A pulse of cold wind seemed to flow out from the broken stone, raising dust and smearing fresh blood into new streaks. Seconds after it did, one of the merlons, the large blocks of stone atop battlements, suddenly quivered and groaned, its form twisting into a new shape. What looked like a Phrygian sled dog seemed to come shuddering out of the block of stone as if digging its way from a snowbank.
It promptly turned, lunged forward, and crushed a vord warrior against the opposite merlon, splattering the mantis to shards of broken chitin and smears of green-brown blood.
All along the walls, the canine gargoyles came to life and began smashing into the vord with implacable ferocity—and once all of them were free of the merlons, the stone
beneath
that recently vacated place began to quiver and heave, and more gargoyles began to emerge.
“Sound retreat!” Bernard ordered.
The trumpet began sounding the signal, and the Legions moved back instantly, as if Bernard’s voice had carried to each and every one of them. Amara joined her husband and the rest of the command staff as they turned to abandon the walls, while all around them more and more canine gargoyles tore their way free of the stone that made the wall and began killing vord with what looked like ferocious glee, their upcurved stone tails wagging.
The mules and their teams were already on the move, and as Amara reached the Valley floor again, she noticed—the ground was growing soft even on this side of the wall. Riva stayed where he was, gasping, both hands on the ground.
Amara rushed to Riva’s side, and said, “Your Grace! We’ve got to go!”
“In a minute!” he panted. “Ground on this side of the wall is all loose earth. Watering it will slow them down even more.”
“Your Grace,” Amara said, “we do not
have
a minute.” She turned to the engineers and snapped, “You men heard the signal. Retreat.”
Exhausted, only a few of them had enough energy to salute, but they all groaned to their feet to begin shambling away from both the steadily shrinking wall and the steadily growing numbers of gargoyles.
Amara looked wildly around her. Everything was flashing colored lights and screams and confusion. Here and there, vord broke through the living wall of angry gargoyles. Knights Terra and Ferrous would close in on each of them, slowing their progress to give the tired
legionares
more time to retreat. Men dragged the wounded toward safety. Horses screamed in panic. Vordbulks continued their vast, deep bellowing while the mantises shrieked and screamed fit to pierce Amara’s eardrums.
She couldn’t see Bernard and the command group.
“My lord!” she screamed. “We must go! Now!”
Riva let out a short, hollow-sounding gasp and sagged to one side, throwing out an arm to catch himself. It was too weak to hold him up, and he crumpled to the steadily dampening ground.
“Get up!” Amara shouted. She knelt and pulled one of the man’s shoulders over hers. “Get up!”
Riva blinked and stared at her with glazed eyes.
Amara wanted to scream in frustration, but she managed to get him mostly upright. The two of them began staggering away from the wall, lurching like a pair of drunks. Faster. They had to move
faster
.
There was a whistling shriek behind her, and Amara turned to see half a dozen mantises rushing her.
Fighting would be impossible. Instead, she flung up a veil around herself and the disoriented High Lord. The charge of the mantises slowed abruptly as it lost a focus, and they began to turn this way and that, each of the six darting forward after the first moving thing it saw.
Unfortunately for mantis number three, the moving thing it saw was Walker the gargant. Though the mantis charged with berserk aggression, Walker barely took notice of it. Instead, he simply lifted one big paw and brought it down in a simple, smashing arc that ended the vord’s offensive with abrupt and absolute finality.
“Amara!” boomed Doroga from Walker’s back. A pair of gargoyles went hurtling by in pursuit of the vord who had broken through. Walker tossed his head and snorted as Doroga continued to call out. “Amara!”
Amara dropped the veil. “Doroga! Over here!”
The Marat leaned forward, and said something to Walker, and the gargant began striding toward her. Doroga grabbed the saddle rope and swung partway down Walker’s side, holding out a hand. Amara guided Riva’s arm into the Marat’s grip. Doroga hauled the man up with a grunt and dragged him onto the saddle. Amara swarmed up the braided leather rope after them, and Doroga shouted something to Walker. The gargant whirled, both front paws coming up off the ground, and turned to the east. It started forward at a pace Amara had never seen in a gargant before—a kind of lumbering gallop that nearly threw her off its back every couple of steps and covered ground with impressive speed.
