Jim Butcher - First Lord's Fury

The Aleran forces were in motion, moving forward.

From high above, Amara could sometimes see entire cohorts of Knights Aeris, black spots of shadow, far below, sharply outlined against the lighted columns of Legions on the ground. There were fewer than there should have been relative to the forces on the move. The Knights Aeris of Alera had taken hideous casualties in the battle to defend Alera Imperia. Their sacrifice had been one of the factors to help convince the enemy to commit the lion’s share of its forces to the final assault on the city itself—an assault that had resulted in annihilation for the attacking vord.

Gaius Sextus’s final, suicidal gambit had bought Alera the time the Realm needed to recover and prepare for this battle, but the cost had been grievous—and Amara feared that their comparative weakness in the skies would leave the Legions with a deadly weak point in their order of battle.

The leading edge of the vord tide rushed to within a quarter mile of the front ranks of the advancing Legions, and a flare of scarlet-and-blue light leapt skyward from the Crown Legion, Aquitaine’s signal to commence. Alera’s Knights and Citizens, after months of preparation and fear, after enduring more than a year of humiliation and pain inflicted by the invaders, were ready, at last, to give them an appropriate reply.

Even though she’d heard of the general theory behind the opening salvo of furycraft, Amara had never seen anything quite like it. She had witnessed the utter destruction of the city of Kalare by the wrath of the great fury Kalus, and it had been a horrible, hideous sight, vast beyond imagining, uncontrolled, horrible in its beauty—and completely impersonal. What happened to the leading wave of vord was every bit as terrible and even more frightening.

The lords of Alera spoke in a voice of fire.

The standard assault of a skilled firecrafter was the manifestation of a sudden and expanding sphere of white-hot fire. They were generally large enough to envelop a mounted rider. Anything caught inside them would be charred to ashes in an instant. Anything within five yards would generally be melted or set aflame—and anything living within another five yards of that would be scorched beyond the capacity of a human being to sustain hostilities. The fire came with an ear-piercing hiss and vanished with a hollow boom. It would leave secondary fires and smooth depressions of molten earth in its wake.

Manifesting such an attack was extremely draining upon the furycrafter involved. Even those with the talents of Lords and High Lords counted the number of spheres he could manifest without resting in the dozens, and not many of those. Given how many vord were on the field, even with the gathered might of all Alera’s firecrafters, they could not inflict instant, significant losses upon the mass of the enemy body.

Gaius Attis had considered a way to improve on that.

Instead of the roar of full-blown fire-spheres, a flicker of tiny lights, like thousands of fireflies, sprang up ahead of the oncoming vord. A moment later, Amara began to hear a tide swell of tiny reports, pop pop pop , like the celebratory fireworks crafted by children at Midsummer. The sparkling lights thickened, redoubling, creating a low wall in front of the enemy, who charged ahead without slowing.

No single one of the little firecraftings was a deadly threat to a human being, much less to an armored warrior form of the vord—but there were hundreds of thousands of them, each one an almost-effortless crafting. As the little flowers of fire continued to blossom, the air around them began to shimmer, turning the sparkling line of lights into strip of hellishly molten air that almost seemed to glow with its own fire.

The leading elements of the vord plunged into the barrier and agonizing destruction. Their screams came up to Amara only distantly, and with a little help from Cirrus, she could see that the vord had not moved more than twenty feet across the killing oven Gaius Attis had prepared for them. The warriors staggered and collapsed, roasted alive, bits of flesh and armor cooking away and being flung up into the gale of rising hot air as ash. Tens of thousands of vord perished in the first sixty seconds.

But they kept coming.

Moving with frantic energy, the vord flung themselves in utter abandonment at the barrier, and thousands more died—but each vord that perished absorbed some of the furycrafted flame. Amara was reminded uncomfortably of a campfire in a thunderstorm. Certainly, no single drop of water could extinguish the flame. It would be boiled to steam as it tried—but sooner or later, the fire would go out.

The vord began to push through, bounding over the charred corpses of those who had come before, using as shields the bodies of their companions who were collapsing from the heat, each successive vord pushing a few feet farther than the one ahead of it.

Signals from the Crown Legion pulled the line of deadly heat back toward the Legion lines, forcing the enemy to pay the full price for those last yards of ground, but they could not bring the band of superheated air too close to the Aleran lines without exposing their own troops to the flame—which also blinded the Aleran battle commanders to the movements of the enemy. So, as the vord began to break through, another signal went up from the Crown Legion, and the massive firecrafting ceased. Seconds later, the vord joined battle with the Legions.

“They have no thought for their own lives,” said Veradis, staring down as Amara did. “No thought at all. How many of them died just now, simply so that they could reach the battle?”

Amara shook her head and didn’t answer. She hovered upon her windstream, high up in the night sky, where the air was cold and bitter. Three wind coaches carrying Aldrick and his swordsmen hovered a few yards off.

“When will the scouts return?” Veradis asked anxiously. The young Ceresian woman was only a moderately good flier, and her long hair and dress were hardly ideal for the circumstances, but she handled herself with composure. “Every moment we wait here, they could be taking her farther away from us.”

“It won’t do the First Lady any good to go charging off in the wrong direction,” Amara called back. “I don’t like them, but Aldrick’s people know their business. When one of their fliers reports in, we’ll move. Until then, we’re smartest to wait here, where we can get anywhere we need to be the most quickly.” She pointed a finger. “Look. The cyclone teams.”

Small, dark clouds of fliers swept down in ranks over the meeting of the opposing forces. As Amara watched, she saw them seizing the air, made treacherously turbulent by the extended fury of the slow-motion firecrafting the Alerans had held before the vord. Citizens and Knights Aeris seized upon that motion in the air, focusing and shaping it, each team adding its own momentum as they wheeled in a caracole down the lines, spinning the furious winds and spinning them again.

It took them only a few moments, working together—and then in half a dozen places just behind the frontmost ranks of the vord, great whirling columns of ash and soot and scorched earth writhed up from the ground. The cyclones roared, howling out a ground-scorching wail of hunger, and began to rush ram pantly through the vord ranks, seizing the creatures like ants and tossing them hundreds of feet through the air—when they didn’t drive tiny bits of detritus through their carapaces like so many diminutive arrowheads, or simply rend them limb from limb on the spot. Each cyclone was shepherded by its own team of windcrafters, each of which kept its own massive, deadly vortex from turning back upon Aleran lines. Windmanes, glowing white forms, like skeletal human torsos trailing a shroud of smoke and mist where their legs should have been, began to glide out of the cyclones and swept down to attack anything within their reach upon the earth.