Captain's Fury (16 page)

And his aunt—his
mother
—had been lying to him for his entire life.

The voice of reason, of understanding, lost the battle to govern Tavi's decisions.

"She had twenty years to talk to me if she needed it so badly," Tavi said, his voice rough. "She had a lifetime. And I have a Legion to move."

"Tavi—" Araris began, his voice a gentle protest.

"
Captain Scipio
," Tavi snarled. "I have a job to do. Either come with me or get out of the way. Or was the loyalty you pledged me another lie?"

Araris stiffened at that. His eyes flashed with sudden anger. Without a word, he unlocked the door, stepped back, and opened it for Tavi, coming to rigid attention.

Tavi started to stride angrily out the door, but hesitated. He didn't—couldn't—look at Araris, but he could see the man regarding him on the periphery of his vision. Tavi went quiet, listening to the silence. There were no more footsteps above, no sound of voices or doors opening and closing. The command center felt eerily empty.

"It was right there in front of me," Tavi said. "All the pieces. Even inside my name."

Araris said nothing.

"I can't," Tavi said quietly. "Not… not now. There's too much." The geyser of confusion and hurt threatened to roar out of control again, and Tavi struggled to slow his breathing, to control it. He glanced aside at Araris.

The
singulare's
face remained impassive as a stone.

Araris was silent for an endless moment. Then, quite deliberately, he lifted his fist to his heart, knuckles thumping gently against his armor. When he spoke, his voice was barely more than a whisper, and his words sent a shiver running down Tavi's spine.

"Hail," he said quietly. "Hail, Gaius Octavian, Princeps of Alera."

Chapter 11

"Cohort!" Marcus bellowed in a voice that every single
legionare
in the Prime Cohort could hear. "Halt!"

The men's steady steps thudded twice more, then fell silent, as the ranks of the First Aleran reached the crest of the low ridge overlooking the Canim's first defensive position. The Prime occupied the center, of course, as it always did. The Fourth, holding his cohort's right flank, took a moment to dress its ranks. The Seventh, whose Tribune spent more time in drill, had no need to straighten out its lines.

"Three days to get here," muttered one veteran to another, as Marcus passed. "We'd have done it in one. Senatorial Guard. Bunch of tenderfoot pansies, can't march without a causeway."

Marcus snapped his baton back against the veteran's shield, and growled, "Quiet in the ranks." He gave the man a glare, and said, "You might hurt the pansies' feelings."

No one actually laughed (and great furies help any man who had), but several muffled snorts puffed out of the men of the Prime, and Marcus could sense them settling into the tense, familiar silence of prebattle. No joke or song or stirring oration could take the fear away from soldiers. Oh, it made for a fine story, no question, the stirring speech upon the edge of battle. But when facing an enemy as determined to survive as you were, talk was cheap, and the men on the ground knew it.

The joke had helped, though, providing a small release of tension, and helped the men settle down into the mindset of victorious
legionares
: that they were professionals with a job to do, and that it was time to get to work.

Marcus stalked up and down the front rank, doing his best to look like he had more interest in his men's discipline than he did in the battle raging five hundred yards away. The sound of the fight washed up to their position like distant surf, mercifully indistinct, a distant rumble of drums, a clamor of horns, an ocean of individual cries and shouts. Marcus glanced at the battle as he paced the front rank, his steps steady and unconcerned.

A few moments later, horses thundered up through the gaps between the cohorts, and the captain, his
singulare
, one of the First Aleran's Knights Aeris, and an escort of Marat cavalry troopers rode along the front rank of the Legion. Marcus turned and saluted as the captain drew his horse up. The captain dismounted and returned the salute. "Good morning, Marcus."

"Sir," the First Spear replied.

The captain swept his eyes over the battle below. Marcus took note of where the young man looked and for how long. Excellent. He was paying attention where he should. He'd always possessed the talent to be a skilled battlefield commander, but even so, he'd come a long way since Marcus had seen him in that first frantic defense of the walls at the Elinarch.

