Cursor's Fury (61 page)

“Now we agree on something,” Tavi said. The bluff had worked. His anxiety began to give way to giddy relief, and it was almost as difficult to contain as the fear had been.

He began to turn his mount, then paused, looked at the standing Canim warrior behind the line of Sari’s ritualists, and called out, “Should you wish to recover the remains of your fallen, I will permit unarmed Canim to retrieve them provided they do so in the next hour.”

The Cane did not respond. But after a few pensive seconds, he tilted his head, very slightly, to one side. Tavi mirrored the gesture, then began to withdraw, turning his face into a mild breeze.

_p. 297
Sari suddenly sniffed, a snuffling sound nearly identical to any canine investigating a scent.

Tavi froze, and the relief he’d begun feeling transformed itself in an instant to an almost-hysterical terror. He looked over his shoulder in time to see Saris eyes widening in shock and recognition.

“I know you,” the Cane breathed. “
You.
The freak. The
messenger
boy!”

Sari’s hand flashed to his satchel and flicked it open, and Tavi suddenly realized that the pale leather case, like the ritualist’s mantles, was made of human skin. Sari withdrew his hand, flinging it straight up over his head. His hand was covered in fresh, scarlet blood, and the droplets flew into the air, scattering, vanishing. He howled something in Canish, and the acolytes behind him joined in.

Tavi turned his horse, desperate to flee, but everything moved with nightmarish deliberation. Before he could give the beast its head, the clouds above them lit up with an inferno of scarlet lightning. Tavi looked up in time to see an enormous wheel of streaming lightning suddenly condense into a single, white-hot point overhead.

Tavi tried to kick the horse into a run, but he was moving too
slowly,
and he could not tear his eyes from the gathering stroke of power—the same power that had massacred the First Aleran’s officers, none of whom were as helpless as Tavi.

The point of fire suddenly expanded into a blinding white light and an avalanche of furious noise, and Tavi opened his mouth and screamed in terror and disbelief. He never heard it.

Chapter 39

Blinding light stole Tavi’s sight. A sudden pressure became a single, enormous pain against either side of his head, and there was no longer any sound. He lost all sense of direction, and for a moment everything whirled around him, leaving him with no point of reference, no sense of position.

_p. 298
Then his sight returned in shadows that deepened into colors, and he was able to sort out his perceptions.

First—he was alive. Which came as something of a surprise to him.

Second, he was still mounted, though his horse was staggering in jerking little jumps, as though it couldn’t decide whether to run or to buck him off. There was an overwhelming scent of ozone, clean and sharp.

Tavi looked down blearily. There was smoke everywhere, and he felt himself coughing though he could not hear it. The ground beneath him was burned black, the grass charred to ash. More grass burned in a twenty-foot circle around him—an area almost precisely the size of the blasted earth of the command tent.

His clothes were singed. His armor was blackened, but not hot. He still held both the reins of his mount and the lance staff that bore the Legion’s standard. The standard’s pole was burned along one side, but whole. The flag’s eagle had been wrought of a different thread than the rest, and that thread had charred, so that instead of the azure-and-scarlet emblem, the whole of the war bird was black.

Tavi stared dully up at the black bird, while overhead him thousands of crows swirled and danced in hungry excitement. The breeze pressed silently against one cheek, and the smoke began to clear. As it did, Tavi began to gather his wits about him again, to realize where he was, and he somehow managed to get the horse to stop trying to throw him off, though it still danced restlessly.

The smoke lifted, and Tavi found himself standing not ten yards from Sari.

The Canim ritualist was stretched to his full height, head tilted back in a pose of bizarre ecstasy, jaws gaping, his bloody hand still raised to the sky. Then he flinched, evidently at some sound, and his eyes dropped to settle on Tavi. The Cane’s eyes widened, his nostrils flared, and his ears quivered and flicked about. His jaws opened and closed twice, faltering motions, though Tavi could not hear any sound Sari made, if any.

Tavi was still stunned, trying to sort out what had happened, and he never gave any real thought to what he did. It flowed out of him on raw instinct as his emotions coalesced into a single incandescent fire of rage and he dug his heels into the near-panicked horse’s flanks.

The terrified horse shot forward, seemingly attaining a full run within the space of a single surge of power, directly at Sari. Tavi felt himself screaming, felt the pounding of the horse’s hooves striking the earth, and felt the banner drag at the air as he swung the standard down upon Sari with all of his strength and in total silence.

