his fist against his armored chest, meeting his gaze, and nodded slightly - whether in agreement or farewell, Tavi did not know. Then Callum began passing orders to the fliers, gathering each of them up as they finished their runs on the Queen.

As they did, Tavi continued hurling flame into the ranks around the vord Queen, killing dozens of mantis warriors, each blast earning him a fresh flash of her pure rage. Kitai took up the slack of the Knights as they ceased shooting at the Queen, her hand flying from quiver to bowstring, her arrows flashing with the supernatural speed and accuracy of a woodcrafter. The Queen was an elusive target - many arrows missed altogether, and those that stayed on their mark inevitably met with her blade. The Queen kept on shrieking, and several thousand mantis warriors were on the move, gathering up around her.

There was an enormous roar of collected windstreams as Callum and his men streaked out to engage the incoming vordknights, and a moment later Kitai switched to firecrafting as well. Bright spheres of blue-white light exploded beside Tavi's scarlet-white firecraftings, chewing a pair of broad holes in the ground. Mantis warriors screamed in agony and died in dozens as they were engulfed in the flames.

The Queen let out another howl of rage and turned toward Kitai, one hand raised and gathering a fistful of flame. As soon as Tavi saw that the Queen's attention was off him, he altered course to soar around behind her and, even as she sent the firecrafting at Kitai, Tavi hurled one of his own at the Queen.

The vord's spectacular reflexes saved her from Tavi's attack, though the warriors immediately around her were scoured from the face of the land. But the dodge had cost her - her own firecrafting exploded yards and yards short of Kitai.

The Queen shifted her aim to attack Tavi, only to have Kitai emulate the tactic Tavi had just used. As the Queen threw, Kitai's fire blast tore into her, forcing her to dodge and ruining her aim. Tavi felt his mouth turning up into a wolfish smile. If they could keep the battle moving this way, they would have her - and the vord Queen had to realize that every bit as much as Tavi did. Which meant that any second now she would...

The Queen shrieked again in anger and flung herself airborne. For a moment, Tavi thought that her wind furies were still in a state of disruption and that she wasn't going to have enough lift to fly - but then a vortex like a small tornado abruptly gathered beneath her, tossing her own brood about like toys, and she came rushing up at them at terrible speed, a wave of raw anger pulsing through the air before her as she flew straight toward Kitai.

Kitai set another salt-headed arrow to her bow, drew, and calmly waited until the last instant to loose it. The arrow leapt from the bow.

The vord Queen snatched it out of the air with her left hand, turned her wrist in a sinuous movement too swift to follow, and drove the tip toward Kitai's throat. Kitai lifted an arm in a desperate block, and the salt-crystal tip drove through her forearm and began to emerge from the other side before the arrow's slender shaft snapped. The blow still drove her forearm up against her mail, and the protruding portion of bloodied salt crystal was powdered to grains against it.

Kitai dropped like a stone.

Tavi sheathed his sword and altered his course smoothly, pouring on the speed, and hoped that Kitai had the presence of mind - even as she plunged through a lethal fall - to realize what the Queen was almost certain to do next.

Even as Kitai fell, she drew her third - her last - salt arrow from the specially designed quiver and loosed it at the Queen in an instinctive snap shot. The vord Queen had to swerve to one side to avoid the arrow, even as another firecrafting blossomed forth from her dark-nailed hand.

Tavi rolled so that his belly was to the sky as he intercepted Kitai, her shoulder blades slamming into his belly, her head whiplashing against his armored chest, even as he made a greater effort of furycraft to bear both of their weights. The Queen's firecrafting boomed deafeningly, exploding less than ten feet away from them with enough intensity to char Tavi's eyebrows and fill his nose with the reek of burned hair.

Tavi had caught Kitai perhaps twenty feet from the ground, and his back actually bounced off a hibernating mantis's head before their fall stopped, and he started gaining altitude again. He let out a grunt, made sure his arms were around her solidly, and poured on all the speed he could, running for the cloud of mist that had enveloped the abandoned steadholt.

"Kitai?" he called. "Kitai?"

She did not answer.

Thunder rumbled across the face of the Valley, a threatening, growling sound from the thunderheads gathering around Garados's snowcapped peak, colored a deep orange by the first rays of the rising sun - Thana, the wind fury known to the Valley's holders as Garados's wife, was preparing a battle force of her own.

"Kitai!" Tavi screamed.

She was limp in his arms.

The vord Queen let out a shriek of triumph and shot after them in deadly, intent pursuit.

Amara woke up with something foul in her mouth. She tried to spit it out, only to feel someone pushing it back in. She let out a weak grunt of protest and lifted a hand.

