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 passage through the wall, led by acting centurion Schultz, the shaft of the spear behind Max and Crassus’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 anticipation 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, bloody 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 Crassus pressed the assault, 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 assault 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, Crassus, 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 assault 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 space 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, 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.