Chapter 31

Gaius Octavian's host came down upon the vord-occupied city of Riva like a thunderstorm.

Though I'm not sure anyone's ever done it quite this literally, Fidelias mused.

As the Legions and their Canim allies swept down from the hills above Riva, the low-hanging clouds and curtains of rain seemed to cling to the banners of Aleran troops and Canim warriors alike, bound by a myriad of misty, intangible scarlet threads that stretched out into the air all around. The leashed clouds engulfed the entire force, concealing their numbers and identity from outside observation - courtesy of the Canim ritualists, led by their new commander, Master Marok.

Within the cloud, Crassus and the fliers of the Knights Pisces hovered over the heads of the marching forces. The Knights Aeris had gathered up the swirling energy of a dozen thunderbolts from a storm that had come through before first light. The strokes of lightning rumbled and crackled back and forth between the Knights, blue-white beasts caged in a circle of windcrafting. Their growling thunder rolled out ahead of the advancing host, concealing the sound of marching troops and cavalry alike.

"This all looks quite stylishly ominous," Fidelias commented to the Princeps. "And appearances can be quite important. But I can't help but wonder why we're doing this, Your Highness."

Octavian waited for a crash of thunder to roll by before he answered. "There just aren't many ways to disguise the identity of a force on the move," he called back, his voice confident. "And I want our full strength to come as a surprise to the vord."

"I see," Fidelias said. "For a moment I thought that you'd effectively blinded and deafened us all for the sake of making a memorable entrance."

The Princeps grinned, showing Fidelias his teeth. "We have eyes outside the mist - Varg's Hunters and the Knights Flora of both Legions."

"You're still creating an information delay. They'll have to come running in here to tell you anything. If a large force arrives unexpectedly, that could be fatal."

The Princeps shrugged. "There won't be any such force," he said with a confidence so perfectly familiar that Fidelias was almost violently reminded of Sextus.

Fidelias lowered his voice. "You can be sure of that?"

The Princeps looked at him for a moment, pensive, and nodded. "Yes."

"Then why not bypass Riva completely?"

"First, because we need to be tested in an actual battle," he replied. "We've never coordinated in offensive operations before, at least not on this scale. It's important that we know what we can do against these particular vord forms."

"And second?"

The Princeps gave Fidelias a bland look that had something granite-hard lurking under the surface. "It's not their city. Is it." He looked out at the mist, as though focusing on whatever was beyond. "Besides, Riva could conceal legions of vord behind her walls. Better to find out now and deal with them rather than waiting for them to come marching up our spines when we reach Calderon."

There was the sound of approaching hoofbeats, and Kitai appeared out of the mist. She pulled in on the Princeps' right side and matched her mount's pace to his, her green eyes intent. "The gates were not destroyed when the city was taken," she said. "They are currently closed and guarded. There are vord on the battlements and in the sky above the city."

"There's a problem," Fidelias said. "We don't have siege equipment."

The Princeps shook his head. "We won't need it." He drew a deep breath, as if bracing himself for something unpleasant, and said, "I'm going to take them down."

Fidelias found himself lifting both eyebrows. The siege gates of the great cities of Alera were more than simple steel and stone. They were wound through and through with furycraftings of every kind imaginable, and more craftings were laid upon them every year, so that they built one upon another like layers of paint. It was done that way for the specific purpose of making the gates almost entirely resistant to the influence of hostile furycraft. A High Lord of the Realm would be daunted by such an obstacle.

"You think you're strong enough to manage that, sir?"

The Princeps nodded once. "Yes, I do."

Fidelias studied Octavian's confident profile. "Be wary of hubris, Your Highness."

"It's only hubris if I can't do it," he replied. "Besides, I need to be tested, too. If I'm to step into my grandfather's shoes, I can't keep on concealing my abilities forever. I need to prove myself."

Kitai snorted quietly. "About bloody time," she said. "Does this mean I'm free to be more obvious as well, Aleran?"

"I don't see why not," said the Princeps.

Fidelias lifted his eyebrows. "Your Highness? I knew she could manage minor furycraftings, lights and such, but..."

"But?" He smiled faintly.

"But she's a Marat, sir. Marat don't use furies."

The Princeps feigned an astonished expression. "She is? Are you sure?"

