Princeps’ Fury

“You propose an alliance,” Varg mused.

“I do.”

The Cane was silent for long moments more. Then he nodded once, and said, “Done.”

CHAPTER 19

Amara and Bernard watched from a position of perfect concealment as the Vord annihilated the remnants of the Ceresian rear guard. The doomed legionares took their stand in the ruins of a nameless village beside the causeway. They locked shields, faced the foe, and fought with desperate determination to slow the oncoming enemy, to give the holders still trying to flee for the safety of the city’s walls a chance to escape.

Four-legged creatures that looked something like the deadly predator-lizards of the southwestern swamps near Kalare dominated the enemy numbers. Long, low to the ground, swift, and powerful, their bodies were covered with the same dark chitin as the other Vord Amara had seen-with the addition of raised, serrated ridges down the lengths of their spines and flanks. As Amara watched, one of them snapped its jaws closed on the thigh of a legionare. In a flash, it had wrapped its body around the man, the motion bonelessly swift-and then it simply writhed, its body gliding in constant motion like a serpent circling its way up a tree branch.

The ridges ripped through steel and flesh alike, and the legionare screamed as he died.

The Ceresian cohort, more than three hundred men, were overrun by the Vord. Their lines held for ten seconds, then fifteen, then twenty. Then they seemed to sag and collapse inward, and the black tide of Vord swarmed over the men, rending and ripping, barely slowing down before they continued in pursuit of the band of refugees the legionares had given their lives to protect.

They had died for nothing.

The Vord caught the holders within two minutes.

Amara couldn’t watch the holders, most of them very old or very young, die. She closed her eyes.

But she could still hear them screaming.

With so much chaos, so much confusion, so much destruction in the lands of Ceres, it had been inevitable, she told herself, desperate to distract herself with a flow of simple fact and calm deduction. Some of the steadholts had received word in time to avoid the oncoming terror. Many had not. Of those that hadn’t, the majority had reacted by taking to the causeways to flee for the shelter of their High Lord’s Legions-and rushed directly into the waiting talons and mandibles of the Vord.

Lord Cereus had spent his legionares’ lives in an effort to shield the refugees for as long as possible, sending out his small cavalry forces in an effort to guide fleeing holders off the causeways and around the worst areas of danger, but there simply had not been enough time or enough men. The slow, the foolish, or the merely unlucky perished by the hundreds upon the roads of Ceres over those few desperate days.

There was nothing she and Bernard could have done. The Vord were simply too many. Any action on their part would have accomplished nothing but to reveal their presence and seal their own fates along with those of the slain refugees. Their mission was more important than that. It could save hundreds of thousands of lives. She could not afford to let compassion for those who were directly in front of her blind her to the fact that she had a greater responsibility to the whole of the Realm. Doing her job was the proper thing to do, the logical thing to do.

Still, she wept for the brave legionares and the poor holders, and logic was no comfort whatsoever.

She wept, but she did so in silence. In the hours that followed, the Vord overran their position in greater and greater numbers, some of them passing within yards of where she and her husband lay hidden by veil and stealth and furycrafted cloth. The enemy was gathering for the attack that would certainly fall soon upon the single Aleran strongpoint that remained to challenge them.

Ceres itself.

* * *

She had not spoken to her husband for four days.

That was, Amara thought, the worst part of the entire arrangement. Speech was a luxury that could not be afforded, not when the enemy could literally lurk beneath virtually any fallen leaf. They could move in nearly perfect silence, and complete invisibility-but the sound of voices, even in whispers, would betray the presence of Alerans more surely than nearly anything else they could do.

Legion scouts had long since developed a fairly complex series of hand gestures, capable of signaling critical information in the field, but it was by no means a substitute for speech. There was no signal language gesture for “I can’t bear to look at this anymore,” or, “someone is going to pay.”