An iron grip settled on her ankle.
She looked down, desperate, helpless against the power in Macio’s clutching hand—and prayed that she had correctly guessed from which building the earlier shots had come. Macio found purchase for one of his feet, and Amara knew that his next move would be simply to swing her by the ankle and smash her against the building’s side like an oversized porcelain doll.
The wall three feet from the top of the building exploded outward with a resounding crack of shattering stone. A broad-knuckled hand snared the neck of Macio’s chitin-armor in an iron grip, and heaved back, smashing the young Citizen’s head against the side of the building. Macio let out a single, choking sound, then the hand gripping him slammed him to the stone again and again and again. Macio’s fingers slipped loosely from Amara’s ankle, and his blood spattered the wall. His neck snapped during the second or third impact. On the fifth, the wall actually gave way, and Macio’s body vanished into the interior of the tower. There were a few more ugly, heavy sounds of impact, of tearing flesh and breaking bone.
Amara hauled herself wearily back onto the roof and lay there gasping with pain, exertion, and sheer terror. The horrible things she had seen that night came rushing back into her thoughts, and she found herself sobbing silently, clutching her belly as if to keep it from rupturing.
Bernard’s hand touched her shoulder a moment later, and she opened her eyes to stare up at him. Her husband was covered in smoke stains, his face all but completely black. There was a fresh cut on one of his cheeks. Fresh blood, Macio’s blood, had splattered over his tunic, face, and neck. The dust and flakes of shattered stone, mixed to a paste with more blood, covered his right arm to the elbow. His Legion-issue
gladius
was at his side, opposite a wide-mouthed war quiver, and he held his heavy-limbed bow in his left hand.
He gathered her up with his left arm and all but crushed her to his chest. Amara clutched him back, feeling the warmth and strength of him against her. “It’s about time,” she whispered.
“I leave you alone for an hour, woman,” he said, his voice shaking. “And I find you running around with a younger man.”
She let out a choking little laugh that threatened to bring out more sobs and held him for another few heartbeats. Then she pushed gently at him, and he rose, lifting her to her feet. “We c-can’t,” she said. “There are more of them around.”
The dull cough of a nearby firecrafting thudded through the air in punctuation. There was an extended roaring sound, and a cloud of dust began to emerge from farther in the city, joining the smoke and fire.
“More of the crafters the vord took?” Bernard said. “Why are they here?”
“They came for the Citizens,” Amara said. “At least one of them was nearby under a veil. He hit me hard enough to let the other catch up with me.”
As she finished speaking, there was a howl of wind above them, and a pair of dark forms streaked by, firelight flickering on steel, showers of sparks exploding irregularly between them. Two others darted after the first pair, converging on them from different angles and altitudes. A few seconds later, far overhead, multiple spheres of white-hot fire burst into life in a rapid line of explosions. Distant, staccato thumps followed. Then a series of deep blue streaks answered the spheres, flashing in the other direction. A hissing drone, like a rainstorm hitting a hot skillet, followed a few moments later.
“Bloody crows,” Bernard breathed. “This is not a smart place to be.”
“No,” Amara said. “Those are good signs.”
Bernard frowned at her.
Amara gestured wearily at the sky. “The enemy crafters must have been working in stealth, picking off our Citizens as they tried to help the city. They had probably been doing it for half an hour or more before I ever arrived. If there’s open battle now, it means that those stealthy operations ceased to be useful to the enemy. Lady Placida must have gotten the word out to her fellow Citizens.”
Bernard grunted. “Maybe. Or maybe half of the enemy crafters are making a big show of it while the rest lurk and wait for a chance to ambush distracted Citizens.”
Amara shivered. “You are a devious man.” Then she glanced down at the plaza and back to Bernard. “What are you doing up here?” she asked.
“Watching Aquitaine,” he said. His voice was quiet and completely neutral. “His
singulares
got torn up something terrible by that bull fury. The ones who could walk had to drag out the ones who couldn’t. Left him there all alone.”
“Watching him,” Amara said quietly. “Not watching over him.”
“That’s right.”
Amara bit her lip. “Despite the loyalty a Citizen owes to the Crown and its heirs.”
