First Lord's Fury (Codex Alera 6)

There was another vast sound - and abruptly, the great fury stood completely still. The change was startling. Rock stopped grinding against rock. Tons and tons of earth and stone ceased their rumbling, and only the sound of a few falling stones, bouncing their way down to earth, remained behind. Almost simultaneously, the howling wind within the storm clouds died. The air went still, until they and the raindrops were the only things moving. The flickering lightning began to come less frequently, and the colors changed from every wild hue imaginable to one color: green.

Vord green.

"Aleran?" Kitai called, her eyes flicking around them.

"Bloody crows," Tavi whispered. He turned to Kitai, and said, "She's trying to claim them. The vord Queen is trying to claim Garados and Thana."

"Is it possible?"

"For you or me?" Tavi shook his head. "But Alera told me that her power has a broader base than ours does. Maybe. And if she does..."

Kitai's face turned grim. "If the Queen claims two great furies, it won't matter who remains to stand against her." She eyed Tavi. "And you led her to them."

He scowled at her, and said, "Yes."

They both increased their speed.

"And you woke her up in the first place."

Tavi clenched his teeth. "Yes."

"I simply wished to be sure I correctly understood the way things are."

Tavi suppressed a sigh, ignored his growing fatigue, and pushed ahead harder, until the roar of their windstreams precluded conversation.

They found the vord Queen atop the frost-coated crown of Garados's head. She simply stood there, half-burned and naked, her head bowed and her hands spread slightly apart. Above her was what looked like a motionless vortex, where terrible winds had borne up crystals of ice and snow into a glittering spiral.

The vord Queen opened her eyes as they came into view of her. Her lips curved up into a smile that no longer looked like a mimicked expression. It contained as much bitterness, hate, and malevolent amusement as Tavi had ever seen on anyone.

"Father," the Queen said. "Mother."

Kitai's spine stiffened slightly, but she didn't speak. Moving in time with Tavi, she touched down on the rocky ground facing the Queen. The three of them made the points of an equilateral triangle.

Eerie silence reigned for several seconds. Heavy, cold drops of rain fell upon stone. Their breaths all turned to steamy mist as they exhaled.

"You're here to kill me," the vord Queen said, still smiling. "But you can't. You've tried. And in a moment, it won't matter what kind of forces you might be able to - "

"She's stalling for time," Tavi said, and reached for his windcrafting to speed his movements. His own voice sounded oddly stretched and slowed as he continued to speak.

"Hit her," he said, and slung out the hottest firecrafting he could call.

The Queen began to dart to the left - but the Marat woman hadn't needed Tavi's direction to begin the attack with him. The Queen slammed into the sheet of solid rock Kitai had called up in a half circle around her. The vord smashed through, but not before Tavi's firecrafting had scored on her, driving a shriek of pain from her lungs.

The ground trembled and lurched as she screamed.

Tavi darted forward, sword in hand. The Queen flung a sheet of fire at him, but again he trapped the blaze within the steel of his blade, heating it to scarlet-and-sapphire flame. Somewhere behind him, Kitai wrought the stone beneath the Queen into something the consistency of thick mud. One foot sank ankle deep into it, pinning her in place. Her blade swept out as Tavi closed, and their swords screamed as they crossed, a dozen times in the space of a heartbeat, a blizzard of sparks filling the air - so thickly that Tavi didn't see the Queen's foot lashing toward him until it was too late.

The kick hit him in the middle of his chest and threw him twenty feet, to fetch up against an outcropping of rock. His head slammed against it, and he bounced off to fall to the ground, his arms and legs suddenly made of pudding. He couldn't breathe. There was a deep dent in the frontal plates of his lorica.

Kitai closed on the vord Queen in a blur of shining mail and damp white hair, wielding a gladius in each hand. She waded into the fight with an elemental brutality and primal instinct that was nothing like the formal training Tavi had received, but which seemed no less dangerous. Violet and emerald sparks warred with one another as the Marat woman met the vord Queen's steel.

"This is pointless," said the Queen calmly, her alien eyes bright as she parried and cut, repelling Kitai's attacks. "It was too late when you arrived. Kill me now, and Garados and Thana both will be entirely unleashed upon the land. Do you think what Gaius Sextus did at Alera Imperia was destruction? And he had but one great fury to unleash. I have two, and more ancient, less tamed ones at that. Garados and Thana will kill every living thing on half a continent. Phrygia, Aquitaine, and Rhodes will be laid waste - as will Garrison, and the gathering of refugees there, and the barbarian tribes who have raised their hands against me."

Kitai bared her teeth, stepping away for a moment. "Better that than to let you live, let you claim them as your own."

"That presumes you have a choice, Mother."

"I am not your mother," Kitai said in a precise, cold voice. "I am nothing to you. You are less than nothing to me. You are a weed to be plucked from the earth and discarded. You are vermin to be wiped out. You are a rabid dog, to be pitied and destroyed. Show wisdom. Bare your throat. It will be swift and without pain."

The vord Queen closed her eyes for a second and flinched from the words as she hadn't from any of the blows. But when she opened them again, her voice was calm, eerily serene. "Odd. I was about to say the same thing to you." She twisted her hips and casually ripped her foot from the earth, the rock screaming protest. "Enough," she said quietly. "I should have dispatched you both at once."

There was a blur in the air, and the two came together in a fountain of sparks amidst the chiming of steel.

Tavi ground his teeth. The feeling was starting to come back to his arms and legs, but it was apparently a slow, slow process. His head hurt abominably.

This wasn't the answer. The Queen was simply too strong, too fast, too intelligent to be overcome directly. They'd had a small enough chance of killing her. Taking her alive, in order to prevent the great furies from being unleashed, was an order of magnitude closer to "impossible" than Tavi cared to attempt.

But how to beat her? With that added advantage, there was simply no way.