Princeps' Fury (Codex Alera 5)

Tavi glanced around the interior of the hive again, but there was no escape. Warrior Vord filled the doorway. Spiders continued to crawl from the walls-and ceiling, it seemed. He would never be able to get out. He'd known it was a risk, that his proposal to the Vord could be rejected-but he truly hadn't believed that it would happen. The cold intellect of the Vord, from everything he knew about them, should have compelled them to protect their nearest hive and kin.

But what drove this queen was... entirely too human. It was a devotion to her senior queen-to her mother, Tavi realized, his senses flushed with an intensity of emotion coming from the junior queen. That was mixed with a horrible and abiding need that was closer to physical hunger than anything else-a need to expand, to overcome, to grow. And mixed with all of that was contempt-contempt for humanity, for the creatures that fell before the united might of the Vord.

Tavi realized that he was never going to leave the hive, and suddenly felt very, very tired.

Well.

Well, then.

He had been held in contempt before. If there was one thing Tavi knew, it was how to take advantage of being underestimated.

Tavi took a deep breath and tightened his hand on his sword. Then he reached to the short blade on his right hip, and drew it slowly into his left hand. Enough earthcrafting should give him the strength to bull through the wall of wax spiders. He'd be bitten as he did it, many times. The poison would kill him, but not for a minute or two at least.

He had another advantage: The cramped quarters inside the hive, combined with the reinforcements blocking the only exit, would prevent the queen from escaping every bit as much as it trapped Tavi. She wouldn't be able to simply cut and run.

He'd have to kill the queen quickly, with all the windcrafting he could muster. He remembered well the blinding speed a Vord queen possessed-but he would have another advantage she probably did not expect. He could accept a lethal stroke if it allowed him to deliver one in return. Metalcrafting would let him ignore the pain of a death blow long enough to deliver a killing strike of his own.

Provided he was fast enough, this hive would become her tomb. With the queen dead and the Vord undirected, Kitai, Max, and the others should have a real chance to escape. And as long as Crassus and the First Aleran had done their jobs, Varg and the Canim should escape as well, to assist Alera against the common foe.

Really, he thought, planning became a great deal simpler and easier when one didn't have the additional bother of working out how to survive said plan.

"It looks like I'm not the only one to make a flawed assumption," Tavi told the queen quietly.

Her eyes narrowed, and he felt the quivering pressure of her mind on his thoughts again.

Her eyes widened.

Princeps Gaius Octavian called upon rock and wind and steel and shifted his body forward into the rush that would-if he was lucky-kill them both.

Chapter 35~36

Chapter 35

The windcrafting infused Tavi's senses with the slowed-time alertness of fury-born speed, or he might not have seen what was about to happen.

The Vord turned on one another.

The nearest Cane-form Vord, the one Tavi had wounded, suddenly jerked and was flung viciously forward as the Vord behind it tore into its back with its talons. Its blood splattered the walls of the entry tunnel as it fell into the open space at the center of the hive, and stained Tavi's boots as the newly dead Vord slid to a halt at his heels. In an instant, three more of the Cane-form Vord bounded into the room, and Tavi realized what had happened.

Varg's Hunters had arrived.

The meaning of the odd, lumpy packs each of the Hunters had carried finally became clear to Tavi. The silent Canim had clad themselves in Vord chitin, somehow fastening enough of the green-black material to themselves to pass for true Vord, at least momentarily-and now they were inside the queen's hive beside him.

"Tavar," growled the eldest of the three Hunters.

"Take her!" Tavi cried.

He surged forward with the Hunters at his side, and the Vord queen let out a piercing shriek.

The wall of wax spiders shivered and collapsed toward them, breaking in a wave of flailing legs and dripping fangs. The spiders bounded through the air, raced across the ground, and skittered across the walls and ceiling to attack. Tavi had an instant to be terrified by the sheer number of spiders, then they were upon him.

He struck one spider out of the air as it leapt at his face, his sword moving with the speed and power and deadly sharpness of all the furycraft at his command. He felled the second and third and fourth in less than a second-there were so many of the creatures that even in the dreamlike slow motion of windcrafted alacrity, there was no time to think, ponder, or plan. He could only react, and strive to make his every movement work against the enemy.

The air was full of slashed corpses of the wax spiders, with spraying blood and severed insect limbs, but despite the web of steel Tavi wove with his swords as he strode forward, the Vord began to break through. He felt one slam into his side, and a sharp, loud pinging sound told him that his armor had held against the spider's fangs. Another seized onto his boot, simply clinging, and threw him off his balance.

Then three more dropped onto his helmet and shoulders, and he twisted wildly as venom-dripping fangs flashed by not an inch from his eyes.

Something slammed against his shoulder, a heavy blow that rang with steel on steel, and one of the Hunter's battle chains crushed the spider beneath it. Tavi managed to turn so that his unwanted passengers were more exposed to the Cane, and several more whiplashing flicks of the heavy chain cleaned the spiders from him.

The other two Hunters took up positions on his left and right, oddly curved swords in hand, flinging the heavy spikes that had wreaked such havoc in Aleran encounters with them during the war in the Vale. Tavi regained his momentum, his own blades whirling, killing-and suddenly found himself face-to-face with the Vord queen.

She moved with a horrible, arachnid grace, and at such speed that even from within his windcrafting, Tavi felt his body responding sluggishly by comparison. Her cloak flew one way as she darted to one side, but the move proved to be a feint, and the hem of the garment cracked like a whip as she reversed her move and raked her talons at Tavi's thigh.

Tavi couldn't respond in time to avoid the blow, so he simply drove his blade hard at the queen's throat.

Her speed astounded him, even as white-hot fire enveloped his leg. She managed to get a hand into the way of the blow, pushing the sword's tip down, but not entirely away from herself-the Aleran steel bit into the pale, rigid-looking flesh in a shower of scarlet-and-cerulean sparks. Her skin, then, was still Vord chitin-it merely looked like human flesh. His sword did not plunge deeply through the armor, despite the earthcraft and metalcraft behind it. An inch or two of blade sank into her abdomen and drew a howl of surprise and rage from the queen.