Princeps’ Fury

Light fell onto the desperate legionares, and faces began to turn skyward. A sudden roar of hope and wild excitement rose from the Legion, and lines that had begun to buckle abruptly locked into place again, shields binding together, firming, holding.

It took a few seconds more before the first of the Icemen began to look up, and only then, as Raucus readied himself to enter the fray, did the High Lord unleash the furies of his skies against the foe.

Lightning came down from the sky in threads so tiny and numerous that more than anything, they resembled burning rain. Blue-white bolts raked the Icemen on the ground below the wall, killing and burning, sending Icemen into screaming confusion-and suddenly choking the pressure of their advance onto the wall.

Raucus flung his sword’s point down as he closed on the exact center of the Icemen’s position atop the wall, and called fire from the burning blade, sending out a white-hot column of flame that charred flesh to ash and blackened bone in a circle fifteen feet across. At the last second, he called upon his wind furies to slow him, landed hard upon the unyielding stone of the wall-now cleared of the treacherous ice.

Raucus called strength up from the earth, shattered two hurled clubs with sweeps of his burning blade, swept a wave of fire over a hundred of the foe between himself and the southern side of the wall, then began grimly hacking his way northward. The Icemen were no fools. They knew that even the mightiest furycrafter could be felled if enough spears and arrows and clubs were thrown at him-and Raucus knew it, too.

But before the shocked Icemen could coordinate their attacks, the High Lord of Antillus was among them with his deadly sword, giving them no chance to overwhelm his defenses with a storm of missiles-and no Iceman alive, no dozen of the savages, was the match for the skill of Antillus Raucus with steel in his hand.

The Icemen fought with savage ferocity, each of them possessed of far more strength than a man-but not more than an enraged High Lord, drawing power from the stones of the land itself. Twice, Icemen managed to seize Raucus with their huge, leathery hands. He broke their necks with the use of one hand and flung the corpses through several ranks of the enemy around him, knocking down dozens at a time.

“Third Antillan!” Raucus bellowed, all the while. “To me! Antillus, to me! Antillus, for Alera!”

“Antillus for Alera!” came the thunder of his legionares’ reply, and his soldiers began to reverse the tide and drive the foe from the walls. The veteran legionares, bellowing their war cry, fought their way to the side of their lord, hammering through the enemy who had been close to overwhelming them moments before.

The enemy resistance melted abruptly, vanishing like sand washed away by a tide, and Raucus sensed the change in pressure. The Third Aleran’s Knights Ferrous cut their way to his side and fell in on his flanks, and after that, it was only a matter of dispatching the animals who remained on the wall.

“Shields!” Raucus barked, mounting up on a crenel, where he could overlook the Icemen’s snow ramp below. A pair of legionares immediately came to his side, covering all three of them with their broad shields. Spears, arrows, and thrown clubs hammered against the Aleran steel.

Raucus focused his attention on the snow ramp. Fire would melt it, right enough, but it would be an enormous effort. Easier to shake it apart from beneath. He nodded sharply to himself, laid a bare hand on the stone of the Shieldwall, and sent his attention down through the stones. With an effort of will, he bade the local furies to move, and the ground outside the Shieldwall suddenly rippled and heaved.

The great structure of ice cracked and groaned-and then collapsed, taking a thousand screaming savages with it.

Raucus rose, nudging the shields aside, as a great cloud of ice crystals leapt into the air. He gripped the burning sword in hand, and stared out intently, waiting for his view of the enemy. For a moment, no one on the wall moved, as they waited to see through the cloud of snow.

There was a cry from farther down the line, one of triumph, and a moment later the air cleared enough to show Raucus the enemy, routed and in full retreat.

Then, and only then, did Raucus let the fire fade from his sword.

His men crowded against the edge of the wall, screaming their defiance and triumph at the retreating enemy. They were chanting his name.

Raucus smiled and saluted them, fist to heart. It was what one did. If it gave his men joy to cheer him, he’d be even more of a heartless bastard than he was not to let them have their moment. They didn’t need to know that the smile was a false one.

There were too many still, silent forms in Antillan armor for it to be genuine.

The efforts of the day’s furycrafting had exhausted him, and he wanted nothing so much as a quiet patch of dry, flat space to go to sleep on. Instead, he conferred with his captain and the Third’s staff, then went to the healer’s tents to visit the wounded.

Like accepting cheers one didn’t deserve, it was also what one did.

Those men lying wounded had become so in service to him. They had suffered their pains for him. He could lose an hour of sleep, or two, or ten, if it meant easing that pain for a few moments for the cost of nothing more than a few kind words.

Sir Carlus was the last of those Raucus visited. The young man was still fairly groggy. His injuries had been more extensive than he had known, and the watercrafting that had healed them had left him exhausted and disoriented. Neck injuries could be that way. Something to do with the brain, Raucus had been told.

“Thank you, my lord,” Carlus said, when Raucus sat down on one edge of his bunk. “We couldn’t have held without you.”

“We all fight together, lad,” Raucus replied roughly. “No thanks need be given. We’re the best. It’s how we do our work. How we do our duty. Next time, it could be the Third saving me.”

“Yes, my lord,” Carlus said. “Sir? Is it true what they say? That you challenged the First Lord to the juris macto?”

Raucus snorted out a quiet laugh. “That was a while ago, lad. Aye, true enough.”

Carlus’s dulled eyes glittered for a minute. “You’d have won, I wager.”

“Don’t be daft, boy,” Raucus said, rising and giving the young Knight a squeeze on the shoulder. “Gaius Sextus is the First Lord. He would have handed me my head. And still would. Think about what happened to Kalarus Brencis, eh?”

Carlus didn’t look happy to hear that answer, but he said, “Yes, my lord.”

“Get some rest, soldier,” Raucus said. “Well done.”

At last, Raucus turned to leave the tent. There. Duty done. At last he could get a few hours of rest. The increased pressure on the Shieldwall, of late, had left him wishing that he had demanded that Crassus serve his first Legion hitch at home. Great furies knew, the boy could make himself useful now. As could Maximus. The two of them, it seemed, had at least learned to coexist without attempting to murder one another.

Raucus snorted at his own train of thought. He sounded, to himself, like an old man, tired and aching and wishing for younger shoulders to bear his burdens. Though he supposed he would rather grow old than not.

Still. It would be nice to have the help.

There were just so many of the crowbegotten savages. And he’d been fighting them for so bloody long.

He walked toward the stairway leading down into the fortifications within the Shieldwall itself, where a heated chamber and a cot waited for him. He’d gone perhaps ten paces when a scream of wind, the windstream of an incoming Knight Aeris, howled in the distance.

Raucus paused, and a moment later, a Knight Aeris soared in, escorted by one of the Third Aleran’s Knights who had been flying patrol. Night had fallen, but the snow always made that a minor inconvenience, particularly when the moon was out. All the same, it wasn’t until the man had landed that Raucus spotted the insignia of the First Antillan upon his breastplate.