Princeps' fury (33 page)

“Bloody crows,” Bernard said. “Would even
she
side with the Vord against Alera?”

“I don’t know,” Amara said. “Once, I wouldn’t have thought anyone would do such a thing.”

“No,” Bernard said. “It’s got to be some other kind of control. If you saw them taking prisoners, then it would appear that the Vord intend to place them under similar constraints.”

“That was my thought as well,” Amara said. “But what are we to
do
about it?”

“Take our findings to the First Lord,” Bernard replied.

“The Legions are already running,” Amara countered. “We would have difficulty catching him—never mind the fact that we have not yet completed our mission.”

“We observed their crafters during the battle, just as he wished.”

“Observing and understanding are not the same thing.” She fumbled for his hand and squeezed it. “Right now, I can’t tell the First Lord anything but superficial details. We need to understand more before it will do any good. We’ve got to see what’s going on before we go back.”

She squeezed his hand tight. “We have an idea which direction they took the prisoners. I think we should find out what’s being done to them.”

Bernard was quiet for a moment before he said, “Whatever they’re doing, it seems obvious that they’re going to be doing it in a very well-protected location.”

“I know.”

“We won’t be dodging the occasional patrol or outbound raiding party. They’ll have real sentries. A lot of them.”

“I know that, too,” she said. “But so far, none of the Vord have spotted us. If I didn’t think we had a real chance of succeeding, I wouldn’t even suggest it.”

“Nothing ridiculous about it,” he said. “If you leave at once, odds are excellent that you’ll make it back to the First Lord. If you stay with me, you’ll double your risk of being found and killed before you can get the information back.”

“But you—”

“Have worked alone before, love. I’ll be harder to locate alone in any case. You won’t be doing anything but improving my odds of getting out.”

Amara frowned at the darkness. “And you’re quite sure that you’re not doing this simply to protect your poor little helpless wife?”

He let out a quick, amused chuckle. “Don’t let her hear you refer to her like that. She’ll call up a windstorm that rips the hide right off you.”

“Bernard, I’m serious.”

His fingers stroked over hers, the motion somehow reassuring. “So am I. If we’re going to take on additional risk, I want to be crowbegotten sure that what we learn gets back to Gaius.” He paused meditatively, then added, “And if it makes my poor little helpless wife a little more likely to come out of it in one piece, that’s a happy coincidence.”

His fingers squeezed hers. Then she felt the earth begin to tremble again, and the light of the gloom-shrouded night bloomed like a darkling sunrise above them. They rose slowly and emerged into the cold, sleeting evening. Without needing to signal one another, they brought up the concealing furycraftings again, their furies winding layers of veils around them even as their cloaks changed their hues, darkening to become one with the night.

Bernard signaled that he would take the lead, then started out into the night, the sound of rattling sleet blanketing the few sounds he made as he moved. Amara wasn’t sure of their direction, in the gloom, but she knew that Bernard had a nearly supernatural facility with fieldcraft. He would lead them to the south, in the direction the Vord had taken the Aleran prisoners—and away from their friends and allies, who were retreating from the Vord.

Amara shivered against the cold and the sleet, and fervently hoped that she had been right in her assessment of their abilities—and that she had not just committed herself and her husband to cold and pitiless deaths at the hands of their inhuman foes.

CHAPTER 23

“There’s frozen ground back in Alera, too, soldier,” Valiar Marcus barked. “Without a palisade, we’ll be easy meat for the first gang of Shuarans to come along. So put your back into it and dig, or I’ll have you at a whipping post until your balls freeze and drop off.”

The startled
legionare
, one of the Free Aleran troopers, started up from where he sat, his face showing chagrin that quickly turned to sullen anger. The spear of
legionares
working on that section of the palisade wall turned darkening faces toward him.

Bloody crows,
Marcus thought.
It was perhaps unwise to threaten a fanatical former slave with a lashing.
He had no desire to fight eight men by himself, but neither could the First Spear back down from any show of open insubordination.

Marcus turned to square his shoulders and face the men, keeping them all within his field of vision. “You know how the Legions maintain discipline,
legionare
, or ought to.”

The recalcitrant
legionare
, perhaps bolstered by the support of his fellows, drawled, “And maybe it’s time that changed, centurion.”

Marcus took one step forward, called up strength from the earth, and struck the man with a backhanded blow. The
legionare
was flung from his feet and crashed into the stack of loose poles that the Legions had brought with them from Alera. The man and the material spilled into a disorderly sprawl. The
legionare
moaned once and lay in a senseless puddle.

Marcus regarded the man distantly for a moment, and said, “I disagree.” He turned his gaze to the other
legionares
, who stood stunned and staring, and said in a quiet voice, “You’ll have to work a bit harder to get your section put up in time, gentlemen.”

