Amara glanced over to where Isana and Odiana and the healers of Octavian’s Legions labored on the wounded, too far gone into their own battles and crafting to take any note of their surroundings. Then she staggered to the door and met Lady Placida there. Placidus Sandos had been found beneath a mound of dismembered vord nearly eight feet deep, badly wounded but alive. Even now, he lay on the ground nearby, and this was the first time Aria had left his side.
She and Amara both stared out, at the incredible form rising from the mountain to the northwest, its brow crowned with thunder and lightning, its shoulders cloaked in storm clouds and rain, its vast and terrible shape blotting out miles of blue sky. Something like a mouth gaped open, and its roar shook the ground again. The two women had to grab at the frames of the doorway to stay standing.
“Great furies,” Amara whispered.
“Aye,” Lady Placida breathed, her eyes wide, her face pale. “
Two
of them.”
Tavi managed his next bounding leap, useless as he knew it would be, frantically calling the wind for all that he was worth—and was suddenly hit in the back by something moving at incredible speed. Pale arms twined beneath his shoulders, preventing him from falling, and Kitai shouted, “Hold on!”
They accelerated as the mountain’s foot fell toward them, blotting out the sky, darkening the morning to twilight. Kitai’s windstream drove them faster and faster toward the rapidly dwindling strip of trees and sunlight at the mountain’s base—and as they grew near, that passage to survival suddenly filled with a small legion of windmanes, their inhuman faces stretched into eerie howls, their claws reaching.
“That’s
cheating
!” Kitai declared hotly—even as their forward pace increased in proportion to her outrage.
“Mind your eyes!” Tavi shouted back.
He lifted his right hand, noting with a touch of surprise that he still held his sword. An effort of will let the weapon burst into flame. He lifted the weapon awkwardly, still being held under the arms by Kitai, then shaped the familiar blade-shaped firecrafting into an elongated, white-hot lance, reaching out in front of them. The terrible speed of their passage didn’t simply blunt the end of the lance; it spread the fire out into a concave disc a dozen feet across. The heat from the fire flooded back to them, distinctly uncomfortable, a hot wind that scorched exposed skin—and sent its own wind flowing out and upward from it.
As the fire-lance met the first of the windmanes, it bowled the feral furies aside—doing them no harm, but sending them wailing and spinning from Tavi and Kitai’s path. Trees at the base of the mountain began to crack and shatter as that vast weight came down, and the darkness grew until only the lance of fire lit their way. Hundreds of terrified birds flew with them, darting shapes in the sole light of the fire-lance.
They shot into the open sky as the mountain smashed down onto the ground below, trees snapping and popping as they were crushed to splinters, stone grinding upon stone. A vast cloud of dust billowed out after them, and Kitai accelerated and climbed to avoid being engulfed by it and having her own windstream suffocated.
Tavi released the fire from his sword and looked down at himself. The high-speed passage upon Kitai’s windstream had scoured much of the dust from him, and a second’s experimentation brought up more than enough wind to sustain his own flight. He tapped Kitai’s fingers, and she released him to fly on his own. He steadied himself, then pulled up beside her, flying with his body almost touching hers, their windstreams merging smoothly.
“Did you kill her yet?” Kitai called, her voice high and tight with excitement and fear.
“Not quite,” Tavi said. He jerked a thumb back at the monstrous form behind them. “I was doing that.”
She gave him a look that managed to blend respect, disgust, and a touch of jealousy. “This is how you show me you want me to be your mate?”
“It’s a big decision,” he returned blandly. “You can’t expect me to make it in an hour.”
Kitai stuck her tongue out at him, and added, “Watch out.”
They both rolled away to the left as Garados’s vast hand swept down at them, as if to knock them from the air. They evaded it by yards, but the wind of its passage was almost more dangerous to them. They were spun violently about and in different directions. Tavi actually watched as a windmane was spawned from the swirling vortexes the blow created.
“Where
is
she?” Kitai called to him.
“Last time I saw her was up near the . . . chest, I think.”