Fidelias gave him a sour look.

The Princeps let out a warm laugh. "You may have noted that our dear Ambassador has very little regard for the proprieties."

"Not when they're ridiculous," Kitai sniffed.

The two sentences came out one after the other, so close together that they might have been uttered by actors following a script or spoken by the same person. Fidelias peered at their identically colored eyes as if for the first time, feeling somewhat stupid. "The way Marat operate in tandem with their clan animals. It's more than just their custom, isn't it?"

"There's a bond," the Princeps said, nodding. "I scarcely understand it myself - and she honestly gives me no help whatsoever when I try."

"That is because knowledge given freely to another is not really knowledge at all, Aleran," Kitai replied. "It is rumor. One must learn for oneself."

"And this bond... it allows her to furycraft as you do," Fidelias said.

"Apparently," the Princeps said.

Kitai rode for a moment, frowning. Then she said, "He's stronger. Better focused. But I can manage more things simultaneously."

The Princeps lifted his eyebrows. "You think so?"

Kitai shrugged her shoulders.

Fidelias frowned. "Ambassador... did you just ride up to the city gates under a veil and try to craft them down?"

Kitai shot Fidelias an annoyed scowl - and said nothing.

The Princeps looked back and forth between the pair of them, his expression unreadable. Then he said, "That was thoughtful of you, Kitai."

"We want the gates down," she said. "What matter who brings them down or when?"

Octavian nodded. "Most considerate," the Princeps said.

Kitai's scowl darkened. "Do not say it."

"Say what? It's the thought that counts?"

She slapped his leg lightly with the ends of her reins.

A Marat with furycraft in the same general vicinity as the Princeps of the Realm. A Princeps who had never demonstrated his skills beyond the most basic, rudimentary uses of the craft - except when he had apparently executed furycraftings so large that they could hardly be recognized as such. Fidelias himself, a proven and confessed traitor to the Crown, an assassin for the Princeps' enemies, riding openly at the Princeps' left hand, under an assumed face and a sentence of death, willingly staying where he was. Meanwhile, in the host behind them, following the Princeps' banner were thousands of the finest troops of Alera's oldest enemies - never mind another enemy, Ambassador Kitai, who quite clearly shared a great deal more than affection with Octavian. And all of them were about to assault an Aleran city overrun by a foe no one had even heard of ten years ago.

The world had become a very strange place.

Fidelias smiled to himself.

Strange, yes. But for some reason, he no longer felt like a man too old to face it.

***
It was not long before horns began to blow, and Aleran scouts appeared in the mists ahead, woodcrafted veils unraveling around them as they approached the column. The Princeps pointed at one of the men, and said, "Scout, report!"

"They're coming, sir!" the man reported. "Skirmish line, maybe a cohort's worth, coming at us hard, sir! And they're ugly, big as they were in Canea, not those swamp-lizard things. Looks like they've got a hell of a reach on them, too."

Octavian grunted. "Looks like the Queen changed them to better handle a shieldwall."

Fidelias nodded. "Like you said she might. I'm impressed."

The Princeps coughed. "It was a guess. I wasn't certain about it. Just seemed reasonable."

Fidelias frowned, and said quietly, "Piece of advice, sir?"

"Hmm?"

"Next time, just nod. People like it better when the Princeps seems to know something they don't."

The Princeps made a quiet, snorting sound and raised a hand, signaling the trumpeter waiting nearby. "Sound advance to the Canim. Let's see what these vord think about meeting a few thousand Narashan warriors instead of a Legion shieldwall."

"And see if the Canim will be willing to take your orders, eh?" Fidelias murmured, beneath the clear notes of the signal trumpet.

Octavian grinned, and responded, quietly, "Nonsense. I have no doubts whatsoever in the solidity of our alliance."

"Excellent, sir," Fidelias said. "That's more like what I was talking about."

The shrill, brassy cries of vord warriors came drifting through the mist, different than any Fidelias had heard before but unmistakable. He had to keep himself from shuddering. For the sake of the rest of the Legion, he was still playing the part of Valiar Marcus, relegated to the role of advisor to the young captain by advancing age. Valiar Marcus would not show fear before the enemy. No matter how bloody terrifying they were to anyone with half a mind.

