But they didn’t hold a candle to the slower taurga.
The Canim beasts were enormously powerful, individually speaking—bigger and stronger than any beast Tavi knew of short of a gargant. But the taurga were omnivores with vicious tempers. Even if they hadn’t been urged by their riders, they would have smashed vord left and right as they ran through them—while upon the beasts’ backs, the Shuaran warrior Canim struck lazy-looking blows with long-handled axes that simply sheared through whatever they hit. They wreaked four or five times the damage the Aleran cavalry had done—which was only reasonable, since there were nearly five thousand of the bloody things.
Shrieks began to go up, here and there, the warning trills of wax spiders who had recognized that something wasn’t right. The mantis warriors in the steadholt began streaking about, a couple of hundred of them at least, as the battle lines of the Aleran Legions closed on the steadholt.
Then a single alien voice rose over the noise of battle, a bone-chilling shriek that made Tavi feel cold to the bottom of his belly. For a second, he felt as if he had simply forgotten how to think, as if such civilized frippery as logic and the ability to form words had become deadweight he needed to cast off. His flight faltered a bit.
Beside him and below him, Tavi saw exactly the same reaction from all of the host, from Alerans, Canim, and their beasts alike—sudden hesitation, flashes of panic, wildly rolling eyes. Even Kitai shuddered. Worse, the sleeping vord seemed to have heard that voice and responded to it. Starting with the nearest vord, the mantis warriors slowly began to stir.
Tavi had heard cries like that before, and knew what they meant: The vord Queen had taken the field.
“See!” Kitai hissed, pointing. “There she goes!”
A shadowy form, hardly visible behind a windcrafted veil, burst through the thick stone wall of the barn as though it had been made from rotten wood. It shot off along the ground, visible only through the disturbance its violent windstream raised from the ground. As it passed over the hibernating vord, it screamed again, and more of the warriors began to stir.
The Aleran command sent out signals by trumpet, but not signals to re-form the ranks or to retreat. The trumpets rang out in pure, clear defiance of the sleeping swarm: attack, attack, attack.
“Go high!” Tavi snarled, and flung himself after the Queen. He dived for the ground to pick up speed and pulled himself out of the dive only seven or eight feet above the earth. He dodged around two Narashan warriors and half a dozen joyously destructive taurga before streaking out ahead of the entire host, closing distance on the fleeing, shrieking disturbance. As he went, even more warriors began to stir, and once a reaching scythe-limb came near to ripping his belly open more or less by pure providence. He batted it aside with his sword, closing to within a few yards of the Queen, and hit upon an inspiration. Concentrating intently, he reached forward with a windcrafting and closed it around the vord Queen in a bubble—a simple privacy crafting. Her voice cut off in midscream.
It took her several seconds to realize what Tavi had done to her. He thought he knew what tactic she would use next, and readied himself for it. Not two seconds later, the vord Queen suddenly shot twenty feet up, and her veil and windstream vanished altogether. She whirled, clearly visible in the predawn light, flinging open a small leather bag of fine salt.
But Tavi had anticipated the maneuver, and as the Queen shot up into the air, he did as well, dismissing his windcraftings an instant later. He sailed through the air and the cloud of fine salt on pure momentum, and didn’t call back his windstream until he was sure he was past the salt.
He and the Queen regained their windstreams at almost the same instant, and she let out a shriek of frustration—cut off midway by another privacy windcrafting. She whirled on him, naked but for a cloak, her sword in hand, her eyes glittering. Then she reversed the direction of her windstream, slowing her forward momentum.
Just as her velocity came to an instant’s standstill, there was the hiss of an arrow loosed from a bow in the darkness above Tavi. The sound gave the vord Queen more than enough time to react, and her sword rose to cut the arrow from the air. The missile splintered upon her blade.
The impact shattered the salt-crystal head of the arrow, and the Queen screamed as her wind furies were ripped and shredded by the weapon. Her windstream collapsed. She fell to the ground and landed on all fours, falling into an instant, inhumanly flexible roll that saved her from the swift sphere of white-hot fire Tavi called forth at the point of her impact.
Kitai and the Knights Pisces swept down and began strafing the Queen in twos and threes, flashing past and loosing arrow after arrow. She dodged with contemptuous speed and began shrieking once more to awaken the sleeping warriors—Kitai’s arrow had disrupted Tavi’s privacy windcrafting with the same vicious efficacy it had the Queen’s windstream.
The nearby warriors stirred at once.
Tavi ground his teeth in frustration. If they allowed the Queen to fly, she would almost certainly waken all the sleeping vord, and odds were good that she might escape entirely—but using salt to keep her grounded also prevented Tavi from using the windcrafting that would prevent her from waking the other vord. If she managed to rouse enough of them, she could disappear into the swarm, and they might never be able to find her, much less bring lethal amounts of power to bear upon her.
Tavi glanced back. They hadn’t flown for long, but it had taken them a mile or more away from the cloud-shrouded host. No help would be coming from there in time to do him any good.
She shrieked again, and, out of pure frustration, Tavi threw another fire-sphere at her. She darted out of it easily and slapped aside another arrow from one of the strafing Knights as she went. Tavi’s strike missed her but caught half a dozen mantis warriors in its blast, charring them to twisted, skeletal shapes.
The vord Queen whirled to look at him, and Tavi felt the last thing he had expected: His watercrafting senses were pounded with an emotional assault—pure rage, the rage of a mother whose children are endangered.
Yes, he thought. This is what I needed.
“Aleran!” Kitai screamed.
He whipped his head up to see Kitai pointing toward the east. The sky, now the pale blue harbinger of sunrise, was thickly dotted with hundreds or thousands of dark shapes moving toward them—vordknights, they had to be. They would reach them in moments, and if that happened, there would be no way to bring enough power to bear upon the Queen.
The fliers of the First Aleran could not possibly stand against so many vordknights. Though their discipline and furycraft might make each Knight Aeris the equal of a dozen vord fliers, there were more than enough of the enemy on the way simply to overwhelm them. If he ordered them to stand against that, they would not survive. Their deaths would serve only to buy time.
But he needed the time.
He flashed the orders to Sir Callum by hand signaclass="underline" Engage and hold the incoming enemy to the east.
By then, it was just light enough for Tavi to see the expression on Callum’s face. He looked to the east and saw what was coming. He became pale, his expression twisting into a grimace of fear. He closed his eyes for a second and turned to Tavi. He banged his fist against his armored chest, meeting his gaze, and nodded slightly—whether in agreement or farewell, Tavi did not know. Then Callum began passing orders to the fliers, gathering each of them up as they finished their runs on the Queen.