Cursor's Fury (83 page)

Kitai snorted, and said, “Aleran, did you really expect us to allow you to order us to stay away from danger while you faced it alone?”

Tavi met Kitai’s eyes for a long and silent moment. Then he glanced at Ehren. “I don’t have time to argue with you both,” he said quietly. “But if we survive this, I’m going to take it out of your hides.”

“That,” Kitai murmured, “could prove interesting.”

Tavi felt his cheeks heat up, and he turned back to the men.

“All right, people,” Tavi said, loudly enough to be heard by all. “The Canim did what we expected. Their raiders tried to finish what the warriors started. First Spear Valiar Marcus and your Legion-brothers didn’t let them do it. So now that we’re all rested, it’s our turn. We’re going to push them over the center wall at the bridge apex. You and I, along with Tribune Antillar, all of our Knights, and our fellow legionares are going to hit the Canim hard enough to knock their teeth all the way back across the crowbegotten ocean.”

The cohort rumbled with a low, growling laugh.

“If this goes well,” Tavi said. “We’ll carry the day, and the beer’s on me.” He paused at another laugh. “But no matter what happens, once we’ve gotten the engineers into place to destroy the bridge, we’ve got to hold. No matter what else happens, that bridge has got to come down. You knew that, and you’re here anyway.”

Tavi drew his blade, snapped to attention, and saluted the ranks of crow-signed young men in front of him.

“First Aleran, Battlecrow Cohort!” Tavi bellowed. “First Aleran, Knights Pisces! Are you with me?”

They answered him with a roaring crash of voices and drawn steel. Max, Ehren, Kitai, and the Knights Terra fell into position around him as Tavi turned and led his Battlecrows and Knights Pisces onto the Elinarch.

Chapter 52

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The Elinarch was a marvel of Aleran engineering. It arched over the waters of the Tiber for a distance of more than half a mile, a span of solid granite drawn from the bones of the world. Infused with furies of its own, the bridge was very nearly a living creature, healing damage inflicted upon it, shifting its structure to compensate for the heat of summer, the cold depths of winter. The same crafting that allowed the roads to support and strengthen Aleran travelers also surged in unbroken power throughout the length of the bridge. It could alter its surface to shed excess water and ice, and smooth grooves collected rainwater in small channels at either side of the bridge during rainstorms.

During this storm, though, those channels ran with blood.

Tavi led his men at a quick march up the bridge. Twenty feet after they started, Tavi saw the trickles of blood in the channels. At first, he thought that the reddish overcast was simply shining on water, runoff rain. But the rain had stopped hours before, and the gloomy day drained color from the world, rather than tinting it. He didn’t really, truly realize it was blood until he smelled it—sharp, metallic, unsettling.

They were not large streams—only as deep, perhaps, as the cupped palm of an adult man, only as wide as his spread fingers. Or rather, they would not have been large streams of rainwater. But Tavi knew that the blood running down the slope of the bridge had carried the lives of many, many men out onto the unforgiving, uncaring stone of the bridge.

Tavi turned his eyes away from it, forcing them to focus ahead, on the uphill march that still remained before him. He heard someone retch in the ranks behind him, as the legionares realized what they were seeing.

“Eyes forward!” Tavi called back to the legionares. “We have a job, gentlemen! Stay focused!”

They reached the final defensive wall, which was now manned by perhaps
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half a cohort of legionares—all of them wounded but capable of bearing arms. They saluted Tavi as he and his volunteers approached.

On the move, the cohort’s formation changed, shifting into a column two legionares wide. Their pace slowed somewhat as the column squeezed through the opening in the northernmost defensive wall, and Tavi kept them in the slender formation as they double-timed to the next defensive wall. The din of battle grew louder.

The bulk of the Legion was there, at the next wall. Tavi could see Valiar Marcus’s short, stocky form on the wall, bellowing orders. Legionares stood at the wall, then in two long lines at either side of the bridge, where the rough steps up to the improvised battlements awaited them. As defending legionares on the wall were cut down, the next men in line took their places. Tavi shuddered, imagining a nightmare wait in a line to pain and death with little to do but watch the blood of your brothers in arms flow past you in the gutter.

