He kept struggling with the lacings, and finally managed to slide free of his armor. Only his continued focus on his metalcrafting as his broken arm and shoulder came free kept the pain from curling him into a ball of agony and sealing his fate. He ripped at the buckles of his heavy greaves until they came free, kicked off the bottom with whatever feeble strength he had left, and swam in the direction he thought was toward the surface. The pressure on his lungs and ears was awful, and he needed to breathe, and his lungs were collapsing, readying to draw in another breath whether he was clear of the water or not, and the dagger had fallen from his mouth and the fire from his shoulder and arm was simply too agonizing to be real-
Something slapped against his head, then seized him by the collar, and he was rising through the water, choking on the first half-breath of water-as his head emerged into the air.
Kitai jerked his head and shoulders out of the water with unexpected strength, and her panic and fury pounded against his senses. “Aleran!” she cried. “Chala!”
He retched out water and choked in a wet, heavy breath, hardly able to move his limbs together.
Something cut through the water nearby them, something dark and large and swift. A shark-or another Vord.
“Go!” Tavi gasped. “Go, go!”
Kitai began swimming, hauling him along by his tunic, and Tavi struggled just to keep his head above the water. They were fifty feet from the Slive, and just as far from the pier-which was haunted with Vord. Tavi had just begun to make sense of things again, through the pain in his shoulder and chest and arm, when he looked up to see the bulk of the Slive, already drifting back from the pier, moving above him.
Men were shouting, and a line fell into the water. Kitai seized it with one hand, wrapped it several times around her forearm and screamed something. Then she was rising and pulling Tavi up out of the water by the tunic-and his weight all seemed to concentrate itself in his ravaged shoulder.
Tavi screamed at the agony and bucked in entirely involuntary reaction, accompanied by the sound of ripping cloth and a short fall into the water.
He fought his way to the air again as something rushed by beneath the surface, brushing against his legs. He saw the ship gliding backward from the pier and away from him, Kitai and the line already out of reach. Her hand was tangled in the rope and she fought frantically to free herself, but she was already yards away. Tavi looked up to see Demos looking over the rail at the side of the ship, the captain’s eyes wide, and then there was only the old carved figurehead of the Slive, the beautiful woman staring sightlessly ahead with a slight smile on her lovely lips.
Tavi’s legs began to fail, and the water reached up for him. He began to sink, the figurehead holding his attention, until it almost seemed to swell in size, growing larger, turning toward him.
He realized with a shock that the carven woman on the Slive’s prow was moving, and that it was not some trick of his frozen, agonized mind. She bent to him with a grace and splendor belied by the peeling paint of her features, smiling, and extended a strong and slender hand.
Tavi summoned the last of his failing strength and took it, feeling her grip his hand with flexible, inexorable strength. She was drawing him from the water, lifting him through the air, as another frog-Vord struck at his heels in vain. He had a brief and dizzying view of the foredeck of the ship, then he was lying on wooden planks, too tired to lift his head.
“Gotcha,” said Demos in satisfaction. “My lord.”
“Chala!” Kitai shouted. She was there beside him, her own wet tunic clinging to her slender form as she ripped a cloak from a passing sailor and tossed it over him. “Maximus! He’s bleeding!”
“Healer!” bellowed Marcus’s smoke-roughened voice. “Bring out a tub!”
“Captain,” Tavi croaked. “Get us the crows away from here.”
“Aye,” Demos said, as several willing hands lifted him toward a tub that had been hurriedly brought up from the hold of the ship. “Aye, my lord. Let’s go home.”
EPILOGUE
All things pass in time. We are far less significant than we imagine ourselves to be. All that we are, all that we have wrought, is but a shadow, no matter how durable it may seem. One day, when the last man has breathed his last breath, the sun will shine, the mountains will stand, the rain will fall, the streams will whisper-and they will not miss him.
The air around the former capital was too hot and too laden with fumes to overfly, Amara thought numbly. She would have to lead their party of rescued Knights and Citizens around it.
She turned course to circle the flaming wasteland, following its eastern edge as they proceeded north. Alera Imperia, the shining white city upon a hill, was only a gaping hole in the ground. Smoke and flame seethed in that cauldron, far below them. The river Gaul poured into it, and steam obscured the land below from time to time in its own layer of thick white mist that lay over the ground like a filmy funerary shroud.
Amara glided in close to the lead wind coach, opened the door, and slipped inside. She sat quietly for a moment, her head bowed.
“Bloody crows,” Gram breathed, looking down. “Did the Vord do that?”
“No,” Bernard said. Amara felt him take her hand in his and squeeze gently. “No. I’ve seen something like this before. At Kalare.”
“Gaius,” Gram whispered. He shook his head, then bowed it. “That arrogant old…” His voice cracked, and he broke off his sentence.
“Do you think the horde was there?” Amara asked her husband.
“Absolutely. They weren’t shy about leaving a trail. You could see it from up here.”
“Then Gaius defeated them,” Gram said.
Amara shook her head. “No. I don’t think so.” She lifted her head and looked out the window at the destruction. “He would never do… this, unless the city was all but taken in any case.”
“The Vord won,” Bernard rumbled nodding. “But he made them pay for it.”
“Where would survivors of the battle go, Bernard?” she asked.
“Survive? That?” Gram asked.
Amara gave him a steady look and turned back to Bernard.
Her husband took a deep breath, thinking. “They’d take the causeway north, into the Redhill Heights, until they reached the crossroads. From there, they could turn east toward Aquitaine or northeast to Riva.”
The crossroads, then, would be the natural rendezvous point for anyone in the region who was fleeing the Vord-ridden south.
She nodded to her husband and stepped out of the coach, once again willing Cirrus to bear up her weight. Then she signaled to the other fliers in their group to follow her, and took the point position again, to lead her own band of survivors north.
Within half an hour, a hundred Knights Aeris plunged down upon them in a swirling mass of cold air, from such an altitude that their armor was coated with frost. The lead Knight-no, Amara corrected herself, the Placidan Lord who was obviously in command of the unit, flashed her an angry signal, to which she knew no countersign. Shouting at one another amidst so many roaring windstreams would have been an exercise in futility, so instead she simply lifted her head to bare her uncollared throat and lifted her hands into the air. The Placidan scowled at her, but flashed a standard signal at her to land, then signaled a hover, and spun his finger to encompass the rest of her group. She nodded, signaling her own folk to remain in place, and descended toward the ground with the Placidan Lord.