Amara pursed her lips and nodded. "That's why you fought as you did. To the end."
Doroga nodded. "And why the queen near this place must be found and destroyed. Before she spawns young queens of her own."
"What do you think happened here?" Amara said.
"Takers came in," Doroga said. "That was what she meant when she said them and not them. This Aric she speaks of was one who was taken. This other man, who sealed her into the stone, must have been free. Maybe one of the last of your people still free."
"Then where is he now?" Amara asked.
"Taken. Or dead."
Amara shook her head. "This isn't… this is too incredible. I've never heard of such a thing. No one has ever known anything like this."
"We have," Doroga rumbled. "Long ago. So long ago that few tales remained. But we have seen them."
"But it can't be," Amara said quietly. "It can't be like that."
"Why not?"
"Aric couldn't have been taken. He was the one who came to warn Bernard. If he was one of these vord now, then they would know…"
Amara felt a slow, vicious spike of cold lodge in her belly.
Doroga's eyes narrowed to slits. Then he spun to one side and took up the enormous war club he had left leaning against a wall. "Calderon!" he bellowed, and outside the walls of the steadholt, his gargant answered with a ringing trumpet of alarm. "Calderon! To arms!"
Amara staggered to her feet looking around wildly for Bernard.
And that was when she heard legionares begin to scream.
Chapter 20
Amara snapped an order to the nearest healer to watch over Heddy, then called to Cirrus. Her fury gathered around her, winds swirling up a cloud of dust that outlined the vague form of a long-legged horse in the midst of the winds. Amara cried out and felt Cirrus sweep her clear of the ground and into the open sky above Aricholt.
She spun in a circle, eyes flickering over the ground beneath her and the skies about her, taking in what was happening.
In the steadholt below her, she saw legionares emerge sprinting from the enormous stone barn. The last man out let out a cry and abruptly fell, falling hard to the stony ground. Something had hold of his ankle and began hauling him back into the barn. The soldier shouted, and his fellow legionares immediately turned back to help him.
Amara held up her hands to the level of her eyes, palms facing each other, and willed Cirrus into the air before her face, concentrating the winds to bend light and draw her vision to within several yards of the stone barn.
The legionares sword slashed through a shining, black, hard-looking limb like nothing that Amara had ever seen, save perhaps the pinching claws of a lobster. The sword bit into the vord's claw-but just barely. The legionare struck again and again, and even then only managed to cripple the strength of the claw, rather than severing it completely.
The men dragged their wounded companion away from the barn, his boot flopping and twisting at a hideous angle.
The vord warrior followed them into the sunlight.
Amara stared down at the creature, her stomach suddenly cold. The vord warrior was the size of a pony, and had to have weighed four or five hundred pounds. It was covered in slick-looking, lacquer-gloss plates of some kind of dark hide. Four limbs thrust straight out to the sides from a humpbacked central body, rounded and hunched like the torso of a flea. Its head extended from that body on a short, segmented stalk of a neck. Twists and spines of chitin surrounded its head, and a pair of tiny eyes recessed within deep grooves glared out with scarlet malevolence. Massive, almost beetlelike mandibles extended from its chitinous face, and each mandible ended in the snapping claw that had crippled the legionare.
The vord rushed out of the doorway, hard on the heels of its prey, its gait alien, ungainly, and swift. Two of the legionares turned to face it, blades in hand, while the third dragged the wounded man away. The vord bounded forward in a sudden leap that brought it down on top of one of the legionares. The man dodged to one side, but not swiftly enough to prevent the vord from knocking him to the earth. It landed upon him and seized his waist between its mandibles. They ground down, and the man screamed in agony.
His partner charged the vord's back, screaming and hacking furiously with his short, vicious gladius. One of the blows landed upon a rounded protrusion upon the creature's back, and it sprayed forth some kind of greenly translucent, viscous liquid.
A string of clicking detonations emerged from the vord, and it released the first legionare to whirl on its new attacker and bounded into the air as before. The legionare darted to one side, and when the vord landed, he struck hard at its thick neck. The blow struck home, though the armored hide of the vord barely opened. But it had been enough to hurt it.
More liquid, nauseating greenish brown, spurted from the wound, and more explosive clicks crackled from the monster. It staggered to one side, unable to keep its balance despite its four legs. The legionare immediately seized his wounded companion, and began to drag the other man away from the wounded, unsteady vord. He moved as quickly as he could.
It wasn't enough.
Another half dozen of the creatures rushed out of the barn like angry hornets from a nest, and the buzzing click of the wounded vord became a terrifying, alien chorus. The vibrating roar increased, and the humped, round backs of the things abruptly parted into broad, blackened wings that let them leap into the air and come sailing at the fleeing legionares.
The vord tore them to shreds before Amara's horrified eyes.
It happened quickly-start to finish in only a handful of seconds, and there was nothing anyone could have done to save the doomed legionares.
More vord emerged from other buildings in the steadholt, and Amara saw three of them leaping forth from the steadholt's well. She heard Giraldi bellowing over the rumble of angry clicking, and a sudden flash of fire boomed into the air as one of Commander Janus's Knights Ignus unleashed furies of fire upon a charging vord.
Another scream, this one very near, snapped Amara's gaze upward, to see one of the Knights Aeris struggling against a pair of winged vord warriors. The man slashed a hand at the air, and a burst of gale-force wind sent one vord tumbling to the side, spinning end over end as it fell toward the earth. But the second vord flared its wings at the last second and it struck him belly first, legs wrapping him, jaw-claws gripping and tearing. The Knight screamed, and the pair of them plummeted toward the ground.
Below her, the veterans of Giraldi's century had immediately linked up to stand together, their backs to one of the steadholt's stone walls and the nearest building securing one flank. Eight or nine of the vord bounded forward, only to be met by a solid wall of heavy Legion tower-shields and blades in the first rank, while the two ranks behind plied their spears in murderous concert with the front row. Supporting one another, Giraldi's veterans stopped the vord charge cold, steel flashing, men screaming defiance. Blood and nauseating vord-fluid sprinkled on the courtyard's stones.