A larger force was positioned to block the opening in the center of the wall. The legionares nearest the opening fought with shield and short blade, but those behind them plied spears, reaching over and around the shieldmen to wound and distract the constant stream of Canim raiders trying to batter their way in by main strength. Canim bodies lay in piles that had become makeshift barricades. Alerans lay unmoving among them, their fellows unable to drag them free in the furious press of melee.

A cry went up, and the weary legionares of the First Aleran roared in sudden hope.

“Max!” Tavi called. “Crassus!”

“Boys!” Max called. Then he grinned at Crassus and flashed his half brother a wink. Crassus returned it as a pale, ghastly parody of a smile. Max and Crassus took over the head of the column, with the Knights Terra filling the next two ranks, then Tavi with Ehren. Kitai, perhaps inevitably, did not run in formation
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but out to one side of the column, green eyes bright, her pace light and effortless despite the weight of the borrowed armor.

“Alera!” Tavi cried, raising his sword to signal the charge. The column picked up speed. His heart was beating so hard that he thought it might break his ribs.

Valiar Marcus’s head whipped around, and he screamed orders. At the very last moment, the force on the ground split, ducking to either side. With a triumphant howl, several Canim poured through the opening.

They were met by the sons of Antillus Raucus, bright steel in their hands.

To Tavi, Max and Crassus’s attack was a glittering blur. Max took a bare step ahead and hit them first, all speed and violence and deadly timing, his blade lashing out high. He struck the nearest Cane and laid open its weapon arm to the bone at the shoulder, then pivoted to one side, blade passing through a second Cane’s throat. He lashed out again, another strike that hammered aside an incoming sickle-sword.

Crassus fought with such flawless coordination with Max’s attack that he might have been his brothers own shadow. He dispatched the disarmed Cane with a thrust that went through the roof of its mouth, blocked a desperate, frenzied attack from the Cane whose throat was already gushing out its life onto the bridge, and struck the third Cane’s weapon hand from its arm while Max struck its blade, throwing open its defenses.

The brothers went through the leading Canim and hit the opening in the wall without even slowing down. Canim screams and cries came from the opening, then the Knights Terra were through and spreading out to either side. Tavi and Ehren were next, and the stinking metal-sewer smell of the dead was suffocating, the small passage terrifyingly confining. They emerged from it in the space of a breath, though it had seemed much longer to Tavi, and he found himself staring at an enormous length of sloping bridge rising toward the improvised walls built at the Elinarch’s apex.

Momentum was everything. Max and Crassus began slashing a way through the Canim as if they were Rhodesian scouts chopping a clear trail through the jungles of their home. Once the Knights Terra were able to fan out to either side of them, they brought their enormous weapons into play. Tavi watched as a sword swung with fury-born strength tore a Cane in half at the waist, to let it fall to the ground in two confused, bleeding, dying pieces. A great hammer rose and fell, crushing another Cane with such force that the tips of broken bones in its rib cage and spine ripped their way out through its skin.

Tavi saw a flash of movement in the corner of his eye, and turned to see one
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Cane bound entirely over the Knights and land on the stones before him. It swept an enormous cudgel at his head. Tavi ducked it, faked to one side, then darted in close before the Cane could recover its balance. He slashed hard in an upward stroke, laying open the huge arteries in the Cane’s inner thigh, spun from its way as the Cane fell, and used the momentum of the spin to strike the back of the Cane’s neck. The blow was not strong enough to cut through the Cane’s thickly furred and muscled neck entirely, but it was more than sufficient to split open its spine at the back of the neck, and dropped it at once to the ground, helpless as it bled to death.

A second Cane bounded over the line, landing outside of Tavi’s sword reach. It whirled on Ehren.

The little Cursor flicked the standard pole out, the Legion’s blackened eagle—crow now, Tavi supposed in some detached corner of his mind—standard lashing out and snapping like a whip into the Cane’s nose. The blow did nothing more than startle the Cane for the space of a second. Tavi could have struck in that second, but he didn’t. Instinct warned him not to, and Tavi recognized and trusted the intuition.

Kitai’s armored figure descended from the wall behind them, swords in either hand sweeping down, opening horrible wounds on the Cane. The Marat girl had bounded up the stairs while they labored through the tunnel, and she had hurled herself from the battlements a beat after they emerged. Kitai rolled forward, under the blind, furious swipes of the Cane’s sickle-sword, came to her feet behind the raider, and cut it down in a short, vicious flurry of slashing blades.