Princeps' fury (52 page)

Only after she had done that did Amara look back at the would-be authors of Alera’s destruction.

The Vord queen was shorter than Amara had expected her to be—not even as tall as Amara herself. She didn’t know why she had thought it would be otherwise. Thinking back on it, the queen she’d fought and helped to kill in Calderon had not been particularly tall or imposing, physically. It had been a human-shaped creature, but there had been nothing human about it.

This queen was different.

Her cloak was finer, for one thing. The other queen had been dressed in cloth that could have come from a not-too-recent grave. This one wore a great cloak of black velvet so deep that it rippled with illusory colors in its folds. She stood in the courtyard with something else in her posture and bearing, too—something alert, almost electric. The other queen had never projected anything but cold and alien patience.

The Vord queen reached up with slender,
pale
hands, and drew back her hood, revealing a face that was youthful, beautiful, and shockingly familiar.

She looked almost precisely like the Princeps’ lover, Kitai.

Amara stared in such shock that she almost forgot to maintain the veils around her. The queen in Calderon had looked human in form, but had been covered in gleaming, green-black chitin, much like the vordknights. This one, though, looked almost entirely human . . .

Except for the eyes.

The eyes were a swirl of black and gold and green, in hundreds of glittering facets. Without those eyes, the Vord queen could have walked down any street in Alera without raising eyebrows—beyond the fact that she was, except for the cloak, apparently naked.

The queen turned those alien eyes in a slow circuit of the courtyard, and with a collective sigh that approached a moan of adoration, or terror, the collared Alerans as one sank to prostrate themselves upon the ground before her.

The queen’s mouth curved into a small, satisfied smile. Then she moved her right hand in a liquid, precise gesture, and Lady Aquitaine stepped up to stand beside her.

The former High Lady stood well over a head taller than the queen. With her hair drawn back into a tight bun, and clad in the formfitting black chitin of the Vord, Lady Aquitaine looked more slender than the richly cloaked, smaller figure before her. From that close, Amara could see the creature crouched upon her breast. It looked almost like a wax spider, but smaller, and clad in a dark shell. Its many legs circled Lady Aquitaine’s torso and, Amara realized with a start, had actually sunk their clawed tips into Lady Aquitaine’s flesh. Worse, the creature’s head, sporting what must have been mandibles as long as Amara’s fingers, was sunk into the flesh of her torso, just over her heart. The thing shivered and pulsed oddly—and in the rhythm of a heartbeat.

“My lady,” Lady Aquitaine said smoothly.

“Judge the male taker’s progress,” the Vord queen murmured. Her voice was a buzzing thing, as inhuman as her eyes, and sounded like many young women speaking in almost-perfect unison.

Lady Aquitaine inclined her head again and turned to Brencis. She walked over to him, her chitin-coated feet clicking sharply into the silence with each step. Then she knelt over the prostrate young man and ran her fingers lightly through his hair.

Brencis shuddered in reaction to her touch, and looked up with eyes as heavy and hopelessly adoring as any of the other slaves in the courtyard.

“Tell me what you have accomplished, dear boy,” Lady Aquitaine murmured.

Brencis nodded. “I’ve been working without stop, lady. Recruiting more Citizens and Knights, with a focus on earthcrafters, as you commanded. Another hundred and twenty are now ready to accept orders when you wish it.”

“Very well done,” Lady Aquitaine said, her tone warm with approval.

Brencis jerked in place, shivering in forced pleasure, and his eyes rolled back into his head for a moment. A moment later, he stammered, “Th-thank you, lady.”

“Sixscore?” asked the Vord queen. “Too slow.”

Lady Aquitaine nodded. “Brencis,” she said, “it’s time for you to tell me how the collaring is accomplished.”

Brencis closed his eyes. His body tensed and twisted again, though this time it was obviously not in pleasure. His face twisted into a grimace, and he said, through gritted teeth, “I. Will. Not.”

Brencis gasped and almost seemed to melt into the earth. For several seconds, the only sounds were his panting sobs of release from agony.

“I’m sorry,” Lady Aquitaine said, turning to speak to the Vord queen. “The standard collar I fitted him with can’t match whatever it is he does to alter the bonding process. I can’t compel the secret from him.”

The Vord queen tilted her head slowly to one side. Dark, glossy black hair fell in gentle waves from beneath her hood. “Can you not cause him to fit himself with this same collar?”

“Why was this one pleased when he resisted?” the queen asked. “She restrained a smile. The facial indication of pleasure, is it not?”

“It is. Though there are nuances of meaning to smiles that can become complex,” Lady Aquitaine said. She looked past the subjugated Brencis to Rook, who also lay prostrate, her face downward. “A young woman. Perhaps she has attached herself to his future. Encouraged him to remain silent, so that he could preserve all the power he could.”

The Vord queen considered that for a moment, and paced silently toward Rook, standing over her. “So that she could benefit herself.”

“Correct.”

“Individuality is counterproductive,” the queen said, her voice calm. Then her form blurred, and Amara saw a gleam of dark, green-black chitin at the tips of the pale queen’s fingers as they ripped half of Rook’s throat away.

Amara’s heart all but stopped at the sheer, sudden viciousness and speed of the attack. She had to fight down a scream, and with it the impulse to fling herself to the wounded woman’s defense.

Rook made a sound that was more of a wet, wheezing gasp than any word. She rolled partly onto one side in reaction, her arms and legs thrashing weakly. Blood rushed from the gaping wound in her neck.