"Countess," said the First Lady's calm, quiet voice. "You must leave them in your mouth. Thanks to your wardrobe, you received considerably more poison than Aria, and if you spit them out before it has been neutralized, I fear you could relapse."

Amara shivered and blinked her eyes open. She was lying in a pool of shallow water, her head resting on Isana's crossed legs. Whatever the stuff in her mouth was, it tasted musty and vile - so much so that it almost completely neutralized the pain throbbing steadily through her cut and bruised body.

Which meant that she was alive. Which didn't make sense. One moment, she'd been about to sell her life for an extremely unlikely chance to combat the vord Queen - in fact, as she remembered it, she had taken that gamble and lost, handily, even before the wasp-things had slammed into her.

"Here comes another one," said a rasping, oddly metallic voice. She turned her head to see what looked like a gargoyle fashioned of steel in the image of Araris Valerian. It took her a second to realize that it truly was Araris, employing a form of metalcrafting they had only heard about Gaius Sextus performing.

Even as she tracked the thought, a vord mantis dropped from the ceiling of the hive - and landed on the ground in two essentially equal-sized pieces. Araris flicked the blood from the sword in his hand and kicked them to either side to clear the space beneath a pair of holes in the ceiling. He was building up quite a pile of remains. There were the various parts and pieces of half a dozen mantis warriors and what must have been eight or ten blade-beasts.

They were still in enemy territory.

That thought pushed another one to mind. She fumbled for her waist pouch and opened it. She reached around inside it with her fingers until she found the stone she was looking for, a smooth river rock the size of her fist. Then she started pushing at the vile mass in her mouth, trying to get it to move to one side.

Gentle hands pushed hers away from her mouth and Amara slapped lightly at them, letting out an irritated, mush-clogged growl.

"She's trying to talk," said a thready, exhausted voice. "Let her. See, the stone in her hand? She must have had some kind of plan for getting us out of here if things went bad."

Amara looked up to see Aria Placida sitting with her back against the wall, beside the pool. Her face was sunken and pale, and she looked as if she could barely hold up her own head, but her eyes were clear. To Amara's surprise, High Lord Antillus Raucus lay beside her, stripped of his armor, with an enormous, ugly purple scar wrapping around his waist like a belt, and the cauterized stump of his arm ending obscenely a few inches from his shoulder He was breathing unsteadily and clearly unconscious.

Isana's hands withdrew, and Amara pushed the mush in her mouth mostly into one cheek. "Firecrafting," she said, holding up the stone. "Signal flare. Need to get it into the open. I convinced Aquitaine to give me the Windwolves' contract. They're up high, waiting to get us out of here."

"Windwolves?" Aria asked.

"Mercenaries in service to the Aquitaines," Isana said. "They're mostly Knights Aeris."

Amara nodded. The movement made her a little dizzy. "Followed us, far enough back and high enough up that they wouldn't be detected by Invidia. They'll know where we are, generally, but we have to signal them our exact location."

"No good," came Araris's voice. It sounded as if his words were rattling around the interior of a metal pipe before they left his mouth. "These holes were where the blade-beasts were being kept for a rainy day - but they don't open beneath the sky. There's some kind of structure above us. If we threw the rock out, it might not be visible outside - "

Three wax spiders abruptly plunged down through both holes. Araris cut them all into quarters before they touched the ground.

" - the building," he finished, never altering the cadence of his words. Then he turned to look at Isana, and Amara noted that the metallic surface of his skin seemed cracked, rusted, and pitted over the right side of his chest and his right shoulder. She realized, with a shudder, that the "rust" was blood seeping out through the cracks. Evidently, the crafting did not make him entirely impervious to harm. He met Isana's eyes for a moment, then said, to Amara, "Give me the stone."

Amara felt the First Lady stiffen. "No. Araris, no."

"Only way," he said quietly.

"I forbid it," she said. "They'll kill you."

"If we all stay, we all die," he said in a quiet, firm voice. "If I go, there's a chance some of us will live." He turned his right hand palm upward, and said, "Countess."

Amara bit her lip - and tossed the stone toward him.

He caught it and rolled his shoulder, wincing. Then he went to stand beneath one of the holes and look up at it. It was ten feet or more to the ceiling. "Hmmm."

Aria pushed herself unsteadily to her feet. She walked over to Araris, bent over, and made a stirrup of her interlaced fingers. Araris hesitated for a moment, then put his booted foot upon her hands. "One," she counted. "Two. Three."

