Araris nodded at Schultz and looked wildly around him. “Marcus!” he called, his voice buzzing oddly. He tossed a stone from his hand into a long arc, and Fidelias snatched it out of the air. He could feel the tingle of a firecrafting in it—a signal flare, most likely. “The First Lady, and three others are trapped in the hive, wounded. They need to be taken to the stronghold at Garrison immediately. There’s the flare for their escort. Lord Placida may be down at the bottom of that ramp. Find him.”
Then he spun on one heel and began a heavy run back toward the green-lighted holes in the barn floor.
“Schultz!” Fidelias barked, tossing the stone to the centurion, who caught it handily enough. “Get that to some open ground and set it off!”
“Yes, sir!” Schultz said. He looked around the havoc within the courtyard a bit blankly, then seemed to be struck by an idea. He muttered something to the stone and hurled it up to fall onto the flat stone roof of the barn. A few seconds later, there was a loud hissing sound, and brilliant blue-white light blazed from the flare.
“Fine,” Fidelias said. “Get a detail to the bottom of that ramp.”
“Aye, First Spear,” Schultz said, and began bawling assignments to his men.
Fidelias watched it happen and shook his head. “Never rains but it pours.”
Between the mopping-up combat in the courtyard, the ongoing trumpet cries to attack, and the sound of the bloody flare all but burning a hole into the flat stone roof of the barn, Fidelias didn’t hear the approaching windstream until Princeps Octavian had all but slammed into him. Flying backward and upside down, Octavian was hauling Kitai through the air, her back against his chest as he came in to land in the courtyard. His heels struck first, digging a furrow in the hard soil, then slipped out from beneath him. He slid across the ground on his back until he fetched up against the inner side of the steadholt’s wall with a grunt.
“Marcus!” Octavian bellowed. “She’s hurt! Get a medico over here, now!” He thrashed his way a bit awkwardly to his feet, lowering Kitai gently to the ground as he went. He spun and threw his right arm up, dragging with it a sheet of earth and stone more than a foot thick, raising it up into a shielding dome just as a flash of green-white lighting ripped out of the mists. It struck the improvised wall and shattered it, but when the debris settled, Octavian remained standing over the wounded Marat woman. “Bloody crows, Marcus!” he bellowed. “I’m a little busy here!”
Marcus kicked a team of
singulares
and a Prime Cohort medico to rush over to Kitai. As soon as Octavian saw that, he took two steps and leapt off the ground and into flight, vanishing into the mists. A second windstream, far larger and more violent, swept over the courtyard, clearly in pursuit.
“Marcus!” bellowed Araris in an iron voice from within the barn. “I need more men here!”
“First Spear, First Spear!” said a young
legionare
frantically. He made a series of frantic gestures.
“Bloody crows, boy, I’m standing right here!” Marcus snapped. “Tell me!”
“Enemy infantry,” the boy panted. “At least thirty thousand, here in two minutes. Enemy airborne troops have been delayed by the Knights Pisces, and will arrive at the same time, approximately seven thousand. Sir, what do we do?”
Two minutes?
Two minutes?
Nearly forty thousand vord were inbound—and his own troops were scattered all over the terrain, out of sight of each other in the fog. They would be swallowed whole in detail.
Bloody crows, what had Octavian gotten him into?
If both he and that young man survived the day, which was looking increasingly unlikely, Fidelias thought, he might be forced to kill him on general principles.
CHAPTER 53
“Count Calderon,” Ehren said, “I know not everything is as it seems. But I would truly love to know why the fact that we’re about to get crushed by that pair of vordbulks is not as it seems. I mean, I thought it would have been obvious by now.”
“Crows,” Bernard breathed quietly. His face was tight with tension. “They must have missed the Queen.”
“What?” Ehren asked.
A seventy-pound boulder went whizzing past them, hurled by one of the hulking behemoths accompanying the vordbulks. It missed them by no more than a foot and smashed into the wall of the tower behind them, sending a webwork of cracks into the stone.
“Bloody crows!” Ehren cried.
“The High Lords and . . .” He swallowed, and seemed to ignore the near miss. “And my wife learned where the vord Queen was.”
