Twice, the Vord breached the earthworks and began pouring down the terraces-but both times, Anag and the Shuaran taurg cavalry charged, shattering the momentum of the advance, which was then pushed back by blocks of Varg’s elite warriors, led personally by the Warmaster.
And then, after more than four endless, nightmarish hours, the horns Magnus had stationed at the piers began to sound the retreat.
“That’s it!” Tavi screamed, turning to the trumpeter he’d kept near him. “Signal the Canim! Sound the retreat!”
As the silver trumpet shrilled, the First Spear turned to Tavi from his place in the ranks, eyes searching. Tavi flashed Marcus several hand signals, and the veteran centurion began barking orders that were repeated instantly through the ranks.
Once more, the Canim horns brayed, and the ritualists came forward for one last, mass summoning of blood magic. The Vord reeled back from the destruction-and in that moment of opportunity, the defenders turned and withdrew from their positions.
“Go!” Tavi shouted, waving men past him, willing them to retreat in good order, to escape, to survive. “Through the city gate and down to the ship! The route is marked by our colors! Go, go, go!”
Four hours of hard fighting made a poor prelude to the mile and a half of hard marching the men would have to make before they could board their ships, but none of them seemed anything less than eager to take to his heels. Despite the hours of slaughter and havoc they and the Canim had wreaked upon the Vord, the enemy numbers outside the walls had not visibly diminished-this was a battle they could not possibly win, and they knew it. They could only hope to survive.
The Vord came over the walls and began to pour down them like a black flood finally breaching a strained levy, pursuing the retreating forces-but the taurg cavalry flung itself forward into the foremost elements of the advance. The taurga, bellowing their fury and fear, smashed into the oncoming Vord with a ferocity and power of impact that Tavi had never seen, an unstoppable hammerblow that left acres of Vord crushed into the Canean soil.
Again and again the taurga charged, and here and there, one of the great mounts fell, pulled down by the sheer weight of numbers, spilling a blue-and-black-armored Canim warrior onto the cold earth to a savage death.
But all they could do was slow the oncoming tide.
Tavi pushed along at the rear of the Aleran forces, a shoulder under one of Crassus’s arms, hauling the exhausted young Tribune along by main force. He was exhausted, and every nerve felt strained. Everything happened very rapidly, and at the same time in achingly slowed distortion.
The Canim and Alerans alike flowed into Molvar through the city’s several gates, and went rushing down to the docks, where the ships stood waiting for them, lined up in specific order. Boarding instructions were designed for speed, not organization. Each ship would take its maximum load from the first to reach it, then clear the piers in the port for the next.
If Tavi had known, when he was younger, how much of war depended upon vast and complex ways of organizing where people were supposed to walk, eat, sleep, and relieve themselves, he thought he would have had a completely different opinion on the subject.
He was among the last Alerans to enter the city, and he could see the Vord, halfway across the open ground, rushing toward the city as the Canim at the gates swung them closed and locked them shut.
“Go!” Tavi urged them silently. “Go, go, go!”
Outside, he heard the Canim cavalry sound their own retreat, then the taurga racing toward the stone piers. Tavi could not imagine the danger and mayhem that was about to ensue when several hundred blood-maddened Canim guided the battle-frenzied taurga down narrow stone staircases so that they could board the ice ships, but it was plain to him that no sane man would want to be anywhere close.
Even as Tavi kept urging his men to hurry on through the city, their way marked by pennants made from strips of red-and-blue cloth, he saw the Canim on the walls of the city begin to rush through the walls and buildings with lit torches, setting them aflame. The fires had been laid hours before, and spread rapidly, smoke coming up in a sudden veil.
Molvar would burn to shield their escape.
“Max!” Tavi gasped, still hauling Crassus along by one arm. “Here, help me!”
Max appeared from the confusion and smoke and got beneath his brother’s other arm. “I can handle him. You should move ahead, get to a ship!”
“Once all of our people are ready to go, I will,” Tavi responded. “Stop slowing me down, and get moving.”
“Captain!” Marcus appeared out of the smoke, coughing. “West wind is rising! The fire’s spreading toward us faster than we can move away!”
“Get to the front of the line with some Knights!” Tavi called back. “Knock down some walls if you have to!”
“Yes, sir!” Marcus saluted and vanished again.
As they got closer to the piers, the line came to a halt, the men backed up in the street, pressed chest to shoulder blades with their fellows. Tavi could hear Marcus bellowing orders in a smoke-roughened voice, somewhere ahead of them. Men had begun to shout and mill about in panic, as the roar of the fire grew nearer, along with the light of the spreading flames.
“Stand easy, men!” Tavi called. “We’ll get through. We’re going to be-”
Tavi didn’t know how the Vord had gotten through. Perhaps it had been one of the first to reach the city, and had plunged through the flames before they had risen to deadly intensity. Perhaps its froglike form had been specifically designed to resist heat. Perhaps it had just gotten lucky. Regardless, Tavi didn’t realize that it was there at all until something disturbingly like a hand seized a weary, wounded legionare beside him, holding the man’s entire head in its grasp, and flung him to his back on the ground.
Just as it happened, there was a surge of motion and a roar of triumph from the Legion ahead of Tavi. Men stumbled forward as the restraining pressure of the bodies in front of them was released.
Tavi screamed for help, but his voice was lost amidst the shouts and the roaring fire and wind. The Vord hunched over the fallen legionare, moving with a hideously lithe ferocity. Sparks flew from the armor over the legionare’s belly as the Vord raked at him with shining green-black claws.
Tavi drew his sword, needing no conscious effort to call upon the furies within the Aleran steel. His sword struck through the arm with which the Vord had the legionare pinned, then through its slender neck in a pair of rapid strokes, followed by a fury-enhanced kick that prevented the Vord’s mass from falling on the downed legionare and pinning him there.
Tavi flashed the stunned-looking man a quick grin and hauled him to his feet. “No lying down on the job, soldier. Watch my back until we get to the ship, eh?”
The man answered his smile with one of his own and drew his sword. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
The two of them hurried through the thickening smoke to catch up with the retreating legionares, and Tavi found himself beginning to cough and struggle for breath. There were more of the Vord in the haze, moving as swiftly as shadows, glimpsed for only a second before they were gone again. An eerie shriek rose through the smoke, and others answered it from all around, the cries echoing between buildings and becoming strangely distorted as they bounced around stone.
Elsewhere in the streets, they heard the snarls and roars of fighting Canim, mixing with the shrieks of the Vord. They were under attack, as they descended through their own routes to the harbor.