Doroga threw back his head in a howl of triumph, and Walker answered him. Amara looked over her shoulder. The wall of gargoyles was holding, but not perfectly. Hundreds of mantises were slipping through, and one of the vordbulks had reached the space where the wall had been, despite the treacherous footing. Walker was moving quickly, but not quickly enough to outrun the oncoming mantises.
But then, he didn’t need to.
A chorus of answering bellows came from ahead of them, and a moment later a long line of gargants came lumbering toward them out of the dark—Doroga’s tribesmen. Gargants, moving in trios and pairs, went smashing into the vord that had leaked through the gargoyles, crushing them before they could mount an effective pursuit of the fleeing Aleran Legions. The sound of battle began to recede behind them, and Amara felt herself shivering in reaction.
She wasn’t cold. She wasn’t even reacting to the fear though she’d certainly been afraid.
The chill that went through her did so because of what had happened.
Invidia had told them the truth. They hadn’t expected the sheer size of the vordbulks, but Invidia had certainly tried to tell them they were larger than gargants.
She’d been telling the truth.
If there was even a
chance
that she might actually be able to deliver on her promise of taking them to the vord Queen, of ending the war, they would have no choice but to take her up on the offer.
Amara looked overhead. The battle was winding down up there, and the fliers were coming down to support the Marat in holding off the oncoming vord. They would be the last troops to leave the battlefield—their speed meant that even if they kept fighting for two or three hours, they could potentially reach Garrison before some of the Legions.
Invidia had told the truth.
The one thing Amara did
not
need was to lose perspective on the situation, but she couldn’t help it. Hope fluttered in her chest: hope that perhaps Invidia really was sincere. That perhaps all the horrors she had seen and committed had changed who she was. Though every reasoning fiber in Amara’s brain told her otherwise, foolish hope continued to dance in and out of her thoughts.
A dangerous emotion, hope. Very, very dangerous.
She felt her smile bare her teeth. The real question was this: Whose hope was the more foolish? Her own?
Or Invidia’s?
CHAPTER 46
“You realize, of course,” Attis said weakly, “that she’s going to betray you.”
The Princeps lay in the bed in the quarters normally reserved for Amara and Bernard, and he was dying. Attis had forbidden anyone to enter the room, apart from Aria or Veradis, his physicians—or Amara.
With good reason. He looked horrible, wasted from a magnificent specimen of masculinity to a starving scarecrow within days. His hair was beginning to fall out. There was a yellow tinge to his skin, and a horrible stench surrounded him. No amount of incense could conceal the smell. It could only dull its edge. It even defeated the room’s gargant scent.
“Is it not possible,” Amara asked, “that Invidia has had a change of heart?”
“No,” Attis said calmly. “A heart would be prerequisite. As would the ability to admit her mistakes.”
“You’re certain of that?” Amara asked. “Without a doubt?”
“Absolutely.”
“That was my assessment as well, Your Highness,” Amara said quietly.
Attis smiled faintly. “Good.” His eyes fluttered closed, and his breath caught for a second.
“My lord?” Amara asked. “Should I send for a physician?”
“No,” he rasped. “No. Save their strength for men who might live.” He panted for a moment before opening his eyes again. They were glazed with fatigue. “You’re going to use her,” he said.
Amara nodded. “Either she will lead us to the Queen and betray us to her. Or she will not lead us to the Queen and betray us. Or she will lead us to the Queen and assist us as she said. Two of three possible outcomes result in an opportunity to remove the Queen. We can’t pass up a chance like that.”
“And she knows it,” Attis said. “She can do the math as well. She knows you have no choice but to try. And your figures are fallacies, really. I would make it seventy percent that she intends to lead you to the Queen and betray you. Another thirty percent that she simply intends to take you to a trap without ever revealing the Queen.”
