Princeps' fury (65 page)

Tavi drew his sword and flung himself from the plunging taurg as the beast began to ride through the scattered and reeling
legionares
who had been driven out of position and away from their various centuries.
“Legionares!”
he bellowed. “To me!”

“Captain!” called a dazed
legionare.

“Form up on me!” Tavi called to the scattered soldiers. “You, you, you, you’re spear leaders! Line them up!
Legionares
, fall in on this line!”

Once he had the men organized into a fighting century, a block ten files long and eight
legionares
deep, he sent them forward, to the support of the men already fighting. He did it over and over, until the scattered soldiers were accounted for, and realized as he did that the Vord had imitated the enemy yet again. Tavi’s group might have hunted down and killed the nearby queen a few days before, but the Vord were returning the compliment—the taken Shuarans, it seemed, had focused their efforts upon killing the centurions within each century. Crested helms lay far more thickly among the fallen Alerans than they should have and in the press of battle, without the leadership of the men wearing them, the organization vital to the Legion’s order of battle had frayed.

The additional centuries helped to stiffen the lines, though Tavi knew that it would only be for a few moments—fortunately, those moments were enough.

The air screamed as forty Knights Aeris swept down upon the battle. Tavi lifted his sword, signaling Crassus, who flew at the head of the Knights—each of whom flew paired with another Knight, carrying a third armored form between them.

“Crassus!” Tavi shouted into the din of battle, pointing to the walls overlooking the bottleneck. “On the wall!”

But the young Tribune hadn’t needed Tavi’s gesticulations to see where his help was needed. Signing instructions to his men, Crassus touched down on the wall overlooking one side of the breech, along with half of his flight. The other half landed on the other side, where each pair of Knights Aeris deposited the men they’d brought to the fight—the Knights Ignus of the First Aleran.

Tavi couldn’t see what happened from his vantage point on the ground, behind the Legion’s wall of shields, but heartbeats later, there was an enormous roar and hellish blue-white light flared ahead of him, burning the black silhouette of the massed ranks into his vision. The Legion let out a shout of exultation at the return of their Knights, and surged forward, driving the Vord back into the sudden vacuum the Knights Ignus had burned into their ranks.

Tavi sprinted up to the earthworks to join Crassus, but by the time he got there, the situation was in hand—at least for the moment. The Vord had reeled back from the breach, and every time they began to press in more closely, one of the Knights Ignus unleashed a blast of fire in their midst.

“Max is coming,” Crassus panted to Tavi. His face was streaked with sweat from the effort of his recent furycrafting. He turned to point back toward the city, where Max and a column of armored figures were marching at the quick step from the Legion camp outside the city walls. “He’s bringing the engineers and our Knights Terra. We’ll close up the breach and—”

On the outer earthworks, Canim horns blared and brayed, and at that signal, dozens of ritualists appeared among the Canim on the walls. All of the hooded figures threw back their pale mantles, dipped their hands into the pouches of blood they wore slung at their sides, and cast scarlet droplets into the air. Again, Tavi wasn’t in position to see the results of the working, but he saw the great, billowing clouds of greenish mist form and fall, and heard the screams of agony among the Vord as it descended upon them, scouring the earthen walls clean of attackers.

“Form up!” bellowed a strident voice from the breach below. “Crows take your idiot eyes, form up! Dress the ranks before they hit us again!”

Tavi looked down to see Valiar Marcus—absent his crested centurion’s helmet—striding among the Aleran lines. The First Spear’s armor was horribly dented over his left shoulder, and that arm hung limply at his side—but he carried his centurion’s baton in his right hand and made liberal use of it, shoving soldiers into line, rapping them sharply on their helmets to get their attention. Marcus had thought quickly, Tavi saw. The scarred veteran must have realized that his crested helm had marked him as a target when the battle had gotten under way and he’d removed it. A quick scan showed Tavi that there was a notable absence of crested helms among the ranks—but the centurions were still visibly doing their jobs, maintaining their presence by virtue of their batons, voices, and sheer force of will.