The fingers of her husband’s blood-encrusted right hand clenched into a fist. “The man’s directly responsible for the deaths of more than four hundred of my friends and neighbors. Some of them my own bloody holders. According to Isana, he makes no secret of the fact that he may someday deem it necessary to kill my nephew.” He stared out at the lone figure in the plaza, and his quiet voice burned with heat without growing louder, while his green eyes seemed to gather a layer of frost. “The murdering son of a bitch should count himself lucky I
haven’t
paid him what he’s owed.” His lips pressed together, staring at Attis’s motionless, focused form amidst half a dozen enormous furies. “Right now, it’d be easy.”
“We need him,” Amara said.
Bernard’s jaw clenched.
Amara put a hand on his arm. “We
need
him.”
He glanced aside at her, took a slow breath, and made a motion of his head that was so miniscule that it could hardly be recognized as a nod. “Doesn’t mean I have to like—”
His head whipped around, and his body began to follow before Amara heard the light tread upon the stone roof. She turned to see a faint blur in the air, someone hidden behind a windcrafted veil and approaching with terrifying speed. Then there was a sound of impact and Bernard let out a croaking gasp, doubling over. The blur moved again, and Bernard’s head snapped violently to one side. Teeth knocked loose from his jaw rattled onto the roof like a small handful of ivory dice, and he crumpled to the floor beside them, senseless or dead.
Amara reached for Cirrus and her weapon simultaneously, but their attacker flung out a nearly invisible arm and a handful of salt crystals struck her, sending the wind fury into disruptive convulsions of ethereal agony. Her sword was not halfway from its sheath before a thread of cold steel, the tip of a long, slender blade, lay against her throat.
The blade shimmered into visibility, then the hand behind it, then the arm behind the hand, and suddenly Amara found herself facing the former High Lady of Aquitaine. Invidia stood clad all in black chitin, and that same horrible, pulsing parasite-creature was locked about her torso. Her hair was dark and unkempt, her eyes sunken, and her skin had an unhealthy pallor.
“And to think,” Invidia said. “I’ve spent the last half an hour scouring this entire plaza looking for the
singulares
I was sure Attis had hidden. Quite unlike him to use nonexistence as camouflage, though I suppose it did make them impossible to find. Hello, Countess.”
Amara shot her motionless husband a glance, swept her eyes over the plaza below, and clenched her teeth. “Go to the crows, traitor.”
“Oh, I have,” Invidia said lightly. “They’d begun to peck at my eyes and lips when the vord found me. I am disinclined to repeat the experience.”
Amara felt a chill smile stretch her lips. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”
“Come, Countess,” Invidia replied. “It is far too late for any of us to seek redemption for our sins now.”
“Then why haven’t you killed me and had done?” Amara replied, lifting her chin to bare more of her throat to Invidia’s blade. “Lonely, are we? Missing the company of our fellow human beings? Needing some scrap of respect? Forgiveness? Approval?”
Invidia stared at her for a moment though her eyes looked through Amara as though she weren’t there. A frown creased her brow. “Perhaps,” she said.
“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you began murdering us all,” Amara spat. “You aren’t wearing a collar, like the others. They’re slaves. You’re free. You’re here by choice.”
Invidia let out a harsh laugh. “Is that what you think? That I have a choice?” Amara arched an eyebrow. “Yes. Between death and destroying your own kind. You could defy the vord and die of the poison still in you—die horribly. But instead you’ve chosen to let everyone else die in your place.”
Invidia’s eyes widened, and her lips peeled back from her teeth in an unnatural grimace.
“The truly sad part,” Amara said, naked contempt ringing in her voice, “is that in the end, it will make no difference. The moment you are more of a threat than an asset to them, the vord
will
kill you. You selfish, petulant child. All the blood on your hands has been for
nothing
.”
Invidia’s jaws clenched, and spots of color appeared high on her cheeks. Her whole body began shaking. “Who,” she whispered. “Who do you think you are?”
Amara learned into the blade and met Invidia’s eyes with her own. “I know who I am. I am the Countess Calderonus Amara, Cursor of the Crown, loyal servant of Alera and the House of Gaius. Though it cost me my life, I
know
who I am.” She bared her own teeth in a wolfish smile. “And we both know who you are. You’ve chosen your side, traitor. Get on with it.”
