Cursors's Fury

Instead, they found themselves faced with the deadliest swordsman in the Legion and the superhuman power of the Knights Terra, followed by the blackened, bloody banner of the captain who had defied Sari and his ritualists, shamed him before the host, and lived to tell the tale despite the terrible powers the ritualists had sent after him.

Battles are fought in muddy fields, in burning towns, in treacherous forests, in unforgiving mountains, and on the blood-spattered stones of contested bridges, Tavi realized. But battles are won within the minds and hearts of the soldiers fighting them. No force was defeated in battle until it believed that it was defeated. No force could be victorious unless it believed it could be victorious.

The First Aleran believed.

The Canim raiders weren’t sure.

At that time, on that bridge, before the terrible swords of the sons of Antil-lus, before the crushing power of the Knights Terra, before the blackened banner of the First Aleran and the reckless, frenzied charge of the Battlecrows, those two facts were what mattered.

It was as simple as that.

The resistance of the Canim forces on the bridge did not simply waver-it abruptly vanished, as panic descended on them. Max and Crassus pressed the assault, and Tavi led the Battlecrows after them. On the walls behind them, trumpets rang. Valiar Marcus had seen the Canim break, and the rest of the weary Legion began rushing forward to lend their strength and momentum to the advance.

The advance had to cover most of five hundred yards, all uphill to the defenses at the bridge’s apex-which had not, after all, been designed to defend against an assault from the Aleran side of the bridge. Without battlements, the only real protection they offered the Canim was the simple impediment of movement caused by the walls themselves and the relatively small opening in them.

That opening, however, also slowed the Canim now attempting to flee. The legionares were slower on foot than their opponents, but caught up to them as the choke point in the wall stranded them on the northern side.

Tavi was barely able to get his cohort into a more conventional fighting front, incorporating the Knights in its center, before the vengeful Alerans fell on the Canim. Canim screamed. Legionares went down. Tavi fought to keep the lines stable, to get the wounded clear of the fighting before they were trampled. The desperate Canim rushed up onto the improvised battlements and threw themselves over, perfectly willing to fall rather than face the juggernaut of the First Aleran’s advance. A few even cast themselves off the bridge. It was a long, dangerous fall to the water from there, the maximum height of the bridge from its surface.

Dangerous as it might have been, the waiting sharks were a far more serious threat-and after two days of constant blood-taint in the water and relatively little food, they were hungry. Nothing that fell into the river came out alive again.

Tavi was the first legionare to mount up onto the battlements at the bridge’s center. Ehren was close behind him, and a roar went up from the Alerans as the black eagle/crow banner gained the wall.

Tavi watched as Max and his Knights plunged through the opening in the wall to make sure the Canim had a reason to continue their retreat. They were followed by a number of excited Battlecrows who should have been taking defensive positions, but who had allowed the heat of battle to control their movements. Max, Crassus, and the Knights Terra settled for crippling blows upon the fleeing Canim where they had to, and the following legionares finished up the gruesome work the Knights had begun.

Tavi had no idea whether Max realized how far past the wall the assault had actually rolled, and he signaled the Battlecrows’ trumpeter to sound the halt. The clarion call rolled out over the downhill slope of the far side of the bridge, and at its signal Max looked around him, and even a hundred yards away, Tavi could see the expression of dismay on Max’s face as he saw how far forward he’d come.

Beside Tavi, Kitai sighed and rolled her eyes. “Alerans.”

Max got the Knights and legionares stopped and began an orderly withdrawal back to the wall at the bridge’s center.

Tavi glanced over his shoulder, then turned and started back down to the surface of the bridge, barking out orders. “Bring up the engineers! Knights Aeris to the wall! Battlecrows, with me!”

Ehren followed hard on his heels. “Uh, sir? Shouldn’t we be preparing to, uh, you know. Defend against a counterattack?”

“That’s what we’re doing,” Tavi said. He stalked through the opening in the wall and out onto the surface of the bridge. Tavi stared down the Elinarch’s slope, to where the Canim were already rallying, down at the next defensive wall. “Schultz! Bring them up!”