Cursor's Fury (77 page)

Amara called to Cirrus and found the fury more responsive, if still more sluggish than normal, presumably thanks to Lady Aquitaine countercrafting against Kalarus’s wind furies. She soared up to the coach, landed with her feet
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on the running board, twined her left arm through the coach window, and reached down to Bernard with her right.

Her husband looked up, glanced at all the leg she was showing in her scarlet slave tunic, and leered cheerfully at her as he grasped her hand. She found herself both laughing and blushing—again—as she helped him up to the running board, then into the coach.

“Are you all right?” he shouted to her.

“No!” she called back. “You scared me to death!”

He burst out into a rolling laugh, and Amara stepped off the coach’s running board and into Cirrus’s embrace, stabilizing herself before darting ahead of the coach and slightly above. She looked back over her shoulder, cursing that she hadn’t been able to braid her hair for the disguise, and hadn’t thought to bring along something to tie it back with. Now it whipped around her face wildly, in her eyes whenever it wasn’t in her mouth, and it took her a moment to get enough of it out of the way to see behind them.

She almost wished she hadn’t done it.

The gleaming figures of Knights Aeris were rising from Kalare. Rook had warned them of the twenty or so who had remained in the city’s garrison. Amara looked at the four mercenary Knights Aeris struggling to keep the overloaded coach in the air. They did not have the speed to evade a pursuit, and the terrain below them offered them few opportunities to play hide-and-seek with Kalarus’s forces. Without being able to rise to the higher winds, they could not use the clouds as cover, the other favored tactic for evading airborne pursuit, and the only one their slower group might have successfully employed.

Which meant, Amara thought, that they would have to fight.

It was not a ridiculous prospect for them to fend off a score of enemy Knights or so—not with Amara and no less than two High Ladies of Alera there.

But as Amara watched, more Knights Aeris rose from the city. Twenty more. Forty. Sixty. And still more.

With a sinking heart, Amara realized that when Kalarus returned to his citadel, he must have come by air—and that he must have brought his personal escorts, the most capable and experienced of his Knights Aeris.

Against twenty Knights, they would have had a chance. But against five times that number—and, she felt certain, Kalarus himself . . .

Chapter 49

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Amara thought furiously, struggling to find alternative courses of action. She forced herself to look at the situation in dispassionate, emotionless terms. No foe was invincible, no situation utterly insoluble. There had to be something they could do to at least improve their chances, and that meant that she needed to make some kind of assessment of their foe’s capabilities and resources.

And at once, she saw that things might not be entirely hopeless.

True, there were scores of Knights Aeris on the way, but only twenty had been in Kalare on their regular post. The rest had returned to Kalare with their master—and
that
meant that they’d already been traveling, probably since before first light, which meant that they might not have the endurance for a protracted chase—particularly if they were forced to pursue through the energy-sapping lower winds.

And then another thought came to her. There had been no slowly approaching roar of such a large group of fliers coming in at low altitude. They’d clearly heard Lady Aquitaines Knights approaching minutes before they’d reached the tower. They should have heard a group with twenty times as many windcrafters coming for three or four times as long as that, before they’d actually entered the citadel. Which meant . . .

In fact, now that she thought about it, it could hardly have been anything else. Kalarus had most certainly not spent the previous ten or eleven days flying along the nape of the earth as Amara’s party had. His presence would have been absolutely necessary with one or more of his Legions—he could not simply throw away days and days in travel. While he might be sadistic, ruthless, and inhumanly ambitious, he was not stupid.

Which meant that Kalarus and his Knights had come through the upper air in a far-more-conventional approach, after either half a day or a day and a half of travel. The former would give him time to fly from Ceres back to Kalare—the
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latter would be about right for him to be returning from the forces put in place to stymie Lord Parcia’s Legions.

And if Kalarus could carry groups through the upper air when the rest of the Realm was grounded by the Canim’s unnatural cloud cover, it would give him an enormous advantage in the campaign.

It also meant, she realized with a cold ripple of nausea, that it likely meant that if he had overcome the Canim’s interdiction of the upper air when even Gaius could not, it was because Kalarus was meant to be able to do so. It meant coordination with the most bitter foe of the whole Realm.

