Codex Alera Book 3 - Chapter 52

The Elinarch was a marvel of Aleran engineering. It arched over the waters of the Tiber for a distance of more than half a mile, a span of solid granite drawn from the bones of the world. Infused with furies of its own, the bridge was very nearly a living creature, healing damage inflicted upon it, shifting its structure to compensate for the heat of summer, the cold depths of winter. The same crafting that allowed the roads to support and strengthen Aleran travelers also surged in unbroken power throughout the length of the bridge. It could alter its surface to shed excess water and ice, and smooth grooves collected rainwater in small channels at either side of the bridge during rainstorms.

During this storm, though, those channels ran with blood.

Tavi led his men at a quick march up the bridge. Twenty feet after they started, Tavi saw the trickles of blood in the channels. At first, he thought that the reddish overcast was simply shining on water, runoff rain. But the rain had stopped hours before, and the gloomy day drained color from the world, rather than tinting it. He didn't really, truly realize it was blood until he smelled it-sharp, metallic, unsettling.

They were not large streams-only as deep, perhaps, as the cupped palm of an adult man, only as wide as his spread fingers. Or rather, they would not have been large streams of rainwater. But Tavi knew that the blood running down the slope of the bridge had carried the lives of many, many men out onto the unforgiving, uncaring stone of the bridge.

Tavi turned his eyes away from it, forcing them to focus ahead, on the uphill march that still remained before him. He heard someone retch in the ranks behind him, as the legionares realized what they were seeing.

"Eyes forward!" Tavi called back to the legionares. "We have a job, gentlemen! Stay focused!"

They reached the final defensive wall, which was now manned by perhaps half a cohort of legionares-all of them wounded but capable of bearing arms. They saluted Tavi as he and his volunteers approached.

"Go get those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, boys!" bellowed one grizzled centurion.

"Send 'em to the crows, Captain!" called a wounded fish with a bloodied bandage around his head.

"Give it to 'em!"

"Take em down!"

"First Aleran!"

"Kick their furry-"

"a.s.sault formation!" Tavi called.

On the move, the cohort's formation changed, shifting into a column two legionares wide. Their pace slowed somewhat as the column squeezed through the opening in the northernmost defensive wall, and Tavi kept them in the slender formation as they double-timed to the next defensive wall. The din of battle grew louder.

The bulk of the Legion was there, at the next wall. Tavi could see Valiar Marcus's short, stocky form on the wall, bellowing orders. Legionares stood at the wall, then in two long lines at either side of the bridge, where the rough steps up to the improvised battlements awaited them. As defending legionares on the wall were cut down, the next men in line took their places. Tavi shuddered, imagining a nightmare wait in a line to pain and death with little to do but watch the blood of your brothers in arms flow past you in the gutter.

A larger force was positioned to block the opening in the center of the wall. The legionares nearest the opening fought with shield and short blade, but those behind them plied spears, reaching over and around the shieldmen to wound and distract the constant stream of Canim raiders trying to batter their way in by main strength. Canim bodies lay in piles that had become makeshift barricades. Alerans lay unmoving among them, their fellows unable to drag them free in the furious press of melee.

A cry went up, and the weary legionares of the First Aleran roared in sudden hope.

"Max!" Tavi called. "Cra.s.sus!"

"Boys!" Max called. Then he grinned at Cra.s.sus and flashed his half brother a wink. Cra.s.sus returned it as a pale, ghastly parody of a smile. Max and Cra.s.sus took over the head of the column, with the Knights Terra filling the next two ranks, then Tavi with Ehren. Kitai, perhaps inevitably, did not run in formation but out to one side of the column, green eyes bright, her pace light and effortless despite the weight of the borrowed armor.

"Alera!" Tavi cried, raising his sword to signal the charge. The column picked up speed. His heart was beating so hard that he thought it might break his ribs.

Valiar Marcus's head whipped around, and he screamed orders. At the very last moment, the force on the ground split, ducking to either side. With a triumphant howl, several Canim poured through the opening.

They were met by the sons of Antillus Raucus, bright steel in their hands.

To Tavi, Max and Cra.s.sus's attack was a glittering blur. Max took a bare step ahead and hit them first, all speed and violence and deadly timing, his blade lashing out high. He struck the nearest Cane and laid open its weapon arm to the bone at the shoulder, then pivoted to one side, blade pa.s.sing through a second Cane's throat. He lashed out again, another strike that hammered aside an incoming sickle-sword.