“It’s going to take us several hours to load the supplies and all the refugees,” Tavi said. “We have to hold them. Marcus is in charge of the breach. Support him. I’m going to talk to Varg.”

“Aye, Your Highness,” Crassus said, slamming a fist to his heart. “We’ll do our part, never fear.”

Tavi rushed up to the walls, taking advantage of the brief respite in the battle as the Vord recoiled from the massive scourge of acidic blood magic the ritualists had released upon them. He had to pace almost half a mile along the walls until he found Varg, who was striding the wall among his own people.

Tavi nodded to him and began speaking without preamble. “Three hours. We have to hold them that long at least.”

Varg looked from Tavi out to the field, where the Vord were still pouring in from all over the countryside. The base of the wall was a ruin of melted chitin and half-formed bodies, all that was left after the ritualists’ counterattack. “Three hours. That could be a long time.”

“It will take that long for the transports to dock and for our people and supplies to load on,” Tavi said. “There’s no point in rescuing them now only to let them starve to death at sea.”

Varg growled out his agreement. “What of our fighters?”

Tavi laid out the withdrawal plan for him. “None of which matters if we can’t hold now.”

Already, the Vord had recovered from the sting of the first repulsion, and were beginning to mass again, preparing to assault the earthworks once more en masse.

“We will hold,” Varg growled. “We will wait for your signal.”

For three hours, more and more Vord poured in from all across the countryside, their numbers growing ever larger, their attacks more focused and cohesive: and for three hours, the last defenders of Canea cast them back.

The casualty rate was hideous, the worst fighting any of them had seen—and for the First Aleran, that was saying something indeed. Once the earthcrafters had closed the breach in the earthworks, the Legions fought to defend a relatively tiny section of the defenses—proportional to their numbers.

It was the Canim who carried the lion’s share of the battle.

Shuarans and Narashans fought side by side, reserve forces of warriors charging forward more and more frequently to come to the aid of hard-pressed militia fighters in their far lighter armor. Ritualists screamed to the night sky and sent death in multiple, hideous forms down upon their attackers—Varg had, it turned out, been bleeding volunteers from his people a bit at a time, regularly, on their way to Canea, saving up a store of blood for the ritualists to use. They unleashed it on the Vord, holding back nothing, to terrible effect, until they were pouring their clouds of acid down the faces of the earthworks not to kill Vord, but to further dissolve the corpses that were piling up higher and higher, building a ramp for the Vord that followed in their wake.

For the Alerans, the fight was grueling and desperate. Blocks of
legionares
, working together, could fend off the wave-assaults of the enemy, but when a formation was broken, or when any of the men were isolated, death followed close behind. Antillar Maximus, leading a cadre of Knights Terra and Ferrous, launched himself time and again into the fray, where the more deadly weapons of the powerful Knights would crush the Vord like so many toys, driving them back from the more vulnerable
legionares
.

Tavi did everything he could to make sure the men could fight on stable ground, and to facilitate the rotation of the rear ranks with those in the fore, fighting the exhaustion that was certain to do them more harm, in the end, than any Vord form or poison. Those wounded too badly to be able to walk were taken from the field, stabilized, and loaded onto the ships that waited for them at the bottom of the city of Molvar. Other wounds were quickly closed, then the men were sent back to the defenses, until there was barely a spear in the Legion who wasn’t at least half-populated by the walking wounded.

When the Vord press became too great, firecrafters would lend their aid to the defenses—but the Knights Ignus quickly tired, and soon only Crassus remained capable of laying out the supporting fire the Legions required to survive. Tavi could only urge the young man on, silently, from his position at the rear of the fighting, and wonder at how the young Tribune could keep rising to his feet, again and again, to destroy more of the Vord.

Meanwhile, behind the battle, the civilians filed down the stairways hurriedly crafted into the stone, down to the water, there to board the vast ice ships. Canim families bore crushing loads with them, everyone lending a hand to the effort to pile supplies on the ships, the knowledge of the certain death that howled at the earthworks driving them to cooperation and orderly conduct more surely than any law or tradition ever could.

