Count Calderon's expression didn't waver. "What," he said finally, "gave you the right to deal with Aquitaine that way? What makes you think one of us wouldn't have handled it?"
"He was ready for any of you," Ehren said simply. "He barely looked twice at me until it was too late." He shrugged. "And I was acting under orders."
"Whose orders?" Bernard demanded.
"Gaius Sextus's orders, sir. His final letter to Aquitaine contained a hidden cipher for me, sir."
Calderon took a deep breath, eyeing Ehren. "What you've done," he said quietly, "orders from Sextus or not, could be considered an act of treason against the Realm."
Ehren arched an eyebrow. He looked down at the stone floor of the fortress beneath him and tapped it experimentally with his cane. Then he looked up at Calderon again. "Did you have orders from Gaius Sextus, sir?"
Bernard grunted. "Point." He exhaled. "You're Tavi's friend."
"Yes, I am, sir," Ehren said. "If it makes it easier for you, I could just vanish. You wouldn't have to make the call."
"No, Cursor," Bernard said, heavily. "I've reached the limits of my tolerance for intrigue. What you did was wrong."
"Yes, sir," Ehren said.
"And smooth," Bernard said. "Very smooth. There's nothing to link his death to you but a dying man's babbling suspicions. And only Amara and I know about that."
Ehren waited, saying nothing.
"Sir Ehren," Bernard said, slowly. He took a deep breath, as if readying himself to plunge into cold water. "What a relief that your injuries were less serious than we believed. I will, of course, expect you to resume your duties at once. Right beside me." He growled, beneath his breath, "Where I can keep an eye on you."
Ehren almost sagged with relief. The only thing that prevented it was that it would have hurt a very great deal. The injuries to his body had been closed and stabilized, but it would be weeks before he could move normally again. "Yes, sir," he said. He found his eyes clouding up, and he blinked them several times until they were clear again. "Thank you, sir."
Bernard put an arm on his shoulder, and said, "Easy, there, young man. Come on. Let's get to work."
The view of the battle from the little citadel's tower was spectacular, even at night. Large furylamps, on the walls and towers of both the defensive ramparts and the citadel, illuminated the Calderon Valley for half a mile. Originally, the Valley's trees and brush had grown up to within a bowshot of the old fortress at Garrison, but they had long since been cleared, for the expanding little city, then cleared back more, to the edge of the range of the mules. It left the ground utterly devoid of features an attacking force could use for cover.
The vord covered that ground like a turbulent black sea. Despite the efforts of the firecrafters and the crews of the mules, which had been spread out on rooftops behind the first wall, the vord had finally covered the ground and were fighting their way up the walls, hacking out climbing holds and coming up in lots of a dozen creatures at a time, until the Legion engineers could earthcraft the holds out of the wall's surface, returning it to unbroken smoothness. Men fought and bled atop the wall, but nowhere near so ruinously as they had only a day or two before. The frontage of the entire fortification was less than three-quarters of a mile, and the sides of the Valley were no wider, there. The vord had to pack themselves in to reach the walls, to the point where their advantage of numbers did them the least amount of good.
Though, Ehren reflected, that was quite a bit different than counting for nothing.
Even though the Legions could face the vord at a point of maximum concentration, where the firecrafting of the Citizens and the freemen's mules could do the most harm, the Aleran Legions remained badly outnumbered. Ehren watched as one segment of the wall rotated weary legionares out for a fresh cohort. The vord needed no such cooperation. They simply kept coming, an endless tide. Ehren counted, out of habit, noting that only six men of the eighty-man century had been lost during their hourlong rotation on the walls. And yet it was entirely possible that their losses, proportionately, were worse than those being inflicted upon the vord.
The hollow booms of firecraftings continued to rumble irregularly through the night, accompanied by the scattered popping sounds of the occasional