Aria straightened with fury-assisted strength and tossed Araris upward as if he'd been a small sack of meal. He went through the hole with his arms held straight up above him, then slammed his elbows down on either side of the hole when he reached the other side. Amara saw his legs kick several times as he hauled himself out, and heard a fresh round of wailing vord cries.

And beyond those, faint but clear - trumpets. Aleran Legion trumpets, sounding the attack, over and over and over again. Firecraftings crackled and boomed in the near distance, and Amara sucked in her breath, sitting up in the pool. "Do you hear that?"

"The Legions," Aria breathed. "But the whole horde lies between here and Garrison. How?"

"Tavi," Isana said, her voice suddenly fierce. "My son."

They fell quiet, and everyone listened to the distant sound of trumpets and firecrafting. Each sounded both near and far away by turns. Minutes crawled by in which nothing changed.

Then the exhausted Lady Aria, still slumped beneath the holes in the ceiling, drew in a sharp breath, and staggered back, crying, "Vord!"

And, as quickly as that, half a dozen mantis warriors came flooding into the hive.

Chapter 52

Fidelias sat upon his horse, keeping pace with the weary infantry of the Legions, and watched the most desperately aggressive military action he'd ever witnessed begin to play out.

The enshrouding mist complicated matters. The knot of Canim ritualists who kept pace with the command group muttered and snarled to themselves constantly. Every so often, one of the Canim would slice at himself with a knife and fling droplets of blood into the air. The drops vanished as they flew, presumably to maintain the misty shroud that would hide their precise location from the enemy.

Of course, it also meant that Fidelias couldn't see his own bloody troops once they were a few hundred yards away. They'd had to work out several chains of couriers to relay signals between the units that had traveled out of sight of the command group. Even now, signals were coming in: Attack under way, light enemy resistance. Apparently, the vord Queen had left a few alert guardians among her sleeping brood - probably posing as sleepers. At least, that was how Fidelias would have done it.

The front ranks of Legion infantry had reached the old steadholt, and the most experienced cohort of the Free Aleran, together with the First Aleran's Battlecrows, reached the gates and a broken-down section of the wall, respectively.

"Now," Fidelias said to the trumpeter behind him.

The man raised his horn and sounded the charge. Other horns throughout both Legions took up the same call, and the sudden roar from nearly four hundred throats joined the voices of the trumpets as the two assault cohorts rushed the old steadholt, while the rest of the Legions moved up to support them. As they did, windstreams roared behind him, and Gaius Octavian and the First Aleran's Knights Aeris took to the air.

A second later, there was an earsplitting cry, metallic, alien, and furiously hostile. It froze Fidelias's throat and locked his limbs into place for an instant. His horse shuddered and danced nervously, nearly knocking him from the saddle. All around him, he could see the same expression of dread and confusion marking the faces of the officers and the men. Even the Canim's mutterings had slowed to a trickle of soft sounds that fell from between their teeth.

"Sound the charge," he rasped. It was hard to force himself to make that much noise, so intent were his instincts to avoid attracting the attention of whatever had made that sound. He looked over his shoulder at the dumbstruck trumpeter, whose face was as white as everyone else's. Fidelias had played the role of Valiar Marcus for far too long to be stricken silent. He drew upon Marcus's strength, stiffened his spine, drew in a deep breath, and bellowed, "LEGIONARE! SOUND THE CHARGE!"

The soldier stiffened as if Fidelias had slapped him and jerked his trumpet to his lips. He puffed out a weak breath of sound, and Fidelias turned to him and broke his centurion's baton over the man's helmet. Shocked by the blow, the man dragged in a deep breath and blasted out the trumpet call, loudly enough to hurt Fidelias's ears.

Other trumpets took it up, and the momentary pause in the advance was over. Forty thousand infantry and cavalry resumed their motion, as a windstream larger and more powerful than any Fidelias had ever seen erupted from behind the old steadholt's walls and rushed out over the fields of sleeping vord, bearing a pale figure in a dark cloak, already vanishing into a windcrafted veil.

The Queen shrieked again, farther away, and Fidelias ordered the trumpeter to continue sounding the attack. Reports started flashing in from the courier lines: Battlecrows heavily engaged. Horse cavalry light resistance. Taurg cavalry inflicting heavy casualties with no resistance. And the last had come with the signal he'd been dreading. Canim infantry heavily engaged by mobile enemy. And, only a moment after that, Enemy aerial forces in Legion strength, inbound.

That tore it. Against a sleeping enemy, they'd had a chance. But if the enemy was waking, and if, as Fidelias dreaded, the Queen had summoned reinforcements, they could be in for it. He was willing to die, if it was necessary to save Alera - but as far as his experience had taught him, a living, fighting solider was almost always more valuable to his Realm than a dead one.

