Princeps’ Fury

The behemoths, though, proved tougher than the Vord-lizards. Ehren saw one of them accept a pair of hammerblows from the great bear without flinching, and in response it simply bent and heaved the fury’s form up off the ground. The granite was riven and shattered, and a few seconds later, the “crack” of protesting stone reached the citadel. The behemoth smashed the bear-form down to the ground, where it crumbled into motionless rubble.

Gaius winced.

“Are you all right, sire?” Ehren asked at once.

“Just feeling sympathy for whoever called out that bear fury,” the First Lord replied. “That sort of thing… leaves a mark.”

Ehren turned his eyes back to the battle and watched for several moments more as the Vord reached the earth furies and simply enfolded them, pouring around them, all but ignoring their presence as dozens of their fellows were crushed. Earth furies could only focus on a task for as long as the one who compelled them, and as the earthcrafters who called them forth began to grow more weary, their furies began to move more slowly and with less purpose. Here and there, a behemoth would meet a fury-those battles ended only one way. The enormous Vord had to be possessed of absolutely awesome strength, to so deal with beings of living stone.

“Enough,” Gaius said. “Sound the recover.”

Again, the trumpet blast rang over the city, and at once the earth furies began to recede into the stone. Down on the walls, Ehren saw exhausted earthcrafters dropping down to sit with their backs against the battlements, while Legion ru

Thousands of the enemy had been slain-but they poured forward, unaffected and unslowed, on the last several hundred yards of their approach to the city walls, through the rough wooden buildings and shanties that surrounded them.

“Fire it,” Gaius said calmly.

At another signal, flame bloomed up in a hundred places at once, and a wind sighed down from above and began to blow more and more strongly. Within a minute, fire had leapt up to raging proportions within the wooden outlying buildings, and completely engulfed the leading elements of the Vord advance. Smoke and heat and flame made it impossible to see what was happening within, but Ehren could vividly imagine the damage that the inferno was wreaking among the Vord.

The horde suddenly stopped in its tracks-by the tens of thousands, they simply ceased moving forward at the precise same instant. A moment later, the closer elements of the enemy force withdrew slightly from the flames.

And waited.

“Mmm,” Gaius said, nodding. “The queen is nearby, to so control them. Let’s see if she’ll send her captured crafters to deal with the problem.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the horde continued to advance behind the front ranks, spreading out to the sides, slowly filling in along the outer edges of the ring of flame. It took only moments for their easternmost elements to reach the banks of the Gaul, the river that flowed past the capital. Then the Vord focused on expanding their lines to the west. The enormous black force was slowly engulfing the city.

After a quarter of an hour had passed, Gaius murmured, “Apparently not.” He turned to a nearby Knight, and murmured, “Inform Lord Aquitaine of the disposition of the enemy.”

The man saluted and took to the air at once, flying toward the north side of the city, on the far side of the horde.

Ehren swallowed. “What are we going to do, sire?”

“The same thing they are, Cursor,” Gaius said calmly. “We wait.”

It took the rest of the day and the first three hours of night for the outbuildings to burn down. Smoke hung in a haze over the city below them, and if that wasn’t enough, fog had begun to roll up off the river. The citadel almost seemed to float among clouds-clouds lit hellishly from below by the burning buildings of the capital. The crows wheeled overhead all the while, chuckling and croaking to one another in the darkness.

Gaius had retired to the antechamber, where Sireos did what he could to fortify the dying First Lord. At Ehren’s insistence, he’d eaten another meal and was dozing on a couch when horn calls blared up from the unseen city below, ghostly in the mist.

The First Lord snapped awake at once-and from his seat nearby, Ehren saw Gaius’s face contort with pain. Then the old man closed his eyes, took in a determined breath, and pushed himself up off the couch to stride toward the balcony. Ehren rose at once to follow him.

Gaius listened to the horn calls for a moment and nodded to himself. “They’re coming through. Here is where we force their hand, Cursor.” He pointed at the trumpeter without looking back at the man, and said, “Sound the attack.”

The clarion call of the charge, universal among the Legions, rang in Ehren’s ears, and was answered by hundreds of horns in the city below.

Gaius raised his hand and cried out, and the chilly northern wind rose to an abrupt gale that threatened to throw Ehren from his feet. The wind roared down over the city, and carried away the pall of smoke and fog-while fa

Ehren paced the balcony at Gaius’s side, and saw that the Vord had surrounded nearly half the circumference of the city-and were surging forward in a unified attack.

Once more, earth furies rose to battle, among the fires and ruined buildings, disdaining the heat. In addition to that, spheres of white-hot fire began to erupt among them, some of them large enough to engulf a behemoth and the Vord-lizards all around it. Knights Aeris erupted into the skies all around the city, and teams of the men streaked along over the outlying buildings, using their windstreams to fan fires and to topple ruined buildings upon the foe.

The Vord advance was slowed-not because they had begun to waver, but simply because the Alerans were killing them faster than they could run forward. Ehren stared at the naked destruction in awe and terror. The ground itself was being rent by the fires unleashed by the Citizens of Alera, gouging out chunks of earth as easily as one might scoop butter from its container. The Vord shrieked and writhed and died, and Ehren could hear their cries even from atop the balcony.

The First Lord was staring hard around the city, though, his eyes searching. “Bloody crows,” he muttered beneath his breath. “Bloody crows take that arrogant slive. Where is he?”

“Who, sire?”

“Aquitaine,” Gaius growled. “This is the moment to strike them, when they are all focused forward on the walls. He had plenty of time to move into position. Where is he?”

No sooner had Gaius said the words than the mighty Gaul suddenly convulsed. The great river, shining silver beneath an almost-full moon, rose from its banks and flowed abruptly toward the rear of the Vord positions, the water cutting smoothly across the plain outside the city, spreading in the midst of the Vord ranks, driving some forward and others back.

Then, impossibly, trumpets sounded from the suddenly empty riverbed, and with a sea-crash roar of furious voices, the full strength of five Legions came charging out of the trench where the river had flowed. They smashed into the flanks and rear of the enemy horde, their flank secured by the new course of the river, and began driving hard into the Vord lines.

“Bloody crows!” Ehren all but screamed.

Even the First Lord arched his eyebrows at the sight. “He must have used his watercrafters to convince the river to flow over and around his troops. Windcrafting to keep the air in the bubble fresh. Earthcrafting to solidify the silt so they could march on it.” Gaius shook his head. “Impressive.”

The city’s defenders roared in defiance. As the endurance of the Citizenry below began to flag, the Vord began to reach the outer wall and legionares went to work with sword and shield upon the battlements. The enemy immediately began changing its formation, its westernmost elements turning to come in and support the threatened eastern half against Aquitaine’s Legions-but Alera Imperia was a large city, and they would have to travel miles to be of any assistance to their fellows.