“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.