ape. The behemoths had bandy legs and enormous apelike arms, and they rolled forward using their forelimbs as well as their feet for locomotion. They were huge, better than twelve feet tall, and covered in plates of Vord armor that looked inches thick.
“Siege units,” Gaius murmured. “They’ll use them for breaching gates and walls, and probably to spearhead assaults.”
Ehren stared at the behemoths and shivered. “Look behind them.”
Gaius fell silent for a moment as he studied what Ehren had noticed.
Behind the first wave of Vord came an enormous line of Alerans.
They weren’t alive, of course. Thanks to the windcrafting, Ehren could see that much. Their skin was mottled with postmortem bruising, and in some cases their bodies bore disfigurements or injuries that would have rendered any human immobile. The taken holders-and the vast majority of them
“Where are the vordknights?” Ehren murmured.
“Staying out of sight, massing for an attack, most likely,” Gaius said. “They can’t have much fight left in them.”
“They’ve been harassing us all the way here,” Ehren said.
“Exactly,” Gaius said. “It takes an enormous amount of power for them to keep themselves aloft. They must eat like gargants to be able to sustain the muscle they’d need for that sort of activity-and even with the patches of
“The queen, you mean?” asked Ehren.
Gaius nodded. “She is the key to the entire battle.” He fell silent again as they watched the Vord swarm over the plains toward the capital.
“So many of them,” Ehren breathed.
For an instant, the First Lord’s eyes glittered with a wild, fey light. “Aren’t there, though.” He nodded and turned to one of the Legion trumpeters at hand. “Signal the first attack.”
The courier nodded and raised his trumpet. Its call sounded clear over the quiet city, and in its wake the Legions roared.
Thousands of Citizens stood among their ranks, called forth to fight for their land, to demonstrate the obligation that went with the privileges of their title. Among the Citizenry, earthcrafting was by far the most common talent, and now those Citizens unleashed their furies upon the Vord.
Just ahead of the Vord ranks, the ground erupted, swelling into hillocks and blisters of stone that burst to disgorge furies of the earth. Gargants, wolves, serpents, great dogs, and nameless things-both beautiful and hideous-came bounding and slithering and charging out of the very soil of the land, to fall upon the first wave of the alien horde.
The battle that ensued had a ghastly sort of beauty to it. The Aleran furies, like statuary come to frenzied life, slammed into the Vord. Furies of the earth, though not swift, were viciously strong and difficult to actually harm-and the Vord were packed in close to one another as they came for Alera Imperia. Ehren watched as a bear made of black-and-grey marble slammed its paws down with methodical precision, crushing a Vord at every blow. A gargant of flint and clay thundered into the Vord ranks without being noticeably slowed, leaving destruction in its wake. A great sandstone serpent wound swiftly around one Vord after another, crushing the howling creatures in its coils and slithering on. The earth furies broke Vord quadrupeds like toys, and shrugged off blow after blow in response.
The behemoths, though, proved tougher than the Vord-lizards. Ehren saw one of them accept a pair of hammerblows from the great bear without flinching, and in response it simply bent and heaved the fury’s form up off the ground. The granite was riven and shattered, and a few seconds later, the “crack” of protesting stone reached the citadel. The behemoth smashed the bear-form down to the ground, where it crumbled into motionless rubble.
Gaius winced.
“Are you all right, sire?” Ehren asked at once.
“Just feeling sympathy for whoever called out that bear fury,” the First Lord replied. “That sort of thing… leaves a mark.”
Ehren turned his eyes back to the battle and watched for several moments more as the Vord reached the earth furies and simply enfolded them, pouring around them, all but ignoring their presence as dozens of their fellows were crushed. Earth furies could only focus on a task for as long as the one who compelled them, and as the earthcrafters who called them forth began to grow more weary, their furies began to move more slowly and with less purpose. Here and there, a behemoth would meet a fury-those battles ended only one way. The enormous Vord had to be possessed of absolutely awesome strength, to so deal with beings of living stone.
“Enough,” Gaius said. “Sound the recover.”
Again, the trumpet blast rang over the city, and at once the earth furies began to recede into the stone. Down on the walls, Ehren saw exhausted earthcrafters dropping down to sit with their backs against the battlements, while Legion runners brought them water-and while medics hauled away no few Citizens who had collapsed, presumably of exhaustion or because their furies had been ravaged by the behemoths.
Thousands of the enemy had been slain-but they poured forward, unaffected and unslowed, on the last several hundred yards of their approach to the city walls, through the rough wooden buildings and shanties that surrounded them.
“Fire it,” Gaius said calmly.
At another signal, flame bloomed up in a hundred places at once, and a wind sighed down from above and began to blow more and more strongly. Within a minute, fire had leapt up to raging proportions within the wooden outlying buildings, and completely engulfed the leading elements of the Vord advance. Smoke and heat and flame made it impossible to see what was happening within, but Ehren could vividly imagine the damage that the inferno was wreaking among the Vord.
The horde suddenly stopped in its tracks-by the tens of thousands, they simply ceased moving forward at the precise same instant. A moment later, the closer elements of the enemy force withdrew slightly from the flames.
And waited.
“Mmm,” Gaius said, nodding. “The queen is nearby, to so control them. Let’s see if she’ll send her captured crafters to deal with the problem.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the horde continued to advance behind the front ranks, spreading out to the sides, slowly filling in along the outer edges of the ring of flame. It took only moments for their easternmost elements to reach the banks of the Gaul, the river that flowed past the capital. Then the Vord focused on expanding their lines to the west. The enormous black force was slowly engulfing the city.
After a quarter of an hour had passed, Gaius murmured, “Apparently not.” He turned to a nearby Knight, and murmured, “Inform Lord Aquitaine of the disposition of the enemy.”
The man saluted and took to the air at once, flying toward the north side of the city, on the far side of the horde.
Ehren swallowed. “What are we going to do, sire?”
“The same thing they are, Cursor,” Gaius said calmly. “We wait.”
It took the rest of the day and the first three hours of night for the outbuildings to burn down. Smoke hung in a haze over the city below them, and if that wasn’t enough, fog had begun to roll up off the river. The citadel almost seemed to float among clouds-clouds lit hellishly from below by the burning buildings of the capital. The crows wheeled overhead all the while, chuckling and croaking to one another in the darkness.
Gaius had retired to the antechamber, where Sireos did what he could to fortify the dying First Lord. At Ehren’s insistence, he’d eaten another meal and was dozing on a couch when horn calls blared up from the unseen city below, ghostly in the mist.
