Princeps’ Fury

The air was full of slashed corpses of the wax spiders, with spraying blood and severed insect limbs, but despite the web of steel Tavi wove with his swords as he strode forward, the Vord began to break through. He felt one slam into his side, and a sharp, loud pinging sound told him that his armor had held against the spider’s fangs. Another seized onto his boot, simply clinging, and threw him off his balance.

Then three more dropped onto his helmet and shoulders, and he twisted wildly as venom-dripping fangs flashed by not an inch from his eyes.

Something slammed against his shoulder, a heavy blow that rang with steel on steel, and one of the Hunter’s battle chains crushed the spider beneath it. Tavi managed to turn so that his unwanted passengers were more exposed to the Cane, and several more whiplashing flicks of the heavy chain cleaned the spiders from him.

The other two Hunters took up positions on his left and right, oddly curved swords in hand, flinging the heavy spikes that had wreaked such havoc in Aleran encounters with them during the war in the Vale. Tavi regained his momentum, his own blades whirling, killing-and suddenly found himself face-to-face with the Vord queen.

She moved with a horrible, arachnid grace, and at such speed that even from within his windcrafting, Tavi felt his body responding sluggishly by comparison. Her cloak flew one way as she darted to one side, but the move proved to be a feint, and the hem of the garment cracked like a whip as she reversed her move and raked her talons at Tavi’s thigh.

Tavi couldn’t respond in time to avoid the blow, so he simply drove his blade hard at the queen’s throat.

Her speed astounded him, even as white-hot fire enveloped his leg. She managed to get a hand into the way of the blow, pushing the sword’s tip down, but not entirely away from herself-the Aleran steel bit into the pale, rigid-looking flesh in a shower of scarlet-and-cerulean sparks. Her skin, then, was still Vord chitin-it merely looked like human flesh. His sword did not plunge deeply through the armor, despite the earthcraft and metalcraft behind it. An inch or two of blade sank into her abdomen and drew a howl of surprise and rage from the queen.

She bounded directly up to the ceiling, the movement so abrupt that it ripped the blade from Tavi’s left hand, and began scuttling like a spider toward the entry tunnel.

Before she could get there, a pair of bloodred steel chains, their ends weighted, whipped up from the ground like lariats. One settled around her wrist, the other around a thigh, and with a snarl, the two Hunters hauled the queen from her ceiling and back to the floor of the hive.

Tavi slashed another pair of spiders from the air as he charged the downed queen. The two Hunters had kept the chains tight, taking the queen’s balance from her each time she tried to regain her feet. Spiders were swarming over them, but the two Hunters, in their Vord-hide armor, ignored them and hauled with all their enormous strength on the chains.

Tavi slammed a leaping spider from the air with his left fist, killing it, whirled his longer blade over his head, reaching up to take it in a two-handed grip, and began the downward stroke that would kill the Vord queen.

She shrieked again and twisted in desperation, and her hood fell back revealing-

Kitai’s terrified face.

Tavi held back his strike for a startled instant, and in that hesitation, the Vord queen twisted her shoulders and ripped her own trapped arm from its socket.

The Hunter who had been holding the other end of the chain stumbled backward at the sudden lack of resistance and fell.

The spiders swarmed over him, burying him completely.

The queen rolled, scuttling sideways like a crab, and seized the other chain in her remaining hand. With a twist of her hips and shoulders, she ripped the chain from the grip of the other Hunter, lashing it at Tavi as she did.

Tavi had to fling himself back to avoid the chain, and the queen turned to fling herself at the hive’s exit.

There was a flash of light and a roar of superheated air, somewhere beyond the hive, lighting the walls to near transparency for an instant as a sphere of white-hot light appeared at ground level outside. Bits and pieces of heat-shriveled Vord armor and anatomy flew in through the hallway, and close behind them came another enormous form-Varg, his sword in hand, his black-and-crimson armor liberally smeared with the ichor. The Canim Warmaster slammed one foot down on the ground, then the other, settling his weight with the immovable mass of a mountain, and raised his sword to a high guard over his head.

“Come, creature,” he snarled. “Come through me if you can.”

The Vord queen let out a shriek and blurred toward Varg.

Tavi cried out and charged-realizing, as he did, that his wounded leg was no longer responding to the commands of his mind.