Princeps’ Fury

“Exactly,” Gaius said. “It takes an enormous amount of power for them to keep themselves aloft. They must eat like gargants to be able to sustain the muscle they’d need for that sort of activity-and even with the patches of croach that they planted in secret, ahead of their advance, we’ve yet to discover one more than an acre in size.” The First Lord shook his head. “Badly supplied infantry can fight on to some degree. But I think the vordknights are more like cavalry. Short cavalry of supplies, and they become ineffective far more rapidly. She’ll save them for a critical stroke.”

“The queen, you mean?” asked Ehren.

Gaius nodded. “She is the key to the entire battle.” He fell silent again as they watched the Vord swarm over the plains toward the capital.

“So many of them,” Ehren breathed.

For an instant, the First Lord’s eyes glittered with a wild, fey light. “Aren’t there, though.” He nodded and turned to one of the Legion trumpeters at hand. “Signal the first attack.”

The courier nodded and raised his trumpet. Its call sounded clear over the quiet city, and in its wake the Legions roared.

Thousands of Citizens stood among their ranks, called forth to fight for their land, to demonstrate the obligation that went with the privileges of their title. Among the Citizenry, earthcrafting was by far the most common talent, and now those Citizens unleashed their furies upon the Vord.

Just ahead of the Vord ranks, the ground erupted, swelling into hillocks and blisters of stone that burst to disgorge furies of the earth. Gargants, wolves, serpents, great dogs, and nameless things-both beautiful and hideous-came bounding and slithering and charging out of the very soil of the land, to fall upon the first wave of the alien horde.

The battle that ensued had a ghastly sort of beauty to it. The Aleran furies, like statuary come to frenzied life, slammed into the Vord. Furies of the earth, though not swift, were viciously strong and difficult to actually harm-and the Vord were packed in close to one another as they came for Alera Imperia. Ehren watched as a bear made of black-and-grey marble slammed its paws down with methodical precision, crushing a Vord at every blow. A gargant of flint and clay thundered into the Vord ranks without being noticeably slowed, leaving destruction in its wake. A great sandstone serpent wound swiftly around one Vord after another, crushing the howling creatures in its coils and slithering on. The earth furies broke Vord quadrupeds like toys, and shrugged off blow after blow in response.

The behemoths, though, proved tougher than the Vord-lizards. Ehren saw one of them accept a pair of hammerblows from the great bear without flinching, and in response it simply bent and heaved the fury’s form up off the ground. The granite was riven and shattered, and a few seconds later, the “crack” of protesting stone reached the citadel. The behemoth smashed the bear-form down to the ground, where it crumbled into motionless rubble.

Gaius winced.

“Are you all right, sire?” Ehren asked at once.

“Just feeling sympathy for whoever called out that bear fury,” the First Lord replied. “That sort of thing… leaves a mark.”

Ehren turned his eyes back to the battle and watched for several moments more as the Vord reached the earth furies and simply enfolded them, pouring around them, all but ignoring their presence as dozens of their fellows were crushed. Earth furies could only focus on a task for as long as the one who compelled them, and as the earthcrafters who called them forth began to grow more weary, their furies began to move more slowly and with less purpose. Here and there, a behemoth would meet a fury-those battles ended only one way. The enormous Vord had to be possessed of absolutely awesome strength, to so deal with beings of living stone.

“Enough,” Gaius said. “Sound the recover.”

Again, the trumpet blast rang over the city, and at once the earth furies began to recede into the stone. Down on the walls, Ehren saw exhausted earthcrafters dropping down to sit with their backs against the battlements, while Legion runners brought them water-and while medics hauled away no few Citizens who had collapsed, presumably of exhaustion or because their furies had been ravaged by the behemoths.

Thousands of the enemy had been slain-but they poured forward, unaffected and unslowed, on the last several hundred yards of their approach to the city walls, through the rough wooden buildings and shanties that surrounded them.

“Fire it,” Gaius said calmly.

At another signal, flame bloomed up in a hundred places at once, and a wind sighed down from above and began to blow more and more strongly. Within a minute, fire had leapt up to raging proportions within the wooden outlying buildings, and completely engulfed the leading elements of the Vord advance. Smoke and heat and flame made it impossible to see what was happening within, but Ehren could vividly imagine the damage that the inferno was wreaking among the Vord.