Cursors's Fury

“Crassus dies, most likely. Then the engineers and our Knights Terra take down the bridge while we hold the Canim.”

Ehren nodded, chewing his lip. “Urn. I hate to say this, but if Crassus has the gem, what’s going to stop Sari from blasting you to bits with lightning as soon as he sees you?”

Tavi turned as Schultz passed him a shield. He started strapping it tightly to his left arm. “Ignorance. Sari won’t know I don’t have it.”

Ehren squinted. “Why does that sound so much like another guess?”

Tavi grinned, watching the oncoming assault. “Tell you in a minute.”

And then Sari threw back his head in an eerie howl, and his entire host answered it with a deafening, painful gale of battle cries. Tavi’s newly healed ears twinged again, and the surface of the bridge shuddered.

“Ready!” Tavi screamed, though his voice was lost in the tumult. He drew his sword and raised it overhead, and all around him the Battlecrows did the same. At the same signal, the Knights Flora on the wall behind him began sleeting arrows into the oncoming Canim, aiming to wound in an effort to force the Canim charge to slow for its wounded.

Sari, though, would permit no wavering in the advance, and the Canim marched past the wounded, leaving them to bleed on the ground, hardly slowing.

Tavi muttered a curse. It had been worth a try.

“Shieldwall!” Tavi screamed, and the Battlecrows shifted formation, pressing closer to their fellow legionares and overlapping the steel of their shields. Kitai and Ehren could not join the wall without shields of their own, and they slipped back several rows in the formation. Tavi felt his shield rattling against those of the men beside him, and he gritted his teeth, trying to will away the terror-inspired trembling.

Then Sari howled again, lifting his own fangstaff, and the Canim, led by the mad-eyed ritualists, charged the Battlecrows.

Stark terror reduced Tavi’s vision to a tunnel. He felt himself screaming along with every man in the cohort. He closed even more tightly with the men beside him, and their armored forms pressed together while the ranks behind closed as tightly as they could, leaning against the men in front of them to lend their own weight and resistance to the shieldwall.

The Canim host smashed into the Aleran shieldwall like a living, frenzied battering ram. Swords flashed. Blood flew.

Tavi found himself fighting desperately simply to see, to understand what was happening around him-but the noise, the screams, and the confusion of close battle blinded him to anything beyond the instant. He ducked behind his shield, then barely jerked his head to one side as a sickle-sword came straight down at him, the tip of the curved weapon threatening to hook over the shield and drive into his helmet. He struck out blindly with the strokes Max and Magnus had drilled into him a lifetime before. He couldn’t tell whether or not most of them scored, much less inflicted wounds, but he planted his feet and stood his ground, bolstered by the support of the rear ranks.

Others were not so lucky. A ritualist’s fangstaff struck and ripped through the neck of a nearby legionare like some kind of hideous saw. Another ducked behind his shield, only to have the hooked tip of a sickle-sword pierce his helmet and skull alike. Still another legionare was seized by the shield and dragged out of the wall, to be torn apart by a trio of screaming ritualists in their human-leather mantles.

The Battlecrows stood their ground despite the losses, and the Canim assault crashed to a savage halt against them, roaring like tide from a bloody sea as it pounded fruitlessly on a stone cliffside.

As men fell, their cohort brothers pushed up, straining forward with all the power and coordination and battlecraft they possessed.

It was hopeless. Tavi knew it was. The cliff might stand against the ocean for a time, but little by little the ocean would grind it away-it was simply a matter of time. The Battlecrows might have stopped the opening charge, but Tavi knew that they couldn’t hold the vast numbers of Canim on the bridge for more than a few moments.

Tavi found himself fighting beside Schultz. The young centurion dealt swift, savage, powerful blows with his gladius, downing a ritualist and two raiders with four precisely timed strokes-until he paid the price for his prowess, and slipped on the blood of his foes, twisting forward and out of the wall. A Cane drove a spear down at Schultz’s exposed neck.

Tavi never hesitated. He turned and chopped through the thrusting spear’s haft in a single, hard stroke, though it left his entire left flank open to the fangstaff of the foaming-mouthed ritualist facing him. He saw the Cane strike in the corner of his eye and knew that he would never be able to block or avoid the deadly weapon.

He didn’t have to.