Jim Butcher - First Lord's Fury

He was breathing harder, but could not stop now. “Grow,” he whispered.

Trees as tall as a man arose around him, before the wall. The air grew heavier and heavier with a damp coolness. The flawless shine on his armor began to cloud over with fine, cold mist. Green subsumed the gates and the walls alike. Ivy wound up over the walls as rapidly as a snake could slither up a branch.

Tavi clung to his saddle with one hand, refusing to slump, his teeth clenched, and snarled, “Grow!”

From the gates and walls of Riva erupted a chorus of snaps, cracks, of the snarl of tearing stone. Green swallowed the walls, lapping up from the earth beneath in a tangled, living tide, a wave of growth. Small trees sprang from cracks in the walls, and from one upon the gates. More ivy wound everywhere, along with every other form of wild growth one could imagine.

Tavi nodded in satisfaction. Then he lifted his fist and snarled, to the water coming up from below, “Arise!”

There was the sound of an ocean wave crashing onto a rocky shore as the water leapt up and washed over the walls, over the green, sank into the minute cracks in the walls—and in that instant, Tavi reached out for fire, for the little warmth that remained in the frigid water from far below, and yanked it clear of the water.

There was a hiss, and a cloud of heavy mist and puffing vapor swallowed the gates and the walls. Ice crackled and screamed.

Panting, Tavi slid off Acteon’s back. He tossed the reins back up over the saddle’s crest and slapped the beast on the flank, sending him running back toward the Legion, crashing through the heavy brush and small trees that had grown up behind him. He heard Kitai’s mare let out a squeal, then follow the big black.

Tavi did not let go of the craftings in front of him. This would be the hard part.

He reached out to the water again and called to fire, sending it coursing back into the ice with a wordless cry. Steam exploded from the walls, from the cracks, in screaming whistles.

“Arise!” he called again, and again the water crashed up from the ground.

And again, he pulled the warmth from the water that had sunk even deeper into cracks that were slightly wider. And he sent heat washing back in a few seconds later.

“Arise!” he called, and began the cycle again.

“Arise!” he called again.

And again.

And again.

And again .

Ice and steam hissed and cracked. Stone screamed. Thick white vapor billowed out from the walls, denser than the veiling cloud, all but opaque.

Tavi fell to one knee, gasping, then slowly lifted his eyes to the gates, his jaw set.

They were coated in a layer of ice six inches thick.

Metal groaned somewhere in the gates, a long moan that echoed from empty buildings and through the mists.

“Right,” Tavi panted. He pushed himself back to his feet, looked over his shoulder, and nodded at Kitai. “Here we go.”

She smiled at him, and said, “Clever, my Aleran.”

He winked at her. Then he slowly drew his sword. He extended it deliberately to his side and concentrated.

The metal seemed to hum—and then fire kindled and rushed down the length of the blade, a white-hot wreath. Tavi reached down into himself, focusing, using the fire along the blade as a starting point, gathering heat and preparing to unleash it.

He extended the sword toward the gate with a scream, and fire and a sudden hammer of wind rushed forth toward the frozen gates. The white-hot firebolt slammed into the gate with a force as real as any ram, the ice sublimating in an instant to steam, and the gates, strained beyond measure by the flexing of water and ice and new life growing within them, shattered.

So did the towers beside the gate.

And a hundred feet of the city’s wall, on either side of the towers.

All of them roared away from the fury of that fiery blast, screaming as they flew into pieces, bursting into their own heat and wild motion as the overstrained furies within were finally pushed past the limits of the physical materials they inhabited and vented their frustrated rage on the matter about them. Stone and metal—some of the pieces were the size of a Legion supply wagon, or as long and as sharp as the largest sword—went flying and spinning away, sent crashing through half-burned buildings and crushing the bases of the outer ring of towers by the will of Gaius Octavian.

Secondary collapses followed, buildings that were torn to shreds by the destruction of the gates falling in beneath their own unsupported weight. And when those structures fell, they claimed others that stood alongside them.

All told, it was nearly four full minutes before the roar of collapsing stone and masonry quieted.

Tavi winced. The damage had been… a little more widespread than he had expected. He’d have to pay Riva for the blocks he’d ruined.

“Aleran,” Kitai breathed in awe.

He turned to face her and tried to look as though he’d meant to do that. He focused on the positive; at least the duration of the collapse had given him a little time to catch his breath and somewhat recover from the effort to cause it.

The silence that settled around them was oppressive, pregnant with anticipation. “Ready,” Tavi told her. “Stand ready.”

“You still think she will respond?” she asked quietly.

He nodded tightly and resettled his grip on his fiery blade. “She has no choice.”

Within heartbeats, as though driven by his words, the vord gave them an answer.

A strange cry began to rise from dozens of points around the city—it was a sound Tavi had never heard from the vord before, a particular, ululating wail that flickered from its lowest tone to its highest in a swift, chattering trill.

And the city exploded with vord.

In an instant, Kitai was at his back, and a glance up showed him Crassus hand-signaling frantically, requesting permission to attack. Tavi flashed him the sign to stay in place and turned just as the nearest vord mantis flung itself at him.

There was no time for thought, or for fear. A series of thoughts so rapid that they seemed almost a flowing, single idea within his mind’s eye gathered furies of the earth, of fire, of steel, and Tavi’s flaming blade split the creature cleanly into two frantically twitching parts in a single diagonal, upward-sweeping stroke.

Another mantis came hard on the heels of the first—metaphorically speaking, anyway, since Tavi wasn’t sure that the things actually had feet , much less heels. A flick of his wrist sent a howling column of wind and fire into its center of mass with such violence that the crafting tore two of the creature’s long legs from its body.

Tavi checked over his shoulder. Kitai had been rushed by no less than four mantises. One was frantically trying to tear itself from the grasp of a pair of slender young trees, a side product of Tavi’s crafting, which had bent in place at a gesture from Kitai and trapped the vord. The other three were struggling to surge forward through tall grass that writhed like serpents and seized their every limb in a thousand soft green fingers—more of Kitai’s crafting.

Tavi turned back and left them to her. The sudden, focused, coordinated attack, its strength doubled upon what would appear to be the weaker of the pair to most observers, suggested the appearance of some sort of guiding intellect—perhaps even the Queen herself. The vord had moved with direction and purpose, not with the blind aggression of a creature defending its territory, as the first group of mantis-forms had done.

Or maybe they were getting smarter.

An instinct drew his face up and to one side in time to see a pair of vordknights blurring toward him. They swept past, scythe-limbs positioned to sweep his head from his shoulders as if he’d been a dandelion and they the groundskeepers. He ducked beneath it, his hand seizing the hem of Kitai’s mail shirt with a jerk, warning her, and she dropped into a low crouch that took her safely beneath the passing scythes.