Princeps’ Fury

Ehren bowed to the First Lord. Then he turned, clutching the letters, and ran.

* * *

Ehren and Sireos exited the tunnel an hour later and began making their way to the causeway so that they could attempt to catch up with the fleeing civilian refugees. Most of another hour of running with the effortless ease of fury-assisted travel brought them into the hills north of Alera Imperia, the beginning of the Redhill Heights, and they paused there to look back.

The capital was burning.

Vord swarmed all over it, like some kind of gleaming mold. Aquitaine’s Legions had apparently made good their escape-though he had only three of them remaining, not the five he’d begun the operation with. They had managed to cross the Gaul, then bring it back into its normal course, and were withdrawing to the north.

White and violet fire like nothing Ehren had ever seen suddenly flashed from the top of the First Lord’s tower. Vordknights swarmed through the air toward it. Knights Aeris, presumably the enemy’s, rushed toward it upon gales that sounded hollow in the distance. A star of scarlet-and-azure light suddenly blazed upon the tower top-the First Lord’s sword, kindled to life.

Ehren held up his hands and brought the air between them into focus. His gifts at windcrafting were, at best, modest. He would not be able to see nearly so well through his visioncrafting as he had through Gaius’s. But it would have to do.

He couldn’t see much more than a gleam of silver and the blazing sword upon the top of the Citadel, but he knew that it had to be Gaius. Vordknights buzzed around the tower like moths around a lantern, so thickly that they sometimes obscured the light almost completely.

Lightning crackled down from the sky to strike the tower, but immediately flashed back upward again, bouncing off like light against a mirror. Vord began to scale the tower, hundreds of them, clawing their way directly up its sides.

Then the figure atop the tower raised both arms above his head, and the earth itself bucked and shook like a stallion at the bite of a horsefly. Ehren was thrown from his feet to the ground, and he lost his visioncrafting-but he could not look away.

The ground rippled like the surface of the sea, shattering buildings like so many toothpicks. The earth split open, great, yawning cracks spreading out for a mile in every direction from the citadel-and then those cracks began to glow with inner, scarlet light. The tremors stopped, and for an instant everything was perfectly silent, motionless.

And then fire like nothing Ehren had ever seen, rock so hot that it had begun to flow like liquid, erupted upward from the ground in a column that was literally miles across. The magma clawed for the sky like a fountain in a city square, and hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of winged forms erupted from the fiery spray, eagles which spread their great wings and streaked through the air, leaving blazing columns of fire in their wakes. The wind rose violently, the superheated air reacting to the eruption, and the fire-eagles swept and spun in great circles, crying out in shrieks made tiny by distance.

Fire filled the skies over Alera Imperia. Cyclones of flame spun away from the city, deadly funnels that seemed to lift everything they touched from the ground, only to incinerate them to ashes.

The ground beneath the city and for miles around began to buckle. Falling walls and buildings added their own gravelly screams to the night’s cacophony. The Vord died by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, devoured by insatiable flame and ravenous earth.

With a final scream, Alera Imperia collapsed into the earth, lowered like a corpse into its grave and consumed by the fires that raged there.

So died Gaius Sextus, First Lord of Alera, his pyre lighting the Realm for fifty miles in every direction.

* * *

Ehren sat numbly, staring at the end of the Realm. The three Legions who had escaped with Aquitaine had nearly reached them. Their outriders came pounding up the causeway on horseback, and one of the weary-looking men drew to a halt as he reached them.

“Gentlemen,” the outrider said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to get moving or else clear the road. The Legions are coming through.”

“Why?” Ehren asked quietly. “Why run now? Nothing could have lived through that.”

“Aye,” the outrider said in a subdued voice. “But there were some of those things that weren’t close enough to get burned up. They’re coming.”

Ehren felt sick to his stomach again. “So what Gaius did… it was for nothing?”

“Crows no, young man,” the outrider said. “What’s left ain’t half a tithe of their numbers-but we’ve only three exhausted Legions left to us and no strong defensive position. It’s more than enough for them to do for us.” He nodded to them, then kicked his horse up into a canter, riding on down the road.

“Sir Ehren?” asked Sireos wearily. “What do we do?”

Ehren sighed and bowed his head. Then he pushed himself to his feet. “We retreat. Come on.”

CHAPTER 41