Amara bowed her head and blinked sudden tears away. “Yes. He was.”
He lifted a weak hand and waved it at her. “Go. You have much to do.”
The vord arrived perhaps a quarter of an hour after Amara emerged from the steadholt’s hall. Trumpets sounded.
Legionares
stood ready as engineers finished closing the gates that had been crafted into the walls, until the walls presented a single face of solid granite, its front smoothed to a gleaming finish. She stood beside Bernard upon a tower ten feet higher than the wall. Defensive towers had been spaced every hundred yards down the length of the wall, here a little less than three miles long.
A courier put down upon the tower, briefly kicking up a small gale of wind, and saluted. “Count Calderon, sir.”
Bernard didn’t take his eyes from the field ahead of him. “Report.”
The young man stood there, blinking uncertainly.
Amara sighed and beckoned him. He took a few tentative steps closer.
“There,” Amara said, once he was past the windcrafting she was maintaining to keep Bernard’s orders from being monitored by enemy crafters. “Can you hear now?”
“Oh,” said the courier, flushing. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Report,” said Bernard in exactly the same tone as before.
The young man looked mildly panicked. “Captain Miles’s compliments, sir, and there’s a sizeable enemy force moving to the north, sir, to circle around the end of the wall!”
“Hngh,” Bernard said. “Thank you.”
The young man’s eyes widened. “Um? Sir? Captain Miles is afraid that the enemy will turn our flank. There’s nearly a quarter mile of open ground at the end of the wall before it reaches the flank of the mountain.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“Sir!” the courier protested. “The
wall isn’t finished, sir!
”
Bernard bared his teeth in a wolfish smile. The leading wave of the vord was now dressing its ranks and preparing to charge. “The wall is exactly what it’s supposed to be, son.”
“But sir!”
Bernard paused to give the young man a hard look.
The courier wilted visibly.
Bernard nodded. “Return to Captain Miles, give him my compliments, and inform him that he is to stand fast. An allied contingent has been placed to support him should he need it.” He paused and looked at the young man. “Dismissed.”
The courier swallowed, saluted, then dived off the side of the tower. He managed to call up a windstream just before he hit the ground, then raced away to the north.
Amara looked at Bernard, and said, “Couldn’t you have told him more?”
“The fewer who know, the better.” He rested his hands on a merlon and nodded calmly as the vord began to move forward in unison. “Giraldi. Signal the mules to stand ready. Section leaders will give the command to begin.”
Giraldi’s voice bellowed down the wall as the ground began to rumble with the vord’s charge. The order was picked up and relayed down the line.
Bernard lifted his hand over his head and watched the oncoming enemy. Once again, as the vord closed to within a few yards, they let out a vast shriek that shook the walls, and once again, their cries clashed with those of the
legionares
upon the battlements. Bernard stood watching the nearest
legionares
intently as they lifted their javelins, and when the first of them threw, he snapped his arm forward, and screamed, “Loose!”
The mules went to work.
Each of the contraptions was built around a boxlike frame. Wooden support struts rose above it, to support a long wooden arm with a shallow bowl at its end. Amara wasn’t familiar with the details of the devices, but each arm was drawn back by a crew of two men, who used raw strength and very minor woodcrafting to pull the arm all the way to a horizontal position. A pin, placed in the device, locked the arm back—and when it was removed, the arm snapped forward with startlingly energetic violence. When it did, it carried so much power with it that the entire framework jumped up off the ground at one end, like a cantankerous mule kicking out with its hind legs.
When Bernard dropped his arm, a hundred mules placed in ranks behind the walls kicked up off the ground, sending the contents of their bowls, dozens and dozens of small glass spheres, soaring up over the walls. They leapt up into the air and spread out into a glittering cloud that caught the light of the lowering sun, throwing back sparkles of scarlet, orange, and gold.
Then the fire-spheres struck the earth and burst into globes of hungry fire,
hundreds
of them all at once, spread out over a wide swath of land.