A double column of Canim warriors, several hundred strong, came rolling up to the front of the host, led by Varg himself. Their loping pace was swift, and Varg stopped to confer briefly with the Princeps. He nodded to Octavian, then gave a few orders in the snarling tongue of the wolf-warriors, and his troops fell into a curved double line that arched out in front of the rest of the host like a legionare's shield.

Fidelias could clearly see only the nearest of the Canim, at the center of the line - Varg and the warriors closest to him. The lean, powerful bodies of the Canim moved in a fashion that was both completely nonuniform and fluidly coordinated, each armored warrior occupying precisely enough space to move and use his weaponry, with his companions on either side maintaining a precise distance, seemingly without any conscious effort.

The Canim were soldiers, sure enough, clearly moving in coordinated discipline, but their methods and tactics were utterly alien to those used by Aleran legionares. Fidelias didn't even want to think of the pure shocking power of a Canim shieldwall. If they used such infantry tactics, an Aleran Legion would not be able to survive the clash of close combat.

Then again, the few times Alerans had clashed with Canim of the warrior caste, the battle had never gone in their favor in any case. At best they had attained a draw, during several brief clashes during the two years of combat around the Elinarch and in the Vale. In the worst cases, the warrior caste had handed the Alerans their heads.

The vord shrieked their alien cries again, this time from closer, and Fidelias felt his heart laboring harder. He straightened his back and forced his expression to Marcus's closed, prebattle discipline. He heard the Princeps giving rapid orders beside him - sending the scouts back out to the army's flanks and front, and ordering Maximus's cavalry to come up to anchor both ends of the Canim lines, to be ready to help if needed.

One Canim element to one Aleran, Fidelias noted. Even when fighting together, the Princeps was showing caution against his allies, who would see it as a reassurance and a mark of respect. The Princeps had been the first to understand the way the wolf-warriors thought, and he had applied that knowledge ably to both the battlefield and the conference table with undeniable success. Rarely had Octavian attained an overwhelming victory against the Canim, and yet at day's end, he had always managed to hold the most vital terrain or gain another mile of ground - and now his former enemies let out a howl and engaged the vord as they appeared out of the mist.

The battle was brief, elemental, and savage.

The vord warrior forms slowed for a few steps upon seeing the Canim ready to meet them, but then hurtled forward with shrill wails and whistles. Horrible scything limbs plunged at the wolf-warriors with the kind of power that would leave Aleran legionares screaming or dead without extraordinary skill or luck.

Against the battle line of Canim in full armor, it was... insufficiently impressive.

Varg simply struck the scythes from his opponents' limbs as they swept toward him, his red steel blade flashing in the strobes of blue-white light from the powers leashed above them. A third strike took the head from the vord, and a heavy kick both crumpled the black chitin of its armored torso and sent it sprawling back to die on the ground, thrashing uselessly. Varg's sword whipped one way and struck a supporting limb from one vord, then reversed itself and removed a scythe from the vord on the other side, which had been wetted in Canim blood, saving a stunned warrior's life.

Varg let out a roar of rage and what seemed to Fidelias like pure, joyous enthusiasm, struck down a second vord, and covered the fallen warrior as he rose and retrieved his weapon. Varg then broke to his right, while the recovered Cane went to his left. Both darted through the line of battle, and the Canim in the second rank followed them, so that the vord on either side of the hole Varg had created found themselves surrounded by warriors, cut down from the front and from behind.

The gap in the vord line widened, as each fallen vord's opponent pushed through and went after the flanks and rear of another foe, so that the battlefield in front of Fidelias and the rest of the command group seemed to break into two halves and part to the left and right, like two curtains opening onto a stage - one littered with the bodies of broken vord warrior forms. The battle raged off into the mist to the left and right, and out of their immediate view.

At some point, the vord shrieks turned to a new, urgent pitch - a retreat? - and Maximus's cavalry horns began to sound the charge, already receding into greater distance.

"Ah, they've broken," said the Princeps, his teeth bared in a wolfish smile. He clenched one hand into a fist. "Max is after them. They're running. By the great furies, they're running!"

