Princeps' fury (66 page)

“Get to the front of the line with some Knights!” Tavi called back. “Knock down some walls if you have to!”

“Yes, sir!” Marcus saluted and vanished again.

As they got closer to the piers, the line came to a halt, the men backed up in the street, pressed chest to shoulder blades with their fellows. Tavi could hear Marcus bellowing orders in a smoke-roughened voice, somewhere ahead of them. Men had begun to shout and mill about in panic, as the roar of the fire grew nearer, along with the light of the spreading flames.

“Stand easy, men!” Tavi called. “We’ll get through. We’re going to be—”

Tavi didn’t know how the Vord had gotten through. Perhaps it had been one of the first to reach the city, and had plunged through the flames before they had risen to deadly intensity. Perhaps its froglike form had been specifically designed to resist heat. Perhaps it had just gotten lucky. Regardless, Tavi didn’t realize that it was there at all until something disturbingly like a hand seized a weary, wounded
legionare
beside him, holding the man’s entire head in its grasp, and flung him to his back on the ground.

Just as it happened, there was a surge of motion and a roar of triumph from the Legion ahead of Tavi. Men stumbled forward as the restraining pressure of the bodies in front of them was released.

Tavi screamed for help, but his voice was lost amidst the shouts and the roaring fire and wind. The Vord hunched over the fallen
legionare
, moving with a hideously lithe ferocity. Sparks flew from the armor over the
legionare’s
belly as the Vord raked at him with shining green-black claws.

Tavi drew his sword, needing no conscious effort to call upon the furies within the Aleran steel. His sword struck through the arm with which the Vord had the
legionare
pinned, then through its slender neck in a pair of rapid strokes, followed by a fury-enhanced kick that prevented the Vord’s mass from falling on the downed
legionare
and pinning him there.

Tavi flashed the stunned-looking man a quick grin and hauled him to his feet. “No lying down on the job, soldier. Watch my back until we get to the ship, eh?”

The man answered his smile with one of his own and drew his sword. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

The two of them hurried through the thickening smoke to catch up with the retreating
legionares
, and Tavi found himself beginning to cough and struggle for breath. There were more of the Vord in the haze, moving as swiftly as shadows, glimpsed for only a second before they were gone again. An eerie shriek rose through the smoke, and others answered it from all around, the cries echoing between buildings and becoming strangely distorted as they bounced around stone.

Elsewhere in the streets, they heard the snarls and roars of fighting Canim, mixing with the shrieks of the Vord. They were under attack, as they descended through their own routes to the harbor.

The smell of seawater, tar, and fish, the odor of every harbor Tavi had ever encountered, suddenly reached him through the acrid stench of smoke. The
legionares
were emerging from one of the several streets to the harbor, where their ships waited to receive them. Enough light shone through the smoke from the burning city above them to light their way, even without the lamps set up along the piers, and Tavi could hear Marcus and other centurions bellowing orders, counting off men to each ship.

“Form on me!” Tavi called, sword still in hand, and began organizing the
legionares
at the rear into an outward-facing defense, swords and shields at the ready, with spears in the second rank, their gleaming steel points protruding in a defensive thicket.

He’d acted none too soon. Vord rushed them through the smoke, half a dozen of the froglike beasts bounding out of the shadows and confusion, only to meet the armor and steel of the readied Legion. Once they were in position, Tavi let a trio of baton-wielding centurions take over the defense, which slowly contracted backward onto the wharves as the
legionares
behind the wall of shields boarded their vessels.

The ships began to warp away from the piers as they filled, turning to sail down the channel and out of the harbor. The smaller Aleran ships had few problems, but the passage was a far tighter fit for the larger Canim vessels, and the process of emptying the harbor was agonizingly slow. It had to be. A ship, if mishandled, could sink in the channel and block it for every vessel behind. Even moving at the most frantic pace that could be managed, the ships practically touching one another as they sailed out, it was more than an hour before the rear of the column stepped slowly backward onto the piers. All the while the smoke thickened, and the fires drew nearer.

Tavi checked to see that Marcus was counting off the last thousand men onto half a dozen ships that had hurriedly thrown lines to the piers and tossed down gangplanks. The
Slive
was the last ship, tying on to the end of the pier, and Tavi could see Kitai standing in the prow.

Tavi counted off men from the last line, sending them back to board a ship one by one, until only he, Marcus, and half a dozen
legionares
remained, marching slowly backward down the stone pier while half a dozen of the frog-Vord ghosted through the smoke, wary of rushing forward after an hour of clashing uselessly against Legion shields.

Only forty yards remained as the last of the
legionares
boarded and the ships cast off. Then twenty. Then ten.

Five yards from the gangplank of the
Slive
, something seized Tavi’s leg in an iron grip and hauled him off the pier and down into the cold water of the harbor. He plunged into frigid and utter darkness, and the weight of his armor pulled him down like a sinking stone.

The Vord that had seized his leg had not let go. Tavi felt an enormous hand clutch him around the waist. Something clamped onto his arm at the elbow, fangs sinking into the skin above the steel bracer on his forearm, tearing into his biceps and shook him savagely.

Tavi had to fight not to scream. His long sword would have been useless at such close quarters, so he drew his dagger and thrust it awkwardly at the Vord, feeling the badly aimed tip slip and turn aside from the Vord’s armored skin. Surrounded completely by water, he tried in vain to summon strength from the earth, the only thing that might allow him to escape the Vord’s grip, but it was useless. He distinctly felt the bone in his arm break as the Vord ripped at him with hideous strength in the dark—and continued pulling, beginning to rip his arm from his body, the pain mounting, bubbles of priceless breath escaping his lips and sliding along his face.

