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?
Perhaps he’d try it for a little wh—
CHAPTER 37
Amara watched the vord’s first assault go up in flames.
It had all worked more or less according to plan. When the firecrafters had lit the oil-lined little tunnels, the flame had rapidly spread down them, out to a distance of about half a mile, creating a steady source of flame. Black smoke had begun oozing up through the air holes.
Then, when the concealed High Lords sent a vast gale of wind sweeping across the plain, they had exploded. The ground erupted with fire and gouts of shattered coal in long lines spaced about twenty yards apart. Oil had splattered everywhere, along with the coal, and within moments the whole plain had been devoured by fire.
Beside her, Bernard peered through the sightcrafting she held between her outstretched hands. He grunted with satisfaction. “Tavi did this at the Elinarch, only backward,” he told High Lord Riva.
“How’s that?” Riva asked.
“At the Elinarch,” Amara said, to spare her husband’s jaw, “he heated the paving stones first, to drive assaulting Canim off them and into the town’s buildings. Then he set the buildings on fire.”
Riva stared out at the plain of fire before them and shuddered. “Ruthless.”
“Indeed,” Amara said.
“The boy finishes what he begins,” Bernard said. His mouth quirked up at one corner. “His Highness, the boy.”
Riva turned to look at the two of them thoughtfully, frowning. “Do you think he’s really on the way?”
“Said he was,” Bernard said.
“But he has so few men.”
Bernard snorted. “Boy didn’t have anyone but an unarmed slave with him when he stopped the Marat at Second Calderon.” He turned to face Riva and met his eyes. “He says he’s coming to fight, believe him.”
Lord Riva stared back at Bernard, his eyes thoughtful. Out on the plain, the fires had begun to die down—leaving half a mile of red-hot coals underfoot. The air over the plain wavered madly in the heat. Burning vord chitin smelled utterly hideous, she noted. There was a dull roar of windstreams overhead as the High Lords, their task completed, returned to friendly lines.
“Bernard,” Amara said quietly.
Her husband glanced out at the plain and nodded. He turned to Giraldi, and said, “Sound the retreat. We fall back to the next wall.”
Giraldi saluted and passed the order along to the trumpeter. Soon, the signal was echoing up and down the length of the wall. Centurions began barking orders. Men began to withdraw down the stairs leading from the walls and form into their units. Marat gargants had rolled up a few moments before, their long, slow steps covering ground rapidly. The wounded were being loaded onto beasts whose saddlecloths had been prepared to carry hurt men safely.
“Count Calderon,” Riva said, his voice becoming somewhat stilted and formal, “I realize that our relationship has been . . . a distant one. And that you have doubtless already worked very hard to prepare the valley’s defenses. Nonetheless, I should like to volunteer my skills and those of my engineers to do whatever we can to help.”
Bernard eyed him again.
“I’m not a very good soldier, Your Excellency,” Riva said. “But I know about building. And some of the finest architects and engineers in the Realm ply their trade in my city.”
Bernard glanced at Amara, who smiled very faintly and pretended to be watching for the enemy.
“Be honored, Your Grace,” Bernard said. “Giraldi, here, will show you to Pentius Pluvus. He’s kept books and schedules for us on this project. He’ll know where you and your folks can help the most.”
Riva offered Bernard his hand. They clasped forearms briefly, and Riva smiled. “Good luck to you, Count.”
Bernard answered him with small, sad smile. “To all of us.”
Riva and Giraldi departed. Bernard gave orders to the rest of the command staff to begin the retreat to the tower. Amara moved to stand beside her husband and twined her fingers with his. Bernard stared out at the fields of glowing coals. Grass fires had begun at the edges of the burning coal, where the heat had leached the water from the land nearby.
Beyond the curtains of wavering heat, the vord were massing, moving, flowing like a single being with a million limbs. It was impossible to make out any details, beyond the fact that they were there—and that more and more of them kept coming.
Amara shuddered.
“Shouldn’t we go?” she asked her husband.
“There’s a little time,” Bernard said. “That’s the beauty of this plan. It does two things at once. Kills the vord and gives us time to fall back to a stronger position.”
He fell silent and resumed staring to the west.
Amara said, very quietly, “You’re thinking about Isana.”
“She’s my sister,” Bernard said.
“You heard what Ehren said.”
Bernard’s expression hardened. He clenched his fist and slammed it into one of the low merlons on the wall. A webwork of cracks shot through it. “The Queen has her.”
Amara put her hand on his fist and squeezed gently. Bernard closed his eyes and made a visible effort to relax. His fist came unclenched a moment later.
“I hoped this would draw her out,” he whispered. “She’d run from a confrontation, but she might lead us back to Isana.”
“The vord Queen is anything but stupid,” Amara said. “She must know that we plan to kill her.”
Bernard grunted. “We’ve got to make her come out. Show herself. If we can’t do that, this is over.”
“I know,” Amara said quietly. “But so does she.”
Bernard rubbed at his jaw again. “How’s Masha?”
“According to Olivia, she’s frightened,” Amara said. “She knows that there’s something bad going on.”
“Poor thing,” Bernard said. “Too bright for her own good.”
“For her own peace of mind, perhaps,” Amara said. “Not necessarily the other.”
He grunted an agreement. “Suppose we shouldn’t waste any more time here.” He put two fingers to his lips and let out a sharp whistle. The horses they were riding nickered and came trotting over to the stairs nearest them.
Amara eyed him, smiling a little. “How do you do that?”
“It isn’t hard,” Bernard said. “You just—”
He stopped talking abruptly as a plume of gaseous white vapor suddenly billowed up from the far side of the field of coal. Amara felt her breath catch in her throat as she watched. The plume thickened, doubling in size and doubling again. At its edges, it became translucent.
“Steam,” Amara breathed.
“Watercraft?” Bernard murmured. He looked up. Only a few white, innocent clouds raced across the sky, none of them dropping rain. “How?”
Amara frowned, then said, “They must have diverted a river. Like Aquitaine did at Alera Imperia.”
Bernard thought it over for a moment, then nodded. “The Little Goose is about a mile and a half past that last hill. Would it be possible to move it that far?”