Jim Butcher - First Lord's Fury

Minutes suddenly seemed an endless amount of time. If he could move fast enough, he could end the Vord War in seconds .

Tavi reached for more strength from the earth beneath him and used it to spring from the pit in a single leap, taking in his surroundings as he did. There was a circle of blackened, smoking earth around the top of the pit, the ground glazed to dirty glass, presumably from the firecrafting launched at the Queen when she appeared. There were dozens of other pits in sight, and the sounds of desperate struggle. Corpses, clad both in chitin and Legion armor, littered the ground. The earthcrafters had attacked like ant lions, opening a sinkhole beneath their targets and drawing them down into close combat, where the enslaved Citizens would have all the advantages. The loose soil would slow Tavi’s people and make them vulnerable to the vicious physical strength of the attackers. Old Maestro Magnus stood on his wooden stool, beating frantically at his beard, which had somehow been set on fire—but, rendered invisible to the subterranean attackers by his precarious perch, he was thus far unhurt.

Tavi landed lightly, on his toes, just as a chitin-armored man wielding an enormously oversized sword swept it in a deadly arc toward Varg.

The Cane caught the fury-assisted blow with a perfect deflection parry, redirecting the vast power of the strike, sliding it away at an angle instead of pitting the raw strength of his bloodred steel directly against the Aleran’s greatsword. The Cane flowed forward and to one side in the wake of the huge sword’s passing, graceful for all his tremendous size and weight, and struck cleanly, once.

The enslaved Citizen dropped dead in his tracks, his head attached to his body only by a scrap of muscle and flesh. Varg continued the motion, never stopping, his blade coming up to a guard that stopped a fraction of a second before becoming an attack directed at Tavi.

“Where?” Tavi demanded, in Canish.

Varg pointed with one clawed finger, then whirled and threw his great curved blade with a smooth contraction of what seemed like every muscle in the Cane’s lean body. It tumbled twice and buried itself in the back of one of two enemy earthcrafters attacking his son, Nasaug. The thrown weapon struck with so much force that it pierced the chitin-armor, but even if it hadn’t, Tavi saw the target’s head snap back at the violence of the strike, and clearly heard the brutal impact break the enemy’s collared neck.

Tavi looked in the direction Varg had pointed and spotted the vord Queen, vanishing into the mists that still surrounded the camp, courtesy of the ritualists. Kitai was pursuing her. That much Tavi had expected. He just hadn’t expected to see the two of them running along the tops of the standard Legion white canvas tents.

Legion tents were mostly of the northern design, made to shed water and snow. Two upright poles at either end supported a long cross-pole, which held up the line of the roof. The cross-pole was perhaps an inch and a half thick.

Kitai and the Queen sprinted along them as though they were as wide as the avenues of old Alera Imperia.

Tavi leapt into the air and roared aloft on a column of wind. Though Kitai and the vord Queen were moving more swiftly than any human could have without crafting, flight was faster still.

“Stay with the Princeps!” someone bellowed behind him, maybe Maximus.

A second roar of wind joined his, and Tavi glanced over one shoulder to see Crassus soaring after him, fresh blood dripping from his wetted blade.

Kitai bounded from one tent to the next, took a half stride from one end of the tent to the other, and leapt to the next tent, following the vord Queen. As Tavi began to close in, she narrowed the Queen’s lead to only feet, and their next leap between tent poles came at nearly the same instant. Kitai’s sword, seething with amethyst fire (how the bloody crows had she done that ? Tavi’s fire always looked like… fire .) licked out and struck the vord Queen low on one calf—only a last-second convulsion of the limb prevented the blow from striking the tendon at the ankle. Kitai had gone for a crippling blow to slow the Queen and allow the rest of the First Aleran’s skilled furycrafters to catch up.

The Queen spun in midair, her body contorting with what could only have been the aid of windcrafting, and a clawed foot lashed out at Kitai’s face as the two of them soared through their leap. Kitai was not caught unawares by the attack, and intercepted it with her left arm—but away from the support of any earthcrafting, she was no match for the vord Queen’s sheer power. The kick broke bones and laid open flesh in a short spray of blood. Kitai cried out and lost her balance as she came down again, tumbling into the tent canvas and bringing the tent down. The vord Queen took a single, contemptuous step on the tent’s cross-pole before it could fall and continued without slackening her pace.

She met Tavi’s eyes for an instant, and her expression unsettled him. He had rarely seen any emotion at all displayed by a vord queen, and he had encountered several—but this Queen was not wearing a blank mask. She was smiling, a child’s gleeful grin of excitement and joy, an expression seen only in the midst of favorite games and birthday celebrations.

Bloody crows. The creature was having fun .

Tavi let out a cry of rage and flew faster, blade held ready for a cavalry-style passing stroke, but Crassus was surging steadily past him, his years of experience surpassing Tavi’s raw power at windcrafting. He had shifted his blade to his left hand, and was arrowing toward the fleeing Queen’s right side. The young Tribune clearly intended to occupy the vord’s attention and defenses while Tavi took the killing stroke on her left. Tavi altered his flight path slightly, the edges of Crassus’s violent windstream ripping his cloak to shreds. He braced himself and closed half an instant behind Crassus’s leading attack.

Before they reached her, the Queen spun between one step and the next, a neat pirouette, and one pale arm moved in a swath across her body, spreading a small, arcing cloud of crystals into the air.

Crassus never had a chance. The salt crystals struck him before he could have registered the threat, tearing his wind furies to useless shreds. He fell with a short, frustrated cry into the sea of white tents beneath them, heavy poles snapping, heavy canvas tearing under the bone-shattering force of his speed.

Tavi rolled over and over to his own left, barely avoiding the spray of salt crystals, nearly losing control of his flight. A desperate thrust of wind sent him arcing up into the air instead of down into entangling tents, and the harsh, metallic laugh of the vord Queen mocked him. A motion of her arm gave birth to a sphere of fire that wiped away half a dozen legionares as they came pouring out of their tent, and with each step she cast more fire to the left and right, killing men as easily as a child crushed ants. Screams of terror and agony followed in her wake.

Tavi stabilized his flight and shook his head furiously. He could not afford to let his emotions control him. The Queen was deadly, and deadly rational. She wasn’t simply running along the tents for a lark. She had a goal in mind, a destination.

Tavi didn’t need to look ahead to know what was coming—and neither, he realized, did the vord Queen. The layout of a Legion camp was standard from one end of the Realm to another, established by centuries of practice, and he realized with a sudden chill that he had given the enemy some margin of advantage by adhering to Legion rote.

She was heading for the healer’s tents.

With a snarl, Tavi dropped his concentration on everything but his windstream and shot past her. He gained a fifty-, sixty-, seventy-yard lead, then had to come down at the most oblique angle he could, on his side in the air, his feet leading. The instant his boots hit the earth, he called upon it to shape itself to the line of his motion, to guide and slow him rather than simply kicking his feet out from beneath him and seeing to it that he broke his fool neck.