Jim Butcher - Cursors's Fury

Amara nodded once, decided. She idly noted that bare seconds had passed since she’d first spotted the pursuit, but she felt sure her reasoning was sound. They might even have a real chance of escape.

She sideslipped into view of the coach’s bearers and signaled for them to flee at their best speed. The flight leader signaled in the affirmative, and the winds rose as he passed signals to his men, and they gathered their furies and ran for it. Amara nodded once at them, and darted down to fly beside the coach’s window.

“We’re under pursuit!” she called. “Kalarus and four- to fivescore Knights Aeris. But his escort has to be tired if they flew in today. We’re going to try to outpace them.”

“The coach is overloaded!” Aldrick shouted back. “The men can’t hold a hard pace for long!”

“Your Graces/’ Amara called to Ladies Placida and Aquitaine. “I hope you might be able to help our fliers or discourage our pursuers somewhat? If we’re able to outrun them, we might not have to fight.”

Lady Aquitaine gave Amara a cool little smile. Then she glanced at Lady Placida, and said, “I think I’m more of a mind to discourage Kalarus and company.”

“As you wish,” Lady Placida said, with a bleak nod, supporting the wilting form of Rook. Then she leaned across the coach and offered Amara the hilt of the longer blade she’d carried with her from Kalarus’s tower chamber. “In case you’re of a similar mind to Lady Aquitaine, Countess.”

Amara took the sword with a nod of thanks and traded a look with Bernard. Then she flicked over to the other side of the coach, long enough to lean her face in the window and press her mouth to his.

“My turn, “ she breathed.

“Careful,” he said, voice rough.

She kissed him again, hard, then called to Cirrus and rose above the coach, sword in hand.

What followed was little different than any other day of flying-except for the small details. The wind sang and shrieked all around them. The landscape rolled by, hundreds of feet below, so slowly that one would be led to believe that they hardly moved at all.

Little things gave the lie to the routine appearance. The coach swayed and shimmied as the bearers took advantage of the flowing winds, cutting to one side or another, jockeying up or down by several feet, eking every extra bit of speed they could from their efforts. Amara felt the winds shifting around her, sometimes easing Cirrus’s labor, sometimes making it fractionally more difficult, as wills and talents greater than her own contended for the sky. Lady Placida’s skill certainly gave them more speed with less effort than they would have otherwise had, but Amara felt sure that Kalarus’s furies struggled against them-and so close to the heart of his domain, he would have an enormous advantage against strangers to it.

Lady Aquitaine’s power was a sullen whisper that fled swiftly past Amara and the other Knights Aeris, interfering with the windstreams of the pursuing Knights, degrading their efforts, forcing them to work harder to maintain the pace. Within moments, Amara saw the first overwearied Knight suddenly descend, exhausted past the ability to continue pursuit. Others fell by the wayside as the miles rolled by, but not swiftly, and not in the numbers Amara had hoped for.

Worst of all was one last small, simple detail.

Kalarus and his Knights were slowly, surely closing the distance.

The coach’s bearers saw it as well, but there was little they could do about it, regardless of how unnerving it was to watch happen. Amara drove them relentlessly, repeatedly answering their frantic signals with orders to continue on their course with all possible speed, and over the course of the next hour she was rewarded for it with the sight of another twenty-six enemy Knights dropping out of the pursuit.

Some instinct warned her to keep an eye on the skies above them, and as the enemy Knights closed to within perhaps fifty yards, she saw a stirring in the heavy grey clouds above them, strands of mist drawn down into swirling spirals, pulled out of place as if by the passage of more Knights Aeris, though none were visible.

She realized what she was seeing at the last second, and screamed a frantic signal to the bearers. Only those on the left side of the coach saw her, but they realized what her panicked gestures meant, and they twisted in their harnesses, throwing the whole power of their furies in against the coach. Their efforts pushed the coach sharply to one side, and the loss of lift sent them into a steep and sudden descent, as the men on the far side of the coach struggled to prevent the coach from sliding into a deadly spin.

Amara rolled to the other side only a second before she saw through the wavering form of a rapidly approaching veil, and saw five figures flying in a classic V-shaped attack formation dive down between her and the evading coach. She saw the gleaming collars on the throats of the Knights Aeris- more of those crowbegotten Immortal madmen, she thought-then she met gazes with High Lord Kalarus himself. His already-thin features were stretched to vulpine proportions by strain, desperate ambition, and rage, and his eyes burned with pure hatred as he swept past, his diving attack foiled by Amara’s warning.

But though Kalarus’s attack had been hidden by the veil he’d crafted over it until almost too late, it had succeeded in one sense. The coach had been slowed, and the swiftest Knights Aeris behind the coach swept down on it, swords gleaming.

Amara sliced through the air down to the Knights Aeris, and shouted, “Lower! As close to the ground as you can!” The frantically weary men responded at once, the dive giving them enough speed to stay ahead of their attackers for a few more moments, while Amara maneuvered, rolling out widely to one side-then abruptly reversing the motion with every ounce of speed Cirrus could bring her, slicing into the wake of those Knights nearest the coach, who in their excited rush had drawn just a bit too far ahead of their comrades.

Amara didn’t even attempt to use her sword. Instead, she ground her teeth and angled her arms, wrists turned in such a way to set her spinning in a tight, corkscrewing circle. Then she cried out to Cirrus and poured on the speed, rushing up on the wearied Knight’s backs.

Amara’s windstream, by the time she blew past them, was a swirling vortex set on its side to their plane of movement, and scattered the half dozen Knights Aeris like dry leaves before an autumn gale. The tactic was hardly an original one, and every Knight Aeris had gone through a great deal of training that would enable him to recover from a windstream suddenly disrupted in such a fashion. However, that training had never been intended to counter the tactic while flying only ten or fifteen feet above the treetops, while High Lords and Ladies battled for influence of the broader winds, at the ends of exhausting chases that had already whittled their numbers down to less than half of their original company.

The near-exhausted Knights Aeris would have recovered and flown on within a handful of seconds.

But Amara had not left them that much time.

Men tumbled wildly out of her wake. She heard a sickly-sharp crunching sound as one of them slammed bodily into the solid trunk of a particularly tall oak. Of the other five, four of them dropped down into the branches, and even the fragile uppermost parts of the trees spun and tumbled them, given how swiftly they were flying when they struck. If they avoided solid impacts with the central trunks of the trees, they might survive the fall, so long as they were very, very lucky.

The last of the Knights Aeris, like Amara, found himself thrown a bit higher by the collision of wildly contradicting windstreams-but he was still slower to recover his equilibrium than the Cursor. By the time he had, Amara streaked across his flight path again, blade striking down at his back. The blade was a fine one, and links of shattered mail flew up from the blow. The wound she inflicted wasn’t deep-but the shock and pain were enough to distract the Knight, and he joined his companions in vanishing through the branches of the waiting forest and disappearing from sight.