A tall, wiry man in the helmet of a centurion from the Free Aleran came striding down the line of men erecting the camp’s palisade and paused, glowering at the men in front of Marcus. His eyes swept back and forth across them, and fastened on the man on the ground. He grunted, turned to Marcus, and gave him a nod. “First Spear.”

The Free Aleran centurion glanced at the unconscious man. He didn’t quite smile. “You men are lucky. I’d have had you all at the whipping post.”

“But—” protested one of the ex-slaves.

“And I’d have been right to do it,” the centurion snapped. “We told you when you signed on that the Free Aleran Legion was not about taking vengeance. We told you that you would be held to the standards of behavior of every other Legion, dealt with in the same way as any free soldier. Now get your lazy asses to work before I decide that the First Spear was too lenient on you, interpret your actions as refusal to obey a direct order while the Legion is in enemy territory, and have you all hanged.”

The men were shocked from their stasis by the centurion’s words, perhaps. In any case, they leapt back to the work with a will.

Marcus faced off with the centurion and nodded to him. “Thank you,” he said in a quieter tone.

“Bugger off, you crowbitten piece of Citizen bootlicking trash,
sir
,” the centurion responded in a voice just as quiet as Marcus’s. “You don’t know these men, or what they’ve seen. If you have a problem with our
legionares
—even idiots like Bartillus, there—you deal with it through our officers. Sir.”

“There is no
our
, here, centurion,” Marcus replied, narrowing his eyes. “We’re all Alerans here. We’ll all die together if it comes to a fight with the Shuarans.”

The centurion glared at Marcus a moment longer. Then he grunted, a tone of vague assent, and turned to start back down the line of laboring men. He barked orders for a pair of them to carry the unconscious Bartillus to the healers.

Marcus watched him go and shook his head. Bloody crows, he must be going senile not to have realized how sharp the division between the former slaves and the First Aleran had been. In the wrong situation, they would be as eager to fight the First Aleran as they would the Canim.

And besides that, he admitted to himself, the Free Aleran centurion had a point. Had the men he’d been passing been members of the Crown Legion, or of the First Imperian, he would most likely have spoken to the centurion in charge of the men, though he was technically within his rights to brace the men directly for such an obvious breach of discipline.

Within his rights, but unwise. And it sent the wrong message to the men of both Legions—that the command of the expedition did not trust the Free Aleran’s officers. He would avoid a repetition of such foolishness in the future.

“First Spear!” Marcus looked up from his thoughts to spot one of Magnus’s runners charging toward him. The young man came to a panting halt and saluted him. “Sir!”

Marcus restrained a sigh, and declined to tell the valet that “sir” was used to address officers, not centurions. “What is it, son?”

“Sir, Sir Magnus’s compliments, and a message from the Princeps has arrived, sir. He said you would wish to be informed immediately.”

Marcus nodded once, sharply. “Take me to the messenger.”

Marcus watched Foss and his best men struggle to save Antillus Crassus’s life. The young Knight Tribune, wounded in a dozen places, lay almost completely still in the healing tub, his breathing barely disturbing the water. His skin showed fresh, pink patches where he must have, in desperation, closed a dozen more such wounds as the ones he still sported. Given that he had likely done it while flying—and likely while fighting as well—it was a wonder the boy was alive at all.

He had flown into the Legion’s camp, barely conscious, and collapsed two of the Legion’s white canvas tents as he crashed to earth. He had been taken from the wreckage directly to the healers, and had not yet woken to give any message.

“Foss?” Magnus asked again. The old Cursor Callidus stood at the healer’s right hand, intently focused upon the wounded man.

Foss shook his wide shoulders in irritation and growled under his breath. The big man’s black hair and beard were too long for the letter of the regulations, but the Tribune Medica was, frankly, too good at his job to be called to task for them. “I’m trying to stack up grains of sand, here, Magnus, and you keep bumping my bloody arm. Go to the bloody crows and let me work.”

Marcus turned and hurried from the tent, crossing the open stretch of ground that lay between the tents of the First Aleran’s healers and those of the Legion of ex-slaves. He strode into the tent and looked around.

The Tribune Medica rose from where he sat at a small table, writing in a ledger. He frowned at Marcus warily. “First Spear.”

“Sir,” Marcus said, saluting the man. “We have word from the Princeps, but his messenger is gravely wounded. I had hoped that you would lend us Dorotea.”

“I would,” the other man said. “But she’s busy. It seems one of our
legionares
was rather badly injured by some overzealous centurion.”

Marcus looked past the Tribune to see the hapless Bartillus lying senseless in a healing tub, his lower face bruised and swollen all along his jawline. Kneeling behind him, her fingers resting lightly on his temples, was a woman in a plain grey homespun gown. She was lean, dark-haired, and exquisitely beautiful. She wore no jewelry or adornment, save for the slender, sinister metal band of a discipline collar at her throat.