Marok kept on snarling and muttering to himself. The old Cane's eyes were closed. His blood ran steadily.
Even before the earthcrafters all reached their positions, those who had gotten there began their work. The earth swelled and heaved like an ocean before the wind. Then it began to fold upon itself. Fidelias was reminded of the way a sheet would ripple and fold when one snapped it to get it spread out over a mattress.
Within moments, the crafting was complete. The earth rose slightly in a short ramp before the Legion lines, rising perhaps eighteen inches - but the far side of the ramp sloped down sharply, to a ditch seven or eight feet deep and twice as wide. Centurions began to shout orders to their units, and the Legions advanced to the lip of the ditch, dressing their ranks and changing out weaponry, to ply their spears against the vord as they tried to climb out. It was not by any means an ideal defensive structure - but it was also far, far better than nothing.
"They've got it," Fidelias said.
Marok let out a slow exhale and allowed his snarling chant to trail off. The bloodspeaker slumped down to the stone of the roof and dropped heavily onto his side. His left arm was still extended, blood running from it. Fidelias turned to him with an alarmed intake of breath.
"Do not concern yourself for me, demon," Marok said. "Bandages. My pouch."
Fidelias found the bandages and began wrapping Marok's arm to stanch the flow of blood.
"I thought you said clouds of acid were for amateurs," Fidelias remarked.
"That was not a cloud. It was a wall." He closed his eyes, and muttered, "Whining demon. You are welcome."
Fidelias was about to order Marok taken to the healers when Ambassador Kitai stormed out onto the roof, looking around wildly. She spotted Fidelias and stalked toward him. "Where is he?"
"Not here," Fidelias replied. "He dropped you off and left. The Queen went after him."
Kitai ground her teeth, and said, "I might have known he would do something like this."
Fidelias arched an eyebrow. "The healers said you had a bump the size of an apple on the back of your head."
Kitai waved her hand impatiently. "I must go to him."
Fidelias leaned toward her. "He's alive?"
Kitai glanced aside, her eyes focused on nothing. "Yes. For now. And... pleased with his own cleverness, may The One help us." She blinked and looked back at Fidelias. "Quick. What is the absolute worst place in this Valley one could go? The most insanely suicidal place to be found? The place where only a great fool would venture - and only an insane fool would follow?"
Fidelias responded at once and found himself speaking in chorus with the Ambassador as they both said, "Garados."
"He is there," Kitai said. And without another word she turned, leapt into the air, and vanished behind a veil as she raised a windscreen and shot off into the open sky. Half a dozen vordknights dropped into her flight path, hoping to intercept her even though they couldn't see her.
Their wings burst into flame, and they went plunging to their deaths on the ground below.
Fidelias exhaled slowly. Then he turned back to the business of battle, redeploying their new assets, though he knew that their position could not long be held against such numbers, not for more than a few hours.
But he had a feeling he had done all that he could.
His eyes drifted in the direction of Garados. Somewhere on the cold, hard slopes of that mountain, a young man was pitting all the strength and cunning and brilliance of a thousand-year dynasty against the intelligence and remorseless power at the heart of the world-eating vord.
And, like everyone else, all Fidelias could do was wait to see what happened.
Chapter 56
From a distance the mountain was undeniably beautiful: tall and imposing, crowned with snow and ice. But the closer one got to it, the more a sense of malevolent, hostile presence seemed to grow. Tavi had encountered the mountain's ire once before - and what he had felt that day had been nowhere near this oppressively bleak. Garados wasn't simply surly and resentful this time.
The vast fury was absolutely enraged.
The thunderclouds gathering around its peak were growing darker by the moment, as though they had drawn the night into themselves as it waned. Thana Lilvia, the vast wind fury that came sweeping down off the Sea of Ice and over the Calderon Valley, was making a show of force today, gathering her herds as usual near her husband. Flashes of lightning in wildly varying colors lashed constantly through the clouds, and even from miles away, Tavi could see the gliding, looping, sinister forms of windmanes, windmanes by the score, prowling the mountain's slopes.
A low thread of fear ran down Tavi's throat, and he swallowed it as manfully as he could. He had seen windmanes kill, and it had been terrifying. But for a stroke of good luck, they would have torn him to shreds as they had that luckless deer.
He ground his teeth. He didn't need to be rehashing his life's closest calls. He needed to be focused on the enemy behind him, a being more dangerous than a cohort of windmanes. He checked over his shoulder. The vord Queen had closed his lead to a scant two hundred yards or so.
Tavi plunged into the thunderclouds gathered at Garados's summit and let out a quick bark of mocking laughter.
A pulse of anger strong enough to destroy worlds flashed through the mist, and Tavi winced at the intensity of it. That wrath belonged to the vord Queen, and was being directed entirely at him. He banked left and reduced his speed, aware that the mountain was near but not sure of its precise location.
He almost found it with the end of his nose. The grey mist occluded the frosty grey stone of the mountaintop near perfectly, and Tavi had to shift course frantically to keep from smashing against it. He avoided disaster, steadied himself, and settled down to light gently upon a slope near the mountain's peak, crouching. The vord Queen's windstream roared on by. She had apparently lost track of him in the mist.
Tavi waited for a moment, but nothing happened. He stomped on the rocky ground beneath him a few times. Then he jumped up and down, feeling exceptionally foolish.
If that didn't provoke the enormous fury, he wasn't sure what would.
Without warning, the vord Queen's voice called through the mist, disassociated from any particular direction. "Where are you, Father?"
Tavi blurred the obvious direction of his own voice with a windcrafting over his mouth. "Why do you keep calling me that?"
"Because your blood gave me birth. Yours and that of my mother."
"So that was you," Tavi said. "You were the thing Doroga dropped that big rock on."