First Lord's Fury (Codex Alera 6)

"Aye, First Spear," Schultz said, and began bawling assignments to his men.

Fidelias watched it happen and shook his head. "Never rains but it pours."

Between the mopping-up combat in the courtyard, the ongoing trumpet cries to attack, and the sound of the bloody flare all but burning a hole into the flat stone roof of the barn, Fidelias didn't hear the approaching windstream until Princeps Octavian had all but slammed into him. Flying backward and upside down, Octavian was hauling Kitai through the air, her back against his chest as he came in to land in the courtyard. His heels struck first, digging a furrow in the hard soil, then slipped out from beneath him. He slid across the ground on his back until he fetched up against the inner side of the steadholt's wall with a grunt.

"Marcus!" Octavian bellowed. "She's hurt! Get a medico over here, now!" He thrashed his way a bit awkwardly to his feet, lowering Kitai gently to the ground as he went. He spun and threw his right arm up, dragging with it a sheet of earth and stone more than a foot thick, raising it up into a shielding dome just as a flash of green-white lighting ripped out of the mists. It struck the improvised wall and shattered it, but when the debris settled, Octavian remained standing over the wounded Marat woman. "Bloody crows, Marcus!" he bellowed. "I'm a little busy here!"

Marcus kicked a team of singulares and a Prime Cohort medico to rush over to Kitai. As soon as Octavian saw that, he took two steps and leapt off the ground and into flight, vanishing into the mists. A second windstream, far larger and more violent, swept over the courtyard, clearly in pursuit.

"Marcus!" bellowed Araris in an iron voice from within the barn. "I need more men here!"

"First Spear, First Spear!" said a young legionare frantically. He made a series of frantic gestures.

"Bloody crows, boy, I'm standing right here!" Marcus snapped. "Tell me!"

"Enemy infantry," the boy panted. "At least thirty thousand, here in two minutes. Enemy airborne troops have been delayed by the Knights Pisces, and will arrive at the same time, approximately seven thousand. Sir, what do we do?"

Two minutes?

Two minutes?

Nearly forty thousand vord were inbound - and his own troops were scattered all over the terrain, out of sight of each other in the fog. They would be swallowed whole in detail.

Bloody crows, what had Octavian gotten him into?

If both he and that young man survived the day, which was looking increasingly unlikely, Fidelias thought, he might be forced to kill him on general principles.

Chapter 53~54

Chapter 53

"Count Calderon," Ehren said, "I know not everything is as it seems. But I would truly love to know why the fact that we're about to get crushed by that pair of vordbulks is not as it seems. I mean, I thought it would have been obvious by now."

"Crows," Bernard breathed quietly. His face was tight with tension. "They must have missed the Queen."

"What?" Ehren asked.

A seventy-pound boulder went whizzing past them, hurled by one of the hulking behemoths accompanying the vordbulks. It missed them by no more than a foot and smashed into the wall of the tower behind them, sending a webwork of cracks into the stone.

"Bloody crows!" Ehren cried.

"The High Lords and..." He swallowed, and seemed to ignore the near miss. "And my wife learned where the vord Queen was."

"Oh," Ehren said quietly. The obvious move would have been to attempt to end the war immediately - a decapitating strike. Had it happened, the vord would not now be operating with such focus and direction. It was, therefore, reasonable to assume that the strike had failed. Given how critical it was, Ehren judged it unlikely that the High Lords would have done anything but fight to the death. And Countess Amara, while a skilled windcrafter, had been by far the person least able to defend herself against a threat like the one the Queen represented.

"I see," Ehren said quietly. A moment later, he added, "I think it's more likely that the Queen escaped than that they were all killed, Your Excellency. I'm sure your wife is all right."

Bernard shook his head. "Thanks for lying, son."

Ehren grimaced.

"Well," Bernard said. He turned to look at the damage the boulder had done to the tower. "If the High Lords haven't done the job, we'll just have to handle it ourselves, won't we?"

He disappeared inside the tower and emerged a moment later with a great, black bow as long as he was tall, its staves thicker than Ehren's forearms, and a war quiver packed with arrows. Count Calderon took a deep breath. Then he grunted and bent the great bow, leaning into it with the whole of his body. He strained with fury-born strength to bend the bow far enough to set its string - which was more like a cable as thick as Ehren's smallest finger.

Calderon let up on the bow gingerly and let out a huge exhale. The veins on his neck were standing out, and his face was red with the exertion. Ehren looked around nervously as Count Calderon readied the weapon.

The battle on the outer wall was still going well, as battles went, the legionares holding steady. The fight on the northern bluff had slowed the vordbulk dramatically - Cereus and the Citizens he led had been steadily assaulting the monstrous beast with every form of furycraft imaginable.

Dozens of square yards of its chitinous hide had been burned away. Trees swayed and bowed, lashing out with their limbs like enormous clubs, but the black chitin-armor seemed to absorb the impacts readily. Spikes rose from the ground to pierce the vordbulk's feet, but the beast had begun dragging its feet forward, shattering the stone spikes before they could pierce it - and anyone coming close enough to the enormous creature to attempt to bring up the spikes beneath one of the monster's planted feet was viciously assaulted by the vord protecting it.

Though it bled from scores of wounds, the vordbulk had not been killed, only slowed; and the furycrafters working against the beast were growing tired. It was an incredibly durable creature, and not simply because of its size. Despite the massive furycraft being brought to bear against it, it simply hunched its shoulders until the surges of power waned and took another giant's step forward. But this much had been done: The Citizens had stalled the creature for the moment, ruining the notion of a simultaneous assault on both sides.

On the south bluff, the vordbulk had not even been slowed down. Within moments, it would be in position to fall and crush the outer walls, simultaneously breaching the defenses and creating a fleshy ramp that the vord mantises could use to enter.