Cursors's Fury

He began to turn his mount, then paused, looked at the standing Canim warrior behind the line of Sari’s ritualists, and called out, “Should you wish to recover the remains of your fallen, I will permit unarmed Canim to retrieve them provided they do so in the next hour.”

The Cane did not respond. But after a few pensive seconds, he tilted his head, very slightly, to one side. Tavi mirrored the gesture, then began to withdraw, turning his face into a mild breeze.

Sari suddenly sniffed, a snuffling sound nearly identical to any canine investigating a scent.

Tavi froze, and the relief he’d begun feeling transformed itself in an instant to an almost-hysterical terror. He looked over his shoulder in time to see Saris eyes widening in shock and recognition.

“I know you,” the Cane breathed. “You. The freak. The messenger boy!”

Sari’s hand flashed to his satchel and flicked it open, and Tavi suddenly realized that the pale leather case, like the ritualist’s mantles, was made of human skin. Sari withdrew his hand, flinging it straight up over his head. His hand was covered in fresh, scarlet blood, and the droplets flew into the air, scattering, vanishing. He howled something in Canish, and the acolytes behind him joined in.

Tavi turned his horse, desperate to flee, but everything moved with nightmarish deliberation. Before he could give the beast its head, the clouds above them lit up with an inferno of scarlet lightning. Tavi looked up in time to see an enormous wheel of streaming lightning suddenly condense into a single, white-hot point overhead.

Tavi tried to kick the horse into a run, but he was moving too slowly, and he could not tear his eyes from the gathering stroke of power-the same power that had massacred the First Aleran’s officers, none of whom were as helpless as Tavi.

The point of fire suddenly expanded into a blinding white light and an avalanche of furious noise, and Tavi opened his mouth and screamed in terror and disbelief. He never heard it.

Chapter 39

Blinding light stole Tavi’s sight. A sudden pressure became a single, enormous pain against either side of his head, and there was no longer any sound. He lost all sense of direction, and for a moment everything whirled around him, leaving him with no point of reference, no sense of position.

Then his sight returned in shadows that deepened into colors, and he was able to sort out his perceptions.

First-he was alive. Which came as something of a surprise to him.

Second, he was still mounted, though his horse was staggering in jerking little jumps, as though it couldn’t decide whether to run or to buck him off. There was an overwhelming scent of ozone, clean and sharp.

Tavi looked down blearily. There was smoke everywhere, and he felt himself coughing though he could not hear it. The ground beneath him was burned black, the grass charred to ash. More grass burned in a twenty-foot circle around him-an area almost precisely the size of the blasted earth of the command tent.

His clothes were singed. His armor was blackened, but not hot. He still held both the reins of his mount and the lance staff that bore the Legion’s standard. The standard’s pole was burned along one side, but whole. The flag’s eagle had been wrought of a different thread than the rest, and that thread had charred, so that instead of the azure-and-scarlet emblem, the whole of the war bird was black.

Tavi stared dully up at the black bird, while overhead him thousands of crows swirled and danced in hungry excitement. The breeze pressed silently against one cheek, and the smoke began to clear. As it did, Tavi began to gather his wits about him again, to realize where he was, and he somehow managed to get the horse to stop trying to throw him off, though it still danced restlessly.

The smoke lifted, and Tavi found himself standing not ten yards from Sari.

The Canim ritualist was stretched to his full height, head tilted back in a pose of bizarre ecstasy, jaws gaping, his bloody hand still raised to the sky. Then he flinched, evidently at some sound, and his eyes dropped to settle on Tavi. The Cane’s eyes widened, his nostrils flared, and his ears quivered and flicked about. His jaws opened and closed twice, faltering motions, though Tavi could not hear any sound Sari made, if any.

Tavi was still stunned, trying to sort out what had happened, and he never gave any real thought to what he did. It flowed out of him on raw instinct as his emotions coalesced into a single incandescent fire of rage and he dug his heels into the near-panicked horse’s flanks.

The terrified horse shot forward, seemingly attaining a full run within the space of a single surge of power, directly at Sari. Tavi felt himself screaming, felt the pounding of the horse’s hooves striking the earth, and felt the banner drag at the air as he swung the standard down upon Sari with all of his strength and in total silence.