He never turned or raised his voice above simple conversational volume - nor could he, as the image of the calm, controlled Princeps of the Realm - but Fidelias judged that Valiar Marcus would be more than happy to do it for him. "They're running, boys!" he bawled out in a training-ground bellow. "Varg and Antillar were too much for 'em!"

A thunder of cheers and Canim roars bellowed out for several seconds before Fidelias passed a cutoff signal back through the line to the cohorts, where Aleran centurions and Canim huntmasters began snarling and growling orderly quiet back into the ranks.

Moments later, the first returning Canim began to appear, walking back toward the ranks in the same arching battle line in which they'd begun the fight. Several were walking only with assistance - but there were no breaks in the line. On the flanks, the Aleran cavalry was returning to its original position in the order of battle. Antillar Maximus came riding in a moment ahead of Varg and saluted the Princeps, slamming his fist into his armor, over his heart.

Varg rolled to halt in front of them and nodded to the Princeps as well. "Not much of a fight."

"It seems that they do have a breaking point, if the will of their Queen isn't driving them," the Princeps said. "Your warriors found it."

Varg let out a pleased growling sound of agreement.

"I hope you will do us the honor of allowing our healers to treat your wounded. There's no sense in having them out of action when we can put them back into top condition."

"That would please me," Varg replied. "I will request it of them."

Octavian inclined his head to the Canim leader and returned Antillar's salute. "Let's have it."

"A few of them managed to get out of the close fight," Antillar Maximus said. "None of them made it out of the fog. The scouts reported other vord like these falling back to the city. They went right up the wall. They're inside now, maybe a thousand."

"And those are just the ones we saw," Octavian said. "We can't leave them in a fortress at our backs, growing a supply of croach to feed reinforcements they move into the area. This one will be up to us, I believe. Signal the Prime Cohort and the Battlecrows. I want them to be the first through the gates. Both cavalry elements are to take up positions around the city, to catch any others who try to run."

Antillar blinked. "Those gates aren't exactly made of paper and glue, Calderon," the Tribune said. "The High Lords were probably reinforcing them for months, this winter. You know how to run the figures. Any idea of the kind of power it will take to bring them down?"

The Princeps considered Antillar's words. Fidelias eyed Antillar and Varg alike, but he didn't think either of them could see how nervous Octavian was. Then the Princeps nodded, and said, "A considerable amount of force."

"I don't think we have it," Max said.

"I think you're wrong, Max," Octavian said calmly.

The Ambassador's eyes narrowed in anticipation, all but glowing green, and her smile somehow made Fidelias take more note of the points of her canine teeth than any of the others.

The Princeps grinned at her in reply, almost unsettlingly boyish, and said, "Let's find out."

Chapter 32

Tavi wondered if he was about to make a very large, very humiliating, potentially fatal mistake.

He frowned, and spoke to that doubting part of himself in a firm tone of thought: If you didn't want to take the big chances, you shouldn't have started screaming about who your father was. You could have moved quietly across the Realm and disappeared among the Marat, if you had wanted to. You decided to fight for your birthright. Well, now it's time to fight. It's time to see if you can do what you have to do. So quit whining and bring down that gate.

"Warmaster Varg will have operational command while I deal with the gate," Tavi said.

The Legion command staff had been briefed on Tavi's intention the day before. They hadn't liked it then. Today, though, they simply saluted. Good. Varg's part in the opening skirmish of the battle (itself but a skirmish for what was to come), had convinced them of the Cane's ability.

"Tribune Antillus!" Tavi called.

After several signals were exchanged, Crassus came cruising down to the ground and landed beside Tavi's horse. They exchanged salutes, and Tavi said, "I'll be moving forward with the Prime and the Battlecrows. I want you and the Pisces hovering over my shoulders."

"Aye, sir," Crassus said. "We'll be there."

"On your way," Tavi said.

Crassus took off, and there was nothing left but for Tavi to break down a defensive structure prepared for decades if not centuries to resist precisely what he was about to attempt. He glanced over his shoulder, at Fidelias. Valiar Marcus would have been waiting stolidly, his expression hard and sober. Though his features hadn't changed whatsoever, Tavi could feel the differences in the man, the more flexible, somehow leonine nature of him. To any casual observer, Fidelias would have appeared exactly like Valiar Marcus. But Tavi could sense that the man was aware, somehow, of his fear.

