"No," Kitai put in quietly. "Us against one."
Tavi nodded. "Sari."
Ehren said, "Ah." He glanced back as the Battlecrows filed into place around them. "You don't think there's a chance he might bring a friend or two?"
"That's the idea," Tavi said. "Make sure they can see the standard."
Ehren swallowed and adjusted the standard against the wind. "So they know exactly where you are."
"Right," Tavi said.
Down the slope of the bridge, brassy horns began to blare once more-this time in a different sequence than used before. Tavi watched as Canim began to emerge from the opening in the next wall, and his heart sped up as he did.
Every single one of them wore the mantles and hoods of the ritualists. They fell into rows, clouds of greenish smoke dribbling from censers, many of them clutching long bars of iron, each end ribbed with dozens of fang-shaped steel blades. They formed the spearhead of a column of raiders, pouring out onto the bridge by the dozens. The hundreds. The thousands.
"Oh, my," Ehren said quietly.
"There," Tavi said to Kitai, barely suppressing a surge of excitement. "Coming up from the back. See the bright red armor?"
"That is he?" she asked. "Sari?"
"That's him."
Ehren said, "Signal your Knights Flora. Have them kill him when he advances. They could almost do it from here."
"Not good enough," Tavi said. "We can't simply kill him. The next ritualist down the ladder will just step into his place. We've got to discredit him, break his power, prove that whatever he promised the rest of his people, he isn't able to deliver."
"He can't deliver if there's an arrow stuck through his gizzard," Ehren pointed out. But he sighed. "You always seem to do things the hard way."
"Habit," Tavi said.
"How are you going to discredit him?"
Tavi turned and beckoned. Crassus leapt lightly down from the wall, as if the ten-foot drop did not exist. He made his way to Tavi's side through the troops and saluted him. "Captain."
Tavi walked a bit ahead of the troops, out of easy earshot. "Ready?"
"Yes, sir," Crassus said.
Tavi drew a small cloth bag from his pocket and passed it over to Crassus. The Knight Tribune opened the pouch and dumped the little red bloodstone into his hand. He stared at it for a moment, then put the gem back and pocketed it. "Sir," he said quietly. "You're sure this was in my mother's pouch."
Tavi knew he wouldn't accomplish anything by repeating himself. "I'm sorry," he told Crassus.
"It was the only such gem she had?"
"As far as I know," Tavi said.
"She's... she's ambitious," Crassus said quietly. "I know that. But I just can't believe she'd..."
Tavi grimaced. "It's possible we don't know the whole story. Maybe we're misinterpreting her actions." Tavi did not believe it for a second. But he needed Crassus to be confident, not gnawed by guilt and self-doubt.
"I just can't believe it," Crassus repeated. "Do you think she's all right?"
Tavi put a hand on Crassus' shoulder. "Tribune," he said quietly, "we can't afford to divide our focus right now. There will be plenty of time for questions after, and I swear to you that if I'm alive, we'll find her and answer them. But for now, I need you to set this aside."
Crassus closed his eyes for a moment, then shivered, a motion that reminded Tavi of a dog shaking off water. Then he opened his eyes and saluted sharply. "Yes, sir.".
Tavi returned the salute. "On your way. Good luck."
Crassus gave Tavi a forced smile, traded nods with Max, who stood with the Knights on the wall, then shot up into the sky on a sudden column of wind.
Tavi shielded his eyes from blowing droplets of water and blood and watched Crassus soar upward. Then he went back to his place in the ranks.
"I thought that those clouds were full of some kind of creature," Ehren said. "That's why we couldn't fly."
"They are, " Tavi told him. "But the bloodstone is some kind of counter to the ritualists' power. It should protect him."
"Should?"
"Protected me," Tavi said. "From that lightning."
"That's not the same thing as clouds full of creatures," Ehren said. "Are you sure?"
Tavi took his eyes from the dwindling figure of the young Knight and stared down the slope. "No. He knows it's my best guess."
"A guess," Ehren said quietly.
"Mmmhmm."
The Canim host's drums began, and the Canim began marching toward them, their pace steady and deliberate. The sound of hundreds of growling voices chanting together rose like a dark and terrible wind.
"What happens if you're wrong?"
"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.
The legionare on Tavi's left pivoted forward, slamming the fangstaff aside with his shield and flicked a menacing blow at the ritualist's head, forcing him to jerk back to avoid it. It wasn t much of a delay, but it was enough for Schultz to recover his balance. He and Tavi snapped back into formation, and the fight went on.
And on.
And on.
