First Lord's Fury (Codex Alera 6)

She clenched her fists instead, forcing away the emotion. Later. She could let herself feel it later, she promised, when signs of panic among the command staff wouldn't deal gaping wounds to the legionares' morale.

She didn't know how long she held herself there, rigid and still. Only moments, surely, but they felt like hours - hours of nightmare, suddenly broken by distant, crackling reports from the night sky overhead.

Amara snapped her gaze up to see fire-spheres blossoming there in balls of grass green, arctic blue, and glacial purple. Black shapes like swarming moths flickered near and around the flaming spheres - vordknights, thousands of them. "Bernard!"

Bernard glanced at her, then up, then grinned suddenly, and the explosion of another massive salvo from the mules cast his face in a feral, almost blood-thirsty combination of light and shadow. "Trying to sneak over the wall to take out the mules in the dark, when we couldn't see them coming," he said. "But the Placidas and the northerners found them first." He pursed his lips for a moment, then said, "Glad they aren't directly overhead."

As if to punctuate Bernard's statement, the corpse of a vordknight, missing its head and two-thirds of the surface of its wings, plunged down and landed on the ground beside one of the crewmen of the mules. The crewman jumped and let out a shriek of surprise, before falling onto his rear, earning a round of frantic-edged belly laughs from his crewmates.

More vordknights appeared, beginning to dive upon the crews of the mules - but each team of Knights Flora had retreated from the wall to its assigned war engine, and they began providing their mule crews with a deadly shield of withering archery. Vordknights fell from the skies and smashed to the earth like rotten fruit. One of them came down on the small ammunition wagon of fire-spheres behind one of the mules, and it exploded in a sudden angry bellow of fire that roared out and consumed the vordknight, the wagon, the mule, its screaming crewmen, and the archers who had been protecting them. Deadly shards of wood from the shattered wagon flew out in every direction, wounding more men on either side, and Amara saw one shard no less than four feet long completely transfix one legionare's thigh, sending the man screaming to the floor of the battlements.

Amara made a gesture to the trumpeter, and the man sounded the call for an aerial attack. With a roar, hundreds of Citizens and Knights Aeris rose into the skies to do battle with the enemy in the darkness overhead. The sound of their windstreams was like the roaring of the sea crashing against stone cliffs. Each unit of Knights was led by Counts and Lords, many of them gifted in multiple disciplines of furycraft, and the number of exploding firecraftings overhead doubled and redoubled, a soaring panoply of brief-lived, swollen stars in every color imaginable. Roaring windstreams rose and fell in pitch and tone, making oddly musical harmonies amidst the flashes of chromatic fire.

Every eye in the whole of the Calderon Valley not being used to fight for survival was glued to the beautiful, deadly display.

"And now that our attention is on the sky," Bernard said, "it's time for the surprise attack. Your Lordship, if you would be so kind as to light the field."

Lord Gram stood nearby and grunted acknowledgment. Though the Princeps had put Bernard in charge of the defenses, Amara's husband had also served Gram for many years as one of the first Steadholders placed in the then-Count's service. Now Gram was a Lord (granted, his lands had been overrun by the enemy, but he was still a Lord), and her husband had made an extra effort to show Gram courtesy, despite his pained jaw. Gram didn't need it, Amara thought, and would have been perfectly comfortable following a simple order - but even in the face of ruin, Bernard had the presence of mind to be considerate. She supposed that, in a way, that sort of grace was symbolic of a great deal of what they were fighting for; the preservation of unnecessary beauty.

Gram stepped forward, lifted his hand, and casually held it out, palm up. Fire kindled in his cupped fingers, until a moment later a tiny form hovered there, just above the surface of his hand - a little feathered figure, its wings blurred into invisibility with their speed. The hot wind washing from them stirred Amara's hair. Gram whispered something to the little fire fury, and flicked his wrist. The fiery hummingbird shot off into the night, gathering speed and brightening in intensity as it flew.

It swept over the battlefield, a globe of white daylight several hundred yards across. It zipped over countless mantis warriors, and at one point blew entirely through the torso of a vordknight that had flown down to intercept it, not even slowing down.

"Bad idea," Gram said, shaking his head, "getting in Phyllis's way like that."

"Phyllis?" Bernard asked.

"Keep those teeth together, Calderon," Gram said testily. "Named her for my first wife. Hotter than any torch, couldn't sit still, and you didn't want to get in her way, either."

Amara smiled at the exchange and tracked Phyllis's progress - and within moments, she spotted the oncoming special units, exactly where Invidia had said they would be.

"Bloody blighted crows," Gram breathed, as if barely able to summon enough wind to speak.

Amara understood the feeling.

The oncoming vord were huge.

They weren't huge on the same order as a gargant. They were huge on the same order as buildings. There were half a dozen of them, each the size of three or four of the largest merchant ships. They moved on four legs, each thicker than the trunk of any tree Amara had ever seen. Their vaguely triangular heads ended in a jagged, black chitin beak that rather reminded her of that of an octopus, except large enough to hold three or four hogshead barrels. The creatures had no eyes that she could see, and their beaks simply seemed to flow up into their skulls, and from there into enormous arching fans of the same material, spreading around the titans' heads like shields. Every stride carried them a good twenty feet, and though they looked ponderous, their pace was, like a gargant's, swifter than one would expect. Dozens of mantis warriors could run beneath them at a time, and though a mantis could run faster than some horses, they passed the enormous bulks of moving black chitin only slowly.

A word from Gram halted Phyllis above the nearest bulk, and everyone on the walls who could be spared from fighting could only stare. Centurion Giraldi stepped up to the battlements beside Bernard and Gram. He stared at the bulks for a moment, and breathed, "Sir? I'd like a bigger wall now."

In the same instant, all six of the bulks raised their opened maws and let out basso bellows. They did not sound loud, precisely, but the sound shook the wall and Amara's bones with unnerving intensity.