Ehren followed hard on his heels. “Uh, sir? Shouldn’t we be preparing to, uh, you know. Defend against a counterattack?”
“That’s what we’re doing,” Tavi said. He stalked through the opening in the wall and out onto the surface of the bridge. Tavi stared down the Elinarch’s slope, to where the Canim were already rallying, down at the next defensive wall. “Schultz! Bring them up!”
“Right,” Ehren said. His voice sounded distinctly nervous. “It’s just that it seems a shame that the engineers went to all this trouble to build us a real nice wall, and here we are out in front of it. Not using it. I’m just worried that it might hurt their feelings.”
“The Knights need the space on the walls and the engineers can’t afford to be interrupted by a breakthrough. We have to buy them all room to work in,” Tavi said.
“Us,” Ehren said. “And one cohort.” He stared down the bridge. “Against the next best thing to sixty thousand Canim.”
“No,” Kitai put in quietly. “Us against one.”
Tavi nodded. “Sari.”
Ehren said, “Ah.” He glanced back as the Battlecrows filed into place around them. “You don’t think there’s a chance he might bring a friend or two?”
“That’s the idea,” Tavi said. “Make sure they can see the standard.”
Ehren swallowed and adjusted the standard against the wind. “So they know exactly where you are.”
“Right,” Tavi said.
Down the slope of the bridge, brassy horns began to blare once more-this time in a different sequence than used before. Tavi watched as Canim began to emerge from the opening in the next wall, and his heart sped up as he did.
Every single one of them wore the mantles and hoods of the ritualists. They fell into rows, clouds of greenish smoke dribbling from censers, many of them clutching long bars of iron, each end ribbed with dozens of fang-shaped steel blades. They formed the spearhead of a column of raiders, pouring out onto the bridge by the dozens. The hundreds. The thousands.
“Oh, my,” Ehren said quietly.
“There,” Tavi said to Kitai, barely suppressing a surge of excitement. “Coming up from the back. See the bright red armor?”
“That is he?” she asked. “Sari?”
“That’s him.”
Ehren said, “Signal your Knights Flora. Have them kill him when he advances. They could almost do it from here.”
“Not good enough,” Tavi said. “We can’t simply kill him. The next ritualist down the ladder will just step into his place. We’ve got to discredit him, break his power, prove that whatever he promised the rest of his people, he isn’t able to deliver.”
“He can’t deliver if there’s an arrow stuck through his gizzard,” Ehren pointed out. But he sighed. “You always seem to do things the hard way.”
“Habit,” Tavi said.
“How are you going to discredit him?”
Tavi turned and beckoned. Crassus leapt lightly down from the wall, as if the ten-foot drop did not exist. He made his way to Tavi’s side through the troops and saluted him. “Captain.”
Tavi walked a bit ahead of the troops, out of easy earshot. “Ready?”
“Yes, sir,” Crassus said.
Tavi drew a small cloth bag from his pocket and passed it over to Crassus. The Knight Tribune opened the pouch and dumped the little red bloodstone into his hand. He stared at it for a moment, then put the gem back and pocketed it. “Sir,” he said quietly. “You’re sure this was in my mother’s pouch.”
Tavi knew he wouldn’t accomplish anything by repeating himself. “I’m sorry,” he told Crassus.
“It was the only such gem she had?”
“As far as I know,” Tavi said.
“She’s… she’s ambitious,” Crassus said quietly. “I know that. But I just can’t believe she’d…”
Tavi grimaced. “It’s possible we don’t know the whole story. Maybe we’re misinterpreting her actions.” Tavi did not believe it for a second. But he needed Crassus to be confident, not gnawed by guilt and self-doubt.
“I just can’t believe it,” Crassus repeated. “Do you think she’s all right?”
Tavi put a hand on Crassus’ shoulder. “Tribune,” he said quietly, “we can’t afford to divide our focus right now. There will be plenty of time for questions after, and I swear to you that if I’m alive, we’ll find her and answer them. But for now, I need you to set this aside.”
Crassus closed his eyes for a moment, then shivered, a motion that reminded Tavi of a dog shaking off water. Then he opened his eyes and saluted sharply. “Yes, sir.”.
Tavi returned the salute. “On your way. Good luck.”
Crassus gave Tavi a forced smile, traded nods with Max, who stood with the Knights on the wall, then shot up into the sky on a sudden column of wind.
Tavi shielded his eyes from blowing droplets of water and blood and watched Crassus soar upward. Then he went back to his place in the ranks.
“I thought that those clouds were full of some kind of creature,” Ehren said. “That’s why we couldn’t fly.”
“They are, “ Tavi told him. “But the bloodstone is some kind of counter to the ritualists’ power. It should protect him.”
“Should?”
“Protected me,” Tavi said. “From that lightning.”
“That’s not the same thing as clouds full of creatures,” Ehren said. “Are you sure?”
Tavi took his eyes from the dwindling figure of the young Knight and stared down the slope. “No. He knows it’s my best guess.”
“A guess,” Ehren said quietly.
“Mmmhmm.”
The Canim host’s drums began, and the Canim began marching toward them, their pace steady and deliberate. The sound of hundreds of growling voices chanting together rose like a dark and terrible wind.
“What happens if you’re wrong?”
“Crassus dies, most likely. Then the engineers and our Knights Terra take down the bridge while we hold the Canim.”
Ehren nodded, chewing his lip. “Urn. I hate to say this, but if Crassus has the gem, what’s going to stop Sari from blasting you to bits with lightning as soon as he sees you?”
Tavi turned as Schultz passed him a shield. He started strapping it tightly to his left arm. “Ignorance. Sari won’t know I don’t have it.”
Ehren squinted. “Why does that sound so much like another guess?”
Tavi grinned, watching the oncoming assault. “Tell you in a minute.”
And then Sari threw back his head in an eerie howl, and his entire host answered it with a deafening, painful gale of battle cries. Tavi’s newly healed ears twinged again, and the surface of the bridge shuddered.
“Ready!” Tavi screamed, though his voice was lost in the tumult. He drew his sword and raised it overhead, and all around him the Battlecrows did the same. At the same signal, the Knights Flora on the wall behind him began sleeting arrows into the oncoming Canim, aiming to wound in an effort to force the Canim charge to slow for its wounded.
Sari, though, would permit no wavering in the advance, and the Canim marched past the wounded, leaving them to bleed on the ground, hardly slowing.
Tavi muttered a curse. It had been worth a try.
“Shieldwall!” Tavi screamed, and the Battlecrows shifted formation, pressing closer to their fellow legionares and overlapping the steel of their shields. Kitai and Ehren could not join the wall without shields of their own, and they slipped back several rows in the formation. Tavi felt his shield rattling against those of the men beside him, and he gritted his teeth, trying to will away the terror-inspired trembling.
Then Sari howled again, lifting his own fangstaff, and the Canim, led by the mad-eyed ritualists, charged the Battlecrows.
Stark terror reduced Tavi’s vision to a tunnel. He felt himself screaming along with every man in the cohort. He closed even more tightly with the men beside him, and their armored forms pressed together while the ranks behind closed as tightly as they could, leaning against the men in front of them to lend their own weight and resistance to the shieldwall.