Fidelias pushed himself back up and saw Magnus holding the vord’s jaws away from his face with both hands. Magnus wasn’t as strong an earthcrafter as Fidelias was. He was unable to dislodge the vord, and the thing had managed to begin raking at him with its claws as it struggled to clamp the incredible power of its jaws over Magnus’s face.
For an instant, Magnus’s eyes met his.
Fidelias saw the branches of logic in his mind, unfolding as calmly and cleanly as if he’d been performing a theoretical exercise.
The situation was ideal. The vord was already badly wounded. The nearest legionares were already taking up their weapons and charging forward—but they would never arrive in time to save Magnus. Fidelias himself was badly wounded. The shock was keeping him from feeling it, but he knew that even with the attentions of a Legion healer, he’d be off his feet for a few days.
Magnus knew.
No one would be able to blame him for only killing two and a half of three vord. Fidelias would remain hidden. Valiar Marcus’s position would be secure. And to accomplish it, all Fidelias would need to do was… nothing.
Nothing but let one of them, the vord, the foe of every living thing on Carna, rip a trusted confidant of the rightful First Lord of Alera to quivering bits of meat.
And suddenly he was consumed with rage. Rage at the lies and selfish ambition that had poisoned the heart of Alera ever since the death of Gaius Septimus. Rage at Sextus’s stubborn pride, pride that had driven him to turn the Realm into a venomous cauldron of treachery and intrigue. Rage at the things he had been forced to do in the name of his oath to the Crown, and then in supposed service to the greater good of all Alera, when it seemed clear that the man to whom he had sworn his oath had abandoned his own duty to the Realm. Things that boy at the Academy, all those years ago, would be horrified to know were in his future.
It had to stop.
Here, before the greatest threat any of them had ever known, it had to stop.
Valiar Marcus let out a roar of furious defiance and threw himself onto the vord’s back. He jammed an armored forearm between the vord’s jaws, and felt the terrible pressure of its teeth as they clamped down. He ignored it and ripped savagely at the vord’s head with his shoulders, twisting and worrying at the thing like a man trying to rip a stump from the earth.
The vord let out a hiss of rage. It was too sinuous and flexible to let him snap its neck.
But as he strained and pulled, Valiar Marcus saw its scales pulled up, extending slightly from the skin of its neck, baring the tender flesh beneath to a blow struck from the proper angle.
Maestro Magnus saw it, too.
He produced the knife from his sleeve with a single flicking motion of his hand, as smoothly and swiftly as a skilled conjurer. The blade was small but bright, its edge deadly keen.
The Cursor drove it to the hilt into the vord’s neck. Then, with a ripping twist, he opened the thing’s throat. The vord bucked, muscles straining in sudden agony—but its jaws had suddenly lost their power.
Then the legionares arrived, swords hacking, and in a moment, it was over.
Marcus lay on his back on the earth in the aftermath. One of the legionares had gone running to find a healer and raise the alarm. The others had spread out in a line, putting their armored bodies between the gathering night outside and the two wounded old men behind them.
Marcus lay there panting and turned to look at Magnus.
The old Cursor was just staring at him, his watery eyes blank with shock, his face and white beard stained with vord blood. He stared at Marcus and stammered out a few sounds that had no meaning.
“We got to talk,” Marcus growled. His own voice sounded rough and thin. “You’re getting a little paranoid, old man. Jumping at every shadow. You need to relax.”
Magnus looked at him. Then he turned and stared at the three dead vord on the ground around them. One of them, the second to die, was still twitching, its tail fluttering randomly in the low brush.
Magnus wheezed out a laugh.
Marcus joined him.
When the healers came up with reinforcements, they eyed the pair of wounded old men as if they’d gone completely mad.
They could only laugh harder.
CHAPTER 5
Running boots hammered the ground outside the command tent, and Antillar Maximus shouted the password at the sentries stationed there as if he intended to bowl them out of his way with sheer volume. Tavi looked up from his reports immediately, lifting a hand, and Maestro Magnus stopped speaking. The old Cursor gathered together loose pages from the table, resorting to holding the last several down with one hand. An instant later, Maximus flung the tent’s door flap aside, letting in a rush of wind scented heavily with spring rain.
Tavi smiled at Magnus’s forethought. No pages went flying. The old Cursor had been wounded only two days before—but he’d taken only a single night’s rest after Tribune Foss had released him for duty, and though battered and obviously stiff, he had returned to the command tent the next morning.
“Tavi,” Max said, panting, “you need to see this. I’ve had them bring your horse.”
Tavi arched an eyebrow at Max’s use of his first name and rose. “What’s happening?”
“You have to see it,” Max said.
Tavi checked the fittings on his armor to make sure they were tight, slung the baldric of his gladius over his shoulder, and followed Max out to the horses. He swung up, waited for Max and the two legionares currently on guard duty to mount up as well, then gestured for Antillar to lead the way.
In the days since the landing, the Canim and the Alerans had settled down into their camps in good order. Only one sticking point was any cause for concern—the little stream that fed the well in the valley between the two Aleran camps ran so deeply that there was no way to reroute it to within reach of either Legion camp. As a result, all three groups had to use the wells Tavi’s engineers had sunk into the rocky ground in the valley, and a series of shallow pools in the approximate center of the Canim camp had been the results.
So far, they had shared the water without serious incident—which meant that no one had been killed, though one Canim and two Alerans had been injured. Tavi followed Maximus to the southernmost gate of the Canim camp. Two of the warrior-caste guards were on duty there, one in the scarlet and black steel armor of Narash, the other in Shuaran midnight blue and black. The Narashan lifted a paw-hand in greeting, and called, “Open the gate for the Warmaster’s gadara.”
The gate, made from leviathan hide stretched over a frame of enormous leviathan bones, swung open wide, and they entered the Canim fortifications.
“It started about ten minutes ago,” Max said. “I told a legionare to stay with it and write down anything he heard.”
Tavi frowned ahead of them, idly keeping his horse from sidestepping as they entered the Canim camp, and the wolf-warriors’ scent filled the beasts’ nostrils. There was a crowd gathered ahead of them, and more were heading that way. Even mounted on a tall horse, Tavi could barely see anything over the craning heads of the Canim in front of him, most standing to their full eight feet or more to peer ahead.
The press of traffic became too much, and Tavi and his men halted, the air around them full of the snarled vowels and growled consonants of the Canim tongue. Max tried to get them moving through the crowd again, but even his legionare’s bellow could make no headway against the ferocious, roaring buzz of the Canim crowd.
Deep, brassy Canim horns brayed, and a small phalanx of red-armored Canim warriors came marching stolidly through the crowd like men walking against the current of a quick-running stream. Tavi recognized Gradash, the silver-furred huntmaster—a rank of warrior roughly equal to that of centurion—guiding the warriors. He directed them to fan out around the Alerans, then tilted his head slightly to one side, a gesture of respect. Tavi returned it.