Cra.s.sus fought with such flawless coordination with Max's attack that he might have been his brothers own shadow. He dispatched the disarmed Cane with a thrust that went through the roof of its mouth, blocked a desperate, frenzied attack from the Cane whose throat was already gushing out its life onto the bridge, and struck the third Cane's weapon hand from its arm while Max struck its blade, throwing open its defenses.

The brothers went through the leading Canim and hit the opening in the wall without even slowing down. Canim screams and cries came from the opening, then the Knights Terra were through and spreading out to either side. Tavi and Ehren were next, and the stinking metal-sewer smell of the dead was suffocating, the small pa.s.sage terrifyingly confining. They emerged from it in the s.p.a.ce of a breath, though it had seemed much longer to Tavi, and he found himself staring at an enormous length of sloping bridge rising toward the improvised walls built at the Elinarch's apex.

Momentum was everything. Max and Cra.s.sus began slashing a way through the Canim as if they were Rhodesian scouts chopping a clear trail through the jungles of their home. Once the Knights Terra were able to fan out to either side of them, they brought their enormous weapons into play. Tavi watched as a sword swung with fury-born strength tore a Cane in half at the waist, to let it fall to the ground in two confused, bleeding, dying pieces. A great hammer rose and fell, crushing another Cane with such force that the tips of broken bones in its rib cage and spine ripped their way out through its skin.

Tavi saw a flash of movement in the corner of his eye, and turned to see one Cane bound entirely over the Knights and land on the stones before him. It swept an enormous cudgel at his head. Tavi ducked it, faked to one side, then darted in close before the Cane could recover its balance. He slashed hard in an upward stroke, laying open the huge arteries in the Cane's inner thigh, spun from its way as the Cane fell, and used the momentum of the spin to strike the back of the Cane's neck. The blow was not strong enough to cut through the Cane's thickly furred and muscled neck entirely, but it was more than sufficient to split open its spine at the back of the neck, and dropped it at once to the ground, helpless as it bled to death.

A second Cane bounded over the line, landing outside of Tavi's sword reach. It whirled on Ehren.

The little Cursor flicked the standard pole out, the Legion's blackened eagle-crow now, Tavi supposed in some detached corner of his mind-standard lashing out and snapping like a whip into the Cane's nose. The blow did nothing more than startle the Cane for the s.p.a.ce of a second. Tavi could have struck in that second, but he didn't. Instinct warned him not to, and Tavi recognized and trusted the intuition.

Kitai's armored figure descended from the wall behind them, swords in either hand sweeping down, opening horrible wounds on the Cane. The Marat girl had bounded up the stairs while they labored through the tunnel, and she had hurled herself from the battlements a beat after they emerged. Kitai rolled forward, under the blind, furious swipes of the Cane's sickle-sword, came to her feet behind the raider, and cut it down in a short, vicious flurry of slashing blades.

Kitai flicked blood from her swords and circled to continue forward on Tavi's right, while Ehren took his left. They pressed ahead, furious sound and violence all around them, and behind them the Battlecrows began to emerge from the pa.s.sage through the wall, led by acting centurion Schultz, the shaft of the spear behind Max and Cra.s.sus's deadly point.

The Canim had not been prepared to defend themselves against an attack, Tavi realized. The enemy must have known that the Aleran's ability to fight was faltering, must have known that time and wounds were taking their toll. The Canim, Tavi somehow knew, had spent the last hour or more in eager antic.i.p.ation of the final, deadly fall of the Aleran defenders, and when the defenders had abandoned the opening in the wall, the Canim had known that the time for the final, killing rush had come at last. They had pressed forward, hungry for the killing blow that would destroy their enemies.

Instead, they found themselves faced with the deadliest swordsman in the Legion and the superhuman power of the Knights Terra, followed by the blackened, b.l.o.o.d.y banner of the captain who had defied Sari and his ritualists, shamed him before the host, and lived to tell the tale despite the terrible powers the ritualists had sent after him.

Battles are fought in muddy fields, in burning towns, in treacherous forests, in unforgiving mountains, and on the blood-spattered stones of contested bridges, Tavi realized. But battles are won within the minds and hearts of the soldiers fighting them. No force was defeated in battle until it believed that it was defeated. No force could be victorious unless it believed it could be victorious.

The First Aleran believed.

The Canim raiders weren't sure.

At that time, on that bridge, before the terrible swords of the sons of Antil-lus, before the crushing power of the Knights Terra, before the blackened banner of the First Aleran and the reckless, frenzied charge of the Battlecrows, those two facts were what mattered.

It was as simple as that.

