am not your mother," Kitai said in a precise, cold voice. "I am nothing to you. You are less than nothing to me. You are a weed to be plucked from the earth and discarded. You are vermin to be wiped out. You are a rabid dog, to be pitied and destroyed. Show wisdom. Bare your throat. It will be swift and without pain."
The vord Queen closed her eyes for a second and flinched from the words as she hadn't from any of the blows. But when she opened them again, her voice was calm, eerily serene. "Odd. I was about to say the same thing to you." She twisted her hips and casually ripped her foot from the earth, the rock screaming protest. "Enough," she said quietly. "I should have dispatched you both at once."
There was a blur in the air, and the two came together in a fountain of sparks amidst the chiming of steel.
Tavi ground his teeth. The feeling was starting to come back to his arms and legs, but it was apparently a slow, slow process. His head hurt abominably.
This wasn't the answer. The Queen was simply too strong, too fast, too intelligent to be overcome directly. They'd had a small enough chance of killing her. Taking her alive, in order to prevent the great furies from being unleashed, was an order of magnitude closer to "impossible" than Tavi cared to attempt.
But how to beat her? With that added advantage, there was simply no way.
So, he thought, take that advantage away.
The Queen had begun to create a bond between herself and the great furies of Calderon, a task that Tavi felt was surely well beyond his own abilities. But in furycraft, like in everything else, it was far more difficult to create than it was to destroy.
"Alera," he whispered. He had no idea if the great fury could hear him, or if she would appear if she did. But he pictured her intensely in his thoughts, and whispered again, "Alera."
And then the great fury was simply there, appearing silently and without drama, the hazy shape of a woman in grey, blending into the cloud and mist, her face lovely but aging, weary. She looked around at the situation, her eyes pausing upon the motionless vortex longer than upon the spark-flooded battle raging between Kitai and the Queen.
"Hmmm," she said calmly. "This is hardly going well for you."
Tavi fought to keep his voice calm and polite. "Has the Queen truly bound the great furies to herself?"
"To a degree," Alera replied. "They are both held motionless, fury-bound, and are... somewhat upset about it."
"She can control them?"
"Not yet," Alera said. "But the house of her mind has many rooms. She is accomplishing the binding even as she does battle. It is only a matter of time." She shook her head. "Poor Garados. He's quite mad, you know. Thana does all that she can for him, trying to keep your folk away, but she's scarcely less psychotic than he is, the past few centuries."
"I need to break her link to Garados and Thana Lilvia," Tavi said. "Is it possible?"
Alera lifted her eyebrows. "Yes. But they are not mortal, young Gaius. They will take vengeance for being bound, and they will not show you the least gratitude."
"Binding can be done even by someone like me," Tavi said. "I mean, I could make Garados sit still if I had to. That's what happened at Kalare and Alera Imperia - and with you, to a degree. Someone like me bound them not to act."
"Correct," Alera said.
"Then show me how to break the bond."
Alera inclined her head and reached out her hand. Like the rest of her, it, too, was covered in opaque grey mist that one could mistake for cloth if one didn't look too closely. She touched his forehead. Her fingertip was damp and cool.
The means simply appeared in Tavi's mind, as smoothly as if it had been something remembered from his days at the Academy. And, like much of furycraft, it was quite simple to implement. Painful, he suspected, but simple.
Tavi touched the stone with one hand and stretched the other up to the motionless sky. The principal furycraft used in the binding was watercrafting. It formed the foundation of the effort, while the appropriate craft related to the fury was added atop it: earth for earth, air for air, and so on. But water was the foundation. He had to cancel the watercrafting with its opposite.