Jim Butcher - First Lord's Fury

“Mmhmm,” Bernard agreed. “Good thing he did, too.”

Riva gave him a harsh look that faded quickly as he let out an exasperated sigh. “Well. You tried to warn us about the vord, didn’t you?”

“We’re all trying to do our best to serve the Realm and our people, sir,” Bernard said. He turned and smiled at Amara as she joined them. “My lady.”

She smiled and touched his hand briefly. “Shouldn’t we sound battle positions?”

“Enemy isn’t here yet,” Bernard said, his voice placid. “Men stand around with swords in their hands for a few hours, they get nervous, tired, start wondering why some fool gave the order for no reason.” He winced and touched his fingertips to his jaw as the effort of so many words pained him. “Won’t hurt to wait. Excuse me.”

Bernard turned to walk down the wall to the elderly man in Legion armor and a centurion’s helmet, his trousers emblazoned with not one, but two scarlet stripes of the Order of the Lion. He muttered a couple of words, and old Centurion Giraldi, out of retirement and back in his armor, nodded stolidly and began dispatching couriers.

“Countess,” Riva greeted her, “when a lord raises a great fortress in his liege lord’s hinterlands, it’s perfectly reasonable to be suspicious. Look what happened at Seven Hills. I don’t think I’m out of line, here.”

“Under most circumstances, you wouldn’t be, Your Grace. But given our situation, I’d say that this is something we can discuss when this is all over. We can even have a hearing over it. Assuming any legates survive.”

Riva grunted, rather sourly, but conceded the point with a nod. He stared out to the southwest, his gaze following the line of the causeway that led back to Riva. “My city taken. My people fleeing for their lives, dying. Starving.” He looked down at his armor, at the sword on his belt, and touched it gingerly. When he spoke again, he sounded like a very tired man. “All I’ve ever wanted for my lands was justice, prosperity, and peace. I’m not much of a soldier. I’m a builder, Countess. I was so pleased with how many folk were moving through the lands to trade, with how much good work you and your husband had done in Calderon. Increasing trade. Building goodwill with the Marat.” He looked at her mildly. “I assumed that you were saving the money you were making, after taxes. Or investing it, perhaps.”

“Oh, we were investing it, my lord,” Amara said, smiling faintly. “In this morning.”

Riva pursed his lips and nodded. “I suppose I can hardly argue with that. How did you do all this? How did you keep it hidden?”

“The walls?” Amara shrugged. “Most people who pass through the valley never leave the causeway. Anything out of sight of the causeway is not difficult to conceal. For the walls, most of the work, as I understand it, is preparing the earth beneath, first. Gathering the proper stone and so on. Once that is done, the raising of the walls is much simpler.”

Riva frowned and nodded. “True. So you aligned the proper stone over time and only brought them up as you needed them.”

“Yes. The Dianic League was most useful in helping us with that, as well as with some of the more serious stone-moving craftings.” She gestured out at the land before them. “And the walls are only the beginning of the defenses, of course. A skeleton, if you see what I mean.”

Lord Riva nodded. “It’s… all quite irregular.”

“My lord husband and his nephew have been exchanging ideas for it by letter for quite some time. Gaius Octavian has a rather irregular turn of mind.”

“So I have gathered,” Riva said. He looked at Bernard, and said, “I have to admit, I think he’s probably the right choice for running the defenses here. He knows them better than anyone else in the Realm, after all.”

“Yes, he does,” Amara said.

“Rather remarkable man, really. Do you know, he’s never once said, ‘I told you so.’ ”

“He isn’t the sort to think such things are important,” Amara said, smiling. “But, Your Grace… he told you so.”

Lord Riva blinked at her, then let out a rueful chuckle. “Yes. He did, didn’t he?”

“Riders!” cried a lookout at the corner of the tower, pointing.

The Aleran pickets who had been watching for the approach of the vord appeared at the top of a distant hill, riding their horses hard down its slope and onto the open plain. Vordknights swarmed over them like night insects around a furylamp, sweeping down to strike and rake, while arrows leapt up from the scouts, with only limited success in warding away the attackers.

“Those men are in trouble,” Riva said.

Bernard raised his fingers to his lips and let out a piercing whistle. He lifted his hand to the Knights Aeris waiting behind the wall and gave them the flier’s hand signals for “lift off,” “escort,” and with a slashing movement of his wrist indicted the direction they were to travel.

In a roar of wind, thirty Knights Aeris swept into the sky and shot toward the riders, to begin herding the vordknights from the fleeing horses with the blasts of their windstreams. They sent the enemy fliers tumbling for a moment or two, not closing to weapons range when they could simply scatter the enemy through the sky like so many dry leaves. They took up position over the scouts, circling protectively above them in an airborne carousel.

Bernard grunted satisfaction. “Like what Aquitaine did at Ceres. No reason to fight the bloody things and lose valuable Knights Aeris. Just get them out of the bloody way.”

The vordknights retreated after a desultory pursuit in which they were simply cast back and completely neutralized by the windstreams of the fliers. The riders came thundering in through a gate crafted into the wall near the command platform. The leader of the riders, a man wearing a woodsman’s green and brown and grey leathers, swung down from his horse and moved with quick purpose toward Bernard, throwing him a crisp Legion salute though he wore neither armor nor sword. Rufus Marcus had been part of the cohort of legionares who had first encountered the vord, years ago, as well as being a survivor of Second Calderon. Like Giraldi, he wore two stripes of the Order of the Lion on his breeches, though they had been so thoroughly muddied that one could hardly tell that they had originally been red.

Bernard returned the salute. “Tribune. What are we looking at?”

“Flyboys had it pretty well, sir,” Rufus replied. “I make it better than three million of their infantry coming, and they aren’t being subtle about it. They’re in close order, sir, not like the packs they move in out in the countryside.”

“That means… that means that this Queen of theirs is present,” Riva said, looking back and forth between them. “Correct?”

“Aye, milord,” Bernard said. “Or so we think.”

“Sir,” said the scout, “they’ve also got a good many of those giants they used for wall work during the campaign last year.”

Bernard grunted. “Figured they would. Anything else?”

“Aye. We couldn’t work around to the back, but I’m sure they had something coming along behind the main body. They weren’t kicking up any dust with all the rain we’ve had of late, but they were drawing crows.”

“Second force?” Bernard said, frowning.

Amara said, “A guess—a pack of prisoners that they plan to feed to their takers and use to counter our crafting, the way they did at Alera Imperia.”

Tribune Rufus nodded. “Could be. Or it could be they called their fliers back together to have them in numbers. We’ve only seen a few. Maybe they’re keeping them on the ground to prevent us spotting them.”

“We’ll be able to handle vordknights,” Bernard said tightly. “It’s probably best to assume that they’re coming with something we haven’t seen before.”