The Aleran infantry had been tasked to take the steadholt. He would simply have to expedite matters. They couldn't have fitted a fraction of the forces there into the steadholt, but at least it would provide a solid object against which the other forces in the field could put their backs - if it could be taken quickly enough.

Fidelias signaled for the Prime Cohort to move, sending them in after the first two, along with a pair of Knights Terra and Ferrous attached to the unit, with orders to support the Battlecrows and secure the steadholt with all due speed. Then he turned to the Canim.

"Master Marok," he said. "There are significant enemy forces inbound. We need to secure the steadholt immediately. Are you willing to help?"

Marok flicked his ears in the affirmative and began loping calmly toward the steadholt. Fidelias and the command group followed him. Fidelias unlimbered the Canim balest from its holder upon his saddle, more a gesture of habit than of any real intent. He was unused to ordering things done at this level rather than doing them himself.

The interior of the steadholt was chaos. Vord rushed and darted everywhere, wax spiders and warriors alike, boiling out of windows and doorway, skittering across rooftops, rushing along the walls. The Battlecrows had formed into two separate squares with iron-hard discipline, defending themselves from attackers and moving, step by step, closer to what was obviously their objective - the mouth of the large stone barn. A furycrafted ramp sloped down into the earth below its flooring. It was often an area used for cool storage on a steadholt. The barn's interior was shadowed, but a steady green glow emerged from two holes in the barn's flooring.

The cohort from the Legion of ex-slaves hadn't done as well as the veteran Battlecrows. Through whatever fortunes of war, they had not been able to lock into a defensive formation when swarmed by the vord. Half of them were dead, or isolated in odd corners of the steadholts, desperate rings of half a dozen men fighting a remorseless enemy. The other half had managed a defensive square, but it was a ragged one - the mantises were steadily picking it apart.

"Master Marok!" Fidelias called. He pointed at the rapidly disintegrating formation of the Free Aleran. Sensing weakness, the vord were attacking more ferociously and in greater numbers. "If you please!"

Marok stepped forward with four other Canim wearing vord-chitin mantles rather than those made of human leather. He snarled something in a language Fidelias did not understand, and the five ritualists drew their daggers in a single, simultaneous motion. A similar movement laid open a long cut upon each of their forearms, bloodying the bright steel of the daggers. They all threw their arms up, scattering droplets of blood to the sky, where they flickered and vanished - until with a single unified howl they lowered their arms - and the misty sky suddenly boiled with dark clouds and fell in time with the ritualists' arms.

Something like a thundercloud fell over the beleaguered Free Aleran cohort, a mass of dark grey. Fidelias thought he could see things writhing within it, sinuous shapes and flickering tentacles.

The vord within the cloud began to shriek and wail in distress.

Marok watched the cloud intently for a moment, then threw his bleeding arm out again, scattering droplets of blood into the darkness of the cloud, crying, "It is enough! The demons are not for you!" in Canish.

The cloud went still. The brisk spring wind soon began dispersing it, and when it had all washed away a moment later, the Free Aleran legionares stood entirely alone, with confused, stunned looks on their faces, their chests heaving for breath.

There was no sign whatsoever of the vord who had been attacking them.

Marok turned to face Fidelias and took on the posture of a Cane waiting for the answer to a question.

"Impressive," Fidelias said.

"Clouds of acid are for amateurs," Marok replied. He glanced over his shoulder at most of the other ritualists, who continued their steady chant and occasional self-bloodletting. None of them looked at him. Marok growled in unmistakable satisfaction.

The four Knights attached to the Prime Cohort broke with their unit and crossed the courtyard to join the first square of the Battlecrows. Centurion Schultz, supporting a dazed-looking young Tribune with blood sheeting over half his face, saw them coming and brought them into the lines at once. Then he put the four men at the "point" of the square's corner, wheeled it into a diamond relative to the second square, and began a steady march forward, using the devastating power of the Knights to cut a path through the vord. Within a moment, the two blocks of Battlecrows had rejoined, and they turned their efforts toward advancing, an implacable block of steel and swords that hacked and chopped its way step by bloody step into the barn.

There was a shriek and a sudden rush of pressure as dozens of warriors flung themselves at the Battlecrows in wholehearted, berserk determination to cut the invaders down, and for a moment the Battlecrows slowed. But then, abruptly, an apparition materialized from the darkness of the barn, a black shadow against the green light in the form of a man. The figure began to move, and suddenly strode out into the light, a completely metallic form the likes of which Fidelias had never seen and only once heard about. Fidelias recognized him at a glance - Araris Valerian, one of the deadliest blades in the Realm, a man whose sword had made him a legend before he'd gotten out of his mid-twenties.

