First Lord's Fury (Page 161)

Bernard stared at it and shook his head slowly. "Great furies, boy," he muttered. "Are you mad?"

The ground shook hard enough to slop water out of the improvised healing tubs that had been crafted from the stone floors in the old hall of the ruined steadholt. Amara steadied herself against a wall and hoped that the earthquake wouldn’t bring the hall down on their heads. After a moment, the tremors subsided, but did not quite stop, and startled, incredulous cries were added to the din of cries of pain and agony.

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.