She nodded, and without speaking the pair altered their flight paths to begin soaring up the enormous, slow-moving mountain fury. More windmanes came at them, these seeming to be random attacks rather than results of some deliberate malevolence—but there were so many of them around the vast earth fury that it hardly mattered. Each windmane had to be countered with windcrafting, driven away, and Tavi found himself thinking that it had really been a great deal less strenuous for him to deal with windmanes when he hadn’t had any furies and had relied upon a pouch of rock salt to discourage them.
Of course, using salt while maintaining his own windstream was problematic in any case—and he didn’t think he’d care to find a spot to land on Garados and craft some salt out of the ground. So he gritted his teeth and concentrated on swatting windmanes out of his path, discouraging the sinister furies from coming too close.
Vast sound shook the air around them twice—Garados, roaring in frustration or simple anger or some other emotion completely alien to such ephemeral beings as Tavi and Kitai. Perhaps he could ask Alera about it later. If there was time. The great fury’s arm swept by, this time much farther away. Pine trees stood up on the forearm like a mortal man’s hairs, and on the same approximate scale. Rain began to fall, heavy and cold.
They soared up past a distorted belly and over the great fury’s chest without seeing the vord Queen—but as they reached the level of Garados’s shoulders, they entered heavy storm clouds. Thick grey haze settled over them, and lightning flickered through the darkness. The wind surged and howled, then died away to a whisper at random—but as they kept going, Tavi was sure he could hear an actual voice in those whispers—a voice that promised torment, pain, and death.
There was another vast sound—and abruptly, the great fury stood completely still. The change was startling. Rock stopped grinding against rock. Tons and tons of earth and stone ceased their rumbling, and only the sound of a few falling stones, bouncing their way down to earth, remained behind. Almost simultaneously, the howling wind within the storm clouds died. The air went still, until they and the raindrops were the only things moving. The flickering lightning began to come less frequently, and the colors changed from every wild hue imaginable to one color: green.
Vord green.
“Aleran?” Kitai called, her eyes flicking around them.
“Bloody crows,” Tavi whispered. He turned to Kitai, and said, “She’s trying to claim them. The vord Queen is trying to claim Garados and Thana.”
“Is it possible?”
“For you or me?” Tavi shook his head. “But Alera told me that her power has a broader base than ours does. Maybe. And if she does . . .”
Kitai’s face turned grim. “If the Queen claims two great furies, it won’t matter who remains to stand against her.” She eyed Tavi. “And you led her to them.”
He scowled at her, and said, “Yes.”
They both increased their speed.
“And you woke her up in the first place.”
Tavi clenched his teeth. “Yes.”
“I simply wished to be sure I correctly understood the way things are.”
Tavi suppressed a sigh, ignored his growing fatigue, and pushed ahead harder, until the roar of their windstreams precluded conversation.
They found the vord Queen atop the frost-coated crown of Garados’s head. She simply stood there, half-burned and naked, her head bowed and her hands spread slightly apart. Above her was what looked like a motionless vortex, where terrible winds had borne up crystals of ice and snow into a glittering spiral.
The vord Queen opened her eyes as they came into view of her. Her lips curved up into a smile that no longer looked like a mimicked expression. It contained as much bitterness, hate, and malevolent amusement as Tavi had ever seen on anyone.
“Father,” the Queen said. “Mother.”
Kitai’s spine stiffened slightly, but she didn’t speak. Moving in time with Tavi, she touched down on the rocky ground facing the Queen. The three of them made the points of an equilateral triangle.
Eerie silence reigned for several seconds. Heavy, cold drops of rain fell upon stone. Their breaths all turned to steamy mist as they exhaled.
“You’re here to kill me,” the vord Queen said, still smiling. “But you can’t. You’ve tried. And in a moment, it won’t matter what kind of forces you might be able to—”
“She’s stalling for time,” Tavi said, and reached for his windcrafting to speed his movements. His own voice sounded oddly stretched and slowed as he continued to speak.
“Hit her,” he said, and slung out the hottest firecrafting he could call.
The Queen began to dart to the left—but the Marat woman hadn’t needed Tavi’s direction to begin the attack with him. The Queen slammed into the sheet of solid rock Kitai had called up in a half circle around her. The vord smashed through, but not before Tavi’s firecrafting had scored on her, driving a shriek of pain from her lungs.
