Furies of Calderon (70 page)

Amara rushed back to the battlements with Giraldi beside her and watched as the Marat horde, beneath the droning yawls of huge, hollowed animal horns, began a determined advance, moving forward at a steady trot, with wolves and herd-bane loping along beside them.

“Crows,” whispered one of the
legionares
beside Amara. She saw the man reach for his spear, fumble it, and drop it. She flinched, hand flashing out and batting the falling weapon away from her Giraldi caught it in one scar-knuckled hand. “Steady,” he growled, eyes on Amara. He passed the spear back to the
legionare.
“Steady, lads.”

The horde grew closer. The sounds of thousands of feet hitting the ground as they ran rose like far off thunder.

“Steady,” Giraldi said. He looked up and down the line and barked, “Archers! Shields!”

The
legionares
stepped up to the battlements In each crenellation stood a man with one of the huge Legion wall shields Behind each, another
legionare
, armed with a bow and a thick war-quiver of arrows, strung his bow and took position. Most of the archers were holders from the Valley.

The Marat grew closer, the eerie droning of their horns growing louder, more unnerving. A restless shuffle went down the line of shieldmen.

“Steady,” Giraldi commanded. He glanced at the young holder in borrowed armor beside him. “You sure you lads can shoot that far?”

The holder peeked around the edge of the shield of the burly
legionare
in front of him. “Yes. They’re in range.”

Giraldi nodded. “Archers!” he growled. “Fire at will!”

All up and down the line, archers set arrows to their bows, their tips pointing up at the sky, standing close to their shield man Amara watched the nearest young man half-draw his bow, then bump his partner with his hip The
legionare
knelt, lowering the shield, and the archer drew as he lowered the bow, took quick aim, and loosed at the oncoming Marat. His partner stood up again swiftly, bringing his shield back into position. All along the wall, the archers began shooting. Each man loosed an arrow every five or six breaths, or even faster.

Amara stood beside Giraldi in the one crenellation not occupied by a shieldman and watched the arrows slither through the air and into the oncoming Marat ranks. The deadly aim of the Aleran holders dropped Marat and beast alike with equal ferocity, littering the ground with fresh corpses, making the eager crows swoop and dive in a swarm over the charging horde. But still the horde came on.

The archers had begun shooting at close to six hundred yards—an incredible distance, Amara knew. They had to have been wood-crafters of nearly a Knight’s skill to manage such a feat. For perhaps a minute, there was no sound but the grunt of archers drawing bows,
legionares
kneeling and standing again, the droning blare of Marat horns, and the rumbling of thousands of feet.

But when the Marat closed to charging range of the walls, the entire horde erupted in a sudden shout that hit Amara like a wall of cold water— chilling, terrifying in its sheer intensity. At the same moment, the war birds let out a shrill, piercing shriek, terrifying from one such beast, but from the thousands below, the sound almost seemed a living thing all its own. At the same moment, the sun broke the horizon across the distant plains, a sudden harsh light that swept over the top of the battlements first, and made archers flinch and squint as they attempted their next shot.

“Steady!” Giraldi bellowed, voice barely carrying over the din. “Spears!”

The shield-bearing centurions gripped their spears, faces set in a fighting grimace.

Below, the Marat charge hit the first razor-edged defensive spikes the holders had crafted out of the earth itself. Amara watched closely, her heart in her throat. The leaders in the Marat charge began to leap and skip among the spikes, looking for all the world like children playing at hopping games. Behind them leapt their animals. Amara saw some of the Marat, with heavy, knotted cudgels, begin to strike the spikes from the sides, shattering them.

“The ones with clubs,” Amara said. “Tell the archers to aim for them. The longer we can keep the spikes in place, the harder it will be for them to pressure the gate.”

Giraldi grunted and relayed her order up and down the walls, and the archers, instead of firing into the enemy at random, began to pick their targets.

Scaling poles and ropes with hooks fashioned of some kind of antlers or bone began to lift toward the wall.
Legionares
thrust at the poles with the crossguards of their spears, pushing them away, and some drew their swords to hack at ropes as they came up, while the archers continued to fire on the enemy. Arrows began to flicker up from the horde below, short, heavy arrows launched from oddly shaped bows. One of the archers beside Amara lingered in aiming his shot for too long, and an arrow struck him through both cheeks in a sudden welter of blood. The holder choked, dropping.

