Jim Butcher - Cursors's Fury

Tavi glanced around him, at the ruins of the tent. His mouth twisted bitterly. It was just then that the crows flooded by overhead, a raucously cawing mass of the carrion birds, thousands of them, sweeping over the Tiber and the Elinarch toward the southwest. They flew by for a solid two minutes, at least, and when a ripple of scarlet lightning went through the clouds overhead, Tavi could see them, wings and beaks and tail feathers of solid black against the red, moving together in a nearly solid mass that almost seemed to be a creature in its own right.

Then they were gone, and neither one of the Cursors on the storm-wracked ground spoke. The crows always knew when a battle was brewing. They knew how to find and feast upon those who would fall.

Magnus sighed after a few seconds more. “You need to shave, sir.”

“I’m busy,” Tavi said.

“Did you ever see Captain Miles unshaven?” Magnus asked quietly. “Or Cyril? It’s what legionares will expect. It’s reassuring. You need to give them that. Take care of your hands, too.”

Tavi stared at him for a second, then let out a slow breath. “All right.”

“For the record, I strongly disagree with your decision regarding Antillus Crassus. He should be imprisoned with the other suspects.”

“You weren’t there,” Tavi said. “You didn’t see his eyes.”

“Everyone can be lied to. Even you.”

“Yes,” Tavi said. “But he wasn’t lying to me tonight.” Tavi shook his head. “Had he been into some kind of plot with his mother, he’d have left with her. He stayed. Confronted me directly. I’m not sure how intelligent he is, but he isn’t a traitor, Magnus.”

“All the same, until we know what further damage his mother might wreak-”

“We don’t know for certain she was involved,” Tavi said quietly. “Until we do, we should be careful with our words.” Magnus didn’t look happy about it, but he nodded. “Besides. Crassus is likely the most powerful furycrafter we have left in the Legion, apart from Maximus, and he’s the one who has been training with the Knights Pisces. He’s the only choice to lead them.”

“He’ll be in a position to ruin anything this Legion attempts to accomplish if you’re wrong, sir.”

“I’m not.”

Magnus pressed his lips together, then shook his head and sighed. He drew a small case out from behind a mound of lightning-tortured earth, and opened it, revealing a small shaving kit and a covered bowl. He opened it to reveal steaming water. “Maximus should be back shortly. You clean up,” he said. “I’ll find you a proper cavalry weapon.”

“I’m going to look, not fight,” Tavi said.

“Of course, sir,” Magnus said, handing him the kit. “I assume you prefer a sword to a mace.”

“Yes,” Tavi said, taking the kit.

Magnus paused, and said, “Sir. I think you should consider appointing a small number of singulares .”

“Captain Cyril didn’t use any bodyguards.”

“No,” Magnus said, his tone pointed. “He didn’t.”

Tavi knew that the enemy was near when he saw the first massive, wheeling flights of crows, circling and swooping around columns of black smoke.

The sun rose behind them as they followed the Tiber toward the harbor town of Founderport, almost twenty miles from the Elinarch. Tavi rode with Max at the head of an alae of cavalry, two hundred strong, while the second alae, mostly made up of the more experienced troops, had been broken into eight-man divisions that moved in a loose line through the hills south of the Tiber, marking terrain and, together with the swift-moving scouts, searching for the enemy.

As the sun rose, it lit the gloomy and unnatural cloud cover overhead, and as the ruddy light finally fell through the low, undulating hills around the river, it revealed points of black smoke rolling up in the broad river valley. Tavi nodded to Max, who ordered the column to a halt. He and Tavi walked forward, to the crest of the next hill, and looked down. Max lifted his hands, bending the air between them, and let out a low, pained grunt.

“You should see this,” Max said quietly.

Tavi leaned over as Max held the windcrafting for him to look through. Tavi had never seen it working from so close, and the crafting made the image far more clear and intense than his little curved piece of Romanic glass. He had to force himself not to take a moment simply to admire the marvel of the apparently close view the crafting offered. A few seconds later, as he realized what he was looking at, he had no need to feign an officer’s calm, analytical distance for the sake of his troops. He had to do it to keep his stomach from emptying itself.

Max’s crafting let Tavi see the corpses of steadholts-dozens of them, throughout the fertile valley. Black smoke rose from solid shapes that had once been houses and barns and halls like the ones Tavi grew up in, each inhabited by scores of families. If the Canim had taken them by surprise, there would be few, if any, survivors.

Here and there, Tavi saw small groups on the move, most of them coming toward him. Some were small, slow-moving masses in the distance. Others were larger and moved much more quickly. As he watched, one such swift group fell upon a smaller one, in the distance. It was too far away to make out any real details, even with Max’s windcrafting to help him, but Tavi knew what he had to be looking at.

A Canim raiding party had just slaughtered a group of refugees, fleeing without hope of salvation from the destruction behind them.

A surge of pure, white-hot rage went through him at the sight, a primal fury that brought stars to his eyes and tinged everything he saw with red-and at the same time, it washed through him, coursed through his veins like a river of molten steel while leaving his thoughts sharp, harsh, perfectly clear in a way that had happened only once before: deep in the caverns beneath Alera Impe-ria, where a mindless agent of the creatures known as the vord had come to murder his friends and his liege.

He heard leather creaking and noted, in passing, that his fists had closed tightly enough to torture the leather of his gloves, hard enough to tear open the injuries on his knuckles. The fact did not strike him as particularly important, and the sensation came from so far away that he could barely tell it was his own.

“Crows,” Max breathed, his rough-hewn face stony.

“I don’t see their main body,” Tavi said quietly. “No concentration at all.”

Max nodded. “Raiding packs. Usually fifty or threescore Canim in each.”

Tavi nodded, and said, “That means we’re only looking at maybe a thousand of them here.” He frowned. “What kind of numbers advantage do we need to ensure victory.”

“Best if we can catch them in the open. They’re big, and strong, but horses are bigger and stronger. Cavalry can stand up to them in the open. Infantry can take them on one-to-one on an open field, if they can keep their momentum and have decent support from Knights. It’s when you fight them in enclosed areas or bad terrain or you stalemate them and grind to a halt that their advantages start mounting up.”

Tavi nodded. “Just look at them. Moving every which way. They don’t look like advance forces at all. There’s no coordination.”

Max grunted. “You think Ehren was wrong?”

“No,” Tavi said quietly.

“Then where is their army?” Max said.

“Exactly.”

Max suddenly stiffened as, in the valley below them, the morning light and the lay of the ground revealed a group of refugees not a full mile away. They moved sluggishly down the road, obviously trying to hurry, obviously weary beyond haste. The road through the valley was not one of the major furycrafted causeways that supported the Realm-the expense of such a creation made the use of the broad, slow waters of the Tiber far more practical for shipping and travel.