Captain's Fury (60 page)

"Understandable," Kitai noted. She glanced at Varg. "I was also unimpressed with the Aleran on our first meeting."

Varg glanced at Kitai, and his jaws parted briefly in amusement, his ears quivering in a motion Tavi had never seen in a Cane before.

They fell silent as a group of mounted horsemen approached from the gates of Mastings, riding swiftly. The horses pulled up to a halt only a few feet away from them, and the officer who led the group, presumably a Tribune, judging by his more modern and well-fitting armor, flung himself from his horse, his face already scarlet with rage.

"What have we here?" he demanded. "Some of the scum at last?" He whirled on a man in a centurion's crested helmet and stabbed an accusing finger at the ground directly before Tavi. "Centurion. I want the gallows constructed right here."

Tavi narrowed his eyes, and he traded a glance with Kitai.

The centurion banged his fist to his chest and began giving orders to the Free Aleran riders. The
legionares
began hurrying about at once, and someone returned with rough lumber within a moment.

Their Cane escort let out a rumbling growl in his throat, watching the angry Tribune with narrowed eyes, but he did not move or speak. Tavi waited a moment before it occurred to him that he was in the same situation with the young warrior Cane as he was with Varg. He'd declared himself the Cane's superior, and any responsibility for acting in a dispute belonged to him.

Tavi met the Tribune's hard eyes for a long moment, but he didn't speak. He glanced aside at Kitai. The Marat girl's expression didn't change, but she shifted position on the driver's bench of the wagon, and reached back to adjust the unconscious Ehren's clothing. Tavi never saw any indication of it, but he was sure she had palmed one of the many knives Ehren habitually secreted about his person.

From the set of his ears, Varg took note of it. He glanced up at the young Cane, whose ears suddenly flattened to his skull.

Tavi suppressed a grimace. If it came to a fight, they'd have no chance, not even if the young warrior and his entire patrol joined in. There were simply too many of the Free Aleran
legionares
about, and in any normal Aleran Legion, the orders of a Tribune would draw immediate support from every
legionare
and centurion in sight.

Another rider came galloping up from the city, kicking his horse the entire way, and when the beast arrived it was in a near frenzy. It screamed and reared, hooves lashing, and the rider dropped off, threw off his helmet, and drew his
gladius
from his belt.

Tavi recognized him immediately, though the last time he had seen Durias, his features hadn't been mottled with rage.

Something was happening here, something more than merely tension during a time of war. There was far too much emotion in the reaction of the Free Alerans, and such things didn't occur for no reason. It didn't bode well for their situation. Men in such an excited state of mind were capable of anything.

Tavi tensed, readying himself to borrow the wind and draw his sword before anyone could stop him—but Durias stalked over to the hard-eyed Tribune, and without a word, fetched him a blow to the face with the back of his empty hand.

The Tribune reeled. Durias lifted his sword and shoved it hard against the Tribune's armored chest, forcing the man to the ground.

"Stand up," Durias snarled, "and I will strike off your useless head, Manus."

The Tribune looked up in a fury. "Centurion. I will have your
head
for thi—"

Durias leaned back and kicked Tribune Manus in the mouth with the heel of one foot. The man's head snapped back in a sudden spray of broken teeth, and he flopped to the ground, unconscious.

Durias glared at him, then at the nearby centurion. "In his cups again?"

The centurion's mouth twisted in distaste, and he nodded.

"Then get him something harder," Durias said. "If he's too drunk to walk, he'll be too drunk to do something this stupid. Now put the crowbegotten lumber back and get those horses back to the stables."

The centurion nodded and immediately began giving orders that were more or less the precise opposite of those he had just uttered. The
legionares
collected the unconscious Tribune and carried him off.

The blocky Durias, who looked even blockier dressed in armor than he had in a scout's field clothes, turned and walked over to Tavi, putting his sword away as he came. He nodded to Tavi as he approached. "Captain."

"Durias," Tavi said. "Nice to see you again, all things considered."

The Free Aleran centurion twitched his mouth into a faint smile. "I wish I could say the same. We need to get you away from here."

"You need to be elsewhere," Durias insisted. "Fortunately, in this case the two aren't exclusive. Nasaug's in the field."

Tavi grimaced as Durias confirmed his guess regarding Nasaug's plans. "I see. Lead the way, then."

"Aye." Durias went back to his horse and swung up without bothering to use the stirrups, hauling himself up purely by the muscles in his chest and arms. He nodded to their Cane escort, and said, "Thank you, Sarsh. I'll take them from here."

The Cane tilted his head casually to one side, and growled, "Watch the one on the horse. He's quicker than he looks."

Durias nodded, frowning, and said, "This way."

They followed Durias away from Mastings and toward the north. Once they were well away from the city walls, Tavi urged his horse up alongside the Free Aleran's. "That was quite a reception committee," he said quietly. "What brought that on?"

Durias glanced aside at Tavi, his expression unreadable. "Isn't it obvious?"

"Not to me," Tavi said. "I've been away awhile."

Durias exhaled through his teeth. "Of course you'd say that," he murmured, almost to himself. He glanced back at the wagon. "That's Varg?"

"He can't have one," Durias snapped. He took a deep, steadying breath. "That is, there are none at the city in any case. They're all in the field, and we're already heading their way."