Twice, the Vord breached the earthworks and began pouring down the terraces—but both times, Anag and the Shuaran taurg cavalry charged, shattering the momentum of the advance, which was then pushed back by blocks of Varg’s elite warriors, led personally by the Warmaster.

And then, after more than four endless, nightmarish hours, the horns Magnus had stationed at the piers began to sound the retreat.

“That’s it!” Tavi screamed, turning to the trumpeter he’d kept near him. “Signal the Canim! Sound the retreat!”

As the silver trumpet shrilled, the First Spear turned to Tavi from his place in the ranks, eyes searching. Tavi flashed Marcus several hand signals, and the veteran centurion began barking orders that were repeated instantly through the ranks.

Once more, the Canim horns brayed, and the ritualists came forward for one last, mass summoning of blood magic. The Vord reeled back from the destruction—and in that moment of opportunity, the defenders turned and withdrew from their positions.

“Go!” Tavi shouted, waving men past him,
willing
them to retreat in good order, to escape, to survive. “Through the city gate and down to the ship! The route is marked by our colors! Go, go, go!”

Four hours of hard fighting made a poor prelude to the mile and a half of hard marching the men would have to make before they could board their ships, but none of them seemed anything less than eager to take to his heels. Despite the hours of slaughter and havoc they and the Canim had wreaked upon the Vord, the enemy numbers outside the walls had not visibly diminished—this was a battle they could not possibly win, and they knew it. They could only hope to survive.

The Vord came over the walls and began to pour down them like a black flood finally breaching a strained levy, pursuing the retreating forces—but the taurg cavalry flung itself forward into the foremost elements of the advance. The taurga, bellowing their fury and fear, smashed into the oncoming Vord with a ferocity and power of impact that Tavi had never seen, an unstoppable hammerblow that left acres of Vord crushed into the Canean soil.

Again and again the taurga charged, and here and there, one of the great mounts fell, pulled down by the sheer weight of numbers, spilling a blue-and-black-armored Canim warrior onto the cold earth to a savage death.

But all they could do was slow the oncoming tide.

Tavi pushed along at the rear of the Aleran forces, a shoulder under one of Crassus’s arms, hauling the exhausted young Tribune along by main force. He was exhausted, and every nerve felt strained. Everything happened very rapidly, and at the same time in achingly slowed distortion.

The Canim and Alerans alike flowed into Molvar through the city’s several gates, and went rushing down to the docks, where the ships stood waiting for them, lined up in specific order. Boarding instructions were designed for speed, not organization. Each ship would take its maximum load from the first to reach it, then clear the piers in the port for the next.

If Tavi had known, when he was younger, how much of war depended upon vast and complex ways of organizing where people were supposed to walk, eat, sleep, and relieve themselves, he thought he would have had a completely different opinion on the subject.

He was among the last Alerans to enter the city, and he could see the Vord, halfway across the open ground, rushing toward the city as the Canim at the gates swung them closed and locked them shut.

“Go!” Tavi urged them silently. “Go, go, go!”

Outside, he heard the Canim cavalry sound their own retreat, then the taurga racing toward the stone piers. Tavi could not imagine the danger and mayhem that was about to ensue when several hundred blood-maddened Canim guided the battle-frenzied taurga down narrow stone staircases so that they could board the ice ships, but it was plain to him that no sane man would want to be anywhere close.

Even as Tavi kept urging his men to hurry on through the city, their way marked by pennants made from strips of red-and-blue cloth, he saw the Canim on the walls of the city begin to rush through the walls and buildings with lit torches, setting them aflame. The fires had been laid hours before, and spread rapidly, smoke coming up in a sudden veil.

Molvar would burn to shield their escape.

“Max!” Tavi gasped, still hauling Crassus along by one arm. “Here, help me!”

Max appeared from the confusion and smoke and got beneath his brother’s other arm. “I can handle him. You should move ahead, get to a ship!”

“Once all of our people are ready to go, I will,” Tavi responded. “Stop slowing me down, and get moving.”

“Captain!” Marcus appeared out of the smoke, coughing. “West wind is rising! The fire’s spreading toward us faster than we can move away!”