“Oh,” Ehren said quietly. The obvious move would have been to attempt to end the war immediately—a decapitating strike. Had it happened, the vord would not now be operating with such focus and direction. It was, therefore, reasonable to assume that the strike had failed. Given how critical it was, Ehren judged it unlikely that the High Lords would have done anything but fight to the death. And Countess Amara, while a skilled windcrafter, had been by far the person least able to defend herself against a threat like the one the Queen represented.
“I see,” Ehren said quietly. A moment later, he added, “I think it’s more likely that the Queen escaped than that they were all killed, Your Excellency. I’m sure your wife is all right.”
Bernard shook his head. “Thanks for lying, son.”
Ehren grimaced.
“Well,” Bernard said. He turned to look at the damage the boulder had done to the tower. “If the High Lords haven’t done the job, we’ll just have to handle it ourselves, won’t we?”
He disappeared inside the tower and emerged a moment later with a great, black bow as long as he was tall, its staves thicker than Ehren’s forearms, and a war quiver packed with arrows. Count Calderon took a deep breath. Then he grunted and bent the great bow, leaning into it with the whole of his body. He strained with fury-born strength to bend the bow far enough to set its string—which was more like a cable as thick as Ehren’s smallest finger.
Calderon let up on the bow gingerly and let out a huge exhale. The veins on his neck were standing out, and his face was red with the exertion. Ehren looked around nervously as Count Calderon readied the weapon.
The battle on the outer wall was still going well, as battles went, the
legionares
holding steady. The fight on the northern bluff had slowed the vordbulk dramatically—Cereus and the Citizens he led had been steadily assaulting the monstrous beast with every form of furycraft imaginable.
Dozens of square yards of its chitinous hide had been burned away. Trees swayed and bowed, lashing out with their limbs like enormous clubs, but the black chitin-armor seemed to absorb the impacts readily. Spikes rose from the ground to pierce the vordbulk’s feet, but the beast had begun dragging its feet forward, shattering the stone spikes before they could pierce it—and anyone coming close enough to the enormous creature to attempt to bring up the spikes beneath one of the monster’s planted feet was viciously assaulted by the vord protecting it.
Though it bled from scores of wounds, the vordbulk had not been killed, only slowed; and the furycrafters working against the beast were growing tired. It was an incredibly durable creature, and not simply because of its size. Despite the massive furycraft being brought to bear against it, it simply hunched its shoulders until the surges of power waned and took another giant’s step forward. But this much had been done: The Citizens had stalled the creature for the moment, ruining the notion of a simultaneous assault on both sides.
On the south bluff, the vordbulk had not even been slowed down. Within moments, it would be in position to fall and crush the outer walls, simultaneously breaching the defenses and creating a fleshy ramp that the vord mantises could use to enter.
Bernard slung the war quiver over his shoulder, in a gesture that seemed like ritual to Ehren, something practiced so many times that the Count probably wasn’t aware that he’d done it. Count Calderon reached up and selected a single arrow. Its head was oddly heavy, a set of four steel blades that reminded Ehren more of a harpoon than anything else. It was only at the last moment that he noted a sphere of gleaming black glass that had been trapped within the steel blades, like a jewel within its setting.
Bernard stared up at the nearest vordbulk, the one on the southern bluff. As both beasts had been doing periodically since they appeared, the vordbulk let out one of its enormous, bone-shaking basso roars.
“Clan Herdbane,” Bernard sighed. “Those fools never did figure out how to stay out of a fight they couldn’t win.”
As Ehren watched, he saw barbarians and their beasts attacking the vordbulk, hurling spears up at its belly, hoping to hit the vitals, as their deadly predator birds clawed their way several yards up the vordbulk’s legs, ripping and tearing to no appreciable effect. Perhaps if given a week, they might eventually nibble the great beast down—but they didn’t have that kind of time.
“You might want to back off a ways, Sir Ehren,” Bernard said. He brandished the arrow. “I’m not entirely sure this thing won’t explode the second I release the string.”
Ehren swallowed and took a couple of steps back. “I . . . see.”
“Bit more,” Bernard said.
Ehren walked twenty feet, to the far side of the citadel’s balcony.
“Suppose it’ll have to do,” Bernard said. He set the arrow to the great bow’s string, faced the vordbulk, and waited.
“That’s . . . a long shot,” Ehren noted. “Three hundred yards?”