"The ruins?" Tavi guessed.

"Just keep up." Durias nudged his horse into a trot for a few steps, drawing ahead of Tavi.

They traveled for three hours that way, Durias leading them, though Tavi became aware that the countryside on either side of the track they followed was far from empty. Once in a while, he managed to catch vague, flickering glimpses out of the corner of his eyes; movement in a stand of tall grass, or a slightly too-solid shadow among the trees. They were being watched, presumably by Durias's scouts, concealing themselves behind woodcraftings of varying skill.

The track began to show much heavier signs of use as they went. When they rounded a final hilltop and came into view of the ruins on their hill, and the battleground Nasaug had chosen to once more pit his forces against the Legions of Alera, Tavi drew up short for a second, unconsciously stopping his horse. He wished like the crows that Max had been nearby to provide a vision crafting for him, so that he might see the besieged hilltop in greater detail, but a few things were obvious, even from there.

The Legions had been hard-pressed, and their outer palisade wall shattered. They'd taken serious losses while doing so. Tavi could see the gleaming armor of fallen
legionares
lying in rough groups and singly, as often as not mixed with the dark-furred forms of fallen Canim. Presumably, they'd died while buying time for the engineering cohort to reinforce the walls of the ruins, which now stood at a conspicuously uniform, formidable height.

A sea of Canim surrounded the hilltop, and even a glance showed Tavi that Nasaug had trained his conscripts into disciplined troops and equipped them with uniform weaponry—even with their own armor, if lighter than that of the warrior Canim or Aleran
legionares
.

Worse, the Canim had brought forth their ritualists again. Streamers of violet fire fell upon the hilltop in what was almost a regular cadence, slamming onto the walls and blasting great gouges from the stones, or from the earth when they struck the ground—and presumably from any Aleran unfortunate enough to be beneath one. Sharp, crackling reports resounded from the hilltop in a steady, hollow-sounding thunder.

They pressed on, passing through several checkpoints, where the Canim sentries seemed to have been expecting them. They waved Durias through without speech, though Tavi could feel their bloody eyes tracking his movements.

As they approached what Tavi recognized as the command area of the Canim force, they came upon a nightmare made flesh.

At the base of a small hillock, the Canim were piling bodies.

There were so many corpses that at first Tavi thought that they had been stacking bags of grain, or sand. Hundreds of dead Alerans lay in the oncoming sunset. The smell was something hideous, and both Tavi's and Durias's horses began to shy away from the stench, nervous at the smell of death. Tavi had to dismount, and moved to the horse's head, holding the bridle and murmuring quietly to soothe the beast.

Tavi wanted to look away from the bodies, but he couldn't. Most of them were
legionares
. Many of them wore the slightly differently styled armor of the Senatorial Guard, but many others wore the achingly familiar armor of the First Aleran.

And still others were dressed in the clothing of common holders.

Tavi stared. Among the dead were the elderly. Women. Children. Their clothing was stained with blood, their bodies mangled by brutally violent attacks. If he didn't retch his guts out on the ground, it was only because he'd had so much practice holding them in over the past two years.

It took him a moment longer, but he realized that the Canim were… putting the bodies through some kind of process. A pair of ritualists in their pale mantles stood at two separate tables—no, they were more like wide, shallow, elevated basins, tilted at a sharp angle. As Tavi watched, two other Canim, older laborers of the maker caste, by their simple clothing and greying fur, gently picked up the body of a holder woman. They carried it to one of the tables and laid it down on the basin, with her head positioned at the basin's lower end.

The ritualist murmured something, a musical-sounding, even meditative growl—and then reached down with a curved knife and cut the dead woman's throat on both sides.

Blood trickled from the corpse. It drained down the shallow basin, where it gathered and flowed down through a hole at the bottom of the basin, out of a small spigot. There, it poured into a wide-mouthed stone jar.

Tavi could only stare at it in mute astonishment, unable to quite believe what he was seeing. The laborers fetched another corpse for the second basin. As Tavi watched, the first ritualist beckoned a nearby Cane, a young male not more than six feet tall, and far more wiry than an adult. The young Cane gathered up the stone jar, replacing it with another one from a row of similar vessels nearby. Then he turned and loped rapidly away, toward the sorcery-blasted hilltop.

A moment later, the ritualist nodded to another set of workers—only these were half a dozen or so Alerans, also wearing the clothing of holders. They gently removed the woman's body, wrapped it in sackcloth, and carried it to an open wagon, typical of those used as an improvised hearse on the battlefield, where they laid it down beside several other similarly wrapped figures.

Tavi looked up to find Durias watching him from where he stood at his own mount's head. The centurion's face was bleak, but Tavi could read nothing from it, nor sense any of the young man's emotions through his own shock, revulsion, and growing anger.

"What is this?" Tavi demanded. His voice came out confident and cold, though he hadn't meant it to be.

The muscles in Durias's jaws flexed a few times. Then he said, "Wait here." He led his horse away.

Tavi watched him go, then averted his eyes from the basins and the stacked corpses. He walked his weary mount back to the wagon to give it the company of the mules drawing it.

Varg flicked his ears in assent, as bodies continued to be drained and runners continued to carry the filled jars toward the battle lines.

"This is how they used power against us at the Elinarch," Tavi snarled. "They killed our people after they landed and used their blood against the Legion."