First Lord's Fury (Page 152)

The interior of the steadholt was chaos. Vord rushed and darted everywhere, wax spiders and warriors alike, boiling out of windows and doorway, skittering across rooftops, rushing along the walls. The Battlecrows had formed into two separate squares with iron-hard discipline, defending themselves from attackers and moving, step by step, closer to what was obviously their objective – the mouth of the large stone barn. A furycrafted ramp sloped down into the earth below its flooring. It was often an area used for cool storage on a steadholt. The barn’s interior was shadowed, but a steady green glow emerged from two holes in the barn’s flooring.

The cohort from the Legion of ex-slaves hadn’t done as well as the veteran Battlecrows. Through whatever fortunes of war, they had not been able to lock into a defensive formation when swarmed by the vord. Half of them were dead, or isolated in odd corners of the steadholts, desperate rings of half a dozen men fighting a remorseless enemy. The other half had managed a defensive square, but it was a ragged one – the mantises were steadily picking it apart.

"Master Marok!" Fidelias called. He pointed at the rapidly disintegrating formation of the Free Aleran. Sensing weakness, the vord were attacking more ferociously and in greater numbers. "If you please!"

Marok stepped forward with four other Canim wearing vord-chitin mantles rather than those made of human leather. He snarled something in a language Fidelias did not understand, and the five ritualists drew their daggers in a single, simultaneous motion. A similar movement laid open a long cut upon each of their forearms, bloodying the bright steel of the daggers. They all threw their arms up, scattering droplets of blood to the sky, where they flickered and vanished – until with a single unified howl they lowered their arms – and the misty sky suddenly boiled with dark clouds and fell in time with the ritualists’ arms.

Something like a thundercloud fell over the beleaguered Free Aleran cohort, a mass of dark grey. Fidelias thought he could see things writhing within it, sinuous shapes and flickering tentacles.

The vord within the cloud began to shriek and wail in distress.

Marok watched the cloud intently for a moment, then threw his bleeding arm out again, scattering droplets of blood into the darkness of the cloud, crying, "It is enough! The demons are not for you!" in Canish.

The cloud went still. The brisk spring wind soon began dispersing it, and when it had all washed away a moment later, the Free Aleran legionares stood entirely alone, with confused, stunned looks on their faces, their chests heaving for breath.

There was no sign whatsoever of the vord who had been attacking them.

Marok turned to face Fidelias and took on the posture of a Cane waiting for the answer to a question.

"Impressive," Fidelias said.

"Clouds of acid are for amateurs," Marok replied. He glanced over his shoulder at most of the other ritualists, who continued their steady chant and occasional self-bloodletting. None of them looked at him. Marok growled in unmistakable satisfaction.

The four Knights attached to the Prime Cohort broke with their unit and crossed the courtyard to join the first square of the Battlecrows. Centurion Schultz, supporting a dazed-looking young Tribune with blood sheeting over half his face, saw them coming and brought them into the lines at once. Then he put the four men at the "point" of the square’s corner, wheeled it into a diamond relative to the second square, and began a steady march forward, using the devastating power of the Knights to cut a path through the vord. Within a moment, the two blocks of Battlecrows had rejoined, and they turned their efforts toward advancing, an implacable block of steel and swords that hacked and chopped its way step by bloody step into the barn.

There was a shriek and a sudden rush of pressure as dozens of warriors flung themselves at the Battlecrows in wholehearted, berserk determination to cut the invaders down, and for a moment the Battlecrows slowed. But then, abruptly, an apparition materialized from the darkness of the barn, a black shadow against the green light in the form of a man. The figure began to move, and suddenly strode out into the light, a completely metallic form the likes of which Fidelias had never seen and only once heard about. Fidelias recognized him at a glance – Araris Valerian, one of the deadliest blades in the Realm, a man whose sword had made him a legend before he’d gotten out of his mid-twenties.

Fidelias had never seen a furycrafter do what Araris had done, though.

The first vord warrior he approached never knew he was near. Araris’s sword clove the legs from one side of its body, then swept its head from its trunk before it could finish falling.

The next vord spun to face the steel swordsman. Its plunging scythe struck Araris on his left shoulder and shattered like a length of desiccated wood. Araris parried the second scythe aside, split the creature’s head with his sword, and kicked the vord’s corpse, still thrashing dangerously, into the crowd of its brethren trying to stop the Battlecrows.

The vord broke, then, rushing back into the barn – but their flight took them within reach of Araris Valerian’s blade. The swordsman never seemed to move with any particular speed – only a fluid, delicate grace entirely at odds with his statuelike appearance. And yet, his sword always seemed to move swiftly enough, no matter how quickly the vord might attempt to evade him. He dropped the first several, it seemed, merely to slow the escape of the others, and his blade and those of the Battlecrows took a heavy toll of the remaining vord. No more than half a dozen of them had survived to flee back into the barn.

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."