“Surgeon!” Amara yelled, and a pair of men on the wall moved quickly to the fallen man, dragging him down before going to work on removing the arrow.

Amara stepped back to the battlements. She swept her gaze over the enemy below, but she couldn’t see anything beyond a horde of Marat and their beasts, so many thousands of them that it was difficult to tell where one left off and the other began.

Giraldi abruptly seized her shoulder and dragged her back from the edge. “Not without a helmet,” he growled.

“I can’t tell what’s happening,” Amara panted. She had to shout to make herself heard. “There are too many of them.”

Giraldi squinted out at the enemy, then drew his head prudently back. “About half of their force is here. They’re holding the rest back, ready to bring them in when they get an opening.”

“Are we holding them?”

“The walls are doing all right,” Giraldi called back, “but the gate is our weak point. They attack the walls only to keep most of our men busy up here. There are too few men at the gate. They’ll force the barricade sooner or later.”

“Why didn’t they craft the gate closed?”

“Can’t,” Giraldi reported. “Engineer told me. No foundation under it for extra wall, and the interior surface is lined with metal.”

From below them there came a crunching sound and a sudden chorus of mixed Aleran war cries of, “Riva for Alera!” and. “Calderon for Alera!”

Giraldi glanced out over the field again. “They must have gotten part of the barricade down. The horde-master has ordered the rest of his troops in, and they’re on the move. They’ll try to put pressure on the gate until the defense breaks.” Giraldi grimaced. “If they don’t repel this first thrust, we’re done for.”

Amara nodded to him. “All right. Almost time, then. I’ll be back up as soon as I can.” She leaned out to look down into the courtyard below. She could just make out the forms of a couple of
legionares
standing their ground almost within the gate itself, spears thrusting. There were shrieks and cries from below, and Amara’s eyes caught a flash of motion, a dark blade seen for only a second as its wielder spun it out behind him. Pirellus was holding the gate once more.

Amara hurried to the nearest stairs and pelted down them to the courtyard, looking around wildly. Hay from the bales she had crashed through earlier that morning lay scattered everywhere over the courtyard. All but a few of the wounded had been pulled back to the west courtyard, and the last of them were being loaded onto stretchers. She started across the courtyard toward the stables. As she did, she saw Pluvus Pentius emerge from one of the barracks, white-faced and nervous, one hand wrapped around the hand of a little boy, whose hand stretched back behind to another child, and so on, until the truth-finder was leading half a dozen children across the courtyard.

Amara hurried to him. “Pluvus! What are these children still doing here?”

“H-hiding,” Pluvus stuttered. “I found them hiding under their fathers’ bunks in the barracks.”

“Crows,” Amara spat. “Get them to the west courtyard with the wounded. They’re supposed to be fortifying one of the barracks to hold them. And
hurry
.”

“Yes, right,” Pluvus said, his skinny shoulders tightening. “Come on, children. Hold hands, and stay together.”

Amara dashed to the stables and found Bernard sitting with his back to the wall just inside one of the doors, his eyes half-closed. “Bernard,” she called. “The gate is under attack. They’ll be coming.”

“We’re ready,” Bernard mumbled. “Just say when.”

Amara nodded to him and turned, focusing her attention on Cirrus, then sent him up and out into the sky, feeling for the wind-crafters she knew would be carrying Fidelias’s rogue Knights toward the fortress.

She felt it a moment later, a tension in the air that spoke of a coming stream of wind. Amara called Cirrus back and worked another sight-crafting, sweeping the sky, searching for the incoming troops.

She spotted them while they were still half a mile from the fortress, dark shapes against the morning sky. “There,” she shouted. “They’re coming in from the west. Half a minute at the most.”

“All right,” Bernard murmured.

Amara stepped out into the open, as the Knights Aeris with their transport litters swept down from the skies, diving for the fortress. A wedge of Knights Aeris flew before the litters, weapons ready, and the sun gleamed on the metal of their armor. They headed toward the gate in a steep dive.

