Jim Butcher - First Lord's Fury

“Or perhaps instead of being a manipulator and assassin, he was simply a loyal servant of the Realm,” Amara said.

A wry, bitter smile tugged at his lips. “The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, Countess.”

“He shouldn’t have been there. He was never trained as a soldier.”

“In a war like this, Countess,” Attis said very softly, “there are no civilians. Only survivors. Good people die, even though they don’t deserve it. Or perhaps we all deserve it. Or perhaps no one does. It doesn’t matter. War is no more a respecter of persons than is death.” He was quiet for a moment, then said, “He was more than I have been. He was a good man.”

Amara bowed her head and blinked sudden tears away. “Yes. He was.”

He lifted a weak hand and waved it at her. “Go. You have much to do.”

The vord arrived perhaps a quarter of an hour after Amara emerged from the steadholt’s hall. Trumpets sounded. Legionares stood ready as engineers finished closing the gates that had been crafted into the walls, until the walls presented a single face of solid granite, its front smoothed to a gleaming finish. She stood beside Bernard upon a tower ten feet higher than the wall. Defensive towers had been spaced every hundred yards down the length of the wall, here a little less than three miles long.

A courier put down upon the tower, briefly kicking up a small gale of wind, and saluted. “Count Calderon, sir.”

Bernard didn’t take his eyes from the field ahead of him. “Report.”

The young man stood there, blinking uncertainly.

Amara sighed and beckoned him. He took a few tentative steps closer.

“There,” Amara said, once he was past the windcrafting she was maintaining to keep Bernard’s orders from being monitored by enemy crafters. “Can you hear now?”

“Oh,” said the courier, flushing. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Report,” said Bernard in exactly the same tone as before.

The young man looked mildly panicked. “Captain Miles’s compliments, sir, and there’s a sizeable enemy force moving to the north, sir, to circle around the end of the wall!”

“Hngh,” Bernard said. “Thank you.”

The young man’s eyes widened. “Um? Sir? Captain Miles is afraid that the enemy will turn our flank. There’s nearly a quarter mile of open ground at the end of the wall before it reaches the flank of the mountain.”

“And that’s a problem?”

“Sir!” the courier protested. “The wall isn’t finished, sir! ”

Bernard bared his teeth in a wolfish smile. The leading wave of the vord was now dressing its ranks and preparing to charge. “The wall is exactly what it’s supposed to be, son.”

“But sir!”

Bernard paused to give the young man a hard look.

The courier wilted visibly.

Bernard nodded. “Return to Captain Miles, give him my compliments, and inform him that he is to stand fast. An allied contingent has been placed to support him should he need it.” He paused and looked at the young man. “Dismissed.”

The courier swallowed, saluted, then dived off the side of the tower. He managed to call up a windstream just before he hit the ground, then raced away to the north.

Amara looked at Bernard, and said, “Couldn’t you have told him more?”

“The fewer who know, the better.” He rested his hands on a merlon and nodded calmly as the vord began to move forward in unison. “Giraldi. Signal the mules to stand ready. Section leaders will give the command to begin.”

Giraldi’s voice bellowed down the wall as the ground began to rumble with the vord’s charge. The order was picked up and relayed down the line.

Bernard lifted his hand over his head and watched the oncoming enemy. Once again, as the vord closed to within a few yards, they let out a vast shriek that shook the walls, and once again, their cries clashed with those of the legionares upon the battlements. Bernard stood watching the nearest legionares intently as they lifted their javelins, and when the first of them threw, he snapped his arm forward, and screamed, “Loose!”

The mules went to work.

Each of the contraptions was built around a boxlike frame. Wooden support struts rose above it, to support a long wooden arm with a shallow bowl at its end. Amara wasn’t familiar with the details of the devices, but each arm was drawn back by a crew of two men, who used raw strength and very minor woodcrafting to pull the arm all the way to a horizontal position. A pin, placed in the device, locked the arm back—and when it was removed, the arm snapped forward with startlingly energetic violence. When it did, it carried so much power with it that the entire framework jumped up off the ground at one end, like a cantankerous mule kicking out with its hind legs.

When Bernard dropped his arm, a hundred mules placed in ranks behind the walls kicked up off the ground, sending the contents of their bowls, dozens and dozens of small glass spheres, soaring up over the walls. They leapt up into the air and spread out into a glittering cloud that caught the light of the lowering sun, throwing back sparkles of scarlet, orange, and gold.

Then the fire-spheres struck the earth and burst into globes of hungry fire, hundreds of them all at once, spread out over a wide swath of land.

“Bloody crows !” screamed a nearby legionare .

The fire seemed to ripple out in a long ribbon as each group of mules unleashed its projectiles. Each mule’s deadly payload devoured scores and scores of the enemy in clouds of sullen flame, spread out over an area fifty yards across. Indeed, if anything, the mules had been spaced too near one another—there were ample areas of overlap, where the spheres from multiple mules detonated in the same area. Thousands of vord died in the flames, and thousands more were scorched and disabled, wailing and running in circles, mad with pain, lashing out at anything that moved.

Amara stared in purest shock as she realized that she had just watched the world change, radically and forever.

That overwhelming hammerblow upon the vord had not been delivered by an exalted High Lord. No group of Citizens or Knights Aeris had unleashed their wrath upon the vord. Crows, it wasn’t even the result of standard Legion battlecrafting. The engines had been shaped here, in the workshops of the holders of the Calderon Valley. Most of the people on their crews were simple holders—nearly half of them were children , young men too young to have served their term in the Legions. The spheres, intended only for a single use, rather than the long-term function of the food-cooling coldstones, had been manufactured in the Valley as well, each of them representing perhaps an hour’s effort by someone gifted with a modest affinity for firecrafting—and much more quickly by someone with a more substantial gift.

Whatever happened, if Alera survived its latest foe, it could not return to what it had been before. Not when the holders had wielded the power of Citizens. Alera’s laws protected freemen to some degree, but they were clearly made to protect the interests of Citizens first and foremost. More than once, Aleran Counts and Lords and even High Lords had faced rebellions from angry freemen—rebellions that were inevitably put down by the superior furycraft of the Citizenry. That was a constant, an immutable fact of Aleran history. The Citizenry ruled precisely because they had access to greater power than any freeman, or any group of freemen.

But that all changed the instant the holders of the Calderon Valley dealt the enemy a blow worthy of the assembled High Lords themselves.

And, less than a minute later, they did it again .

The vord warriors came hurtling forward, shrieking their brassy cries and hammering at the base of the wall. Their scythes slashed down onto the smoothed granite, but unlike the stone of the first wall, this wall’s material resisted their assault tenaciously. Legionares upon the walls took ruthless advantage of the enemy’s inability to scale it to meet them. Great cauldrons of boiling oil, water, or scalding-hot sand were poured down onto the mantis warriors. Where such containers were not available, the legionares resulted to a more primitive and reliable measure: They simply dropped large rocks onto the enemy.