“Range isn’t a problem,” said Bernard through his stiffened jaw. “Angle is a bit odd, though.”
“Ahem, yes,” Ehren said. “But honestly, sir . . . there must be some other way for you to . . . Your Excellency, it’s
one
arrow. What could you possibly think it will do?”
The vordbulk’s vast flanks expanded as it drew in a breath.
Bernard drew the black bow, and its staves groaned like the mast of a ship in high winds. Muscles knotted in his shoulders, back, and arms, and again his teeth clenched, and his face turned red with effort. There was a faint trembling in the earth as Bernard pulled the arrow back to his ear. The grain of the black bow writhed and quivered, even as it was bent, and Ehren realized that the Count was putting an enormous amount of earthcrafting into bending the bow and would be using even more woodcrafting to straighten its staves, to impart all the power he could to the missile. When he released the string with a short cry of effort, the reaction of the bow nearly took him from his feet. There was a thundercrack in the air before him, and the arrow leapt into the night so swiftly that Ehren would not have been able to follow it had not the morning light gleamed on the steel head.
The vordbulk opened its mouth to roar again, just as the arrow angled upward, into the creature’s vast maw. The roar went on for a moment, then there was a flash of light, a whumping sound, and a burst of smoke and little licks of fire that poured from the vordbulk’s mouth. It stopped in its tracks and roared again, this time at a higher pitch, and a veritable fountain of green-brown vord blood spewed from its mouth and fell to the earth in a disgusting miniature waterfall.
“Hngh,” Bernard said. He sagged visibly, his chest heaving in slow, deep breaths, and he leaned against the railing to stay upright. “Guess . . . Pentius Pluvus . . . was right.”
“Eh?” Ehren asked, watching the vordbulk with fascination.
Bernard sagged until he sat down on the bench against the outer wall of the tower, behind them. “Pluvus said an explosion is a very different thing when it starts off surrounded by flesh instead of occurring in the open air. Much more devastating. Apparently a crow ate one of our little fire-spheres one day, and a boy tried to knock it out of the air with his sling before it could escape. Normally, one of the little ones we used at first would only singe some feathers if they went off nearby. This time they found feathers and bits two hundred yards away.”
“I see,” Ehren said. “How very . . . very nauseating.”
The vordbulk let out another distressed cry. It staggered like a drunkard.
“This bow can put an arrow right through a couple of sides of beef,” Bernard said. “I wouldn’t practice on live cows, of course. Cruel.”
“Mmm,” Ehren said faintly.
The vordbulk shook its head. Fluid slewed out and splattered in great, sickening arcs.
“So I shot at the roof of that thing’s mouth,” Bernard said. “I figure the arrow stopped three or four feet past that. Somewhere up in its brain, maybe. Then . . .” Bernard made an expanding motion with his hands and settled down to watch the vast creature in silence.
The vordbulk gradually listed to one side and fell. It was a motion more akin to a tree’s toppling—to
several
trees’ toppling—than any animal’s movement. The ground shook when it landed, and dozens of stones were jarred loose from the side of the bluff, to come crashing down among the buildings of the town. Dust and dirt flew twenty feet into the air around the creature. The vordbulk let out one last slow, gasping cry that trailed off from an earsplitting roar to gradual silence.
Ehren turned his eyes to Bernard and just stared at the man.
“Anybody could have done it,” Bernard said wearily.
Wild cheering, faint by contrast, rang up from the city below, and from the reserve positions behind them.
The Count of Calderon closed his eyes and settled back against the wall of the tower, clearly exhausted, and winced as his shoulders moved. “It was a crowbegotten big target.” He opened one eye to squint at the second vordbulk. “Now. If only I had another one of those arrows. And a sphere to match it. And a night’s sleep.” He shook his head. “We’re all just so bloody tired. I don’t know how Cereus keeps going.”
Ehren sat down beside Bernard, frowning up at the second vordbulk. “Count? What are we going to do about that one?”
“Well, Sir Ehren,” Bernard said philosophically. “What do you suggest? My weaponsmith says it will be the day after tomorrow before he has another arrow like that one ready. I could send in the Legions, but they’d just get stomped flat by the hundreds. Our Knights and Citizens are all either on the wall fighting the horde, or they’re already up on the bluff.”