His perfectly reasonable fear. His very well-advised fear. His quite mature and wise fear, even.

Shut up and get to work, he thought firmly.

Acteon, the long-legged black stallion Tavi rode, tossed his head and shook his mane. The horse had been his, and in the care of the First Aleran Legion, since shortly after he had been forced to take command - a gift from Hashat, the Marat clan-head of the Horse. The Marat stallion had greater agility and endurance than any Aleran horse Tavi had ever seen, but he wasn't a supernatural beast.

He wouldn't save Tavi from anything he didn't handle himself.

"Standard-bearer," Tavi said quietly. "Let's go."

Hoofbeats came up beside him, and Tavi looked aside at the dappled grey mare Kitai rode. His eyes went up to her rider, and he smiled faintly at Kitai, who was wearing her Legion-issue mail. It didn't offer the same protection as the heavier steel plates of his own lorica, but though she was more than strong enough to wear the heavier armor, she disdained it, preferring the greater flexibility of the mail.

"I suppose you're going to ignore me if I tell you to wait here," he said.

She arched an eyebrow at him and settled her grip on the standard. The misty wisps of faint scarlet, drifting outward from the standard like strands of seaweed, seemed to whisper to the mists around them, gathering them closer. Kitai had not picked up the royal standard of the Princeps, the plunging eagle, scarlet upon blue. Instead, she bore the original standard of the First Aleran. It had once been a blue-and-scarlet eagle, wings spread as if in flight, its background also scarlet and blue, halved, contrasting the colors of the eagle. The first battle the Legion faced had left the eagle burned black, and the First Aleran's "battlecrow" had never been replaced.

Tavi had carried the standard into an extremely dangerous situation himself... had it been only three, almost four years since the Elinarch? It felt like a hundred.

Kitai met his eyes and lifted her chin, a small smile on her mouth. Her message was clear. He had triumphed at that meeting. He would do so again at this one. Something quivering and tight went out of him, and his hands and mind felt a great deal steadier.

"I suppose so," he said.

He made no gesture, but the pair of them started out together at the same instant.

Tavi rode through the fog. Acteon's hooves clopped on the ground. The track to the nearest of the city's gates was obvious before him, littered here and there with the remains of the battle the rest of Alera had fought there days before. Here a splash of scarlet Aleran blood, now brown and buzzing with flies. There, a gladius, broken six inches from the hilt, the results of hasty construction or shoddy maintenance. A legionare's bloodstained helmet lay on its side, its crown bearing a puncture mark shaped much like the profile of a scythe of a new warrior-form vord they had fought that very day.

But there were no corpses, either of fallen legionares or of any vord beyond those slain that very hour. Tavi shivered. The vord did not let fallen meat go to waste - not even that of their own kind.

The leashed thunder of the storm came with them. Tavi could hear the steady windstreams that kept the Knights Pisces aloft nearby, within a couple of hundred yards, above and behind them. The nearest of their number, probably Crassus, hovered almost directly overhead, only just visible in the cloud.

The walls of Riva loomed suddenly out of the mist, along with the city gates. They stood forty feet high, with the towers on either side rising twenty feet beyond that. Tavi felt the muscles in his back tightening, and his heart began to beat faster.

He was about to announce his identity to anyone who was watching.

And then something, he was sure, would happen - and he doubted it would be anything he would enjoy.

Tavi focused on the gates. They were made of stone sheathed and woven with steel. They weighed tons and tons, but they were balanced so perfectly on their hinges that a single man, unassisted by furies, could push them open when their locks were not engaged. Even so, they were stronger than the stone siege walls that framed them. Fire would not distress them. A steel ram could batter them for days with no effect, and the swords of the finest Knights Ferrous in the Realm would shatter upon them. The thunderbolts held ready by the First Aleran's Knights would do little more than scar the finished steel surface. The earth itself could not be shaken around them.

In Tavi's experience, though, very few people had sufficient respect for the destructive capacities of the gentler crafts.

Wood and water.

He had a come a long, long way from the Calderon Valley, from being the scrawny apprentice shepherd without the ability to so much as operate a furylamp or an oven. In that time, he had known peace and war, civilization and savagery, calm study and desperate application. As a boy, he had dreamed of finding a life in which he proved himself despite the fact that he had no furycraft at all - and now his furycraft might be all that kept him alive.

