Princeps’ Fury

Distrust, the need to rule, the emotions themselves could all be used against them.

“I think she’s returned to Alera by now-or at least she’s on the way. What if I told you I would be willing to remove her?”

The Vord tilted its head to one side. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Survival,” Tavi replied. “If we are to survive, we must eliminate her-and you must let us escape unharmed in order for us neutralize her.”

“Let you escape…” The queen leaned forward slightly. “Who?”

“All of my people and the Canim of this land,” Tavi replied promptly. “All of them. They will return to Alera with me. They are necessary to deal with the threat.”

She looked slowly around the interior of the hive. Then her green eyes focused on Tavi.

“It costs you nothing,” Tavi urged her gently. “Slow the offensive long enough for the Canim to escape the continent. They will no longer be a threat to anything you’ve built here. You won’t have to fight them anymore.”

The queen’s eyes flared with a brighter light, and she took a step closer. Tavi felt a sudden rush of thoughts flicker through his head-irrational fear sputtered through his body for no apparent reason. (He considered entirely rational the fear that he was surrounded by nightmarish creatures which might kill him, or worse, at any moment.) A rush of memories went by, bringing with them a dozen scents so distinct that he was half-certain that they were real, and not mere memories.

“There are others nearby,” the queen said, slowly. “They came with you. But you have not told them your true purpose here.”

A chill went down Tavi’s spine as he realized that the creature was actually examining his thoughts. “No,” he answered. “They never would have accepted what I planned to do.” He smiled faintly. “They aren’t the negotiating sort.”

“You are sincere,” the queen murmured.

“What is the point of attempting to deceive a being who can read your mind?” Tavi asked. “I’ve accomplished a lot of things by finding common interests between myself and my enemies.”

“An enemy who becomes an asset is defeated as surely as one who is killed,” the Vord queen said.

“More so,” said Tavi.

The Vord queen gave him an odd little smile.

The dark-armored shapes of Vord warriors began to fill the entrance to the hive behind him. The Cane-form Vord came forward slowly and silently, moving awkwardly in the confined space.

Tavi’s stomach seemed to drop into his boots.

“Your logic was sound but for a single, flawed assumption,” the Vord queen said. “You assumed that because the junior queens had been created without the ability to create their own subordinate queens, that they would still have the desire to rule. It is a shortcoming of individuality.”

Wax spiders emerged from the walls and flowed over the floor between Tavi and the queen in a miniature flood, crawling over one another until they were chest high, walling her away from him as surely any pile of stone.

“Your breed seek authority, leadership, as an extension of your personal identity. You know nothing of devoting yourself to something larger. You know nothing of truly subordinating the self for the greater good of all.”

Tavi glanced around the interior of the hive again, but there was no escape. Warrior Vord filled the doorway. Spiders continued to crawl from the walls-and ceiling, it seemed. He would never be able to get out. He’d known it was a risk, that his proposal to the Vord could be rejected-but he truly hadn’t believed that it would happen. The cold intellect of the Vord, from everything he knew about them, should have compelled them to protect their nearest hive and kin.

But what drove this queen was… entirely too human. It was a devotion to her senior queen-to her mother, Tavi realized, his senses flushed with an intensity of emotion coming from the junior queen. That was mixed with a horrible and abiding need that was closer to physical hunger than anything else-a need to expand, to overcome, to grow. And mixed with all of that was contempt-contempt for humanity, for the creatures that fell before the united might of the Vord.

Tavi realized that he was never going to leave the hive, and suddenly felt very, very tired.

Well.

Well, then.

He had been held in contempt before. If there was one thing Tavi knew, it was how to take advantage of being underestimated.

Tavi took a deep breath and tightened his hand on his sword. Then he reached to the short blade on his right hip, and drew it slowly into his left hand. Enough earthcrafting should give him the strength to bull through the wall of wax spiders. He’d be bitten as he did it, many times. The poison would kill him, but not for a minute or two at least.

He had another advantage: The cramped quarters inside the hive, combined with the reinforcements blocking the only exit, would prevent the queen from escaping every bit as much as it trapped Tavi. She wouldn’t be able to simply cut and run.

He’d have to kill the queen quickly, with all the windcrafting he could muster. He remembered well the blinding speed a Vord queen possessed-but he would have another advantage she probably did not expect. He could accept a lethal stroke if it allowed him to deliver one in return. Metalcrafting would let him ignore the pain of a death blow long enough to deliver a killing strike of his own.

Provided he was fast enough, this hive would become her tomb. With the queen dead and the Vord undirected, Kitai, Max, and the others should have a real chance to escape. And as long as Crassus and the First Aleran had done their jobs, Varg and the Canim should escape as well, to assist Alera against the common foe.

Really, he thought, planning became a great deal simpler and easier when one didn’t have the additional bother of working out how to survive said plan.

“It looks like I’m not the only one to make a flawed assumption,” Tavi told the queen quietly.

Her eyes narrowed, and he felt the quivering pressure of her mind on his thoughts again.

Her eyes widened.

Princeps Gaius Octavian called upon rock and wind and steel and shifted his body forward into the rush that would-if he was lucky-kill them both.

CHAPTER 35

The windcrafting infused Tavi’s senses with the slowed-time alertness of fury-born speed, or he might not have seen what was about to happen.

The Vord turned on one another.

The nearest Cane-form Vord, the one Tavi had wounded, suddenly jerked and was flung viciously forward as the Vord behind it tore into its back with its talons. Its blood splattered the walls of the entry tunnel as it fell into the open space at the center of the hive, and stained Tavi’s boots as the newly dead Vord slid to a halt at his heels. In an instant, three more of the Cane-form Vord bounded into the room, and Tavi realized what had happened.

Varg’s Hunters had arrived.

The meaning of the odd, lumpy packs each of the Hunters had carried finally became clear to Tavi. The silent Canim had clad themselves in Vord chitin, somehow fastening enough of the green-black material to themselves to pass for true Vord, at least momentarily-and now they were inside the queen’s hive beside him.

“Tavar,” growled the eldest of the three Hunters.

“Take her!” Tavi cried.

He surged forward with the Hunters at his side, and the Vord queen let out a piercing shriek.