The ground trembled and lurched as she screamed.
Tavi darted forward, sword in hand. The Queen flung a sheet of fire at him, but again he trapped the blaze within the steel of his blade, heating it to scarlet-and-sapphire flame. Somewhere behind him, Kitai wrought the stone beneath the Queen into something the consistency of thick mud. One foot sank ankle deep into it, pinning her in place. Her blade swept out as Tavi closed, and their swords screamed as they crossed, a dozen times in the space of a heartbeat, a blizzard of sparks filling the air—so thickly that Tavi didn’t see the Queen’s foot lashing toward him until it was too late.
The kick hit him in the middle of his chest and threw him twenty feet, to fetch up against an outcropping of rock. His head slammed against it, and he bounced off to fall to the ground, his arms and legs suddenly made of pudding. He couldn’t breathe. There was a deep dent in the frontal plates of his lorica.
Kitai closed on the vord Queen in a blur of shining mail and damp white hair, wielding a
gladius
in each hand. She waded into the fight with an elemental brutality and primal instinct that was nothing like the formal training Tavi had received, but which seemed no less dangerous. Violet and emerald sparks warred with one another as the Marat woman met the vord Queen’s steel.
“This is pointless,” said the Queen calmly, her alien eyes bright as she parried and cut, repelling Kitai’s attacks. “It was too late when you arrived. Kill me now, and Garados and Thana both will be entirely unleashed upon the land. Do you think what Gaius Sextus did at Alera Imperia was destruction? And he had but one great fury to unleash. I have two, and more ancient, less tamed ones at that. Garados and Thana will kill every living thing on half a continent. Phrygia, Aquitaine, and Rhodes will be laid waste—as will Garrison, and the gathering of refugees there, and the barbarian tribes who have raised their hands against me.”
Kitai bared her teeth, stepping away for a moment. “Better that than to let you live, let you claim them as your own.”
“That presumes you have a choice, Mother.”
“I am not your mother,” Kitai said in a precise, cold voice. “I am nothing to you. You are less than nothing to me. You are a weed to be plucked from the earth and discarded. You are vermin to be wiped out. You are a rabid dog, to be pitied and destroyed. Show wisdom. Bare your throat. It will be swift and without pain.”
The vord Queen closed her eyes for a second and flinched from the words as she hadn’t from any of the blows. But when she opened them again, her voice was calm, eerily serene. “Odd. I was about to say the same thing to you.” She twisted her hips and casually ripped her foot from the earth, the rock screaming protest. “Enough,” she said quietly. “I should have dispatched you both at once.”
There was a blur in the air, and the two came together in a fountain of sparks amidst the chiming of steel.
Tavi ground his teeth. The feeling was starting to come back to his arms and legs, but it was apparently a slow, slow process. His head hurt abominably.
This wasn’t the answer. The Queen was simply too strong, too fast, too intelligent to be overcome directly. They’d had a small enough chance of killing her. Taking her alive, in order to prevent the great furies from being unleashed, was an order of magnitude closer to “impossible” than Tavi cared to attempt.
But how to beat her? With that added advantage, there was simply no way.
So,
he thought,
take that advantage away.
The Queen had begun to create a bond between herself and the great furies of Calderon, a task that Tavi felt was surely well beyond his own abilities. But in furycraft, like in everything else, it was far more difficult to create than it was to destroy.
“Alera,” he whispered. He had no idea if the great fury could hear him, or if she would appear if she did. But he pictured her intensely in his thoughts, and whispered again, “Alera.”
And then the great fury was simply there, appearing silently and without drama, the hazy shape of a woman in grey, blending into the cloud and mist, her face lovely but aging, weary. She looked around at the situation, her eyes pausing upon the motionless vortex longer than upon the spark-flooded battle raging between Kitai and the Queen.
“Hmmm,” she said calmly. “This is hardly going well for you.”
Tavi fought to keep his voice calm and polite. “Has the Queen truly bound the great furies to herself?”