After a silent moment, he nodded once, and said, "What do you think, First Spear?"

"It's their first dance, sir. No telling until it's over."

The battle was being waged along a road—a common trail, not a furycrafted causeway. The gentle, rolling terrain of the Vale narrowed, at that point, where a pair of old stone bluffs faced one another across an open gap. A small town called Othos filled that opening but sported only a modest defensive wall. The town was overlooked by a small steadholt high upon the eastern bluff. The omnipresent crows found on any Aleran battlefield whirled overhead in enormous numbers, like a great, dark wheel circling high above the embattled town.

The Canim had gone to work on the defenses, throwing up earthworks outside the walls of Othos itself, and the wolfish creatures now fought tenaciously to hold the outer wall. The First Senatorial had assaulted up the middle, driving hard down the road for the earthworks. Even as Marcus watched, the first assault began to falter, as
legionares
failed to bull past the enormous defenders. A moment later, the trumpets began to sound a retreat, and the First Senatorial pulled back, falling into interspersed columns.

More trumpets sounded, and in the gaps between those columns, the Second Senatorial charged, hurling fresh troops into the defenders without giving them a chance to recover from the first assault. The Second almost immediately began to push forward, breaching the earthen wall in two places before the Canim managed to plug the gap, driving the Second back. Just as they did, the First Senatorial, having reorganized its ranks and given its
legionares
a chance to breathe, charged forward in turn, smashing into the weary defenders like an axe into rotten wood. They crested the defenses in half a dozen places in the first minute, and then it was the deep, braying horns of the Canim that sounded the retreat.

"Not bad," the captain mused aloud. "That kind of retreat isn't easy to coordinate with a countercharge."

Marcus grunted. "They've had a year and a half to train, sir, while we were on the job."

"True." The captain watched as the Canim defenders fell back to the city wall under the cover of a veritable thunderstorm of missiles. The Canim favored spears sized to fit them, and the crow-eaten things were thick and long enough to spit a cow upon. Driven by the unbelievable strength of the wolf-warriors they could pierce a
legionare
, body, armor, and all, and still retain enough power to wound the man behind him.

Worse than the spears, though, was the sudden thunderstorm of hurled stones. A Canim warrior could hurl a stone the size of a man's head without any particular effort, and they lobbed them in high arcs, so that they plummeted almost straight down upon the hapless Guard below. Armor and helmets of Aleran steel were of limited use against the impact of stones so large and heavy. Even when laboring Tribunes began bellowing the orders for their cohorts to shift to a tortoise formation, the rain of stones disrupted the tight ranks necessary for it, leaving men exposed and breaking upraised arms, even through the shields they wielded.

The primitive missiles were less deadly, in a relative sense, than well-aimed arrow fire, but they possessed a far greater capacity to inflict crippling injuries, and the ranks of the Guard nearest the town walls were badly mauled before they were ordered back to the earthworks and out of rock range.

The retreat left the ground before the walls exposed, and the excited crows plunged down toward the corpses; but not before Marcus was able to get a quick estimate of the fallen. The Guard had left the still, armored forms of between seven and eight hundred
legionares
lying dead on the killing field.

"Bloody crows," the captain muttered in a tone that only Marcus was close enough to hear. Disgust tinted the young man's voice. "The battle's not fifteen minutes old, and he's already lost a tithe of one of his Legions."

Marcus grunted his agreement. "Going to be a lonely walk to Mastings at this rate, sir."

"Especially since they outnumbered us to begin with," the captain spat. "We have to pick our moments for attrition tactics."

Below, the Guard Legions were massing behind the earthworks. Scaling ropes and ladders were being prepared for the assault on the walls, and half a dozen Knights Terra, recognizable by the preposterously outsized mallets they wielded, gathered in the center to smash down the town's gates.

