After days of seeing the terror the Vord had visited upon the holders of Ceres, Amara felt only a surge of vicious satisfaction at the sight. Even if the Vord’s furycrafters went into action-assuming they had survived that titanic assault at all-it might well be too late to turn the tide of this battle. The First Lord, it seemed, had broken the back of the enemy’s advance.
And then, Amara watched the stars on the southern horizon began to go black, one by one.
It took her husband a moment longer to notice it, but she felt him suddenly go tense as he, too, saw it.
The darkness, whatever it was, kept swallowing the stars, more and more quickly-and a low, heavy thrumming sound filled the air.
Oh great furies, Amara thought. Aerial troops. There must be thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Bloody crows, they blot out the stars.
The creatures that had assaulted the city, their ground troops-the Vord had sacrificed them willingly, thrown them into the jaws of the Aleran’s trap in order to draw out their Citizens and furycrafters, to goad the Alerans into revealing the positions of their most potent weapons.
The counterstroke fell with inhuman ferocity.
Amara could see very little from where she sat. But flashes of light erupted in the night sky, each revealing dark figures. All of them looked human, though she could hardly bring herself to believe that was possible. Surely the Vord could not have taken so many Knights Aeris. And certainly, it was not solely the Vord who were using firecrafting in the night skies.
The dull thud and pop of firecraftings echoed across the valley, and the calls of the cavalry’s horns became more harried, disorganized, and desperate. Once, the roar of multiple windstreams deafened them and kicked up clouds of dust as several Knights Aeris went streaking over their position in a long, arching curve, perhaps seeking to flank some enemy element back in the main area of the fray.
And then from the walls of the city, a small group of heavily armored Knights Aeris leapt skyward, and, as they did, the sword of a single man at the center of the group kindled into brilliant golden light. That sword blazed brighter and brighter as the group of Knights streaked toward the battle, trailing streaks of fire behind it, like a living comet.
Not a single eye in the entire Ceresian valley could help but see that light, soaring toward the combat, and no one who saw it mistook it for anything other than precisely what it was-a naked challenge, a statement of raw defiance. She drew in a sharp breath, identifying the flickering golden flame as the banner colors of the High Lord of Rhodes.
The old man was a schemer, a man of dangerous ambition, and only the fact that his city neighbored that of the Aquitaines had prevented him from being a more serious threat to the Realm than Kalarus had been. As it was, Aquitaine had made it his first order of business to gain and maintain a solid margin of advantage and control over his predatory neighbor-but even so, Rhodes was widely known as a crafter of particular skill among the Citizenry.
Amara wondered if the man’s arrogance had blinded him to the fact that Gaius was sacrificing him like a piece in a ludus game, hoping to draw out one of the Vord’s major weapons in turn.
From somewhere to the south, on the ground or in the skies, Amara could not tell, came a piercing sound-a shriek that blended the sound of tearing metal and agonized lions, a sound that tore at her ears and ripped at her frayed nerves, that filled her with an insane desire to leap to her feet, screaming in mindless, instinctive response.
Amara had heard that sound before, and the memory filled her with icy terror.
It was the war cry of a Vord queen.
High Lord Rhodes and his personal bodyguards-Counts and Lords themselves, they had to be-streaked into the air to the south, a golden globe of light, that was suddenly surrounded by flickering, swift-moving black forms, like mosquitoes and moths gathering by the thousands around the flame of a candle in a forest at night.
A globe of sickly green-white light suddenly surged up from the earth to meet him.
Light flashed, sparks exploding in a cloud so thick that for a moment it obscured every single form in the southern sky, so bright that every broken stone, every dead branch and fallen leaf of the ruin around them cast a crisp-edged black shadow. A detonation rolled across the valley, so loud that it slapped against Amara’s chest like a physical blow.
For a second, she could see nothing.
She blinked her dazzled eyes several times-and when she could see again, her stomach wrenched sharply, turning a slow circle within her belly.
A dying golden star was falling in slow, fading majesty toward the ground far below.
Amara watched, unable to move, unable to look away.
A High Lord had fallen.
Rhodes, a High Lord of Alera, surrounded by Citizens, prepared, on his guard, determined, and doing battle with all the might of the Realm around him, had fallen to the Vord queen, fallen in the instant of their meeting.
The golden light died away before the body reached the earth.
The Vord queen shrieked again, and that time Amara did let out a cry, the sound torn from her chest by a surge of involuntary terror. Green lightning suddenly filled the southern sky, spreading in a webwork that was miles across, centered upon the sphere of green-white light, upon the Vord queen, at last revealing the frantic battle being fought to the south.
The sky was filled with winged, humanoid Vord, the green lightning gleaming off the shining black plates of their chitin.
Not thousands of them.
Not tens of thousands.
Hundreds of thousands.
The Aleran forces who faced them were outnumbered, so laughably outnumbered that the very thought of giving battle was as ridiculous as that of a man with a shovel attempting to stem the ocean’s tide.
The lightning faded to darkness.
The roar of approaching windstreams began to rise. Cavalry trumpets sounded the retreat, and panicked horn calls within the city began to echo them.
Amara watched numbly as the rout began-then she shook herself, focusing her mind to the task at hand. Gaius had sent one of his strongest assets out to die for that precise reason, to reveal the source of the Vord’s power and give her a chance to find it.
She did not dare delay. The Vord would be overhead soon, and it would be madness to lower their veils for long-but she could not get a clear look from that distance, even with Cirrus’s help, without lowering the concealing furycraftings.
She touched Bernard’s wrist, and he nodded once. An instant later, the faint blurring of shadow and shape that was his woodcrafted veil was gone. She lowered her own veil as well, then held up her hands, and willed Cirrus to bring the green sphere into closer view.
The night sky blurred, then her eyes almost seemed to rush forward as her wind fury bent the light to let her see more clearly. The green sphere leapt up into crystalline clarity, and Amara focused upon High Lord Rhodes’s killer.
Her breath caught in her throat, and for an instant it seemed her heart forgot to keep beating.
At the center of the sphere was a cloaked figure, skin smooth and dark, black cloth billowing about her, green-white eyes gleaming from within the depths of a heavy hood-the Vord queen.
She was the only Vord there.
Around her was a score of heavily armored Knights Aeris-Alerans, every one of them. All of them wore armor that looked like some kind of bizarre imitation of Legion lorica, made from the black chitin of the Vord, and they bore weapons of the same material. To a man, they were young-no, Amara corrected herself. They were young-looking.