Life, Tavi reflected, seldom makes a gift of what one expects or plans for.

But some part of him, the part that was little enamored of walking the more prudent avenues of thought, was quivering with excitement. How many times had he suffered at the hands of the other children at Bernardholt for lacking furies of his own? How many childhood nights had he lain awake, attempting simply to will himself the ability to furycraft? How often had he shed private, silent tears of shame and despair?

And now, he had those abilities. Now he knew how to use them. Fundamentally speaking.

No matter how much danger he knew he was in, there was a part of him that wanted simply to throw back his head and crow defiant triumph at those memories, at the world. There was a part of him that wanted to dance in place, and was wildly eager to show his strength at last. Most of all, there was a part of him that wanted to face his enemies for the first time upon his own talent and strength and no one else's. Though he knew he was untested, he wanted the test.

He had to know that he was ready to face what was to come.

So it was with both wary tension and absolute elation that Tavi reached out to the furies spread about the world before him.

Almost immediately, Tavi could feel the craftings seething over and through the great gates, running like living things within the great constructs - fury-bound structures, as potent as gargoyles but locked into immobility, focused into stasis and into maintaining that stasis absolutely. Tavi had as much chance of commanding those furies to cease their function as he had of commanding water not to be wet.

Instead, he turned his thoughts down, beneath them. Far, far below the surface, beneath the immeasurable mass of the furycrafted walls and towers of Riva, he felt the flowing water that sank into the rocks beneath the city, that had seeped through them year after slow, steady year, and pooled into a vast reservoir far below. Originally intended as an emergency cistern for the lonely little outpost of Riva, it had sunk beneath year after year of added construction as the city grew, until it had been forgotten by everyone but Alera herself.

By now, the little cistern had become something far larger than its creators - probably Legion engineers, back in the days of the original Gaius Primus - had ever intended.

Tavi focused his will upon that long-forgotten water and called out to it.

At the same time, he reached out to the earth beneath his feet, to the soil and dust lying before the city's walls. He felt through the soil, felt the grass growing beneath his horse's hooves. He felt clover and other weeds and flowers, beginning to grow, not yet brought down by the groundskeepers of Riva. There was a plethora of different plants there, and he knew them all. As an apprentice shepherd who had grown up not far from Riva, he'd been made familiar with virtually every plant that grew in the region. He'd had to learn which the sheep could eat safely and which he should avoid: which plants might trigger problems in a member of the flock and which might be used to help support the animal's recovery from illness or injury. He knew Rivan flora as only someone who had been raised there could.

He reached out to all of them and extended his thoughts to the plants, the seeds, numbering and sorting them in his thoughts. He focused his will and whispered, beneath his breath, "Grow."

And beneath him, as if the earth were letting out a long breath, the grass began to grow, to surge with green life. Blades lengthened, and were suddenly outstripped by the quick-growing weeds and flowers. They opened in a mute riot, sudden color flushing along the surface of the earth, and within a few seconds more, grass and flowers alike burst into seed.

Joy and fierce pride assaulted him in a distracting surge, but Tavi let the emotions wash by him and focused upon his task.

Such growth could not happen without plenty of water to nourish it, and as the sudden growth began to leach all the water from the ground, the water from the deep well began to arrive, rising through the layers of earth and stone. At an absentminded motion of his hand, a gentle stream of wind curled along the ground and sighed up over the gates and towers beside it.

Tavi opened his eyes long enough to see tiny seeds, some of them little larger than motes of dust, begin to drift up through the air, to where a thin film of water had begun to cling to the surface of the gates, the towers, courtesy of the cloud around them.

He closed his eyes again, focusing on those seeds. This would be much harder, without the gentle nourishment of the soil around them, but again he reached out to the life before him, and whispered, "Grow."

Again, the earth around him sighed fresh green growth. Weeds and small trees began to rise above the grass - and the walls of the great city began to flush a steady shade of green. Bits of grass grew from cracks so tiny they could barely be seen. Moss and lichen spread over the surface as quickly as if they had been spread by raindrops in a steady shower.

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.

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