Jim Butcher - Cursors's Fury

“The First Spear has his men ready for the push,” Max said. “But they’re tired, and barely holding together. He says if we don’t hit them soon, we won’t be able to.”

Tavi took a deep breath, nodded once, then put on his helmet. “Our Knights?”

“On the way, sir,” Max said.

Tavi laced his helmet into position and stalked over to the waiting cohort of fish. Max kept pace beside him, and the armored figures of the Knights Terra with him followed him. Before Tavi had reached the fish, Crassus and his Knights Pisces marched double time into position beside the volunteer cohort. Crassus called the halt, and the Knights stopped with commendable discipline, given how little time they’d spent in marching drill. The engineers, meanwhile, hurried into position at the rear of the other two forces.

Tavi stopped before them all, looking the men over, trying to think of what to say to them at a time like this. Then he stopped and blinked at the armor of the two groups of men.

The legionares’ armor had changed. Instead of the blue-and-red eagle of the First Aleran, the insignia over their hearts had become the perfect black silhouette of, not an eagle, but a flying crow.

Beside them, the Knights Pisces’ armor had changed as well. Again, the original insignia of the Legion had been replaced-this time with the finned, solid black shape of a shark, jaws opened wide.

Tavi arched an eyebrow and glanced at Crassus. “Tribune. Was this your doing?”

Crassus saluted Tavi, and said, “We watched the Canim trying to swim the river this morning, sir. Apparently, they never realized how bad a bunch of fish could hurt them.” Crassus straightened his spine. “It seemed appropriate, sir.”

“Hngh,” Tavi said. He glanced at Schultz. “And what about you, acting centurion? Did you men also take it upon yourselves to change your uniforms?”

“Sir,” Schultz said with a crisp salute. “We just wanted to match the standard, sir!” Schultz glanced aside at Tavi. “And to let the Canim know that this time the crows are coming for them, sir!”

“I see,” Tavi said. He turned to speak to Max, and found Ehren standing beside Max, dressed in an ill-fitting breastplate. The little Cursor carried Tavi’s standard in his right hand, and the armor and helmet made him look a great deal more formidable than Tavi would have expected.

Standing beside Ehren was Kitai. The Marat girl wore another set of armor which, while clearly not her own, fit her tall, athletic form perfectly adequately. She’d slung a Legion-issue gladius from either hip. Her mouth was curled up into a small, excited smile, and her exotic green eyes burned with the intensity of her anticipation.

“What are you two doing here?” Tavi asked.

“It occurred to me, Captain,” Ehren said, “that since the First Lord already has messages on the way about the Elinarch, he and his captains will be here within a week or two at the most, and it would take me nearly four weeks to ride it. The fastest way to get him that message was to stay here, Captain.”

Kitai snorted, and said, “Aleran, did you really expect us to allow you to order us to stay away from danger while you faced it alone?”

Tavi met Kitai’s eyes for a long and silent moment. Then he glanced at Ehren. “I don’t have time to argue with you both,” he said quietly. “But if we survive this, I’m going to take it out of your hides.”

“That,” Kitai murmured, “could prove interesting.”

Tavi felt his cheeks heat up, and he turned back to the men.

“All right, people,” Tavi said, loudly enough to be heard by all. “The Canim did what we expected. Their raiders tried to finish what the warriors started. First Spear Valiar Marcus and your Legion-brothers didn’t let them do it. So now that we’re all rested, it’s our turn. We’re going to push them over the center wall at the bridge apex. You and I, along with Tribune Antillar, all of our Knights, and our fellow legionares are going to hit the Canim hard enough to knock their teeth all the way back across the crowbegotten ocean.”

The cohort rumbled with a low, growling laugh.

“If this goes well,” Tavi said. “We’ll carry the day, and the beer’s on me.” He paused at another laugh. “But no matter what happens, once we’ve gotten the engineers into place to destroy the bridge, we’ve got to hold. No matter what else happens, that bridge has got to come down. You knew that, and you’re here anyway.”

Tavi drew his blade, snapped to attention, and saluted the ranks of crow-signed young men in front of him.

“First Aleran, Battlecrow Cohort!” Tavi bellowed. “First Aleran, Knights Pisces! Are you with me?”

They answered him with a roaring crash of voices and drawn steel. Max, Ehren, Kitai, and the Knights Terra fell into position around him as Tavi turned and led his Battlecrows and Knights Pisces onto the Elinarch.

The Elinarch was a marvel of Aleran engineering. It arched over the waters of the Tiber for a distance of more than half a mile, a span of solid granite drawn from the bones of the world. Infused with furies of its own, the bridge was very nearly a living creature, healing damage inflicted upon it, shifting its structure to compensate for the heat of summer, the cold depths of winter. The same crafting that allowed the roads to support and strengthen Aleran travelers also surged in unbroken power throughout the length of the bridge. It could alter its surface to shed excess water and ice, and smooth grooves collected rainwater in small channels at either side of the bridge during rainstorms.

During this storm, though, those channels ran with blood.

Tavi led his men at a quick march up the bridge. Twenty feet after they started, Tavi saw the trickles of blood in the channels. At first, he thought that the reddish overcast was simply shining on water, runoff rain. But the rain had stopped hours before, and the gloomy day drained color from the world, rather than tinting it. He didn’t really, truly realize it was blood until he smelled it-sharp, metallic, unsettling.

They were not large streams-only as deep, perhaps, as the cupped palm of an adult man, only as wide as his spread fingers. Or rather, they would not have been large streams of rainwater. But Tavi knew that the blood running down the slope of the bridge had carried the lives of many, many men out onto the unforgiving, uncaring stone of the bridge.

Tavi turned his eyes away from it, forcing them to focus ahead, on the uphill march that still remained before him. He heard someone retch in the ranks behind him, as the legionares realized what they were seeing.

“Eyes forward!” Tavi called back to the legionares. “We have a job, gentlemen! Stay focused!”

They reached the final defensive wall, which was now manned by perhaps half a cohort of legionares-all of them wounded but capable of bearing arms. They saluted Tavi as he and his volunteers approached.

“Go get those bastards, boys!” bellowed one grizzled centurion.

“Send ‘em to the crows, Captain!” called a wounded fish with a bloodied bandage around his head.

“Give it to ‘em!”

“Take em down!”

“First Aleran!”

“Kick their furry-”

“Assault formation!” Tavi called.

On the move, the cohort’s formation changed, shifting into a column two legionares wide. Their pace slowed somewhat as the column squeezed through the opening in the northernmost defensive wall, and Tavi kept them in the slender formation as they double-timed to the next defensive wall. The din of battle grew louder.

The bulk of the Legion was there, at the next wall. Tavi could see Valiar Marcus’s short, stocky form on the wall, bellowing orders. Legionares stood at the wall, then in two long lines at either side of the bridge, where the rough steps up to the improvised battlements awaited them. As defending legionares on the wall were cut down, the next men in line took their places. Tavi shuddered, imagining a nightmare wait in a line to pain and death with little to do but watch the blood of your brothers in arms flow past you in the gutter.