As they did, Tavi continued hurling flame into the ranks around the vord Queen, killing dozens of mantis warriors, each blast earning him a fresh flash of her pure rage. Kitai took up the slack of the Knights as they ceased shooting at the Queen, her hand flying from quiver to bowstring, her arrows flashing with the supernatural speed and accuracy of a woodcrafter. The Queen was an elusive target—many arrows missed altogether, and those that stayed on their mark inevitably met with her blade. The Queen kept on shrieking, and several thousand mantis warriors were on the move, gathering up around her.
There was an enormous roar of collected windstreams as Callum and his men streaked out to engage the incoming vordknights, and a moment later Kitai switched to firecrafting as well. Bright spheres of blue-white light exploded beside Tavi’s scarlet-white firecraftings, chewing a pair of broad holes in the ground. Mantis warriors screamed in agony and died in dozens as they were engulfed in the flames.
The Queen let out another howl of rage and turned toward Kitai, one hand raised and gathering a fistful of flame. As soon as Tavi saw that the Queen’s attention was off him, he altered course to soar around behind her and, even as she sent the firecrafting at Kitai, Tavi hurled one of his own at the Queen.
The vord’s spectacular reflexes saved her from Tavi’s attack, though the warriors immediately around her were scoured from the face of the land. But the dodge had cost her—her own firecrafting exploded yards and yards short of Kitai.
The Queen shifted her aim to attack Tavi, only to have Kitai emulate the tactic Tavi had just used. As the Queen threw, Kitai’s fire blast tore into her, forcing her to dodge and ruining her aim. Tavi felt his mouth turning up into a wolfish smile. If they could keep the battle moving this way, they would have her—and the vord Queen had to realize that every bit as much as Tavi did. Which meant that any second now she would…
The Queen shrieked again in anger and flung herself airborne. For a moment, Tavi thought that her wind furies were still in a state of disruption and that she wasn’t going to have enough lift to fly—but then a vortex like a small tornado abruptly gathered beneath her, tossing her own brood about like toys, and she came rushing up at them at terrible speed, a wave of raw anger pulsing through the air before her as she flew straight toward Kitai.
Kitai set another salt-headed arrow to her bow, drew, and calmly waited until the last instant to loose it. The arrow leapt from the bow.
The vord Queen snatched it out of the air with her left hand, turned her wrist in a sinuous movement too swift to follow, and drove the tip toward Kitai’s throat. Kitai lifted an arm in a desperate block, and the salt-crystal tip drove through her forearm and began to emerge from the other side before the arrow’s slender shaft snapped. The blow still drove her forearm up against her mail, and the protruding portion of bloodied salt crystal was powdered to grains against it.
Kitai dropped like a stone.
Tavi sheathed his sword and altered his course smoothly, pouring on the speed, and hoped that Kitai had the presence of mind—even as she plunged through a lethal fall—to realize what the Queen was almost certain to do next.
Even as Kitai fell, she drew her third—her last—salt arrow from the specially designed quiver and loosed it at the Queen in an instinctive snap shot. The vord Queen had to swerve to one side to avoid the arrow, even as another firecrafting blossomed forth from her dark-nailed hand.
Tavi rolled so that his belly was to the sky as he intercepted Kitai, her shoulder blades slamming into his belly, her head whiplashing against his armored chest, even as he made a greater effort of furycraft to bear both of their weights. The Queen’s firecrafting boomed deafeningly, exploding less than ten feet away from them with enough intensity to char Tavi’s eyebrows and fill his nose with the reek of burned hair.
Tavi had caught Kitai perhaps twenty feet from the ground, and his back actually bounced off a hibernating mantis’s head before their fall stopped, and he started gaining altitude again. He let out a grunt, made sure his arms were around her solidly, and poured on all the speed he could, running for the cloud of mist that had enveloped the abandoned steadholt.
“Kitai?” he called. “Kitai?”
She did not answer.
Thunder rumbled across the face of the Valley, a threatening, growling sound from the thunderheads gathering around Garados’s snowcapped peak, colored a deep orange by the first rays of the rising sun—Thana, the wind fury known to the Valley’s holders as Garados’s wife, was preparing a battle force of her own.
“Kitai!” Tavi screamed.
She was limp in his arms.
The vord Queen let out a shriek of triumph and shot after them in deadly, intent pursuit.
Amara woke up with something foul in her mouth. She tried to spit it out, only to feel someone pushing it back in. She let out a weak grunt of protest and lifted a hand.
“Countess,” said the First Lady’s calm, quiet voice. “You must leave them in your mouth. Thanks to your wardrobe, you received considerably more poison than Aria, and if you spit them out before it has been neutralized, I fear you could relapse.”
Amara shivered and blinked her eyes open. She was lying in a pool of shallow water, her head resting on Isana’s crossed legs. Whatever the stuff in her mouth was, it tasted musty and vile—so much so that it almost completely neutralized the pain throbbing steadily through her cut and bruised body.
Which meant that she was alive. Which didn’t make sense. One moment, she’d been about to sell her life for an extremely unlikely chance to combat the vord Queen—in fact, as she remembered it, she had taken that gamble and lost, handily, even before the wasp-things had slammed into her.
“Here comes another one,” said a rasping, oddly metallic voice. She turned her head to see what looked like a gargoyle fashioned of steel in the image of Araris Valerian. It took her a second to realize that it truly was Araris, employing a form of metalcrafting they had only heard about Gaius Sextus performing.
Even as she tracked the thought, a vord mantis dropped from the ceiling of the hive—and landed on the ground in two essentially equal-sized pieces. Araris flicked the blood from the sword in his hand and kicked them to either side to clear the space beneath a pair of holes in the ceiling. He was building up quite a pile of remains. There were the various parts and pieces of half a dozen mantis warriors and what must have been eight or ten blade-beasts.
They were still in enemy territory.
That thought pushed another one to mind. She fumbled for her waist pouch and opened it. She reached around inside it with her fingers until she found the stone she was looking for, a smooth river rock the size of her fist. Then she started pushing at the vile mass in her mouth, trying to get it to move to one side.
Gentle hands pushed hers away from her mouth and Amara slapped lightly at them, letting out an irritated, mush-clogged growl.
“She’s trying to talk,” said a thready, exhausted voice. “Let her. See, the stone in her hand? She must have had some kind of plan for getting us out of here if things went bad.”
Amara looked up to see Aria Placida sitting with her back against the wall, beside the pool. Her face was sunken and pale, and she looked as if she could barely hold up her own head, but her eyes were clear. To Amara’s surprise, High Lord Antillus Raucus lay beside her, stripped of his armor, with an enormous, ugly purple scar wrapping around his waist like a belt, and the cauterized stump of his arm ending obscenely a few inches from his shoulder He was breathing unsteadily and clearly unconscious.