"Crows." The captain's voice sounded distant and tired. "I tried to warn him."

Marcus caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, and glanced up to see twin arrowhead formations of Knights Aeris streaking through the sky toward the town.

The captain had seen them, too. "There they go."

"Textbook," Marcus agreed.

Another trumpet sounded, and with a roar the Guard plunged forward. Spheres of white-hot flame burst into being upon the walls overlooking the gate, as the Guard's Knights Ignus unleashed their furies upon the defenders.

The missile storm began again, but the two formations of Knights Aeris strafed the battlements, sending Canim flying as they were caught in the enormous gale of the Knights' combined windstreams. The
legionares
charged, ladders and ropes rising, even as the Knights Terra rushed the gate.

The captain's head snapped aside, and he pointed up at the western bluff. "There."

Marcus looked up to see dark shapes rising from concealment atop the bluff, and they were soon mirrored by more movement on the eastern side. Marcus could see forms atop both bluffs moving strangely, but it took him a moment to realize what they were doing.

They were spinning in place.

The stones that began to fall upon the conveniently massed ranks of the Guard made the hand-tossed projectiles of moments before seem like pebbles by comparison. Stones half the height of a man came crashing down, lethal to anyone beneath them, crippling to anyone close enough to be struck as the stone rebounded from the earth and tumbled wildly.

Marcus stared in mute surprise. It would take an earthcrafter of considerable talent to throw stones that size, and the Canim
had
no earthcrafters. Not only that, but even if they had been strong enough to throw the boulders, they could not possibly have been thrown at such speed to such distance—and yet they were doing it.

The captain narrowed his eyes, staring at the bluffs, and let out a sudden snarl. "Slingers," he said. "Bloody crows, they're slingers."

Marcus shot a glance at the captain and peered more closely. The young officer was right, by the great furies. The Canim atop the bluffs were whirling the enormous stones at the end of long, heavy chains. Each slinger would rush forward, get the stone moving, then begin to spin, whirling the boulders in great circles, gathering speed, until they released them to sail out and down onto the Guard below.

Horns blared with frantic authority as the deadly rain disrupted formations and sowed panic and confusion in the ranks. The Knights Aeris formations wheeled up and separated, each soaring toward one of the bluffs, to suppress the slingers and sweep them from their position.

Marcus felt nothing but contempt for the arrogance of the commander who had sent those men into the battle unprepared. It was no fault of Arnos's men, but they were going to die for it.

As the Knights bore down upon the bluffs, they began to fall out of formation. Men twisted and jerked in midair, then began plummeting out of the skies to smash upon the ground below.

"Balests," Marcus grunted.

The captain nodded tightly. Without the Knights Aeris to suppress the battlements, the Canim began the terrible rain of smaller stones again, hurling them down upon the
legionares
attempting the walls. They regained their positions around and over the gate, slamming stones down at the Knights Terra attempting to destroy it, forcing them to draw back or risk a crushed skull.

"Crows," Marcus said. "The only thing the Guard is doing is providing the Canim cover from our own firecrafters." He watched as men struggled and died, as the chaos of the battle took hold of the
legionares
. The pressure on the walls faltered, and Marcus had seen battles enough to know that the Guard would soon withdraw, whether or not their officers ordered it.

The captain snarled again. "I'm not waiting any longer." He turned to Sir Callum, the Knight Aeris who had ridden up with him, and said, "Go."

Callum dismounted and dragged a roll of bright scarlet cloth from his saddlebag. He took a pair of quick steps and flung himself into the air, soaring upward. He let the scarlet banner come unrolled as he did, until he was dragging the twenty-yard signal flag behind him.

Almost instantly, fresh trumpets sounded, silvery notes that seemed to float down from overhead. There was a quiet rumble, like distant thunder, and suddenly horsemen flying the banner of the First Aleran were racing along the top of the eastern bluff. They fell upon the slingers holding those heights, putting a sudden halt to the rain of enormous stones.