was shepherded by its own team of windcrafters, each of which kept its own massive, deadly vortex from turning back upon Aleran lines. Windmanes, glowing white forms, like skeletal human torsos trailing a shroud of smoke and mist where their legs should have been, began to glide out of the cyclones and swept down to attack anything within their reach upon the earth.
Amara shook her head. She'd been trapped without shelter in a furystorm that had called up windmanes once before - and the deadly, wild wind furies had nearly torn her to pieces. Gaius Attis was creating hundreds more of the creatures with the cyclones he was harnessing, and they would haunt the region for decades, if not centuries to come, posing a threat to holders, cattle, wildlife -
Amara forced herself to abandon that line of thought. In this respect, at least, she thought Aquitaine was quite right - if the vord weren't stopped, here, now, there wouldn't be any holders. Or cattle. Or wildlife.
We aren't just fighting for ourselves, she thought. We're fighting for everything that lives and grows in our world. If we do not throw down the vord, nothing of what we know will remain. We will simply cease to be - and no one will be left to remember us.
Except, she supposed, for the vord.
Amara clenched her hands hard and restrained herself from calling upon Cirrus and flinging her own skills into the battle being fought below.
"Countess?" called Veradis in a shaking voice.
Amara looked around until she spotted the younger woman, hovering several yards farther south and slightly lower than Amara was. She altered her windstream until she had maneuvered into position beside the Ceresian Citizen. "What is it?"
Veradis pointed wordlessly at the causeway leading up from the southwest.
Amara frowned and focused Cirrus upon the task of bringing the road into clearer visibility. At first, in the dim light of the weak moon, she could see nothing. But then flickers of light farther down the road drew her attention, and she found herself staring at...
At a moving mass, on the road. That was all she could be certain of. It was different from the stream of still-coming vord warrior forms in that there was no gleam of wan light on vord armor, no regular, seething mass of creatures moving as many bodies under the control of a single mind. There were flickers of light moving amidst that body, irregular in shape, spacing, and color, or she wouldn't have been able to see anything at all.
Amara concentrated, murmuring to Cirrus to draw the distant road even closer in her sight. It was difficult to do so while maintaining her windstream, but the far road sprang into focus after a moment of effort and showed Amara the last thing that she had been expecting in the vord's train.
Furies.
The road was filled with manifest furies. Thousands, tens of thousands, of them.
The variety of the furies in sight was dizzying. Earth furies showed themselves as hummocks of stone in the road, rumbling along through the earth. Some were vaguely shaped like animals, but most were not. The largest of them pushed the entire causeway up into a single hummock as they cruised forward, moving as fast as a running horse. Wood furies bounded along the causeway, their shapes never quite matching that of any single animal or creature, but blending the traits of many - others, invisible in the trees and plants at either side of the road, could only be seen as a ripple of forward motion amidst the living things. Water furies bounded or slithered forward, some shaped like great serpents or frogs, while others were simply amorphous shapes of pure water, held together by the will of the fury inhabiting it. Fire furies rushed among them, mostly in the form of predator animals, though others were flickering forms of fire, changing from one instant to the next - it was they whose light Amara had seen. And from three to twenty feet above the surface of the road rushed a horde of wind furies. They were mostly windmanes, though Amara could see far larger wispy shapes ghosting among them, the largest in the form of a truly enormous shark that cruised through the air as if it were the sea.
So many furies. Amara felt slightly dizzied.
She dimly noted forms moving along the outer edges of the road, or flying slightly above it - captured Alerans. She realized, after a moment's thought, that they were herding