Fidelias had never seen a furycrafter do what Araris had done, though.

The first vord warrior he approached never knew he was near. Araris's sword clove the legs from one side of its body, then swept its head from its trunk before it could finish falling.

The next vord spun to face the steel swordsman. Its plunging scythe struck Araris on his left shoulder and shattered like a length of desiccated wood. Araris parried the second scythe aside, split the creature's head with his sword, and kicked the vord's corpse, still thrashing dangerously, into the crowd of its brethren trying to stop the Battlecrows.

The vord broke, then, rushing back into the barn - but their flight took them within reach of Araris Valerian's blade. The swordsman never seemed to move with any particular speed - only a fluid, delicate grace entirely at odds with his statuelike appearance. And yet, his sword always seemed to move swiftly enough, no matter how quickly the vord might attempt to evade him. He dropped the first several, it seemed, merely to slow the escape of the others, and his blade and those of the Battlecrows took a heavy toll of the remaining vord. No more than half a dozen of them had survived to flee back into the barn.

Araris nodded at Schultz and looked wildly around him. "Marcus!" he called, his voice buzzing oddly. He tossed a stone from his hand into a long arc, and Fidelias snatched it out of the air. He could feel the tingle of a firecrafting in it - a signal flare, most likely. "The First Lady, and three others are trapped in the hive, wounded. They need to be taken to the stronghold at Garrison immediately. There's the flare for their escort. Lord Placida may be down at the bottom of that ramp. Find him."

Then he spun on one heel and began a heavy run back toward the green-lighted holes in the barn floor.

"Schultz!" Fidelias barked, tossing the stone to the centurion, who caught it handily enough. "Get that to some open ground and set it off!"

"Yes, sir!" Schultz said. He looked around the havoc within the courtyard a bit blankly, then seemed to be struck by an idea. He muttered something to the stone and hurled it up to fall onto the flat stone roof of the barn. A few seconds later, there was a loud hissing sound, and brilliant blue-white light blazed from the flare.

"Fine," Fidelias said. "Get a detail to the bottom of that ramp."

"Aye, First Spear," Schultz said, and began bawling assignments to his men.

Fidelias watched it happen and shook his head. "Never rains but it pours."

Between the mopping-up combat in the courtyard, the ongoing trumpet cries to attack, and the sound of the bloody flare all but burning a hole into the flat stone roof of the barn, Fidelias didn't hear the approaching windstream until Princeps Octavian had all but slammed into him. Flying backward and upside down, Octavian was hauling Kitai through the air, her back against his chest as he came in to land in the courtyard. His heels struck first, digging a furrow in the hard soil, then slipped out from beneath him. He slid across the ground on his back until he fetched up against the inner side of the steadholt's wall with a grunt.

"Marcus!" Octavian bellowed. "She's hurt! Get a medico over here, now!" He thrashed his way a bit awkwardly to his feet, lowering Kitai gently to the ground as he went. He spun and threw his right arm up, dragging with it a sheet of earth and stone more than a foot thick, raising it up into a shielding dome just as a flash of green-white lighting ripped out of the mists. It struck the improvised wall and shattered it, but when the debris settled, Octavian remained standing over the wounded Marat woman. "Bloody crows, Marcus!" he bellowed. "I'm a little busy here!"

Marcus kicked a team of singulares and a Prime Cohort medico to rush over to Kitai. As soon as Octavian saw that, he took two steps and leapt off the ground and into flight, vanishing into the mists. A second windstream, far larger and more violent, swept over the courtyard, clearly in pursuit.

"Marcus!" bellowed Araris in an iron voice from within the barn. "I need more men here!"

"First Spear, First Spear!" said a young legionare frantically. He made a series of frantic gestures.

"Bloody crows, boy, I'm standing right here!" Marcus snapped. "Tell me!"

"Enemy infantry," the boy panted. "At least thirty thousand, here in two minutes. Enemy airborne troops have been delayed by the Knights Pisces, and will arrive at the same time, approximately seven thousand. Sir, what do we do?"

Two minutes?

Two minutes?

Nearly forty thousand vord were inbound - and his own troops were scattered all over the terrain, out of sight of each other in the fog. They would be swallowed whole in detail.

Bloody crows, what had Octavian gotten him into?

If both he and that young man survived the day, which was looking increasingly unlikely, Fidelias thought, he might be forced to kill him on general principles.