more. He raised his arms and called to the wind, and it answered him with a howl, spinning into a sudden, hysterically powerful circle around him and Kitai. The vord-wasps began to hammer into that whirling shield, their chitin-stings like tiny scalpels and arrowheads at the same time. They collided with the nearly solid air in half a dozen angry swarms, each striking from a slightly different direction, their arrow-straight flight suddenly becoming a wild spin as they were thrown aside.
By some chance of fate or pure luck, a few of the wasps made it through. Tavi dispatched them with swift, sure movements of his sword, using its fire to brush them out of the air just as he had the vordknights.
The stream slackened for a breath, and Tavi looked up through the open roof of the whirling column of wind and flashed signals to Crassus. Six targets, attack them.
Crassus dropped a swift gesture of affirmation toward Tavi and began signaling his men. A pair of seconds later, the first caged lightning bolt was loosed, and flashed across the sky from the cloud above Tavi and Kitai to the city. A large green-and-black lump, where a patch of the croach high upon a wall seemed to bulge with some half-formed hulk of armor, suddenly exploded into white light and fury. Fragments went flying in every direction, and the half shape that was left seemed to gout fire for several seconds before settling into a more conventional bonfire.
And the stream of deadly arrow-wasps from that horrible hive abruptly vanished.
Tavi swatted several more wasps down, and noted that Kitai had manipulated the spinning force of the winds Tavi held around them, directing several thousand arrow-wasps into the vord still trapped in the grasses. Tavi doubted that the poison coating the wasps' stingers would prove dangerous to the mantis-forms, but their stingers punched through vord chitin with great effectiveness, and each drew its individual trickle of blood. In very short order, no mantis-forms remained standing. Kitai turned her attention to the spiders and mantis-forms rushing from the city, and the vord arrow-wasps sliced and cut into their own kind, helpless before the vast winds.
Thunder rolled overhead, accompanied by blinding-bright flashes of light. Three, four, five, six. Each time Crassus brought one of the captured bolts forth, he destroyed another hive - and after the sixth, the flow of arrow-wasps rushing into the wind shield abruptly ceased, just as the mass of the enemy body came rushing toward Tavi and Kitai.
"I think that went well," Kitai called.
"I'll take it," Tavi said. Then they both leapt upward, and the whirling shield compressed and gathered beneath them, lifting them both up into the skies and out of the reach of the vord below.
Either Crassus had been passing information by hand signal back to the command group, or else Varg had had his fill of waiting. Drums sounded, and the Legion came into sight. Varg had placed Tavi's leading cohorts in the center and flanked them with the taurg cavalry, while a fresh group of warriors stood ready to support any weak points in the line.
"Sir?" Crassus shouted toward him, gesturing at what lightning remained. "What do we do with the rest of it?"
Tavi pointed a finger at the collapsed section of wall, where the vord were pouring out.
Crassus nodded and over the next several minutes dumped all the energy they'd captured from the morning's thunderstorm into the relatively narrow opening. Lightning bolts blew craters in the earth and left the smoldering wreckage of vord forms lying on the blasted ground.
The Legion closed in, with taurga simply crushing down vord that had spread out to the sides of the opening. Their riders never needed to lift their weapons. The Battlecrows and the Prime plugged the hole in the wall and began methodically slaughtering the vord. They were aided by a thin line of Varg's warriors armed with balests, the heavy, steel-bowed, shoulder-fired weapons of the Canim. The warriors' height allowed them to shoot over the Aleran lines without striking an allied legionare, and when one of the steel projectiles struck a vord, the creature fell, screaming, or simply expired outright.
The mantis-form vord were dangerous opponents: So were the most experienced and decorated cohorts in the First Aleran. Tavi watched as their centurions assessed the threat of the mantis-form scythes. The weapons really weren't terribly different from the long-handled sickle-swords used by the Canim militia during the last battles against Nasaug's forces in the Vale, but if adjustments