“Ready!” Amara shouted, and drew her sword. “Ready!” She waited a pair of heartbeats more, until the enemy reached the valley-side wall and passed over the western courtyard then the garrison commander’s building. She took a breath, willing her hands to stop shaking. “Loose!”

All around her in the courtyard, hummocks and lumps of scattered hay shook and shimmered, and a full fifty holder bowmen, covered with handfuls of hay and by the wood-crafting Bernard had worked over them, became vaguely visible. As one, they lifted their great bows and opened fire directly up at the underside of the incoming Knights.

The holders’ aim proved deadly, and their attack had taken the mercenaries completely by surprise. Knights Aeris in their armor cried out in sudden shock and pain, and men began to plummet from the skies like living hailstones. The archers stood their ground, shooting, even as the stunned mercenaries began to recover. One of the Knights Aeris who had not been hit began to weave the air into a shield of turbulence, and arrows began to abruptly veer and miss. Amara focused on the man and sent Cirrus toward his wind-stream. The Knight let out a cry of surprise and fell like a stone.

The second and third litters listed and began to spin out of control toward the ground, while injured and surprised bearers struggled to keep them from simply dropping. The first litter, though one of its bearers had taken an arrow through the thigh, made it through the withering cloud of arrow fire, though it had to veer to one side, and dropped onto the roof of one of the barracks on the opposite side of the courtyard.

Knights Aeris began to swoop and dive toward the courtyard, attacking, and though the holders’ archery had done well when the Knights had not been prepared to face it, the air shortly became a howling cloud of shrieking furies, rendering the holders’ arrows all but useless.

“Fall back!” Amara shouted, and the holders began to withdraw, harried by the airborne Knights, toward the stables. The Knights gathered together for a charge, their intention evidently to take the courtyard and hold it, and rushed at the retreating archers in a swift and deadly dive. Amara hurled Cirrus at the opposing furies, and though she was able to do little more than disrupt the formation of the Knights Aeris, they broke off the charge, swooping back up into the sky above the fortress, enabling the archers to retreat into the carrion-stink of the stables.

Amara herself turned and pelted toward the
legionares
stationed outside the gate. She caught a glimpse of the Knight Commander standing beside the makeshift wooden barricade. The Marat had managed to find two or three ways to crawl through it, and Pirellus danced from one spot to the next, his blade, and the spears of the two men backing him up, keeping the Marat at bay. “Pirellus!” she shouted. “Pirellus!”

“A moment, Lady,” he called, and whipped his sword out in a blinding thrust. The Marat who received it died without so much as a struggle, simply collapsing in the gap among the various wooden objects Pirellus took a pair of steps back and nodded to the spearmen and to a few of the other
legionares
standing by.

The men moved forward to hold the barricade, and Pirellus turned to Amara. “I heard you calling. The mercenaries attacked?”

“Two of their litters went down outside the walls,” she said, and pointed, “But a third landed on the roof of that barracks.”

Pirellus nodded once. “Very well Stay here and—Countess!” The black blade swept out and something shattered with a brittle sound Amara, who had begun to turn, felt splinters of wood flickering against her cheek, and the broken fletching of an arrow rebounded from her mail. She lifted her eyes to the barracks and saw Fidelias there, calmly drawing another arrow to his stout, short bow and taking aim, even as behind him, several men began to clamber down from the roof. The former Cursor’s thin hair blew in the cold wind, and though he stood in the shadow of the newly risen walls, Amara could see his eyes on hers, calm and cool, even as he drew back the second shaft, aimed, and loosed.

Pirellus stepped in the way of the shot, cutting it from the air with a contemptuous slap of his blade, and called to the men behind him Fidelias’s soldiers were joined by the Knights Aeris who circled back above the fortress and then dove toward the gates Pirellus dragged Amara back to the stables and growled, “Stay down.”

Even as he did, Amara could see the
legionares
form into a ragged rank that met the oncoming troops and the Knights above with an uncertain tenacity Fidelias, on the barracks roof, climbed down to the ground, his eyes flickering over the hay scattered there. He knelt into it. There came a blurring in the air, and then he simply vanished, covered by a wood-crafting of his own.