Princeps’ Fury

and even though he’s broken the spirit of his word of peace to us by putting us up here in this weather, you defend him.”

Varg’s chest rumbled in a warning growl. “No,” the Cane said. “I understand him. There is a difference.”

Tavi nodded, and was silent for a time, watching the battle below. Then he said, “What will he do next?”

Varg’s ears twitched slightly, this way and that, as he pondered. “Lararl knows that when Sarl fled, he took ten thousand warriors with him. He will think Nasaug has no more than ten thousand under his command at Molvar. And so he will send thirty thousand to assault them in order to force a surrender.”

“Will they?” Tavi asked.

“Ten thousand warriors against thirty thousand, in hostile territory? Only a fool would throw away his warriors’ lives in such a hopeless battle.” Varg showed his teeth. “But Lararl does not know that Nasaug has trained our makers into something very like warriors themselves. His thirty thousand will meet something more like sixty thousand. And Nasaug will hand them their tails.”

“And then what?” Tavi asked.

Varg tilted his head slightly, staring at Tavi.

“After that, what will your people do?” Tavi asked. “Fortify Molvar? Hold it? Wait for the Vord to break through Lararl’s defenses and besiege them? Then fight until they are pushed into the sea?”

Varg turned back to the fight. “What would you have me do?”

“Return to Alera with me,” Tavi said.

Varg snorted, eyes glittering. “You just spent years convincing us to leave.”

Tavi gestured at the land below and said, quietly, “That was before I saw this.”

“And the sight made you wish to help us, Aleran?”

“If it helps, let’s just say that I consider you and your people to be dead already. And you know as well as I do that it will only be a matter of time before the Vord arrive in Alera. I simply wish to spend your deaths more profitably for my own people.”

Varg’s ears twitched in amusement, and his mouth dropped open for a bare second.

“My people at Molvar are in danger as well,” Tavi said. “It makes sense for us to assist one another until we are out of the current crisis.”

“You propose an alliance,” Varg mused.

“I do.”

The Cane was silent for long moments more. Then he nodded once, and said, “Done.”

CHAPTER 19

Amara and Bernard watched from a position of perfect concealment as the Vord annihilated the remnants of the Ceresian rear guard. The doomed legionares took their stand in the ruins of a nameless village beside the causeway. They locked shields, faced the foe, and fought with desperate determination to slow the oncoming enemy, to give the holders still trying to flee for the safety of the city’s walls a chance to escape.

Four-legged creatures that looked something like the deadly predator-lizards of the southwestern swamps near Kalare dominated the enemy numbers. Long, low to the ground, swift, and powerful, their bodies were covered with the same dark chitin as the other Vord Amara had seen-with the addition of raised, serrated ridges down the lengths of their spines and flanks. As Amara watched, one of them snapped its jaws closed on the thigh of a legionare. In a flash, it had wrapped its body around the man, the motion bonelessly swift-and then it simply writhed, its body gliding in constant motion like a serpent circling its way up a tree branch.

The ridges ripped through steel and flesh alike, and the legionare screamed as he died.

The Ceresian cohort, more than three hundred men, were overrun by the Vord. Their lines held for ten seconds, then fifteen, then twenty. Then they seemed to sag and collapse inward, and the black tide of Vord swarmed over the men, rending and ripping, barely slowing down before they continued in pursuit of the band of refugees the legionares had given their lives to protect.

They had died for nothing.

The Vord caught the holders within two minutes.

Amara couldn’t watch the holders, most of them very old or very young, die. She closed her eyes.

But she could still hear them screaming.

With so much chaos, so much confusion, so much destruction in the lands of Ceres, it had been inevitable, she told herself, desperate to distract herself with a flow of simple fact and calm deduction. Some of the steadholts had received word in time to avoid the oncoming terror. Many had not. Of those that hadn’t, the majority had reacted by taking to the causeways to flee for the shelter of their High Lord’s Legions-and rushed directly into the waiting talons and mandibles of the Vord.

Lord Cereus had spent his legionares’ lives in an effort to shield the refugees for as long as possible, sending out his small cavalry forces in an effort to guide fleeing holders off the causeways and around the worst areas of danger, but there simply had not been enough time or enough men. The slow, the foolish, or the merely unlucky perished by the hundreds upon the roads of Ceres over those few desperate days.

There was nothing she and Bernard could have done. The Vord were simply too many. Any action on their part would have accomplished nothing but to reveal their presence and seal their own fates along with those of the slain refugees. Their mission was more important than that. It could save hundreds of thousands of lives. She could not afford to let compassion for those who were directly in front of her blind her to the fact that she had a greater responsibility to the whole of the Realm. Doing her job was the proper thing to do, the logical thing to do.

Still, she wept for the brave legionares and the poor holders, and logic was no comfort whatsoever.

She wept, but she did so in silence. In the hours that followed, the Vord overran their position in greater and greater numbers, some of them passing within yards of where she and her husband lay hidden by veil and stealth and furycrafted cloth. The enemy was gathering for the attack that would certainly fall soon upon the single Aleran strongpoint that remained to challenge them.

Ceres itself.

* * *

She had not spoken to her husband for four days.

That was, Amara thought, the worst part of the entire arrangement. Speech was a luxury that could not be afforded, not when the enemy could literally lurk beneath virtually any fallen leaf. They could move in nearly perfect silence, and complete invisibility-but the sound of voices, even in whispers, would betray the presence of Alerans more surely than nearly anything else they could do.

Legion scouts had long since developed a fairly complex series of hand gestures, capable of signaling critical information in the field, but it was by no means a substitute for speech. There was no signal language gesture for “I can’t bear to look at this anymore,” or, “someone is going to pay.”

In the four days since they had entered occupied territory, they had discovered the scenes of multiple massacres of holders and legionares alike-and instances where the Vord had met less success, as well. Twice, wide swaths of woodland had been burned black, down to the very soil, and the charred remains of Vord armor and bits of tree trunk were all that remained, evidence of the fury of the Knights and lords of Ceres. In other instances, the destruction had been more limited and prosaic, but no less brutal-groups of desperate holders, some of them gifted strongly enough to make a fight of it, had unleashed all the crafting at their command, and left Vord crushed and broken on the earth, among the bodies of Aleran dead. In still other places, a lone Vord would be found dead, destroyed by what was doubtless a rogue fury, running wild and