Jim Butcher - Academ's Fury

The vord drew closer.

Fidelias stared at them, then realized something. He was afraid for the men in the hall. He was afraid for those wounded lying helplessly on the marble floor, for the desperate healer trying to care for them, and afraid for Lady Aquitaine, who had acted with such decisive precision to control the chaos she had found there when she arrived.

One of the pale spiders made a gliding, twenty-foot jump, landing ahead of its fellows on the marble, and only twenty feet from Lady Aquitaine's back. Without pause, it flung itself through the air at her.

To expose himself would be the height of irrationality. Suicide.

Fidelias raised his bow, drew the string tight, and shot the leaping spider out of the air three feet before it touched Lady Aquitaine. The arrow impaled the spider and sank into the wooden paneling of the wall, where the creature writhed in helpless agony.

"Your Grace!" Fidelias thundered. "Behind you!"

Lady Aquitaine turned, her eyes flashing in time with the blade of her sword as she drew and saw the oncoming threat. The guardsmen, once warned, reacted with trained speed, weapons appearing as if by magic, and a cloud of pale spiders flung themselves forward through the air in an alien flood.

Men started screaming, their voices joining with a chorus of shrill, whistling shrieks. Steel tore into the pale spiders. Fangs found naked flesh of throats and calves and anywhere else not protected by armor.

Fidelias had seen many battles. He had seen battlecrafting on both large and minor scales. He had worked closely with units of Knights, pitted himself against other furycrafters of various levels of strength, and he had seen the deadly potency of such crafting.

But he had never seen one of the High Blood of Alera enter into open battle.

Within seconds, he understood the vast chasm of power that yawned between a Knight's power, or his own, and that of someone of the blood and skill of Lady Aquitaine.

As the spiders hurled themselves forward, the hallway dissolved into chaos, but for the area near Lady Aquitaine. Her sword moved like a shaft of light, intercepting one spider after another and striking with lethal precision. Her expression never altered from the serene mask she habitually wore, as she weathered the initial wave of leaping creatures, and the instant she had bought herself a few seconds free of attack, she lifted a hand and cried out, her eyes flashing.

Half the hallway beyond exploded into flame, consuming the vord in blinding heat. A furnace-hot gale exploded through the halls in another rattling detonation, but the crafting had stopped the tide of spiders only briefly. Those that survived the fires flung themselves onward over the smoldering remains of their kin.

And then their larger kin arrived.

One of the warrior vord seized a guardsman, its armor turning aside several blows from the man's heavy sword, and shook him back and forth like a dog with a rat. Fidelias heard the man's neck break, and the vord threw him aside and lunged for the next in line-Lady Aquitaine.

The High Lady dropped the sword as the vord warrior closed, and caught the creature's mandibles in her gloved hands as it tried to close them on her neck.

Lady Aquitaine's mouth quirked into an amused little smile, and the earth shook as she called forth power from it and slowly shoved the creature's jaws back open. It began to struggle frantically, but the High Lady of Aquitaine did not release it, pushing its jaws wider until there was a sickly cracking sound, and the vord began flailing its limbs wildly. Once that happened, she seized one of the mandibles in both hands, spun, and hurled the warrior fifty feet down the hall, into a tall marble pillar, where its armor shattered and it fell like a broken toy, gushing alien fluid, twitching, and dying.

The second warrior flung itself directly at her. Lady Aquitaine saw it coming, and with that same amused little smile, she leapt back and up into the air into graceful flight, a sudden wind rising to support her, just out of reach of the vord warrior.

But for all her power, she did not have eyes in the back of her head. Spiders she had not seen dropped down toward her from the ceiling. Fidelias did not waste his time in thinking. He focused on his task, sending a pair of heavy arrows flashing over the distance between them, tacking one of the spiders to the ceiling before it had fallen six inches, and hammering the other away from Lady Aquitaine a bare foot above her head.

She snapped her head around and saw the results of Fidelias's shooting, then flashed him a fierce, heated smile. Below her, the guardsmen were fighting together now, after the initial shock of the vord attack, and reinforcements were arriving, including two Knights Flora and half a dozen Knights Ferrous, whose archery and swordplay brought the second vord warrior down in short order.

Lady Aquitaine darted over to hover above the wounded guardsmen on the ground, almost casually striking down spiders that approached them with fists of wind and flame. Once more guardsmen arrived, she alighted to the marble floor outside the doorway of the room Fidelias remained within.

"Well done, Fidelias," she said quietly. "Your archery was superb. And thank you."

"Did you think I would not support you when the action began, my lady?"

She tilted her head. Then she said, "You exposed yourself to warn me, Fidelias. And to warn the guard. These men, if they didn't have larger worries at hand, would hunt you down and kill you."

Fidelias nodded. "Yes."

"Then why did you risk yourself for them?"

"Because, my lady," he said quietly, "I turned against Gaius. Not Alera."

She narrowed her eyes and nodded thoughtfully. "I see. It wasn't something I had expected of you, Fidelias."

He inclined his head to her. "Some of those spider creatures got through, my lady. They went on down the stairway."

"There's little to be done for that," she replied. "Best you take your leave now, before the fighting is finished and someone remembers seeing you. Guardsmen are already on the way down to the stairs. We are fortunate to have had your warning. Without it, their attack might have succeeded."

"I don't believe it was meant to succeed," Fidelias said, frowning. "It was meant to delay us."

"If so, it only did so for a few minutes," Lady Aquitaine said.

Fidelias nodded and withdrew from the doorway toward the hidden passage. "But critical minutes, my lady, in a desperate hour," he said. "Great furies grant that we are not now too late."

As he ran full tilt down the stairs, Tavi thought to himself that it was probably just as well Gaius had him running up and down the crows-eaten things over and over for the past two years. Because if he had to run down them one more time, he was going to start screaming.

He reached the last several dozen yards of them and caught up to the wax spiders. "Kitai!" he screamed. "Kitai, more Keepers! Look out!"

He heard the sudden clash of breaking glass, then he came down the last of the stairs and into the antechamber.

Kitai had evidently heard Tavi's warning in time, and her response had been to fling herself at the First Lord's liquor cabinet, where she seized bottles of hundred-year-old wine and started flinging them with deadly accuracy at the oncoming wax spiders. By the time Tavi's feet hit the floor, three of them were already lying on their backs, partially crushed by Kitai's missiles. Even as Tavi ran forward, a pair of spiders dropped down onto Max's recumbent form, and three more headed for Maestro Killian.

Kitai leapt to protect Killian, whipped her swords out of her belt, and shouted a challenge at the wax spiders. Tavi rushed over to Max and seized the sword nearby him-Gaius's blade, which Max had been using earlier. One of the spiders ducked down to bite at Max. Tavi swung the sword before he'd really gotten a good grip on it, and he struck mostly with the flat of the blade. The blow at least knocked the spider off Max, and Tavi followed it with a hard kick aimed at the second beast.