Princeps Fury

CHAPTER 27

Amara and Bernard took their next major risk about an hour before sundown.

They had been drawn to what had been a small but obviously prosperous steadholt by the presence of several of the lizard-shaped Vord who loitered outside the place, instead of rushing about on the hunt, as had all the creatures they had seen thus far. Amara and Bernard had slipped past the guards and into the steadholt, to find that the Vord had overrun the place and set it up as some kind of base of operations.

A vordknight crouched at the peak of the steadholt’s main hall, as motionless as any statue. The croach had spread over most of the ground and was growing up the walls of every building. The steadholt’s well was completely blocked off by the waxy substance. One of the doors to the barn had been torn from its hinges and lay on the ground, already buried in the wax.

Pale wax spiders glided busily back and forth, tending the croach as bees might their honeycomb. All of them that Amara could see emerged from the shadowy interior of the barn and returned to it once their tasks were complete.

Bernard drew close enough to her side to touch her and pressed his fingers lightly against one of her ankles. She tapped his forearm with her fingertips twice, lightly, to acknowledge his signal. Then, one at a time, they slipped on the broadened shoes that they had made specifically for walking on the croach. The waxy substance served the Vord as sustenance and as a kind of sentinel. The weight of an adult human would break the resinous surface, spilling out the faintly luminous liquid within like blood and immediately drawing the attention of the wax spiders who stood watch over it.

Bernard and Octavian, in one of their regular written planning sessions, had between them come up with an idea for broad-bottomed shoes that would spread out the weight of an adult onto a larger surface, reducing the stress upon the croach. With them, the two should be able to walk, carefully, on the croach without breaking its surface or summoning a swarm of its guardians.

In theory.

In practice, the shoes were bloody difficult to use, and Amara suddenly felt very glad that she had insisted that Bernard have a swift-release mechanism built into the pads of leather and still-flexible wood. If they didn’t work the way that they had hoped, Amara wanted to be able to get the ungainly things off her feet as rapidly as possible.

With their stealth-craftings still wrapped securely about them, they walked-waddled, really, Amara thought- along the inner wall of the overrun steadholt toward the cavernous barn, until they finally stepped onto the croach itself. Amara moved as carefully as she ever had in her life, stepping forward with the awkward motion the shoes demanded, an unusually high lift of the knee, then the first foot forward onto the glowing surface, then the whole of her weight brought slowly to bear upon the forward foot, so that the broad pads of the shoes spread her weight. She supposed that were she a character in a dramatic tale, she’d have one hand on her sword and one eye upon the nearest of the spiders-but that was perfect nonsense. She was a great deal more interested in making sure that she kept her balance and that the edges of the shoes didn’t come down at too sharp an angle, tearing the croach and revealing their presence to foes who were, in all likelihood, too numerous to fight successfully in any case.

Amara took one step, then another. No whistling, warbling outcry went up around her. She paused to look back as Bernard stepped onto the croach. Her husband was a great deal larger than she was, and heavier, and his shoes proportionately wider-and therefore more clumsy. Even from barely more than an arm’s length away, Amara could hardly see more than his outline, but she saw him move with the same steady patience with which her husband did everything else as he stepped onto the croach behind her.

No cry went up. The shoes were working. So far.

Amara turned her focus back to her own movements, leading the way, and tried to tell herself that she was walking like a graceful, long-legged heron, and not like a waddling duck, in the broad shoes. It wasn’t far to the door of the barn-twenty feet, or a little more. Even so, it seemed to take at least an hour to walk the distance. That was ridiculous, of course, and Amara told herself so quite firmly. But her throat was so tight and her heart pounding so loudly that she wasn’t sure she could have been expected to hear herself very clearly.

It could only have been a few moments later that she pressed her back against the stone wall of the barn and leaned cautiously forward to peer inside to see what it was that the Vord were standing watch over so diligently.

It was a larder. Amara could think of no other way to describe it.

The croach was deeper there, rising in murky swirls to a foot off the stone floor of the barn and more.

People-bodies-were sealed within it. Amara could make out few details. The croach was translucent, but shapes beneath it remained murky and mercifully indistinct. The bodies were not twisted in the shapes of death. They simply lay peacefully, as though the folk who had met their deaths there had fallen asleep and been sealed into waxy tombs. Some of the more indistinct shapes, deepest in the croach, were too thin to be bodies-but they might, Amara realized, be bones, the flesh eaten from around them by the croach.

Except for three who had been standing, sealed into the croach where it lined the wall behind them. They had been two men and a woman, their limbs restrained by the waxy resin-and their bodies had been damaged badly before they died.

They had, Amara realized, been tortured.

She took swift stock of the three bodies. They were not clad as holders, but in the greens and browns, in the cloaks and leathers of woodsmen, even as she and her husband were. In fact, taking into account that their faces had been distorted by pain as they died…

She felt a chill run through her.

She recognized them all. She’d been at the Academy with the young woman, Anna, who had been from a steadholt near Forcia. She’d gone through her basic training as a Cursor with Anna, before graduating the Academy and being apprenticed to Fidelias.

The Vord had captured, tortured, and murdered three of her fellow Cursors, men and women chosen specifically for this mission for their ability to remain unheard and unseen. For all the good it had done them.

Her belly twisted nauseatingly, and she turned her face away. For a second, she fought to control her stomach. Then she forced herself to look again, to think.

Two more spiders, she realized, were busy repairing a trail of damage in the croach inside the building-footprints. Human footprints. They led from the doors to the dead scouts.

The Vord were without pity but also without rancor. None of the other bodies showed signs of torment. They were simply… devoured.

Alerans had done this, she realized.

Alerans had done this.

Amara saw in her mind’s eye the Alerans surrounding the Vord queen at the battle of Ceres and shivered again-this time with raw rage.

She felt her husband’s presence next to her, the brush of his body against hers as he looked at the inside of the barn as well. She felt it when the same realization reached him, when his body tensed suddenly and one of his knuckles made the softest of creaks beneath his gloves as his hand tightened into a furious fist.

She touched his wrist, willing her rage into frozen stillness, and the two turned to begin making their torturously slow way across the croach again, and out of the steadholt. They took off the croach shoes and ghosted back into the countryside. Without a word, Amara stepped back and let her husband take the lead.

Whoever had tortured the scouts had done so within hours of when Amara had found the bodies. Whoever the culprits had been, they were obviously tied in some fashion to the Vord, to the Alerans who had been helping them-the source of the Vord’s furycraft. They were therefore a lead to the heart of Bernard and Amara’s mission,