the bloody sheep had been a great deal larger and stronger than he was, and the flocks' rams had frequently chased him up trees. And all of that before he'd left the Calderon Valley.
He found himself grinning.
Though worry and terror and rage all burned away at his guts, Gaius Octavian was smiling.
This was a game he knew how to play.
He altered his course abruptly, shooting straight up into the air. The Queen came after him, her windstream a howling, cyclonic roar.
It took him only a moment to clear the ritualists' mist, and he climbed out of it to find the sun coming up red on the eastern horizon under a heavily clouded sky, painting the Calderon Valley in the colors of blood. To his right, the Canim cavalry was engaged in wholesale slaughter of the sleeping vord, though Varg and the infantry were loping swiftly toward the vast bank of mist that hid the two Legions. Awakened vord ran amok by the thousands, and the comparatively small Aleran cavalry force was hitting any group of vord who thought they might attack the Canim infantry from the flanks while they marched. The sound of battle and the hollow coughs of medium-sized firecraftings drifted up to him, oddly attenuated by the mist.
The Queen emerged below him after several seconds. The unblackened part of her body sported fresh black-edged acid marks, and her speed seemed to have dropped even more, but her eyes glittered coldly, focused on Tavi and Tavi alone.
Tavi felt the grin spreading wider across his face. "All right. If you want the Calderon Valley so badly, the least I can do is give you the tour."
He poured all his concentration and will into his windstream and shot off to the northwest, toward the thunderstorm-shrouded peak of Garados.
Chapter 55~56
Chapter 55
Fidelias struggled to pull some semblance of order out of the battle's chaos. Granted, battles were never orderly, tidy, or easily managed - but this one was worse than most.
With only minutes to prepare, and his army broken into separate elements, each of them too small to challenge the main body of the vord alone, he had done the only thing he could do. He'd marched the First Aleran out of the ruined steadholt and deployed them in an arching line around the steadholt's exterior, while ordering the healers, wounded, and medical personnel into the relative safety of the steadholt's great hall. He'd placed the Free Alerans on the steadholt's flanks, intending to let his veteran troops take the brunt of the coming assault, while the less-experienced freemen handled any stragglers or enemy probes. While he was screaming those orders and getting his legionares into position - at times laying about him with his fists rather than a baton - the Windwolves had nonchalantly swept down with their wind coaches as if this was simply another day in Alera Imperia.
Fidelias directed Aldrick ex Gladius to the hive and left him to get the First Lady and company out of this disaster before the vord swallowed them whole. He had just returned to the improvised command post on the roof of the great stone barn, when someone screamed, "Vord!"
They came rushing along the ground and buzzing through the sky, all of them moving with an unsettling, sinuous sort of rhythm.
Fidelias immediately appropriated every single Knight Aeris from the Free Aleran - all three of them - with instructions to, "Keep those bloody bug men off my roof." The Legions, without the defenses to which they were accustomed when fighting against such odds, locked shields in tight formation and waited to receive the mantises' charge. The vord flung themselves forward, filling the air with their whistling shrieks.
Men started dying.
The vord all but climbed over one another in a desperate need to attack the Aleran forces and showed none of the hesitance they generally did before attacking a shieldwall. They simply rushed forward, one vord paying the price to break the cohesion of the lines while two others took advantage of the disruption to strike. The First Aleran was giving at least as well as it got, Fidelias thought, but that was a ruinous rate of exchange in the current market.
Footsteps made him look over his shoulder, and he found the First Lady approaching with an escort of hard-bitten types wearing mail and the black sashes of the Windwolves. Aldrick ex Gladius, a large, brawny man with cold eyes and a black beard, walked on Isana's left, opposite the gleaming figure of Araris Valerian.