Princeps Fury

backs.”

“The keels go fairly deep, and are weighted with stone,” Crassus assured the Cane. “They should be stable, provided they don’t take a big wave broadside. They won’t roll.”

“Roll, crows,” Maximus sputtered. “Ice melts.”

“It also floats,” Tavi said, feeling a little smug himself, though he probably didn’t deserve it. He hadn’t been working himself to exhaustion for days to make them happen, after all.

“The firecrafters have been making coldstones nonstop,” Crassus told Max. “There are enough of them there to keep the ships from melting for three weeks, by which time they’ll have made more-and the engineers stretched a granite frame throughout. They think they’ll hold, if we can avoid the worst of the weather.”

Tavi slammed a fist on the pauldrons of Crassus’s armor. “Well done, Tribune,” he said fiercely.

“So,” Kitai said, smiling. “We get everyone on the ships, and we leave the Vord screaming their frustration behind us. This is a fine plan, Aleran.”

“If the weather holds,” Max said darkly.

“That’s what Knights Aeris are for,” Crassus said calmly. “It will be hard work, but we’ll do it. We have to do it.”

Canim horns brayed from the earthworks, pulsing out in odd, baying signals. Tavi held up a hand for silence and watched Gradash.

The old Cane took in the horn calls and reported, “The first of the main body of Lararl’s regulars have been sighted, Tavar.”

Max whistled. “One crowbegotten fine retreat, if they held together all the way from the fortress.”

Tavi nodded agreement. “And that means that the Vord won’t be far behind. We need to get moving, people. The enemy is close.” He began giving rapid orders, rounding up a couple of couriers to get them out to the right portions of the Legion, when a surge of terrified realization from Kitai hit him like a punch in the belly. He stopped in the middle of his sentence and turned to her.

“Aleran!” she said, staring out at the breach in the earthworks where the First Aleran was stationed.

Tavi spun to see the First Aleran under assault. Enormous blue-armored Canim had, in the midst of passing peacefully through their positions, suddenly whirled to attack. In the bright moonlight, Tavi could see the Shuarans hacking into the surprised Alerans, fighting in perfect unison and entirely without regard for their own lives.

He sucked in a breath and realized what had happened. “Taken,” he spat. “Those Shuarans have been taken by the Vord.” He turned to the others, and said, “The Vord aren’t close. They’re here.”

CHAPTER 44

The Vord surged toward the defenses around Molvar in a great, dark wave, and the last defenders of Canea rose to meet them in a single, enormous roar of defiance and hate. Signal horns, Canim and Aleran alike, bayed and shrilled across the fey, silver-lit landscape, and from the west poured a great wave of the enemy, chitin gleaming and winking beneath the great eye of the winter moon.

Tavi knew that he was speaking, because orders were flying off his lips more rapidly than he could keep track of them, and all around him officers of the Legion were slamming out salutes and sprinting away, but it seemed that he didn’t actually understand anything he was saying. His thoughts were racing, trying to cover every possible outcome of the next minutes and hours, anticipating everything, taking every measure he possibly could. Then he was swinging up behind Kitai onto a taurg and racing toward the battle.

The First Aleran had hacked down the taken Shuarans, suffering ruinous casualties in doing so-anything taken by the Vord was enormously strong, oblivious to pain, and fought with mindlessly suicidal ferocity. Though the taken Canim were down, several Alerans had joined each of the fallen enemy upon the earth-and the enemy’s ruse had paid a dividend. The Legion’s ranks had been badly disrupted, and the Vord’s first thrust came hard on the heels of their opening gambit.

The Legion was being driven back from the breach in the earthworks, while more Vord-always more Vord- assaulted the rest of the defensive positions, preventing the Canim from coming to the Alerans’ aid. Now the Legion fought to defend a twenty-foot-wide corridor, the opening in the earthworks. Ten-foot walls flanked the opening, and legionares with spears crouched in ranks atop those walls, thrusting their weapons into the press of armored Vord bodies below, while the infantry fought with shield and sword to keep the Vord from forcing their way through the engineered bottleneck and past the fortifications.

Tavi drew his sword and flung himself from the plunging taurg as the beast began to ride through the scattered and reeling legionares who had been driven out of position and away from their various centuries. “Legionares!” he bellowed. “To me!”

“Captain!” called a dazed legionare.

“Form up on me!” Tavi called to the scattered soldiers. “You, you, you, you’re spear leaders! Line them up! Legionares, fall in on this line!”

Once he had the men organized into a fighting century, a block ten files long and eight legionares deep, he sent them forward, to the support of the men already fighting. He did it over and over, until the scattered soldiers were accounted for, and realized as he did that the Vord had imitated the enemy yet again. Tavi’s group might have hunted down and killed the nearby queen a few days before, but the Vord were returning the compliment-the taken Shuarans, it seemed, had focused their efforts upon killing the centurions within each century. Crested helms lay far more thickly among the fallen Alerans than they should have and in the press of battle, without the leadership of the men wearing them, the organization vital to the Legion’s order of battle had frayed.

The additional centuries helped to stiffen the lines, though Tavi knew that it would only be for a few moments-fortunately, those moments were enough.

The air screamed as forty Knights Aeris swept down upon the battle. Tavi lifted his sword, signaling Crassus, who flew at the head of the Knights-each of whom flew paired with another Knight, carrying a third armored form between them.

“Crassus!” Tavi shouted into the din of battle, pointing to the walls overlooking the bottleneck. “On the wall!”

But the young Tribune hadn’t needed Tavi’s gesticulations to see where his help was needed. Signing instructions to his men, Crassus touched down on the wall overlooking one side of the breech, along with half of his flight. The other half landed on the other side, where each pair of Knights Aeris deposited the men they’d brought to the fight-the Knights Ignus of the First Aleran.

Tavi couldn’t see what happened from his vantage point on the ground, behind the Legion’s wall of shields, but heartbeats later, there was an enormous roar and hellish blue-white light flared ahead of him, burning the black silhouette of the massed ranks into his vision. The Legion let out a shout of exultation at the return of their Knights, and surged forward, driving the Vord back into the sudden vacuum the Knights Ignus had burned into their ranks.

Tavi sprinted up to the earthworks to join Crassus, but by the time he got there, the situation was in hand-at least for the moment. The Vord had reeled back from the breach, and every time they began to press in more closely, one of the Knights Ignus unleashed a blast of fire in their midst.

“Max is coming,” Crassus panted to Tavi. His face was streaked with sweat from the effort of his recent furycrafting. He turned to point back toward the city, where Max and a column of armored figures were marching at the quick step from the Legion camp outside the city walls. “He’s bringing the engineers and our Knights Terra. We’ll close up the breach and-”

On the outer earthworks, Canim horns blared and brayed, and at that signal, dozens of ritualists appeared among the Canim on the walls. All of the hooded figures threw back their pale mantles, dipped their hands into the pouches of blood they wore slung at their sides, and cast scarlet droplets into the air. Again, Tavi wasn’t in position to see the results of the working, but he saw the great, billowing clouds of greenish mist form and fall, and heard the screams of agony among the Vord as it descended upon them, scouring the earthen walls clean of