Jim Butcher - First Lord's Fury

“We need him,” Amara said.

Bernard’s jaw clenched.

Amara put a hand on his arm. “We need him.”

He glanced aside at her, took a slow breath, and made a motion of his head that was so miniscule that it could hardly be recognized as a nod. “Doesn’t mean I have to like—”

His head whipped around, and his body began to follow before Amara heard the light tread upon the stone roof. She turned to see a faint blur in the air, someone hidden behind a windcrafted veil and approaching with terrifying speed. Then there was a sound of impact and Bernard let out a croaking gasp, doubling over. The blur moved again, and Bernard’s head snapped violently to one side. Teeth knocked loose from his jaw rattled onto the roof like a small handful of ivory dice, and he crumpled to the floor beside them, senseless or dead.

Amara reached for Cirrus and her weapon simultaneously, but their attacker flung out a nearly invisible arm and a handful of salt crystals struck her, sending the wind fury into disruptive convulsions of ethereal agony. Her sword was not halfway from its sheath before a thread of cold steel, the tip of a long, slender blade, lay against her throat.

The blade shimmered into visibility, then the hand behind it, then the arm behind the hand, and suddenly Amara found herself facing the former High Lady of Aquitaine. Invidia stood clad all in black chitin, and that same horrible, pulsing parasite-creature was locked about her torso. Her hair was dark and unkempt, her eyes sunken, and her skin had an unhealthy pallor.

“And to think,” Invidia said. “I’ve spent the last half an hour scouring this entire plaza looking for the singulares I was sure Attis had hidden. Quite unlike him to use nonexistence as camouflage, though I suppose it did make them impossible to find. Hello, Countess.”

Amara shot her motionless husband a glance, swept her eyes over the plaza below, and clenched her teeth. “Go to the crows, traitor.”

“Oh, I have,” Invidia said lightly. “They’d begun to peck at my eyes and lips when the vord found me. I am disinclined to repeat the experience.”

Amara felt a chill smile stretch her lips. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”

“Come, Countess,” Invidia replied. “It is far too late for any of us to seek redemption for our sins now.”

“Then why haven’t you killed me and had done?” Amara replied, lifting her chin to bare more of her throat to Invidia’s blade. “Lonely, are we? Missing the company of our fellow human beings? Needing some scrap of respect? Forgiveness? Approval?”

Invidia stared at her for a moment though her eyes looked through Amara as though she weren’t there. A frown creased her brow. “Perhaps,” she said.

“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you began murdering us all,” Amara spat. “You aren’t wearing a collar, like the others. They’re slaves. You’re free. You’re here by choice.”

Invidia let out a harsh laugh. “Is that what you think? That I have a choice?” Amara arched an eyebrow. “Yes. Between death and destroying your own kind. You could defy the vord and die of the poison still in you—die horribly. But instead you’ve chosen to let everyone else die in your place.”

Invidia’s eyes widened, and her lips peeled back from her teeth in an unnatural grimace.

“The truly sad part,” Amara said, naked contempt ringing in her voice, “is that in the end, it will make no difference. The moment you are more of a threat than an asset to them, the vord will kill you. You selfish, petulant child. All the blood on your hands has been for nothing .”

Invidia’s jaws clenched, and spots of color appeared high on her cheeks. Her whole body began shaking. “Who,” she whispered. “Who do you think you are?”

Amara learned into the blade and met Invidia’s eyes with her own. “I know who I am. I am the Countess Calderonus Amara, Cursor of the Crown, loyal servant of Alera and the House of Gaius. Though it cost me my life, I know who I am.” She bared her own teeth in a wolfish smile. “And we both know who you are. You’ve chosen your side, traitor. Get on with it.”

Invidia stood motionless. The many fires blew a hot wind over the rooftop. Somewhere, there was a roar of collapsing masonry as a building succumbed. Distant thumps of firecrafting pulsed irregularly through the night. The distant desperation of the trumpets and drums of the embattled Legions remained a constant, hardly noticed music.

“So be it,” Invidia hissed.

And then the rooftop exploded into motion.

Amara called upon Cirrus, and the wounded fury flooded into her, lending speed and agony alike as time seemed to slow down. Amara surged forward, bobbing down, and ducked under the quick cut that Invidia flicked at her neck. Given the fury-born strength of the former High Lady, had the blow landed, Amara had no doubt that it would have killed her. She coiled her knee up against her chest as she moved, then, one hand coming down to rest lightly on the rooftop, she drove her leg out, all the strength of her hips and legs behind it, the power driven with brutally concentrated force through her heel and into Invidia’s hip.

Invidia’s armor absorbed much of the bone-breaking power of the blow, but it struck her with such speed that its force drove her back through the air. The incredible strength conveyed by furycraft did nothing to add to her body’s mass, after all, and Amara’s kick had moved with such raw speed that even had she possessed the superior strength of an earthcrafter, it would have been all but redundant.

Amara felt her ankle snap, and the pain, added to Cirrus’s own agony, was enough to wash away her concentration on her windcrafting. The world returned to its usual pace, and Invidia crashed backward into the low stone rim that lined the edge of the roof. She hit with brutal force, and a cry was driven from her lungs. She shook her head and lifted a hand, her eyes blazing with sudden fury.

Then fire exploded directly upon her, the white-hot fury of a Knight Ignus’s fire-sphere, intensified by an order of magnitude. The bloom of scalding heat washed back over Amara in a flood that flung her ragged-cut hair straight back from her head, and she threw herself to the ground to shield the unmoving Bernard’s face from the scalding heat of that blast.

She looked back a moment later, her eyes still dazzled from the intensity, and found that half of the building’s rooftop, the part where Invidia had stood, was simply gone . There was no rubble, no fires, no dust—the building simply ceased to be in the area of a sphere the diameter of a couple of carriages. The places where the building had been devoured were cut as neatly as if with a knife, the very edge of the original material burned black and otherwise perfectly in shape. A terrible smell filled the air.

There was no sign of Invidia.

There was the sound of a very light impact on the rooftop nearby. Amara looked up to see another veiled, nearly invisible shape, standing ten feet away, facing the sterile destruction on the rooftop. “I do hope,” Gaius Attis murmured, “that you were not burned. I tried to contain the spread of the heat.”

“You used us,” Amara snarled. She jerked her furious gaze away from Attis’s veiled form. Sheer pain had all but blinded her with tears, but she found Bernard’s throat with her fingers. His pulse beat steady and strong, though he still wasn’t moving. His own fury-born strength had enabled him to survive Invidia’s blow to the jaw. Had such a strike landed on Amara, it would have broken her neck.

“It was necessary,” Attis replied evenly. He turned, scanning the smoke-and-fire skies over Riva. “Invidia would never have exposed herself to me if she did not think she could kill me easily, such as when I was distracted with those furies. And if she hadn’t found someone watching over me, she would have assumed my guard to be too well concealed, and not shown herself for fear of being taken by surprise. You and your Count are both capable enough that it was feasible you might have been entrusted with warning me of danger but vulnerable enough to be quickly overwhelmed by someone of Invidia’s caliber.”