CURSOR'S FURY

Tavi closed his eyes for a second, and that horrible fatigue threatened him again. Part of him wanted to snarl at Max to shut up and follow orders. The rest realized that the big Antillan was right. He was asking these men to risk their lives carrying out a course of action he had pla

“All right,” Tavi said. “I’ll sit down. But just for a minute.”

“A minute,” Max said, nodding. “That’s fine.”

Tavi slipped out of his helmet, sat down with his back against the stone columns at the base of the Elinarch, and closed his eyes. He’d never be able to get any sleep, but at least he could take a few moments of quiet to order his thoughts, to go over the possibilities, all the things that could go wrong with his plan.

Try as he might, he couldn’t think of anything else he might do, and after a few moments of effort, he shook his head and opened his eyes.

Gloomy daylight greeted his gaze, the veiled sun barely visible through the overcast above the land. Tavi blinked up at it in confusion for a second. A muscle cramp seized his neck and set off a series of similar painful contractions in the muscles between his shoulder blades. He labored to his feet and bent, trying to stretch the muscles, until the cramps eased.

“Sir,” said Schultz from behind him.

“Centurion,” Tavi mumbled, turning. “How long was I asleep?”

“Hours, sir,” Schultz replied. “Tribune Antillar said to leave you be.”

Tavi muttered something about Max-under his breath. It wouldn’t do for a Legion’s captain to call one of his Tribunes names in front of the men, after all.

“Oh,” Schultz said. He swallowed, then hurried to one side and picked up a plate covered with a soft napkin and a tankard that lay nearby. “He told me to give you these first thing, sir.”

Tavi ground his teeth, but managed to keep from snatching the plates from Schultz’s hands. “Thank you.”

“Welcome, sir,” Schultz said. Then he hastily backed away as though he expected Tavi to rip his head off.

Tavi suffocated a grumpy snarl, wolfed down the food and drank the water in the tankard. By the-time he finished, the lingering after-spasms of the muscle cramps had vanished.

“Can you form words yet, sir?” Max asked, striding up to Tavi. He nodded to Schultz, and the acting centurion bellowed for the cohort to fall in. Le-gionares began to rise from where they’d dropped into sleep on the ground or sat awaiting their turn to fight.

“Don’t make me hurt you, Max,” Tavi said. He cocked his head, frowning up the slope of the bridge, where the sound of battle continued. “Our status?”

“Valiar Marcus did it,” Max said. “He held them.”

Tavi gave Max a look.

“But you knew that, “ Max said. “Since we’re all standing here.”

“Max…”

Max gave him an easy grin. “Just trying to lighten things up a little, sir. You’re always so grumpy in the morning.” He nodded toward the walls. “The raiders have been attacking all morning. Our Knights Flora started going through arrows like water, and the First Spear caught them flat-footed between assaults and pushed them back to the second wall about an hour ago.”

“Losses?” Tavi asked.

“Heavy,” Max said, his expression sobering. “Without proper gates, someone has to meet the Canim on foot as they come through, and even their raiders are hard to kill for any legionare. And those ritualists came up a while ago, started throwing these smoking censers at our people. The smoke was poison. Killed a lot of men. Not quick.”

“What happened?” Tavi asked.

“Our Knights Flora started dropping any ritualist that stuck his nose out, and the wind changed after sunrise. It would blow back onto the Canim if they tried it now. No smoke since then.”

A cart rumbled up, drawn by a pair of harried horses led by a young boy. He turned the cart around, and Tavi could see light shining on the blood that lay inside. The boy called out, and legionares came ru

Tavi watched, sickened, as another cart passed the first. There were more, coming along behind them, to pick up wounded and bring them back to the healers.

Tavi tried to swallow. “How many?”

“Uh. Around eleven hundred dead, I think,” Max said, his tone quiet, neutral. “About the same number of men out of action. Foss and his boys look like something the crows have been at. It’s all they can do just to save men who are bleeding out.”

Tavi watched as more of the legionares following his orders were loaded onto the half dozen carts for the wounded.

The dead were stacked like cordwood into the last of the carts. It was the largest of the carts in service, with a high-railed bed, and it required the patient, enormous strength of a team of oxen to pull.

“The First Spear has his men ready for the push,” Max said. “But they’re tired, and barely holding together. He says if we don’t hit them soon, we won’t be able to.”

Tavi took a deep breath, nodded once, then put on his helmet. “Our Knights?”

“On the way, sir,” Max said.

Tavi laced his helmet into position and stalked over to the waiting cohort of fish. Max kept pace beside him, and the armored figures of the Knights Terra with him followed him. Before Tavi had reached the fish, Crassus and his Knights Pisces marched double time into position beside the volunteer cohort. Crassus called the halt, and the Knights stopped with commendable discipline, given how little time they’d spent in marching drill. The engineers, meanwhile, hurried into position at the rear of the other two forces.

Tavi stopped before them all, looking the men over, trying to think of what to say to them at a time like this. Then he stopped and blinked at the armor of the two groups of men.

The legionares’ armor had changed. Instead of the blue-and-red eagle of the First Aleran, the insignia over their hearts had become the perfect black silhouette of, not an eagle, but a flying crow.

Beside them, the Knights Pisces’ armor had changed as well. Again, the original insignia of the Legion had been replaced-this time with the fi

Tavi arched an eyebrow and glanced at Crassus. “Tribune. Was this your doing?”

Crassus saluted Tavi, and said, “We watched the Canim trying to swim the river this morning, sir. Apparently, they never realized how bad a bunch of fish could hurt them.” Crassus straightened his spine. “It seemed appropriate, sir.”

“Hngh,” Tavi said. He glanced at Schultz. “And what about you, acting centurion? Did you men also take it upon yourselves to change your uniforms?”

“Sir,” Schultz said with a crisp salute. “We just wanted to match the standard, sir!” Schultz glanced aside at Tavi. “And to let the Canim know that this time the crows are coming for them, sir!”

“I see,” Tavi said. He turned to speak to Max, and found Ehren standing beside Max, dressed in an ill-fitting breastplate. The little Cursor carried Tavi’s standard in his right hand, and the armor and helmet made him look a great deal more formidable than Tavi would have expected.

Standing beside Ehren was Kitai. The Marat girl wore another set of armor which, while clearly not her own, fit her tall, athletic form perfectly adequately. She’d slung a Legion-issue gladius from either hip. Her mouth was curled up into a small, excited smile, and her exotic green eyes burned with the intensity of her anticipation.

“What are you two doing here?” Tavi asked.

“It occurred to me, Captain,” Ehren said, “that since the First Lord already has messages on the way about the Elinarch, he and his captains will be here within a week or two at the most, and it would take me nearly four weeks to ride it. The fastest way to get him that message was to stay here, Captain.”

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.