“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.