Amara shrugged. “By your argument, we have a seventy percent chance, instead of sixty-six. Regardless, it’s still a better opportunity than we’ve ever had or will ever have again.”
Attis said nothing. Outside, trumpets blared. It was nearly noon, and the vord pursuing the fleeing Legions to their final fortification had begun their attack by midmorning. Crushed into the relatively small frontage of the final redoubt at the outskirts of Garrison, the vord were making little headway against the determined
legionares
. Mules operating from town rooftops and squads of firecrafters brought blazing death to the enemy. The air was filled with the grotesque stench of internal fluids and burned chitin, even here, inside the little citadel. The incense didn’t help with that smell, either.
“I think you know what she intends to do,” Attis said.
“Yes.”
“You’re willing to pay the price this could entail?”
“I have no choice,” she said.
Attis nodded slowly, and said, “I do not envy you. When?”
“Four hours after midnight,” Amara said. “The team will meet Invidia and strike just before dawn.”
“Bother,” Attis said. “I hate not knowing the end of a story.”
“Your Highness?”
He shook his head. “You didn’t need to consult me, Amara, and yet here you are. You must want something of me.”
“I do,” she said quietly.
His weak voice turned wry. “All things considered, it is probably best if you do not dawdle. Out with it.”
She told him what she wanted.
He agreed, and they made the necessary arrangements.
Not long after noon, Gaius Attis, High Lord Aquitaine, fell quietly unconscious. Amara sent for the healers, but they only arrived in time to see him take his last slow, quiet breath.
He died there, his expression that of a man with few regrets.
Amara bowed her head, and wept a few silent tears for the man Gaius Aquitainus Attis had become in his last weeks, for all the lives she had seen lost, the pain she had seen in his last days.
Then she dashed the tears from her face with one fist and turned to leave the chamber. This night would see the most important mission of her life. There would be time for weeping soon, she told herself.
Soon.
Durias, First Spear of the Free Aleran, rode beside Fidelias, looking back over his shoulder at Octavian’s forces. They had stopped for water, the first such rest in six hours, beside a small, swift-flowing river. Thousands of men and Canim, taurga and horses, drank thirstily.
“This is mad,” Durias said, after a moment. “Absolutely mad.”
“And it’s working,” Fidelias pointed out.
“You can’t think that anyone is
pleased
with it, Marcus,” Durias pointed out. “The men are puking their guts out.”
“As long as they don’t do it where everyone is drinking.”
Durias smiled and shook his head. “The Canim resent it, you know.”
Fidelias smiled. “They’ll resent it a lot less when Legion shieldwalls and Legion Knights are holding their flanks.”
Durias grunted. “You think we can win this fight?”
“No,” Fidelias said. “But I think we can survive it. In the long term, it’s probably the same thing.”
Durias frowned thoughtfully and eyed him. “How are you feeling? Word is your heart started acting up.”
“Better now,” Fidelias told him. “I feel like a new man.”
“That’s because you’re sandbagging it, slacker,” Durias said. “You’re going to miss that armor tomorrow morning.”
Fidelias grinned easily. “That’s a long time from now. Besides, I don’t see you walking and letting some poor
legionare
have a turn on horseback.”
Durias sniffed. “Rank has its privileges,” he said piously. “I go letting some random
legionare
ride while the First Spear takes his place, I’m upsetting the natural order of the Legion. Bad for morale. Totally irresponsible.”
“Good, kid,” Fidelias said. “You’ll make officer yet.”
Durias grinned. “Take that back.”
A Tribune of the Free Aleran rode up to them and threw Durias a salute. His armor, though standard Legion lorica, was old and worn, if obviously currently in good maintenance, and scoured free of any insignia whatsoever. “First Spear.”
“Tribune,” Durias said, returning the salute. “Report.”
“Four more contacts with the enemy, all of them with the wax spiders. We also burned out another half a dozen patches of the
croach
. They like to start it around the edges of a pond whenever they can. They’re getting easier to find.”
“That means that the well-hidden patches will be that much more difficult to spot,” Durias said. “Don’t ease up on them.”