Crassus nodded, saluted sharply, clapped a hand against his brother’s shoulder, and frowned in concentration. He vanished from sight behind a windcrafted veil, and a moment later a miniature gale rose, whipping droplets of falling rain into a painful, stinging mist. Then the winds faded as the young heir of Antillus took to the skies.
Max stood silently looking up into the rain for a long moment after his brother had departed, his expression blank. Perhaps it was the rain. Tavi’s ability to sense others’ emotions was nowhere near as reliable as he would like it to be, but he could clearly feel the conflicting welter of worry and affection and sadness and pride and seething jealousy that poured off his friend.
Max looked down to find Tavi watching him. He averted his eyes, and Tavi felt Max close down on his emotions, walling them away from observation.
“Wish I could do that,” Max said.
Tavi nodded. “Me too.” He put a hand on Max’s shoulder. “Max, I need your help here. The rain’s getting heavier and the night’s getting colder. If we don’t get some shelter, we could freeze to death.”
Max closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded. “Right. I’m on it.”
“Durias,” Tavi said. “Would you assist him, please?”
The burly centurion nodded. “Yes sir, Captain.”
Kitai walked over to Tavi. “You. Armor. Off.”
Tavi had been wearing the Legion lorica for so long that he had virtually forgotten it was there, but Kitai was right. The temperature was dropping fast. Once it was cold enough, any flesh that touched the armor would freeze to it-and besides, wearing it under those weather conditions was rather like putting on a coat made of icicles.
Tavi felt distinctly vulnerable as he shed the steel casing, and he doubted that Max and Durias liked it any better. The two men knelt at the center of the tower, bare hands flat to the dark stone, their eyes closed. Within a moment, there was a trembling vibration in the soles of Tavi’s boots, then a smooth, round half dome of stone, like a partial bubble made of solid granite, rose out of the top of the tower.
Max and Durias sat back on their heels once it was done. Then Durias rose, considered the eight-foot dome for a moment, and with casual precision drove his fist through an inch of solid rock. He ran his fingertips horizontally over the surface and did it again. Then he moved down the dome and went through the same process, until he had broken out a rough doorway leading to the dome’s interior.
Max bowed and rolled his hand in an elegant flourish. “Your summer palace awaits.”
They gathered their things and hurried out of the rain. It was not nearly the improvement Tavi had hoped for. They were out of the wet, but the inside of what was in essence a small cave was not precisely warm. At least, not until Max frowned ferociously in concentration, the tip of his tongue between his lips, and laid his fingertips on one wall of the dome. His hands shimmered with heat-not the savage white flame of a battlecrafted fire, but something infinitely more gentle, hardly visible, and within a moment or two the dome was as warm as a baker’s kitchen.
Kitai let out a purring sound and stretched out full length upon the floor. “I like you.”
Max smiled wearily at her and slumped down. “Should keep us for a while. If we can hang a cloak over the doorway, longer.”
“I’ll see to it,” Durias said, taking off his own plain green cloak. “We should get some sleep.”
“Kitai,” Tavi said.
“No,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
Max looked back and forth between them. “Do what?”
“Stand first watch,” Kitai said.
Durias glanced back at them. “Do you think we need to do that? I know we’re prisoners, but Lararl did give us his word that he wouldn’t harm us tonight. When the Canim give their word, they mean it.”
“It seems to me that Varg has Hunters that he sometimes employs when he needs to get around portions of his codes of behavior and honor that somehow conflict with his interests,” Tavi said. “So far, Varg seems to have used them in order to protect the spirit of those codes, if not their letter. But it occurs to me that it would be a very small step for a Warmaster to employ his Hunters to get around the spirit while preserving the letter, if you see what I mean.”
Durias frowned. “You don’t think it’s possible that you’re judging Lararl wrongly?”
“Of course it’s possible,” Tavi said. “But it isn’t probable. He gave us his oath of peace tonight, then stuck us on a roof in these conditions and left us here without shelter, food, or water. He’s keeping the letter of his word. But not the spirit of it. So we’re standing watch.”
“I am standing watch,” Kitai said. “Your lips are still blue.”
Tavi frowned and glanced at Max’s dim form. “Are they?”
“Can’t tell,” Max said. “Too dark in here.”
“There, you see?” Kitai said. “I am the only one qualified to judge.”
She pushed Durias’s cloak aside and slipped out of the shelter.
The rest of them had been Legion long enough to know what to do next.
They were asleep in seconds.
Tavi woke later. The rock of the tower was hard and uncomfortable under his back, but not painfully so-he hadn’t been sleeping longer than two or three hours. The stone was cool, but true to Max’s word, the air inside the little shelter was still toasty warm. Tavi had passed worse nights in the field with the Legion.
The cloak over the dome’s doorway moved aside, and Kitai appeared in the door. She padded silently to Tavi’s side, knelt, and kissed him. Then she gave him a sleepy-eyed smile and stretched out on the floor. “Your turn.”
Tavi gathered up his cloak, dry after several hours in the warmth inside the shelter, and threw it on over his shoulders before heading out into the cold and the mild sleet atop the tower. He drew the hood over his head and looked around the top of the blocky building, identifying Varg’s silent form, crouched at the westernmost edge of the building. Tavi padded quietly across the wet, cold stone to stop several feet away from Varg, where he could still see the enormous Cane in his peripheral vision, and stared out over the sight below them.
Lararl’s command building overlooked the fortifications below, where the battle against the Vord was raging. As far as Tavi could tell, it was going at precisely the same furious pitch as it had hours before. Still the Shuarans, in their blue-and-black armor, fought to hold the battlements, and still the Vord came on in a gleaming black tide.
From above, though, it was possible to make out far more detail.
The Vord had changed from those Tavi had seen and heard described before. Previously, he had encountered only the many-legged Keepers, bizarre, spiderlike creatures who haunted the green-glowing
But he had also read his uncle’s reports concerning the Vord warrior-creatures, enormous things each the size of a bull, hunched and crablike in their thick shells, with huge pincer-claws and buzzing wings that could launch them skyward.
These were different.
All of the Vord attacking the fortifications were covered in the same slippery-looking black chitin, with the same eerie angularity to it, the same oddly shaped limbs-but the similarities went no further than that.
Some of the Vord went upon two legs, monstrosities more than ten feet tall, and impossibly wide. They moved with slow, ponderous steps, lifting stones that must have weighed well over a hundred pounds, and hurled them at the fortifications like an idle boy flinging rocks into a pond. Some of them went mostly on all fours, their lower limbs freakishly oversized and overdeveloped. They were able to make tremendous leaps of forty and fifty and sixty feet at a time, like huge, hideous frogs, or fiendishly oversized crickets, attacking by slamming their spine- covered bodies violently into their foes.
The majority of the Vord in the assault had powerful shoulders and heavy arms, ending not in grasping hands but in vicious, scythelike hooks. The head was elongated, apparently eyeless, though it sported a nightmarishly oversized mouthful of curving black fangs-a bizarre fusion of wolf and mantis.
Tavi realized with a start that the Vord had somehow taken inspiration from the foe that they faced.
They had made themselves more like the Canim.