The Vord queen stood over the dying woman with a mildly interested expression on her face, staring down at her with unblinking eyes.

“What,” the queen asked, “is Masha?”

Lady Aquitaine looked on impassively, her expression remote. Even so, she averted her eyes from the dying woman and said, “It is a female proper name. Perhaps her sister or her child.”

“Ah,” the Vord queen said. “What is Countess Amara?” Her head tilted slightly, and her unsettling, faceted eyes glittered in the light of torches and furylamps. “A woman. Ungroomed.”

Lady Aquitaine’s head snapped around toward the queen abruptly. “What?”

The queen looked up at her without expression. “Her mind. There is an increase in activity preceding death.”

Lady Aquitaine hurried to Rook’s side, reaching down to turn her face slightly to one side, and her eyes widened in recognition. “Bloody
crows
.” She looked up at Brencis, and snapped, “Healing tub,
now
.”

She clamped her hands over the gaping wound in Rook’s neck, her eyes narrowing. “You’ve . . . Crows, the wound is . . .” She looked up and snarled, “Brencis!”

“What are you doing?” the queen asked. Her tone was politely interested.

“This woman is an agent of Gaius Sextus,” Lady Aquitaine said, her voice tight. “She might have information that—” She broke off suddenly, shuddering.

“Dead,” the Vord queen said, her voice clinically detached. To punctuate the word, she lifted the scoop of bloody flesh she still held in the taloned fingers of her hand and nipped off a small bite. A spot of Rook’s blood, still hot, sent out a wisp of steam into the cool night air as it smeared the Vord queen’s chin.

“Because she, too, is an agent of Gaius,” Lady Aquitaine said, rising a bit unsteadily from the body. “She and Rook have worked together before and—” Her eyes narrowed abruptly. “Amara must be
here
.”

Amara felt a surge of terror join the helpless rage and sickened pity in her breast, and pushed them both aside to call upon Cirrus. Borrowing swiftness from the wind fury, she drew back her arm and flung the stone knife at Lady Aquitaine, the weapon letting out a sharp crack like a whip as it tumbled toward her with an almost lazy grace to Amara’s fury-heightened senses.

Amara’s aim was true. The heavy stone knife hit Lady Aquitaine just right and center of her chest, upon the form of the quivering Vord . . .
thing
that crouched there. The knife, furycrafted from heavy granite, would have made a poor tool, its blade too dull to be of everyday use, but for its intended task of parting the flesh of a single victim, it more than sufficed. The sheer mass of the thing made its tip as deadly as any arrow or blade of steel, especially at the speed with which Amara had thrown it. The knife plunged through the Vord creature as easily as through a rotten apple, and continued on to the flesh beneath, cracking bone with moist snapping sounds, hurling its target from her feet and to the ground.

Amara gritted her teeth at how badly wrong the plan had gone, but there was no help for that now. Brencis had gone running off to fetch a tub, and had been nowhere in sight, and Lady Aquitaine—no,
Invidia
, Amara thought viciously, for she was no Aleran Citizen anymore—would have circumvented Amara’s veil in seconds. So before Invidia’s feet had hit the ground following the impact of her shoulders, Amara had turned and leapt skyward, calling Cirrus to bear her aloft.

Amara’s feet were perhaps seven feet from the ground when she felt hands like stone wrap around the ankles of her soft boots. Desperately, she called upon Cirrus to bear her up with even more force, even as she drew her steel dagger from her belt and twisted to thrust it down at her attacker with the instant, blindingly swift violence of trained instinct.

Yet as fast as she was, the Vord queen was faster.

She released one of Amara’s legs to spread the fingers of one pale hand wide. Amara had time to realize that the queen’s hand was still wet with Rook’s lifeblood, as the tip of her dagger pierced the queen at the center of her palm.

There was no more reaction than if Amara had thrust her knife into the ground. Without any expression beyond one of steady concentration, the Vord queen twisted her wrist, the knife still trapped in her flesh, and tore it from Amara’s grasp. Amara kicked one leg, trying to get loose of the queen’s remaining grip as they continued to rise from the courtyard, albeit slowly, but the Vord’s grasp was inhumanly strong. Her alien eyes glittering more brightly, the Vord queen swarmed up the length of Amara’s body, hand over hand, and Amara felt the tip of her own dagger thrust twice into her flesh in hot bursts of tingling pain.

Then an iron bar pressed against her throat, and her vision darkened.

Amara struggled wildly, but it was useless, everything spinning down to a tunnel. She saw the walls of Ceres rushing at her, and in a last burst of defiance called Cirrus with every remaining ounce of her strength to rush them both toward the obdurate stone.

Then nothing.

CHAPTER 37

Amara awoke with a gasp as water trickled into her nose. She coughed and tried to lift her arms to her face, but couldn’t move them. Her body ached in every joint and muscle, and she was ravenously hungry. She flung her head back and forth, and realized that she was almost entirely submerged in something liquid and warm.

Her eyes flew open in a panic, images of sleeping bodies wrapped in glowing green
croach
filling her thoughts, her body contracting and convulsing to pull her free. Her arms flexed but refused to move from her sides, and her legs stayed firmly clasped together. Pain burned through her biceps, her thighs, and the warm liquid covered her face entirely as she slipped lower into it.

“—her head out of the water befo—” shouted a woman’s voice.

It was cut off completely. Then a fist seized her by the hair and hauled her up, out of the warm liquid.