“Oh, we were investing it, my lord,” Amara said, smiling faintly. “In this morning.”
Riva pursed his lips and nodded. “I suppose I can hardly argue with that. How did you do all this? How did you keep it hidden?”
“The walls?” Amara shrugged. “Most people who pass through the valley never leave the causeway. Anything out of sight of the causeway is not difficult to conceal. For the walls, most of the work, as I understand it, is preparing the earth beneath, first. Gathering the proper stone and so on. Once that is done, the raising of the walls is much simpler.”
Riva frowned and nodded. “True. So you aligned the proper stone over time and only brought them up as you needed them.”
“Yes. The Dianic League was most useful in helping us with that, as well as with some of the more serious stone-moving craftings.” She gestured out at the land before them. “And the walls are only the beginning of the defenses, of course. A skeleton, if you see what I mean.”
Lord Riva nodded. “It’s… all quite irregular.”
“My lord husband and his nephew have been exchanging ideas for it by letter for quite some time. Gaius Octavian has a rather irregular turn of mind.”
“So I have gathered,” Riva said. He looked at Bernard, and said, “I have to admit, I think he’s probably the right choice for running the defenses here. He knows them better than anyone else in the Realm, after all.”
“Yes, he does,” Amara said.
“Rather remarkable man, really. Do you know, he’s never once said, ‘I told you so.’ ”
“He isn’t the sort to think such things are important,” Amara said, smiling. “But, Your Grace… he told you so.”
Lord Riva blinked at her, then let out a rueful chuckle. “Yes. He did, didn’t he?”
“Riders!” cried a lookout at the corner of the tower, pointing.
The Aleran pickets who had been watching for the approach of the vord appeared at the top of a distant hill, riding their horses hard down its slope and onto the open plain. Vordknights swarmed over them like night insects around a furylamp, sweeping down to strike and rake, while arrows leapt up from the scouts, with only limited success in warding away the attackers.
“Those men are in trouble,” Riva said.
Bernard raised his fingers to his lips and let out a piercing whistle. He lifted his hand to the Knights Aeris waiting behind the wall and gave them the flier’s hand signals for “lift off,” “escort,” and with a slashing movement of his wrist indicted the direction they were to travel.
In a roar of wind, thirty Knights Aeris swept into the sky and shot toward the riders, to begin herding the vordknights from the fleeing horses with the blasts of their windstreams. They sent the enemy fliers tumbling for a moment or two, not closing to weapons range when they could simply scatter the enemy through the sky like so many dry leaves. They took up position over the scouts, circling protectively above them in an airborne carousel.
Bernard grunted satisfaction. “Like what Aquitaine did at Ceres. No reason to fight the bloody things and lose valuable Knights Aeris. Just get them out of the bloody way.”
The vordknights retreated after a desultory pursuit in which they were simply cast back and completely neutralized by the windstreams of the fliers. The riders came thundering in through a gate crafted into the wall near the command platform. The leader of the riders, a man wearing a woodsman’s green and brown and grey leathers, swung down from his horse and moved with quick purpose toward Bernard, throwing him a crisp Legion salute though he wore neither armor nor sword. Rufus Marcus had been part of the cohort of legionares who had first encountered the vord, years ago, as well as being a survivor of Second Calderon. Like Giraldi, he wore two stripes of the Order of the Lion on his breeches, though they had been so thoroughly muddied that one could hardly tell that they had originally been red.
Bernard returned the salute. “Tribune. What are we looking at?”
“Flyboys had it pretty well, sir,” Rufus replied. “I make it better than three million of their infantry coming, and they aren’t being subtle about it. They’re in close order, sir, not like the packs they move in out in the countryside.”
“That means… that means that this Queen of theirs is present,” Riva said, looking back and forth between them. “Correct?”
“Aye, milord,” Bernard said. “Or so we think.”
“Sir,” said the scout, “they’ve also got a good many of those giants they used for wall work during the campaign last year.”
Bernard grunted. “Figured they would. Anything else?”
“Aye. We couldn’t work around to the back, but I’m sure they had something coming along behind the main body. They weren’t kicking up any dust with all the rain we’ve had of late, but they were drawing crows.”
“Second force?” Bernard said, frowning.
Amara said, “A guess—a pack of prisoners that they plan to feed to their takers and use to counter our crafting, the way they did at Alera Imperia.”
Tribune Rufus nodded. “Could be. Or it could be they called their fliers back together to have them in numbers. We’ve only seen a few. Maybe they’re keeping them on the ground to prevent us spotting them.”
“We’ll be able to handle vordknights,” Bernard said tightly. “It’s probably best to assume that they’re coming with something we haven’t seen before.”
The scout took a swig of water from a mostly empty skin. “Aye. Almost always a solid bet. I don’t think the vord have much of a bluff. The way they’re coming on, they think they’ve got themselves a good hole card.”
“Do you still play cards, Tribune?” Amara asked, idly amused.
“Oh, aye.” Rufus grinned. “Mostly why I stay in the Legions, Countess. When those townies and wagon guards lose, they figure they don’t want to scuffle with me and five thousand other fellas.”
Rufus finished the water in his skin, his eyes on the horizon from which he had recently appeared. A moment later, he grunted as if someone had punched him in the belly, and said, “Time to place our bets.”
Amara turned to see the vord pour over the horizon.
Again she was struck by how much it was like watching the shadow of a cloud wash over the land. There were so many of the mantis-form warriors, moving together, that they seemed like a single entity, a carpet of gleaming green-black armor, of slashing edges and piercing points. Amara almost felt that she would cut her finger if she pointed at them.
The leading vord poured down over the hilltop—and the horde began to spread. More forms came rolling over every hilltop Amara could see, from horizon to horizon, all moving together, dressing their line as they went until, in the last mile, they all came rushing forward together, in a vast and single wall of terrible purpose. More eerie still, it happened in complete silence. There was not a shriek or a cry, no rattle of drum, no blaring of horns. They simply came on like the shadow of a cloud, and every bit as unstoppable. The silence was horrible. It made them seem somehow unreal in the bright light of morning.
Bernard stared at them intently, then nodded. Beside him and slightly to one side, old Giraldi raised his voice in a parade-ground bellow. “Draw steel!”
His voice carried up and down the wall in booming clarity in that perfect silence—and then more than one hundred and fifty thousand swords whispered from their sheaths. The sound of it, far more deadly than any rustling of leaves in the wind, which it resembled, flowed up and down the wall. Amara realized, with faint surprise, that her own weapon was in her hand.