_p. 299
Tavi’s aim was true. The heavy haft of the lance came down at an angle upon Sari’s muzzle, and struck with such force that the Cane’s jaws clamped shut on his lolling tongue and drove the ritualist to the ground.

Tavi whipped his head around in time to see on of Sari’s acolytes leaping for him. Tavi pulled his mount around to face the Cane, and the warhorse’s hooves lashed out and struck with terrible force. A second Cane ran at Tavi, and he jabbed the lower end of the standard pole squarely into his attacker’s face, striking with such force that he clearly saw the yellow shards of shattered fangs fly into the air.

His wits returned to him in full in a sudden flash, and he knew the other acolytes would be charging as well—and that there were another sixty thousand Canim behind them. He’d fought off the first two, but even without help, they would kill him if he stayed to give them battle. He looked around wildly, got his bearings, then turned the horse for the town and gave the beast its head.

The animal needed no encouragement, and it fled for the shelter of the town.

Fast as the beast was, it wasn’t fast enough to avoid another Canim that threw itself at the horse in a frenzy, clawed hands ripping at the horse’s withers, drawing a splatter of blood. The horse’s body shook with the scream of pain Tavi could not hear, and the animal veered wildly, ripping the reins from Tavi’s hands.

A glance over his shoulder showed him more acolytes rushing forward, and others sprinting through the ranks of squatting warriors—though the warriors themselves did not rise. One of them threw a dart of some kind. Tavi could not see if it struck, but the horse bucked in pain and nearly faltered before thundering on.

Tavi reached for the reins, but his head was still whirling, and the horse was pounding over open ground as fast as it could move. It was difficult enough simply to stay seated, and by the time Tavi recovered the reins, he looked up to see the broad waters of the Tiber not fifty feet ahead.

Tavi looked around wildly to find the walls of the city several hundred yards to the east. He checked over his shoulder. Behind him, dozens of ritualists were not ten seconds behind. The beast’s injuries must have slowed its pace. Tavi turned the horse toward the town, but its feet slipped on the loose earth and shale near the river, and the mount fell, taking Tavi with it.

The water of the river slapped him hard in the face, and there was a brief and terrible pressure on one of his legs. The horse thrashed wildly, and Tavi knew that the panicked animal could easily kill him in its frenzy. Then the horse’s weight was gone, and Tavi tried to rise.

_p. 300
He couldn’t. The leg that had been pinned beneath the horse had sunk into the clay of the river’s bottom. He was trapped there, with the surface less than a foot away.

He almost laughed. It was inconceivable that he had escaped an entire army of Canim, survived that deadly, bloody lightning, only to drown.

He forced himself not to thrash in panic and instead reached down, digging his fingers into the clay. It had been softened by the water, or the task would have been hopeless, but Tavi was able to work his knee lose, and from there to pull the rest of his leg from the cold grasp of the river’s bottom.

Tavi rose from the river, looked wildly around him, and saw the standard lying half out of the water. He sloshed to the river shore and seized it up, taking it in a fighting grip, and looking up to face twenty or more of the ritualist acolytes, in their black cloaks and mantles of human skin. They had fallen upon the horse as it came from the water, and now their claws and fangs were scarlet with new blood.

Tavi looked back to his left, and saw that the Aleran cavalry was already on the move over the Elinarch. It would be a futile gesture. By the time they arrived, there would be nothing of Tavi
left
to rescue.

Strange, that it was so quiet, Tavi thought. He saw his death in the eyes of the bloody Canim. It seemed that such a thing should have been a great deal noisier. But he heard nothing. Not his enemies snarls, nor the cries from the city. Not the gurgle of water as the Tiber flowed around his knees. Not even the sound of his own labored breath or the beating of his heart. It was perfectly silent. Almost peaceful.

Tavi gripped the standard and faced the oncoming Canim without moving. If he was to die, it would be on his feet, against them, and he would take as many of the things with him as he possibly could.

Today,
he thought,
I am a legionare.

The fear vanished, and Tavi abruptly threw back his head and laughed. “Come on!” he shouted to them. “What are you waiting for? The water’s fine!”

The Canim rushed at him—and then suddenly slid to a halt in their tracks with two dozen panicked, inhuman stares.

Tavi blinked, entirely confused. Then he looked behind him.

On either side of him, the waters of the Tiber had flowed into solid form, into water-sculptures similar to those he had seen before.