closed even more tightly with the men beside him, and their armored forms pressed together while the ranks behind closed as tightly as they could, leaning against the men in front of them to lend their own weight and resistance to the shieldwall.
The Canim host smashed into the Aleran shieldwall like a living, frenzied battering ram. Swords flashed. Blood flew.
Tavi found himself fighting desperately simply to see, to understand what was happening around him-but the noise, the screams, and the confusion of close battle blinded him to anything beyond the instant. He ducked behind his shield, then barely jerked his head to one side as a sickle-sword came straight down at him, the tip of the curved weapon threatening to hook over the shield and drive into his helmet. He struck out blindly with the strokes Max and Magnus had drilled into him a lifetime before. He couldn’t tell whether or not most of them scored, much less inflicted wounds, but he planted his feet and stood his ground, bolstered by the support of the rear ranks.
Others were not so lucky. A ritualist’s fangstaff struck and ripped through the neck of a nearby legionare like some kind of hideous saw. Another ducked behind his shield, only to have the hooked tip of a sickle-sword pierce his helmet and skull alike. Still another legionare was seized by the shield and dragged out of the wall, to be torn apart by a trio of screaming ritualists in their human-leather mantles.
The Battlecrows stood their ground despite the losses, and the Canim assault crashed to a savage halt against them, roaring like tide from a bloody sea as it pounded fruitlessly on a stone cliffside.
As men fell, their cohort brothers pushed up, straining forward with all the power and coordination and battlecraft they possessed.
It was hopeless. Tavi knew it was. The cliff might stand against the ocean for a time, but little by little the ocean would grind it away-it was simply a matter of time. The Battlecrows might have stopped the opening charge, but Tavi knew that they couldn’t hold the vast numbers of Canim on the bridge for more than a few moments.
Tavi found himself fighting beside Schultz. The young centurion dealt swift, savage, powerful blows with his
Tavi never hesitated. He turned and chopped through the thrusting spear’s haft in a single, hard stroke, though it left his entire left flank open to the fangstaff of the foaming-mouthed ritualist facing him. He saw the Cane strike in the corner of his eye and knew that he would never be able to block or avoid the deadly weapon.
He didn’t have to.
The legionare on Tavi’s left pivoted forward, slamming the fangstaff aside with his shield and flicked a menacing blow at the ritualist’s head, forcing him to jerk back to avoid it. It wasn t much of a delay, but it was enough for Schultz to recover his balance. He and Tavi snapped back into formation, and the fight went on.
And on.
And on.
Tavi’s arms burned from the effort of using shield and sword, and his entire body trembled with the exhausting effort of holding against the overwhelming foe. He had no idea how long the fight lasted. Seconds, minutes, hours. It could have been any of them. All he knew for certain was that they had to hold their ground until it was over. One way or the other.
More men died. Tavi felt a flash of heat upon one cheek as a Canim sickle-sword passed near. Canim fell, but their numbers never seemed to lessen, and bit by bit, Tavi felt the supporting pressure of the rear ranks waning. The inevitable collapse would come soon. Tavi ground his teeth in raw frustration-and saw a flash of red only a few feet away. Sari was there, in his scarlet armor, and Tavi saw the ritualist’s fangstaff smash down onto an already- wounded legionare, slamming him to the bridge’s surface.
Grimly, Tavi began to give the order to advance. A single, hard push might bring Sari within the reach of his blade-and he was determined that no matter what happened, Sari would not leave the bridge alive.
As he was about to scream the order, golden sunlight suddenly washed over the bridge.
For the space of a breath, confusion turned the combat into a spastic, inexpert affair, as virtually everyone involved turned their gazes to the sky in shock. For the first time in nearly a month, the golden sun shone down upon the Eli-narch, the blazingly hot sun of a late-summer noon.
Though he knew he would never be heard, Tavi screamed, “Max!”
A cry went up on the wall behind them, the Knights there letting out a sudden cry of mass effort, and unleashed upon the Canim a weapon such as no Aleran had ever seen.
Though not all of the Knights Aeris could fly well, their lack of ability was more an issue of inexperience than it was of strength. Every Knight Aeris there had considerable power for other applications of windcrafting-and given how-basic this one was, they were more than up to the task.
Tavi could only imagine what was happening now, behind him and up on the walls and in the skies over the Elinarch. Thirty Knights, all together, raised a far-viewing crafting of the kind normally used to observe objects at distance. Instead of forming only between their own hands, however,
Tavi heard Max bellow, and his mind’s eye provided him with another image-Max, raising up his own far-view crafting in a series of individual disks that curved and bent that light to flash down the length of the bridge’s slope.
To shape it into a weapon. Precisely as Tavi had used his bit of curved Romanic glass to start a fire, only… larger.
The searing point of sunlight flashed across the bridge, and where it touched, raiders and ritualists screamed as skin blackened and clothing and fur instantly burst into flame. Tavi glanced over his shoulder, and saw Max on the wall, arms lifted high, his expression one of strain-and rage. He cried out and that terrible light began sweeping over the Canim, felling them as a scythe fells wheat. A horrible stench-and an cacophony of infinitely hideous shrieks-filled the air.
Back and forth flicked the light, deadly, precise, and there was nowhere for the Canim to hide. Dozens died with every single one of Tavi’s labored heartbeats-and suddenly the tide of battle began to change. The rift in the clouds widened, more light poured down, and Tavi thought he could see the shadow of a single person high in the air, at the center of the clear area of sky.
And, as the Canim attack came to a shocked halt, Tavi saw Sari again, not twenty feet away. The ritualist stared upward for a second, then whirled to see his army dying, burned to death before his very eyes. He whirled around, naked terror on his face, as his final assault became a desperate rout. The panicked raiders ran for their lives, trampled their fellows, and threw themselves from the bridge in their effort to avoid the horrible, unexpected Aleran sorcery. Those nearest the next wall managed to scramble through it in time.
The rest died. They died by fire, at the hands of their comrades, or in the jaws of the hungry sea-beasts in the river below. By the hundreds, by the thousands, they died.
In seconds, only those Canim nearest the Aleran shieldwall, and therefore too close to the Alerans to be targeted, were still alive. Those who attempted to flee were cut down by Antillar Maximus’s deadly sunbeam. The rest, almost entirely ritualists, flew into an even greater frenzy born of their despair and the death they knew had come for them.
Tavi grimly dodged the wild backswing of a fangstaff, and when he looked back at Sari, he saw the Cane staring at him-then up at the sky overhead.
Sari’s eyes turned calculating, burning with rage and madness, and then he suddenly howled, body arching up precisely as it had the day before.
Sari had to know that his life was over, and Tavi knew that Sari had plenty of time to call down the lightning once more-and Tavi was surrounded by his fellow Alerans. Though the blast would be meant for him, anyone near him would die as well, just as they had when Sari’s lightning struck Captain Cyril’s command tent.
He’d given Lady Antillus’s bloodstone to Crassus, so Tavi made the only choice he could.
He sprinted forward, out of the wall, and charged Sari.
Once more the power crackled in the air. Once more, lights blazed along the ritualist’s body. Once more the scarlet lightning filtered through the clouds all around the single shaft of clear blue sky Crassus had opened.
Once more blinding, white light and thunderous noise hammered down upon Tavi.
