Princeps’ Fury

“Well,” Durias murmured, looking around warily. “At least it’s warm.”

“So far so good,” Tavi murmured. “Time to test the Canim’s new shoes.”

Varg was the first to approach. As the largest of the Canim, he would be the most likely to break the surface of the croach and attract the presence of the wax spiders who maintained and repaired it. The big Cane approached with exaggerated steps, a peculiar tilt to his ears that Tavi had never quite seen before on one of the wolf-warriors. Broad discs, almost like dishes, really, of green-black Vord chitin were secured to each of his feet.

“These…” he switched to Aleran for the word, “shoes.” He shook his head. “I cannot move well in them.”

“They’ll distribute your weight,” Tavi told him. “I hope enough that you can walk the croach without breaking it.”

“Who taught you the use of these things, Tavar?”

“Some of my people use something like them to move more easily over deep snow,” Tavi replied. “Though the original design was made of wood and leather. I thought the chitin was more logical.”

“Perhaps if it does break the croach, it will not sense the presence of Vord hide as an outside attacker,” Varg growled.

“Worth a try,” Tavi said. He waited a beat, then added. “Anytime now.”

Varg eyed him without amusement. Then he swept his red-eyed gaze around the nearby forest and took a slow, cautious step onto the croach.

The shoes worked. They held him up.

Varg growled, a satisfied sound, and gestured once at the other Canim. Anag and the three Hunters prowled forward onto the glowing croach, almost comically cautious about where they placed their chitin-shod feet.

Tavi nodded at them once. Then he turned to Kitai, who flashed him a feral grin and started through the forest in deliberate silence, as scout and pathfinder.

The rest of them followed her, into the glowing green night, and toward the architect and epicenter of that eerie new world.

CHAPTER 31

“The less you say, the better,” Rook said. “The less I know about why you’re here, the less harm I can do you should the information be taken from me.”

Which is precisely why I did not inform you of Bernard’s presence, Amara thought.

They had stepped from the slavers’ tunnel into one of its adjoining chambers. There was a heady odor coming from a number of tightly fitted barrels against the far wall. Amara recognized the smell of preprocessed hollybells, the flowers from which the drug aphrodin was made. The slavers, it seemed, had used the tunnels as an entry point for smugglers as well as for moving their own merchandise in and out of the city. Doubtless, they had demanded their own extortionate piece of the lucrative enterprise.

“That’s a risk I need to take,” Amara told her calmly in reply. “You can tell almost as much about my intentions from the questions I ask as from anything I say. If I can’t ask you questions, whatever you tell me is going to be of limited use.”

Rook smiled grimly. “Believe me, Countess. I think I can make a fair guess at all of your questions.”

“Then you must already know what I’m doing here.”

“I suspect,” Rook said, raising a finger to the collar and shuddering. “I do not know. There is a difference.”

Amara studied the other woman for a long moment before she shook her head. “How do I know that you aren’t feeding me misinformation?”

Rook considered the question seriously for a moment before answering. “Countess, the First Lord himself came to me on the steadholt where my daughter and I were living. It was seventy-four miles south of here.”

Amara had to suppress a shiver. The past tense was certainly appropriate if the steadholt they had seen earlier that very day was any indication. The region that far south of Ceres had certainly been overrun by the Vord.

“He told me what was happening. He told me that if I served him on this mission, he would see to it that my daughter was taken to safety-to anywhere in Alera that I chose. And that if I returned from it, I could join her.”

Amara could not suppress the curse that slipped from between her lips. Gaius had given Rook no choice at all: Do what he wished, or perish with her daughter before the oncoming menace. “Rook, I don’t know why you-”

Rook held up her hand for silence. Then said, simply, “I sent her to Calderon.”

For a moment, Amara couldn’t find a response. “Why Calderon?” she finally asked.

Rook shrugged a shoulder and gave her a weary smile. “I wanted her as far from the Vord as possible. With the most capable, forewarned, and best-prepared people I knew. I know that Count Bernard has been trying to warn folk of the Vord for years. I assumed that he would begin preparing his own home to resist them. If I betray you, Countess, my daughter has no one to protect her. I would rather die screaming with blood running from my nose and ears than that.”

Amara bowed her head. It was an accurate description of the kind of death that awaited anyone who defied a discipline collar too severely or for too long, or should anyone try to remove the collar save whoever had put it there. The locking mechanism on the collars was fiendishly complex, but Amara had no doubt that Rook could bypass it whenever she chose, given the proper tools.

It would, of course, kill her to remove it.

Rook had defied High Lords and Ladies-and the First Lord himself, in her effort to secure her child when she had been held prisoner against Rook’s loyalty by the late High Lord Kalarus. Amara had no doubt whatsoever that the woman would sacrifice her life without hesitation if she thought that by doing so she could protect Masha.

“Very well,” Amara said. “What can you tell me?”

“Little,” Rook said. She made a frustrated gesture at the collar. “Orders. But I can show you.”

Amara nodded once.

Rook turned back to the tunnel and beckoned her. “Follow me.”

* * *

Veiled to the utmost of her ability, Amara crouched on a blackened rooftop beside Rook, overlooking the city’s former Slave Market, the Vord’s “recruitment” area.

She’d seen merrier slaughterhouses.

There were several dozen Vord, the low-slung garimlike versions, assembled in the courtyard, waiting in patient coils of gleaming black exoskeleton next to every entrance to and from the place, and Amara suspected that she would see similar sentries at every crossroads and gateway within the city.

Besides the Vord, several hundred Alerans filled the Slave Market. The majority of them were imprisoned in the various different cages required to hold strongly gifted furycrafters. Firecrafters were those imprisoned beneath the steady rain-shower trickle of water that poured down from pipes overhead. Earthcrafters were being held in cages suspended several feet from the ground. The windcrafters, as Amara well knew, would be inside the low brick cubes of solid stone, with no access to air but for what could come in through a few holes no larger across than Amara’s thumb. A metal cage sufficed for woodcrafters, though they were placed far opposite the courtyard from the heavy wooden beams that restrained the metalcrafters inside.

Most interesting were the cages that had to take multiple layers of precautions to contain their prisoners- doubtless the captured Citizenry. One metal cage that swung high off the ground and was simultaneously drizzled with water and fine black dirt caught Amara’s eye, particularly. The cage held a number of damp, mud-spattered figures, only two of them armored men captured during the battle. The other four were women, probably taken when the Vord overran their homes to the south. All of them-and most of the prisoners Amara could see, for that