Invidia stood motionless. The many fires blew a hot wind over the rooftop. Somewhere, there was a roar of collapsing masonry as a building succumbed. Distant thumps of firecrafting pulsed irregularly through the night. The distant desperation of the trumpets and drums of the embattled Legions remained a constant, hardly noticed music.
“So be it,” Invidia hissed.
And then the rooftop exploded into motion.
Amara called upon Cirrus, and the wounded fury flooded into her, lending speed and agony alike as time seemed to slow down. Amara surged forward, bobbing down, and ducked under the quick cut that Invidia flicked at her neck. Given the fury-born strength of the former High Lady, had the blow landed, Amara had no doubt that it would have killed her. She coiled her knee up against her chest as she moved, then, one hand coming down to rest lightly on the rooftop, she drove her leg out, all the strength of her hips and legs behind it, the power driven with brutally concentrated force through her heel and into Invidia’s hip.
Invidia’s armor absorbed much of the bone-breaking power of the blow, but it struck her with such speed that its force drove her back through the air. The incredible strength conveyed by furycraft did nothing to add to her body’s mass, after all, and Amara’s kick had moved with such raw speed that even had she possessed the superior strength of an earthcrafter, it would have been all but redundant.
Amara felt her ankle snap, and the pain, added to Cirrus’s own agony, was enough to wash away her concentration on her windcrafting. The world returned to its usual pace, and Invidia crashed backward into the low stone rim that lined the edge of the roof. She hit with brutal force, and a cry was driven from her lungs. She shook her head and lifted a hand, her eyes blazing with sudden fury.
Then fire exploded directly upon her, the white-hot fury of a Knight Ignus’s fire-sphere, intensified by an order of magnitude. The bloom of scalding heat washed back over Amara in a flood that flung her ragged-cut hair straight back from her head, and she threw herself to the ground to shield the unmoving Bernard’s face from the scalding heat of that blast.
She looked back a moment later, her eyes still dazzled from the intensity, and found that half of the building’s rooftop, the part where Invidia had stood, was simply
gone
. There was no rubble, no fires, no dust—the building simply ceased to be in the area of a sphere the diameter of a couple of carriages. The places where the building had been devoured were cut as neatly as if with a knife, the very edge of the original material burned black and otherwise perfectly in shape. A terrible smell filled the air.
There was no sign of Invidia.
There was the sound of a very light impact on the rooftop nearby. Amara looked up to see another veiled, nearly invisible shape, standing ten feet away, facing the sterile destruction on the rooftop. “I do hope,” Gaius Attis murmured, “that you were not burned. I tried to contain the spread of the heat.”
“You
used
us,” Amara snarled. She jerked her furious gaze away from Attis’s veiled form. Sheer pain had all but blinded her with tears, but she found Bernard’s throat with her fingers. His pulse beat steady and strong, though he still wasn’t moving. His own fury-born strength had enabled him to survive Invidia’s blow to the jaw. Had such a strike landed on Amara, it would have broken her neck.
“It was necessary,” Attis replied evenly. He turned, scanning the smoke-and-fire skies over Riva. “Invidia would never have exposed herself to me if she did not think she could kill me easily, such as when I was distracted with those furies. And if she hadn’t found someone watching over me, she would have assumed my guard to be too well concealed, and not shown herself for fear of being taken by surprise. You and your Count are both capable enough that it was feasible you might have been entrusted with warning me of danger but vulnerable enough to be quickly overwhelmed by someone of Invidia’s caliber.”
“She might have killed us
both
,” Amara said.
“Quite,” Attis answered. “But not without revealing her presence.”
Amara stared at him hard for a moment, blinking tears from her eyes. “Those weren’t feral furies,” she said. “They were yours, disguised.”
“Obviously, Cursor. Honestly, do you think I would stand about completely unprotected when the slightest disturbance would result in my death? When a person with a great deal of dangerous personal knowledge about me is running about with the vord during an assault?” He paused reflectively. “I regret that I couldn’t tell you or your Count what I was doing, but it would rather have defeated the point.”