Between each of the fires around the walls stood seven silent suits of armor, complete with scarlet capes, the traditional-style bronze shields, and the ivory-handled swords of Septimus’s singulares. The armor stood mute and empty upon nearly formless figures of dark stone, eternally vigilant, the slits in their helmets focused upon their charge. Two of the suits were missing weapons—Tavi and Amara had taken them for protection on that night so long ago.
At the center of the pool rose a block of black basalt. Upon the block lay a pale shape, a statue of the purest white marble, and Tavi stared at the representation of his father. Septimus’s eyes were closed, as though sleeping, and he lay with his hands folded upon his breast, the hilt of his sword beneath them. He wore a rich cloak that draped down over one shoulder, and beneath that was the worked breastplate of a somewhat ostentatious Legion officer rather than the standard-issue lorica Tavi had on.
Slouched at the base of his father’s memorial bier was the vord Queen.
She was bleeding from more wounds than Tavi could count, and the water around her, instead of being crystalline, was stained the dark green of a living pond. She slumped in absolute exhaustion. One eye was missing, that side of her once-beautiful face slashed to ribbons by the windmanes’ claws.
The other eye, still glittering black, focused upon Tavi. The vord Queen rose, her sword in her hand.
Tavi stopped at the edge of the pool and waited, settling his grip on his own blade.
The two faced one another and said nothing. The silence and stillness stretched. Outside, the storm’s wrath was a distant thing, impotent. Light flickered through the crystalline walls.
“I was right,” the Queen said, her voice heavy and rough. “There is a strength in the bonds between you.”
“Yes,” Tavi said simply.
“My daughter who lives in far Canea… she will never understand that.”
“No.”
“Is it not strange, that though I know her failure to see it is a weakness, though I know that she would kill me upon sight, that I want her to live? To prosper?”
“Not so strange,” Tavi said.
The Queen closed her eye and nodded. She opened it again, and there was a tear tracking down her face. “I tried to be what I was meant to be, Father. It was never personal.”
“We’re beyond that now,” Tavi said. “It ends here, and now. You know that.”
She was still for a moment, before asking, very quietly, “Will you make me suffer?”
“No,” he said, as gently as he could.
“I know how a vord queen dies,” she whispered. She lifted her chin, a ghostly shadow of pride falling across her. “I am ready.”
He inclined his head to her, very slightly.
Her rush sent out a spray of water, and she came at him with every ounce of speed and power left in her broken body. Even so badly battered, she was faster than any Aleran, stronger than a grass lion.
Gaius Octavian’s blade met that of the vord Queen in a single, chiming tone. Her sword shattered amidst a rain of blue and scarlet sparks.
He made a single smooth, lightning-swift cut.
And the Vord War was over.
CHAPTER 57
The wind had picked up so sharply that the Knights Aeris Fidelias had borrowed began to run out of work. The conditions were simply too harsh for the vordknights to stay aloft, especially when a mix of cold rain and sleet began sluicing down. The changing conditions had ripped the Canim’s sorcerous mist apart even earlier than that, and Fidelias, from his vantage point on the barn’s roof, had gotten an excellent view of the size of the force attacking them.
There weren’t thirty thousand vord. There were more like fifty thousand.
No simple ditch could have given the Legions any real hope against a force that outnumbered them so badly. Oh, had they been fighting Marat, Icemen, even Canim, there might have been a straw of hope. Legion discipline in the face of overwhelming odds was less a professional practice than it was a form of contagious insanity, especially in a veteran unit like the First. They might be killed to a man, but they would never break. That fact alone was enough to grind the determination out of any rational foe.
But the vord weren’t rational.
So the First Aleran would be killed to a man—and Fidelias with them, if it came to that. Perhaps that was the specter of Valiar Marcus inside his thoughts speaking, but if so, Fidelias had no intention of countermanding him. He wasn’t leaving these men.
The rain came down harder, and harder still, until it was almost like one of the typhoons that sometimes visited the southern coast. Fidelias watched his men fighting grimly on against impossible odds and found himself weeping in silence, his face stony. It was raining. No one would see. But even so, force of habit made him reach for the modest watercrafting talents he possessed, which were at least suitable to stop tears.
His head whipped up abruptly, and he snapped, to the nearest courier, “Bring me the First Lady!”
Isana’s cloak and dress were soaked through by the time she reached the barn’s roof. Thank goodness. It was the closest thing she’d had to a bath in weeks.
The ground continued to quiver and shake at odd intervals. Vast sounds, deep and unearthly, reverberated through the night, passing over the screams and cries and drums and trumpets of battle, the roar of wind, the slap of heavy rain. They reminded Isana of the calls of leviathans in the open sea—only a great deal more expansive. She couldn’t see a hundred yards in the rain, and she had a feeling that she should be glad of it.
She hurried across the roof with Araris and Aldrick trailing behind her, to where Valiar Marcus stood with his command staff. He saluted her as she approached, pointed at the ditch the legionares were defending, and said, without preamble, “My lady, I need you to fill that ditch with water.”
Isana arched an eyebrow. “I see,” she said, and stared thoughtfully at the ditch. Puddles were already collecting in its bottom, thanks to the rain. She closed her eyes, touched upon Rill in her thoughts, and sent the fury out into the land around the steadholt, where it appeared as a barely noticeable ripple in the downpour. It didn’t seem favorable. The steadholt was located upon the local high ground, such as it was, so that any floodwaters would pour around it. Making that much water run uphill would be a terrible strain, possibly beyond her strength.
Instead, on an inspiration, she sent Rill up. The fury flowed into the air above the steadholt, leaping from raindrop to raindrop, and then began to spread out like a wide, unseen umbrella above the steadholt. Ah, much better. She spread Rill’s presence out as widely as she possibly could and murmured to her to begin redirecting the rain as it fell.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, all at once, a waterfall appeared out of nowhere, the collected rain of several acres worth of ground all funneled to the same spot. It splashed down into the trench, knocking several mantises from their feet, and within seconds had begun to fill it.
Exhausted men lifted their voices in ragged cheers, and the surge of hope that arose from all of them struck Isana like a cleansing fire. The legionares began pushing harder, their spirits lifted, slamming the vord back into water that grew deeper and deeper as Isana’s crafting continued.
A good start. But she could do more. Once the improvised moat had been filled, she sent Rill down into it and, with another effort of will and a faint circling motion of one hand, the water began to spin. It was not long before it had become a current, circling the steadholt, strong enough to take a mantis from its feet and send it spinning off downstream. She pressed it faster and faster, then withdrew Rill wearily from the stream. It would continue circling on momentum for a good while, she judged, long enough to give the legionares a few moments to breathe. Vord after vord splashed into the water, only to be swept helplessly around the steadholt, over and over and over—and the current had the added benefit of slowly eroding the ditch deeper. By the time the water did calm enough for them to ford it, the vord would find the defenses higher and more difficult to attempt than they had been before.