And then his feet struck the icy silt at the bottom of the harbor.

Fury-born strength surged through him and he transferred the dagger to his mouth, gripping the blade in his teeth, so that he could twist around with his undamaged arm. The motion tore his shoulder from its socket, but he drew the steel of his dagger into his mind and the pain became a piece of background datum, like the temperature of the water or the fact that he was hungry. He secured a grip on the Vord’s armored limb and twisted his hips, scissoring his legs up, feeling his back strike the mud as the Vord struggled. He locked his legs around what he thought was the Vord’s body, closed his good hand in the tightest grip he could imagine and arched his body, crushing his legs together with all his strength.

For seconds they strained in stasis—and then something broke with a horrible crack, and the Vord’s grip went loose. Tavi kept ripping and straining until the Vord tore, then shoved the still-twitching pieces away from him, into the water.

His fingers flew to the fastenings on his armor. He’d done and undone them thousands of times by now, and it was an operation he could perform when practically asleep—when he was using both hands. And when the leather fastenings weren’t soaked and swollen. And when his fingers weren’t numb from the freezing water. And when he wasn’t more than half-panicked, his lungs burning, with brightly colored stars dancing across his vision.

He kept struggling with the lacings, and finally managed to slide free of his armor. Only his continued focus on his metalcrafting as his broken arm and shoulder came free kept the pain from curling him into a ball of agony and sealing his fate. He ripped at the buckles of his heavy greaves until they came free, kicked off the bottom with whatever feeble strength he had left, and swam in the direction he thought was toward the surface. The pressure on his lungs and ears was awful, and he needed to
breathe
, and his lungs were collapsing, readying to draw in another breath whether he was clear of the water or not, and the dagger had fallen from his mouth and the fire from his shoulder and arm was simply too agonizing to be real—

Something slapped against his head, then seized him by the collar, and he was rising through the water, choking on the first half-breath of water—as his head emerged into the air.

Kitai jerked his head and shoulders out of the water with unexpected strength, and her panic and fury pounded against his senses. “Aleran!” she cried.
“Chala!”

Kitai began swimming, hauling him along by his tunic, and Tavi struggled just to keep his head above the water. They were fifty feet from the
Slive
, and just as far from the pier—which was haunted with Vord. Tavi had just begun to make sense of things again, through the pain in his shoulder and chest and arm, when he looked up to see the bulk of the
Slive
, already drifting back from the pier, moving above him.

Men were shouting, and a line fell into the water. Kitai seized it with one hand, wrapped it several times around her forearm and screamed something. Then she was rising and pulling Tavi up out of the water by the tunic—and his weight all seemed to concentrate itself in his ravaged shoulder.

Tavi screamed at the agony and bucked in entirely involuntary reaction, accompanied by the sound of ripping cloth and a short fall into the water.

He fought his way to the air again as
something
rushed by beneath the surface, brushing against his legs. He saw the ship gliding backward from the pier and away from him, Kitai and the line already out of reach. Her hand was tangled in the rope and she fought frantically to free herself, but she was already yards away. Tavi looked up to see Demos looking over the rail at the side of the ship, the captain’s eyes wide, and then there was only the old carved figurehead of the
Slive
, the beautiful woman staring sightlessly ahead with a slight smile on her lovely lips.

Tavi’s legs began to fail, and the water reached up for him. He began to sink, the figurehead holding his attention, until it almost seemed to swell in size, growing larger, turning toward him.

He realized with a shock that the carven woman on the
Slive
’s prow
was
moving, and that it was not some trick of his frozen, agonized mind. She bent to him with a grace and splendor belied by the peeling paint of her features, smiling, and extended a strong and slender hand.

Tavi summoned the last of his failing strength and took it, feeling her grip his hand with flexible, inexorable strength. She was drawing him from the water, lifting him through the air, as another frog-Vord struck at his heels in vain. He had a brief and dizzying view of the foredeck of the ship, then he was lying on wooden planks, too tired to lift his head.

“Gotcha,” said Demos in satisfaction. “My lord.”

“
Chala!”
Kitai shouted. She was there beside him, her own wet tunic clinging to her slender form as she ripped a cloak from a passing sailor and tossed it over him. “Maximus! He’s bleeding!”

“Healer!” bellowed Marcus’s smoke-roughened voice. “Bring out a tub!”

“Captain,” Tavi croaked. “Get us the crows away from here.”

“Aye,” Demos said, as several willing hands lifted him toward a tub that had been hurriedly brought up from the hold of the ship. “Aye, my lord. Let’s go home.”

EPILOGUE

All things pass in time.

We are far less significant than we imagine ourselves to be. All that we are, all that we have wrought, is but a shadow, no matter how durable it may seem. One day, when the last man has breathed his last breath, the sun will shine, the mountains will stand, the rain will fall, the streams will whisper—and they will not miss him.

—FROM THE FINAL JOURNAL ENTRY OF GAIUS SEXTUS, FIRST LORD OF ALERA

The air around the former capital was too hot and too laden with fumes to overfly, Amara thought numbly. She would have to lead their party of rescued Knights and Citizens around it.

She turned course to circle the flaming wasteland, following its eastern edge as they proceeded north. Alera Imperia, the shining white city upon a hill, was only a gaping hole in the ground. Smoke and flame seethed in that cauldron, far below them. The river Gaul poured into it, and steam obscured the land below from time to time in its own layer of thick white mist that lay over the ground like a filmy funerary shroud.