Tavi's arms burned from the effort of using shield and sword, and his entire body trembled with the exhausting effort of holding against the overwhelming foe. He had no idea how long the fight lasted. Seconds, minutes, hours. It could have been any of them. All he knew for certain was that they had to hold their ground until it was over. One way or the other.
More men died. Tavi felt a flash of heat upon one cheek as a Canim sickle-sword passed near. Canim fell, but their numbers never seemed to lessen, and bit by bit, Tavi felt the supporting pressure of the rear ranks waning. The inevitable collapse would come soon. Tavi ground his teeth in raw frustration-and saw a flash of red only a few feet away. Sari was there, in his scarlet armor, and Tavi saw the ritualist's fangstaff smash down onto an already-wounded legionare, slamming him to the bridge's surface.
Grimly, Tavi began to give the order to advance. A single, hard push might bring Sari within the reach of his blade-and he was determined that no matter what happened, Sari would not leave the bridge alive.
As he was about to scream the order, golden sunlight suddenly washed over the bridge.
For the space of a breath, confusion turned the combat into a spastic, inexpert affair, as virtually everyone involved turned their gazes to the sky in shock. For the first time in nearly a month, the golden sun shone down upon the Eli-narch, the blazingly hot sun of a late-summer noon.
Though he knew he would never be heard, Tavi screamed, "Max!"
A cry went up on the wall behind them, the Knights there letting out a sudden cry of mass effort, and unleashed upon the Canim a weapon such as no Aleran had ever seen.
Though not all of the Knights Aeris could fly well, their lack of ability was more an issue of inexperience than it was of strength. Every Knight Aeris there had considerable power for other applications of windcrafting-and given how-basic this one was, they were more than up to the task.
Tavi could only imagine what was happening now, behind him and up on the walls and in the skies over the Elinarch. Thirty Knights, all together, raised a far-viewing crafting of the kind normally used to observe objects at distance. Instead of forming only between their own hands, however, this crafting was massive, all their furies working in tandem to form a disk-shaped crafting a quarter of a mile across, directly above the wall where they stood. It gathered in all of that sudden sunlight, shaping it, focusing it into a fiery stream of energy only a few inches across that bore down directly upon Max.
Tavi heard Max bellow, and his mind's eye provided him with another image-Max, raising up his own far-view crafting in a series of individual disks that curved and bent that light to flash down the length of the bridge's slope.
To shape it into a weapon. Precisely as Tavi had used his bit of curved Romanic glass to start a fire, only... larger.
The searing point of sunlight flashed across the bridge, and where it touched, raiders and ritualists screamed as skin blackened and clothing and fur instantly burst into flame. Tavi glanced over his shoulder, and saw Max on the wall, arms lifted high, his expression one of strain-and rage. He cried out and that terrible light began sweeping over the Canim, felling them as a scythe fells wheat. A horrible stench-and an cacophony of infinitely hideous shrieks-filled the air.
Back and forth flicked the light, deadly, precise, and there was nowhere for the Canim to hide. Dozens died with every single one of Tavi's labored heartbeats-and suddenly the tide of battle began to change. The rift in the clouds widened, more light poured down, and Tavi thought he could see the shadow of a single person high in the air, at the center of the clear area of sky.
And, as the Canim attack came to a shocked halt, Tavi saw Sari again, not twenty feet away. The ritualist stared upward for a second, then whirled to see his army dying, burned to death before his very eyes. He whirled around, naked terror on his face, as his final assault became a desperate rout. The panicked raiders ran for their lives, trampled their fellows, and threw themselves from the bridge in their effort to avoid the horrible, unexpected Aleran sorcery. Those nearest the next wall managed to scramble through it in time.
The rest died. They died by fire, at the hands of their comrades, or in the jaws of the hungry sea-beasts in the river below. By the hundreds, by the thousands, they died.
In seconds, only those Canim nearest the Aleran shieldwall, and therefore too close to the Alerans to be targeted, were still alive. Those who attempted to flee were cut down by Antillar Maximus's deadly sunbeam. The rest, almost entirely ritualists, flew into an even greater frenzy born of their despair and the death they knew had come for them.
Tavi grimly dodged the wild backswing of a fangstaff, and when he looked back at Sari, he saw the Cane staring at him-then up at the sky overhead.
Sari's eyes turned calculating, burning with rage and madness, and then he suddenly howled, body arching up precisely as it had the day before.
