First Lord's Fury (Codex Alera 6)

"Where?" Kitai snapped, taking several rapid steps from the others, looking left and right at the ground beneath her.

Tavi focused his thoughts upon the earth beneath him. Subtle though such travel might be, his flight to the command tent had been far swifter, and he felt the foremost earthcrafting coming toward him, several yards away. Instead of answering, he stopped, took a quick pair of steps, and with the power of the earth itself behind his arms and shoulders, thrust the burning blade straight down into the soil beneath him. The blade struck home, though he could tell only from the sudden quivering jerks that ran through the steel to his hand, like the wriggling motion of a fish caught upon a hook that ran through the line and pole to the hand of an angler. He withdrew, the motion effortless with the burning sword, and struck again only inches from the first blow.

The earth beneath him suddenly collapsed downward in a circle perhaps ten feet across. One moment, he was standing upon solid ground, and the next it was falling from beneath him. One hand, formed into a stiffening claw, thrust up from the loose soil. Tavi tried not to take note of the fact that the hand was a woman's and not young, forcing the fact of what he had just done to the back of his mind.

"Aleran!" cried Kitai's voice. Her anxious face appeared at the top of the sudden pit Tavi found himself in.

"I'm all ri - " Tavi began.

The enemy earthcrafter following in the wake of the first suddenly stumbled out of the earth five feet from Tavi, abruptly finding himself standing in the open air at the bottom of the pit. Tavi stared at him for a motionless instant of recognition. He hadn't seen the massively muscled, lank-haired man who had appeared, a thug named Renzo, since commencement activities at the Academy. The enormous young man was perhaps a year older than Tavi and weighed two of him. An extremely accomplished earthcrafter, Renzo had been stupid enough to be a friend of Kalarus Brencis Minoris, which doubtless explained the steel slaver's collar about his mountainous neck. Tavi had beaten Renzo into screaming surrender before he'd had use of any furycrafting at all, and the act still shamed him in his memory.

The instant of hesitation gave Renzo a chance to react. He flicked a hand, and the earth surged up around Tavi, as if to bury him alive.

Tavi recovered his balance and immediately drew strength from the earth - specifically, from the earth trying to smother him, weakening the furies responding to Renzo's command. He waded forward, through the failing power of those furies, and, with an instant of razor-sharp focus, cut cleanly through Renzo's hastily raised blade, the steel collar about the huge man's neck - and the neck beneath it. Renzo's body dropped like a slaughtered hog's, still quivering.

Time slowed.

There was little blood. The blazing sword in Tavi's hand had cauterized the cuts even as he made them. The courtyard bully's broad hands twitched and spasmed. His head had fallen facedown, and Tavi could see his mouth moving for a few seconds, as if to spit out the dirt upon his tongue. That didn't last long. A heartbeat, two, then there was stillness.

Renzo had been an appallingly petty evil from the last days of Tavi's childhood.

Tavi felt sick at how easy it had been to murder him.

His thoughts and focus were, for a few seconds, entirely shattered, and so, when the vord Queen exploded from the earth behind Renzo's corpse, she nearly killed him in the first instant of their meeting.

Tavi seized upon a windcrafting, weak though it was down in the sinkhole, to speed his perceptions. Even with the crafting, there was time for no more than a bizarre, flash impression of a beautiful face, glittering black eyes, a tattered old dress - and then there was a flicker of motion as a shadowy blade darted toward his heart.

Tavi had enough time to think, I didn't feel it coming, it's not made of metal. Fortunately, his reflexes hadn't had any metalcrafting to rely upon when he first trained with a weapon, and they hadn't needed the advance warning. His own burning blade caught the dark weapon in the vord Queen's hand, defeated the Queen's disengage, then suddenly slipped and wobbled as the resistance of the other weapon vanished. The dark blade curled in her hand like a striking serpent and drove into his belly. It pierced his armor as though it were made of soft cloth instead of battle steel, and he felt himself thrown back hard against the layers of a stone shelf lining the pit wall behind him.

The vord Queen came at him, her eyes shining with a terrible intensity, but he responded with the instant, deadly reflexes of a man who had been wise enough to embrace the cold, insensible strength of his armor and weaponry, who felt no pain though his body was trapped against the rough wall, impaled upon a deadly blade. The vord Queen was swift enough to avoid having her head taken from her shoulders, but only just. Tavi's burning sword left a wound in her scalp and seared away a mass of thin white hairs. She blurred away from him, letting out a metallic shriek, and simply bounded up out of the pit.

An explosion of light and furious sound bright enough to hurt his eyes - odd, that metalcrafting didn't seem to offer any protection from that source of pain - made the shape of the disappearing Queen a silhouette and left her profile burned onto his eyes in bright color as the rest of the world went dark.

Every instinct in him screamed to get out of the hole, get into action, move, move, move. But he didn't. When the Queen had leapt from the pit, she hadn't been holding a sword. Whether he could feel the pain or not, given the rock at his back it was almost certain that there was a preternaturally sharp weapon still thrust into his belly, sunk into the stone behind him like a nail into wood. If he simply tore his way free, he could all but cut himself in half.

He held the blazing sword uncomfortably close to his own body, squinting down with his light-dazzled eyes, and confirmed it. There was a bar of gleaming, green-black material still thrust through the plates of his lorica. He touched a hand to it, lightly, and found that it was double-edged and as sharp as a scalpel. The lightest touch had opened flesh with a horrible, delicate ease. It looked like vord chitin and, for all that he knew, it was. When the blood from his fingers touched it, the weapon quivered, sending silver shocks of sensation through his body, though his metalcrafting kept him from experiencing it as pain.

Bloody crows. The thing was alive.

Outside the pit, the vord Queen shrieked again, the sound a brassy challenge. Explosions of fire thundered outside. People screamed. Steel rang on steel.

Tavi was having a hard time getting enough breath. It couldn't be the lungs themselves. The chitin blade's thrust had been far too low. He glanced at his fingers and saw them smeared with something tarry and green. It smelled vile. Lovely - poison, which must have been shutting down his breathing.