Kalarus had made a bargain with the Canim.

The fool. Could he possibly have found a better way to declare to Alera’s enemies that she was vulnerable to attack? Or a way more certain to alienate him from any of Alera’s Citizenry who might otherwise remain neutral?

Not that their lack of neutrality would be of any use to Amara. She and the rest of her company would be long dead by then if Kalarus truly could use the upper air while their party was reduced to low-level flight.

But flight at the upper levels would be both totally concealed and totally blind. Kalarus could no more easily see through the clouds than anyone else. Though he might be able to travel farther, faster, leaping ahead of them if they pulled away, all they would have to do to confound such a leapfrog pursuit would be to alter their course.

A sprint, then, was their best option—a straight bid to outpace the pursuing Knights Aeris, who were bound to be weary after their travel. That should at the very least thin out the numbers of their pursuers. And it was not impossible that the High Ladies might, between them, make it more difficult for their pursuers to continue the chase. Ladies Placida and Aquitaine were already weary from their efforts, true—but then, so was Kalarus.

Amara nodded once, decided. She idly noted that bare seconds had passed since she’d first spotted the pursuit, but she felt sure her reasoning was sound. They might even have a real chance of escape.

She sideslipped into view of the coach’s bearers and signaled for them to flee at their best speed. The flight leader signaled in the affirmative, and the winds rose as he passed signals to his men, and they gathered their furies and ran for it. Amara nodded once at them, and darted down to fly beside the coach’s window.

“We’re under pursuit!” she called. “Kalarus and four- to five-score Knights Aeris. But his escort has to be tired if they flew in today. We’re going to try to outpace them.”

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“The coach is overloaded!” Aldrick shouted back. “The men can’t hold a hard pace for long!”

“Your Graces,” Amara called to Ladies Placida and Aquitaine. “I hope you might be able to help our fliers or discourage our pursuers somewhat? If we’re able to outrun them, we might not have to fight.”

Lady Aquitaine gave Amara a cool little smile. Then she glanced at Lady Placida, and said, “I think I’m more of a mind to discourage Kalarus and company.”

“As you wish,” Lady Placida said, with a bleak nod, supporting the wilting form of Rook. Then she leaned across the coach and offered Amara the hilt of the longer blade she’d carried with her from Kalarus’s tower chamber. “In case you’re of a similar mind to Lady Aquitaine, Countess.”

Amara took the sword with a nod of thanks and traded a look with Bernard. Then she flicked over to the other side of the coach, long enough to lean her face in the window and press her mouth to his.

What followed was little different than any other day of flying—except for the small details. The wind sang and shrieked all around them. The landscape rolled by, hundreds of feet below, so slowly that one would be led to believe that they hardly moved at all.

Little things gave the lie to the routine appearance. The coach swayed and shimmied as the bearers took advantage of the flowing winds, cutting to one side or another, jockeying up or down by several feet, eking every extra bit of speed they could from their efforts. Amara felt the winds shifting around her, sometimes easing Cirrus’s labor, sometimes making it fractionally more difficult, as wills and talents greater than her own contended for the sky. Lady Placida’s skill certainly gave them more speed with less effort than they would have otherwise had, but Amara felt sure that Kalarus’s furies struggled against them—and so close to the heart of his domain, he would have an enormous advantage against strangers to it.

Lady Aquitaine’s power was a sullen whisper that fled swiftly past Amara and the other Knights Aeris, interfering with the windstreams of the pursuing Knights, degrading their efforts, forcing them to work harder to maintain the pace. Within moments, Amara saw the first overwearied Knight suddenly
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descend, exhausted past the ability to continue pursuit. Others fell by the wayside as the miles rolled by, but not swiftly, and not in the numbers Amara had hoped for.

Worst of all was one last small, simple detail.

Kalarus and his Knights were slowly, surely closing the distance.

The coach’s bearers saw it as well, but there was little they could do about it, regardless of how unnerving it was to watch happen. Amara drove them relentlessly, repeatedly answering their frantic signals with orders to continue on their course with all possible speed, and over the course of the next hour she was rewarded for it with the sight of another twenty-six enemy Knights dropping out of the pursuit.