Sari had to know that his life was over, and Tavi knew that Sari had plenty of time to call down the lightning once more-and Tavi was surrounded by his fellow Alerans. Though the blast would be meant for him, anyone near him would die as well, just as they had when Sari's lightning struck Captain Cyril's command tent.
He'd given Lady Antillus's bloodstone to Crassus, so Tavi made the only choice he could.
He sprinted forward, out of the wall, and charged Sari.
Once more the power crackled in the air. Once more, lights blazed along the ritualist's body. Once more the scarlet lightning filtered through the clouds all around the single shaft of clear blue sky Crassus had opened.
Once more blinding, white light and thunderous noise hammered down upon Tavi.
And once more it did nothing.
Chips of hot stone flew up from the bridge. A ritualist, accidentally standing too close, was charred to smoking meat. But Tavi never slowed. He crossed the remaining space in a single leap, sword raised.
Sari had a single instant in which he stared at Tavi, eyes wide with shock. He fumbled for a defensive grip on his fangstaff.
Before he could get it, Tavi rammed his sword into Sari's throat. He stared at the Cane's startled eyes for a single second-then he twisted the blade, jerking it free, ripping wide the ritualist's throat.
Blood sheeted down over Sari's scarlet armor, and he sank limply to the bridge, to die with a surprised look still on his face. There was a horrified cry from the ritualists as their master fell. "Battlecrows! " Tavi howled, signaling them forward with his sword. "Take them!"
The Battlecrows charged the Canim with a roar.
And a moment later, the Battle of the Elinarch was over.
Max came running up to Tavi after the last of the ritualists had been slain. The maddened Canim had neither given nor asked for quarter, which Tavi supposed was just as well. He wasn't at all sure that he could have restrained his le-gionares after the losses they'd suffered.
"Calderon," Max demanded. "He tried the lightning on you. Again." Max was sweating from the effort of his crafting and looked pale. "How the crows did you survive it?"
Tavi reached to his belt and drew the Canim knife they'd captured while engaging the raiding parties the day before the battle. He held up the skull-shaped pommel. A bloodstone glimmered wetly in one of the eyes. Wet, red blood dribbled down from the jewel and over the handle. "We had another gem, remember?"
"Oh," Max said. "Right." He frowned. "So how come you can hear me?"
"Opened my mouth and had some lining in my helmet," Tavi said. "Foss said it made a difference. Something about air pressure."
Max scowled at Tavi, and said, "Gave me a heart attack. Thought you were dead, and you just had another gem the whole time." He shook his head. "Why didn't you just give that one to Crassus?"
"Wasn't sure it would work," Tavi said. "I knew the one I gave him would. He was more important than me for this."
The young Knight in question descended wearily from the sky and landed on the bridge to the cheers of the Knights Pisces. Crassus walked slowly over to Tavi and saluted. "Sir."
"Well done, Tribune," Tavi said, his voice warm. "Well done."
Crassus smiled a bit, and Max clapped him roughly on the shoulder. "Not bad."
Ehren, still bearing the standard, also offered his congratulations, though Kitai only gave Crassus a speculative glance.
Tavi looked around him, struggling to order his thoughts. It was more difficult than he had thought it would be. Too many emotions were rushing back and forth through him. Elation that his plan had succeeded. Crushing guilt, that so many had died for that success. Fury at the Canim, at Kalarus, at the treacherous Lady Antillus, and fury, too, for Sari and his like, whose lust for power had killed so many Alerans and Canim alike. Sickness, nauseous sickness at the sight and scent of so much blood, so many corpses, cut down with steel or charred by the savage sunfire he'd had his Knights unleash on the enemy. Giddiness that he had, against difficult odds, survived the past several days. And... realization.
His work was not yet done.
"All right," he said, raising his voice. "Schultz, get the wounded to the healers and fall back to the wall. Tell the First Spear I want him to consolidate units with too many losses into functioning cohorts and take up defensive positions until we're sure the enemy has withdrawn from the town and is on his way back to Founderport. Get everyone a meal, some rest, especially the healers, and tell him..." Tavi paused, took a breath, and shook his head. "He'll know what to do. Tell him to shore up defenses and see to our people."
Schultz gave him a weary salute. "Yes, sir."
"Max," Tavi said. "Go get our horses."
Max lifted his eyebrows. "We going for a ride?"
"Mmmm. Bring one alae of cavalry. We're going to follow the Canim withdrawal and make sure they want to keep moving away."
"Yes, sir," Max said, saluting. He gave a sharp whistle and a hand signal to someone on the wall and marched away.
"Sir Ehren, if you would, find Magnus and make sure he knows what has happened."