Tavi’s gaze went to the fortress’s defenders. The Shuaran warriors favored axes over the curving swords commonly carried by Varg’s Narashans, and they used the weapons against the armored chitin of the Vord with crushing effect. The Shuarans worked methodically, in teams of two and three warriors, as the Vord tried to breach the walls. One or two warriors would pin a single Vord with spears fitted with heavy crosspieces, while a third, wielding an axe, would close in for a killing stroke.
Here and there among the defenders, Tavi spotted the figure of a black-robed ritualist, wearing the usual hooded mantle. These ritualists, however, did not sport the usual garment of pale leather Tavi had become accustomed to. Instead, theirs were made of gleaming black scales of chitin. The ritualists, Tavi realized, wore mantles made from the flesh of their foes.
Which meant that the pale leather of the mantles Sarl and the Narashan ritualists had been wearing was made of…
Tavi shuddered.
As he watched, one of the ritualists thrust a clawed paw-hand into a leather basket-pouch at his side, and withdrew it soaked in dark crimson blood. He flung the blood out over the edge of the battlements he defended just as a number of Vord scaled the top simultaneously, threatening to create a breach in the defenses. Tavi couldn’t hear the Cane from his position, but he saw the ritualist lift his muzzle to the night sky, jaws parted in a primal howl.
There was a flicker in the air as the droplets of blood flew, green-gold sparkles, and suddenly a cloud of sickly green gas billowed forth from the empty air. The gas rolled out in an instant, engulfing the threatening Vord-who simply dissolved, convulsing in agony, their bodies liquefying with terrifying abruptness as the green cloud touched them. The ritualist lifted the bloodstained paw-hand and slammed it down, as if smashing a book down upon an insect, and the green cloud descended over the edge of the battlements just as abruptly.
Tavi had seen some of his own men slain by an identical ritual-working during his two-year battle with the Narashans. He had no qualms with watching the Vord be slain, but he was just as glad that he did not see the carnage that the ritualist had just visited upon whatever creatures were unfortunate enough to be below that section of the wall.
The Shuarans were professionals. Their tactics were calculating, brutal, and efficient. They were not battling the Vord, so much as simply butchering them as they attained the walls. From what Tavi could see, forty, perhaps even fifty Vord fell for every single casualty suffered by the Shuaran warriors.
Even so, he thought, the Vord stretched to the horizon.
They could afford to pay that price.
Tavi did not think that the Shuarans could.
“Tell me what you see, Aleran,” Varg rumbled quietly.
Tavi glanced over at the grizzled Warmaster. Varg had unrolled the heavy cloak carried by all Narashan warriors. He crouched on his haunches, the cloak completely covering him, the sleet and rain sheeting down it to the surface of the tower. His hood covered all but the last inch or two of his muzzle.
“The Vord aren’t using any taken,” Tavi said quietly.
Varg grunted and nodded to Tavi’s left. “Down there.”
Tavi looked that way, to the first street above the active battlements. He spotted a number of young Canim there, adolescents and children mostly, spread out every ten or twenty feet. All of them bore short clubs and crouched beneath their cloaks against the rain, just as Varg was doing.
“Sentries,” Tavi surmised. “To keep the takers from getting into the city.”
“Takers smell bad,” Varg said. “Make odd noise when they move. Young ones have the sharpest senses. And the takers are only a threat if one is not aware of them. Lararl has the young ones positioned all over the city.” The Cane turned to look at Tavi, eyes gleaming within the depths of his hood. “But you know that is not what I mean.”
“No.” Tavi returned his eyes to the battle. “The Vord aren’t using aerial troops. They could have created half a dozen breaches by now if they were, and forced Lararl to fall back to his next line. Instead, they’re just throwing away tens of thousands of their soldiers. They’re up to something.”
Varg turned his gaze back to the fight. “When we were both young, I tried to teach Lararl to play
Tavi shook his head. “Will he truly attack your people?”
Varg nodded.
“With a foe like this out to destroy us all, he would truly put others of his own kind to death. It seems foolish to me,” Tavi said.
Varg shrugged. “Shuar could barely produce enough food to sustain itself in the best of years. They imported food from other ranges. From Lararl’s perspective, my people are doomed to death by slow starvation in any case. It is a dishonorable way to die. Far preferable for their lives to be spent in a useful purpose.”
“Were I Lararl, I would reach for every possible weapon I could find against a threat like that.”
“Were you Lararl, the one whose decisions defended your people’s children, you would use the weapons you knew you could trust to destroy the enemy. You would be forced to choose who would live and who would die, Aleran. And given a choice between sacrificing the lives of your own people and the lives of neighboring enemies who were also in danger, you would protect your people, just as I would protect mine-and Lararl protects his.” Varg shook his head. “He fears that he will fail his people’s trust in him. It makes him almost blind. He cannot see even that much.”
Tavi sighed. “Even though he’s just told you he intends to murder all of your people, including your own son, 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.”