The resistance of the Canim forces on the bridge did not simply waver-it abruptly vanished, as panic descended on them. Max and Cra.s.sus pressed the a.s.sault, and Tavi led the Battlecrows after them. On the walls behind them, trumpets rang. Valiar Marcus had seen the Canim break, and the rest of the weary Legion began rushing forward to lend their strength and momentum to the advance.

The advance had to cover most of five hundred yards, all uphill to the defenses at the bridge's apex-which had not, after all, been designed to defend against an a.s.sault from the Aleran side of the bridge. Without battlements, the only real protection they offered the Canim was the simple impediment of movement caused by the walls themselves and the relatively small opening in them.

That opening, however, also slowed the Canim now attempting to flee. The legionares were slower on foot than their opponents, but caught up to them as the choke point in the wall stranded them on the northern side.

Tavi was barely able to get his cohort into a more conventional fighting front, incorporating the Knights in its center, before the vengeful Alerans fell on the Canim. Canim screamed. Legionares went down. Tavi fought to keep the lines stable, to get the wounded clear of the fighting before they were trampled. The desperate Canim rushed up onto the improvised battlements and threw themselves over, perfectly willing to fall rather than face the juggernaut of the First Aleran's advance. A few even cast themselves off the bridge. It was a long, dangerous fall to the water from there, the maximum height of the bridge from its surface.

Dangerous as it might have been, the waiting sharks were a far more serious threat-and after two days of constant blood-taint in the water and relatively little food, they were hungry. Nothing that fell into the river came out alive again.

Tavi was the first legionare to mount up onto the battlements at the bridge's center. Ehren was close behind him, and a roar went up from the Alerans as the black eagle/crow banner gained the wall.

Tavi watched as Max and his Knights plunged through the opening in the wall to make sure the Canim had a reason to continue their retreat. They were followed by a number of excited Battlecrows who should have been taking defensive positions, but who had allowed the heat of battle to control their movements. Max, Cra.s.sus, and the Knights Terra settled for crippling blows upon the fleeing Canim where they had to, and the following legionares finished up the gruesome work the Knights had begun.

Tavi had no idea whether Max realized how far past the wall the a.s.sault had actually rolled, and he signaled the Battlecrows' trumpeter to sound the halt. The clarion call rolled out over the downhill slope of the far side of the bridge, and at its signal Max looked around him, and even a hundred yards away, Tavi could see the expression of dismay on Max's face as he saw how far forward he'd come.

Beside Tavi, Kitai sighed and rolled her eyes. "Alerans."

Max got the Knights and legionares stopped and began an orderly withdrawal back to the wall at the bridge's center.

Tavi glanced over his shoulder, then turned and started back down to the surface of the bridge, barking out orders. "Bring up the engineers! Knights Aeris to the wall! Battlecrows, with me!"

Ehren followed hard on his heels. "Uh, sir? Shouldn't we be preparing to, uh, you know. Defend against a counterattack?"

"That's what we're doing," Tavi said. He stalked through the opening in the wall and out onto the surface of the bridge. Tavi stared down the Elinarch's slope, to where the Canim were already rallying, down at the next defensive wall. "Schultz! Bring them up!"

"Right," Ehren said. His voice sounded distinctly nervous. "It's just that it seems a shame that the engineers went to all this trouble to build us a real nice wall, and here we are out in front of it. Not using it. I'm just worried that it might hurt their feelings."

"The Knights need the s.p.a.ce on the walls and the engineers can't afford to be interrupted by a breakthrough. We have to buy them all room to work in," Tavi said.

"Us," Ehren said. "And one cohort." He stared down the bridge. "Against the next best thing to sixty thousand Canim."

"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, bra.s.sy 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. Cra.s.sus 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," Cra.s.sus said.

Tavi drew a small cloth bag from his pocket and pa.s.sed it over to Cra.s.sus. 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 Cra.s.sus.

"It was the only such gem she had?"

"As far as I know," Tavi said.

"She's... she's ambitious," Cra.s.sus 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 Cra.s.sus to be confident, not gnawed by guilt and self-doubt.

"I just can't believe it," Cra.s.sus repeated. "Do you think she's all right?"

Tavi put a hand on Cra.s.sus' 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."

Cra.s.sus 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."

Cra.s.sus 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 Cra.s.sus 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?"

"Cra.s.sus 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 Cra.s.sus 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sault. "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 a.s.sault crashed to a savage halt against them, roaring like tide from a b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.sive, 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sault 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 Cra.s.sus, 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 Cra.s.sus 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 s.p.a.ce 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.