“Bloody
crows
!” screamed a nearby
legionare
.
The fire seemed to ripple out in a long ribbon as each group of mules unleashed its projectiles. Each mule’s deadly payload devoured scores and scores of the enemy in clouds of sullen flame, spread out over an area fifty yards across. Indeed, if anything, the mules had been spaced too near one another—there were ample areas of overlap, where the spheres from multiple mules detonated in the same area. Thousands of vord died in the flames, and thousands more were scorched and disabled, wailing and running in circles, mad with pain, lashing out at anything that moved.
Amara stared in purest shock as she realized that she had just watched the world change, radically and forever.
That overwhelming hammerblow upon the vord had not been delivered by an exalted High Lord. No group of Citizens or Knights Aeris had unleashed their wrath upon the vord. Crows, it wasn’t even the result of standard Legion battlecrafting. The engines had been shaped here, in the workshops of the holders of the Calderon Valley. Most of the people on their crews were simple holders—nearly half of them were
children
, young men too young to have served their term in the Legions. The spheres, intended only for a single use, rather than the long-term function of the food-cooling coldstones, had been manufactured in the Valley as well, each of them representing perhaps an hour’s effort by someone gifted with a modest affinity for firecrafting—and much more quickly by someone with a more substantial gift.
Whatever happened, if Alera survived its latest foe, it could not return to what it had been before. Not when the holders had wielded the power of Citizens. Alera’s laws protected freemen to some degree, but they were clearly made to protect the interests of Citizens first and foremost. More than once, Aleran Counts and Lords and even High Lords had faced rebellions from angry freemen—rebellions that were inevitably put down by the superior furycraft of the Citizenry. That was a constant, an immutable fact of Aleran history. The Citizenry ruled precisely because they had access to greater power than any freeman, or any group of freemen.
But that all changed the instant the holders of the Calderon Valley dealt the enemy a blow worthy of the assembled High Lords themselves.
And, less than a minute later, they did it
again
.
The vord warriors came hurtling forward, shrieking their brassy cries and hammering at the base of the wall. Their scythes slashed down onto the smoothed granite, but unlike the stone of the first wall, this wall’s material resisted their assault tenaciously.
Legionares
upon the walls took ruthless advantage of the enemy’s inability to scale it to meet them. Great cauldrons of boiling oil, water, or scalding-hot sand were poured down onto the mantis warriors. Where such containers were not available, the
legionares
resulted to a more primitive and reliable measure: They simply dropped large rocks onto the enemy.
After the first three massive volleys, the mules began lighter work. Their loads were smaller, and they threw less often. It was the only way they could make the limited supply of fire-spheres last. The resulting attacks were smaller, if no less devastating to the vord hit by them.
It took several minutes for the vord to rush over the havoc the mules had caused in the field before the wall. At first, they arrived in scattered, irregular bunches, easily focused on and destroyed by the wall’s defenders. It didn’t last. Though an ongoing slaughter was being wreaked upon the vord by Octavian’s mules, the vord’s strength of numbers seemed undiminished. Soon, they were pressing against the wall again, and if they could not easily create footholds in the wall, their own dead began to pile up into ramps that grew closer and closer to the ramparts.
Bernard watched another flight of fire-spheres go sailing over the wall and nodded his approval. “Great furies, if it didn’t work,” he said. He shot his wife a quick, fierce grin. “Tavi said they would work when he sent me the plans.”
“When was that, again?” Amara asked.
Bernard scratched at his chin, then leaned his forearms on a merlon, casually crossed, like a man gossiping over a stone fence. The pose was intentional, Amara knew. The men around him were looking at him for indications of his state of mind every so often, and he showed them a mask of calm, almost casual confidence. “Three, four months after the Elinarch, I reckon. But I didn’t look at them again until he wrote about his idea to use the fire-spheres as ammunition for the mules. So I had Giraldi build one and test it and . . .” He spread his hands demonstratively.
“I know you said they’d be effective, but . . .” Amara shook her head. “I had no idea.”
