“Excellent, sir,” Fidelias said. “That’s more like what I was talking about.”
The shrill, brassy cries of vord warriors came drifting through the mist, different than any Fidelias had heard before but unmistakable. He had to keep himself from shuddering. For the sake of the rest of the Legion, he was still playing the part of Valiar Marcus, relegated to the role of advisor to the young captain by advancing age. Valiar Marcus would not show fear before the enemy. No matter how bloody terrifying they were to anyone with half a mind.
A double column of Canim warriors, several hundred strong, came rolling up to the front of the host, led by Varg himself. Their loping pace was swift, and Varg stopped to confer briefly with the Princeps. He nodded to Octavian, then gave a few orders in the snarling tongue of the wolf-warriors, and his troops fell into a curved double line that arched out in front of the rest of the host like a legionare’s shield.
Fidelias could clearly see only the nearest of the Canim, at the center of the line—Varg and the warriors closest to him. The lean, powerful bodies of the Canim moved in a fashion that was both completely nonuniform and fluidly coordinated, each armored warrior occupying precisely enough space to move and use his weaponry, with his companions on either side maintaining a precise distance, seemingly without any conscious effort.
The Canim were soldiers, sure enough, clearly moving in coordinated discipline, but their methods and tactics were utterly alien to those used by Aleran legionares. Fidelias didn’t even want to think of the pure shocking power of a Canim shieldwall. If they used such infantry tactics, an Aleran Legion would not be able to survive the clash of close combat.
Then again, the few times Alerans had clashed with Canim of the warrior caste, the battle had never gone in their favor in any case. At best they had attained a draw, during several brief clashes during the two years of combat around the Elinarch and in the Vale. In the worst cases, the warrior caste had handed the Alerans their heads.
The vord shrieked their alien cries again, this time from closer, and Fidelias felt his heart laboring harder. He straightened his back and forced his expression to Marcus’s closed, prebattle discipline. He heard the Princeps giving rapid orders beside him—sending the scouts back out to the army’s flanks and front, and ordering Maximus’s cavalry to come up to anchor both ends of the Canim lines, to be ready to help if needed.
One Canim element to one Aleran, Fidelias noted. Even when fighting together, the Princeps was showing caution against his allies, who would see it as a reassurance and a mark of respect. The Princeps had been the first to understand the way the wolf-warriors thought, and he had applied that knowledge ably to both the battlefield and the conference table with undeniable success. Rarely had Octavian attained an overwhelming victory against the Canim, and yet at day’s end, he had always managed to hold the most vital terrain or gain another mile of ground—and now his former enemies let out a howl and engaged the vord as they appeared out of the mist.
The battle was brief, elemental, and savage.
The vord warrior forms slowed for a few steps upon seeing the Canim ready to meet them, but then hurtled forward with shrill wails and whistles. Horrible scything limbs plunged at the wolf-warriors with the kind of power that would leave Aleran legionares screaming or dead without extraordinary skill or luck.
Against the battle line of Canim in full armor, it was… insufficiently impressive.
Varg simply struck the scythes from his opponents’ limbs as they swept toward him, his red steel blade flashing in the strobes of blue-white light from the powers leashed above them. A third strike took the head from the vord, and a heavy kick both crumpled the black chitin of its armored torso and sent it sprawling back to die on the ground, thrashing uselessly. Varg’s sword whipped one way and struck a supporting limb from one vord, then reversed itself and removed a scythe from the vord on the other side, which had been wetted in Canim blood, saving a stunned warrior’s life.
Varg let out a roar of rage and what seemed to Fidelias like pure, joyous enthusiasm, struck down a second vord, and covered the fallen warrior as he rose and retrieved his weapon. Varg then broke to his right, while the recovered Cane went to his left. Both darted through the line of battle, and the Canim in the second rank followed them, so that the vord on either side of the hole Varg had created found themselves surrounded by warriors, cut down from the front and from behind.
The gap in the vord line widened, as each fallen vord’s opponent pushed through and went after the flanks and rear of another foe, so that the battlefield in front of Fidelias and the rest of the command group seemed to break into two halves and part to the left and right, like two curtains opening onto a stage—one littered with the bodies of broken vord warrior forms. The battle raged off into the mist to the left and right, and out of their immediate view.
At some point, the vord shrieks turned to a new, urgent pitch—a retreat?—and Maximus’s cavalry horns began to sound the charge, already receding into greater distance.
“Ah, they’ve broken,” said the Princeps, his teeth bared in a wolfish smile. He clenched one hand into a fist. “Max is after them. They’re running. By the great furies, they’re running!”
He never turned or raised his voice above simple conversational volume—nor could he, as the image of the calm, controlled Princeps of the Realm—but Fidelias judged that Valiar Marcus would be more than happy to do it for him. “They’re running, boys!” he bawled out in a training-ground bellow. “Varg and Antillar were too much for ’em!”
A thunder of cheers and Canim roars bellowed out for several seconds before Fidelias passed a cutoff signal back through the line to the cohorts, where Aleran centurions and Canim huntmasters began snarling and growling orderly quiet back into the ranks.
Moments later, the first returning Canim began to appear, walking back toward the ranks in the same arching battle line in which they’d begun the fight. Several were walking only with assistance—but there were no breaks in the line. On the flanks, the Aleran cavalry was returning to its original position in the order of battle. Antillar Maximus came riding in a moment ahead of Varg and saluted the Princeps, slamming his fist into his armor, over his heart.
Varg rolled to halt in front of them and nodded to the Princeps as well. “Not much of a fight.”
“It seems that they do have a breaking point, if the will of their Queen isn’t driving them,” the Princeps said. “Your warriors found it.”
Varg let out a pleased growling sound of agreement.
“I hope you will do us the honor of allowing our healers to treat your wounded. There’s no sense in having them out of action when we can put them back into top condition.”
“That would please me,” Varg replied. “I will request it of them.”
Octavian inclined his head to the Canim leader and returned Antillar’s salute. “Let’s have it.”
“A few of them managed to get out of the close fight,” Antillar Maximus said. “None of them made it out of the fog. The scouts reported other vord like these falling back to the city. They went right up the wall. They’re inside now, maybe a thousand.”
“And those are just the ones we saw,” Octavian said. “We can’t leave them in a fortress at our backs, growing a supply of croach to feed reinforcements they move into the area. This one will be up to us, I believe. Signal the Prime Cohort and the Battlecrows. I want them to be the first through the gates. Both cavalry elements are to take up positions around the city, to catch any others who try to run.”