“I know,” Bernard said.
“This . . . this is going to change everything.”
“Hope so,” he said fervently. “Means there’s something left standing to change.”
Amara looked steadily at him for a moment while his eyes shifted back to the battlefield. He knew. She could see it in his face. He
knew
what the mules represented. Not in and of themselves, of course, but as a symbol for the collective strength of the freemen of Alera—strength that could now be given deadly expression, if need be, now that someone had shown them the way.
The battle raged. Gargants fitted with huge baskets shambled up and down the walls, carrying more stones to the
legionares
.
Legionares
with spears began to fend off the vord as they came within reach of the longer weapons. Occasionally, a Knight Ignus would melt a corpse-ramp into a bubbling pool of slagged, stinking chitin, or a Knight Terra would simply cause it to sink into the soft earth. But they were holding. By the great furies, they were
holding
.
Another flight of fire-spheres went whispering overhead to bring down raging fire on the heads of the mantis warriors, when there was a sudden tremor in the ground, and a distant sound, a roar that rose up like some great beast voicing a warning.
Amara turned her face to the north and looked at the enormous, bleak grey mountain that loomed there, like some unimaginably huge bastion positioned to hold the Legions’ flanks. As she watched, she saw clouds of dust billowing forth from the mountain. An entire face of the mountain’s slope had apparently given way, causing a rockslide so enormous that it beggared the imagination.
The roll of the land kept her from seeing any details, but it wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened. The vord had circled around the end of the second wall, probably hoping to come at the Legions from the rear, or even to proceed toward the civilians back near Garrison. Instead, they had discovered what anyone who lived in the Calderon Valley knew from the time they were old enough to understand speech—that the mountain’s name was Garados, and that it did not tolerate visitors.
Amara had known the murderous fury was dangerous, but when she imagined what that meant, she hadn’t gotten the right scope of its overwhelming, malevolent power. Clearly, it would seem that Garados was the next best thing to a great fury itself, if not a full-blown superpower in its own right.
“Unbelievable,” she murmured.
“Bloody mountain has been a worry and an almighty trial to me for most of twenty-five years,” Bernard growled. “About time the thing started pulling its weight.”
A few minutes later, a new cry abruptly went up from the vord, a long slow wail that rose and fell in a steady cycle every few seconds. Amara tensed and leaned forward onto the merlon beside her husband, watching the enemy intently.
The vord rushed about, swirling in ranks past and through one another, falling into some sort of unthinkable, alien order and . . .
And
withdrew
.
“They’re running!” screamed a
legionare
.
The men on the wall went berserk with defiance and triumph, screaming imprecations after the retreating vord and raising their weapons into the failing light of the sun. While they did, the vord continued to fall back, and within a few moments, they had all vanished back in the direction from which they had come. A minute later, the only movement on the open field consisted of the still-twitching limbs of slain vord and the black wings of crows swooping down to feast upon the fallen.
“Giraldi,” Bernard said. “Sound stand down. Get a rotation going to get the men food, water, and rest.”
“Yes, sir,” Giraldi said. He saluted and went about his duties.
“That goes for the rest of you, too, people,” Bernard said to his command staff on the roof of the tower. “Get something in your bellies and find a spot to get a nap.”
Amara waited until they had all departed to say, “You did it.”
Bernard grunted and shook his head. “All we did was make them take us seriously. Before today, the vord had never had much in the way of tactics. They just threw more warriors at every problem.” He rubbed at one eye with his forefinger. “Today they tried to turn our flank. Tomorrow . . .” He shrugged. “They pulled back because someone over there is busy thinking of a way to bring us down. The next time we see them, they’ll have something nasty prepared.”
Amara shivered. He took a step closer and put his arm around her. The movement was awkward in his lorica, but Bernard managed.
“The important thing,” he said, “is that we’re still here. Once we fall back to Garrison, we should be able to hold out for weeks, if need be. We’ve successfully bought time.”