"But that won't help Gaius," Ehren said.
Sireos shook his head. "The damage helatin does takes years to build up, and it is subtle. I'd have to have been looking for it specifically, and unfortunately the poison's effects look a great deal like the effects of simple age."
"Wouldn't Gaius have noticed it?" Ehren asked.
"Because he's grown old before, and should know what it feels like?" The physician shook his head. "Part of what the helatin did would have reduced Gaius's ability to detect it for himself. Even if he was a young man, the best we could hope for would be to manage it. As things are..."
"Habit," Ehren said bitterly. "How long has it been going on?"
"Six years, at the least," Sireos said. "Given the idiocy of that business in Kalare, I'm frankly surprised that he's alive right now, much less on his feet."
"For some reason," Gaius said quietly, "I find it comforting to know that growing old isn't this painful for everyone."
Ehren looked up to see the First Lord standing in the doorway. He coughed, a wheezing sound, and pressed his hand to his chest with a grimace. "In my tonic, you say?"
Sireos nodded. "I'm sorry, Sextus."
Gaius took this news without expression. "How much time did she take from me, do you think?"
"There's no way to be sure."
"There seldom is," Gaius said, his voice slightly harder. "How long, Sireos?"
"Five years. Maybe ten." The physician shrugged.
A small smile quirked the corners of the First Lord's mouth. "Well. I suppose that makes the two of us even, then."
Ehren turned to him. "Sire..."
Gaius waved a hand. "I've taken as much from her, and better years, at that. She was a child, caught up in games she had no way to understand or avoid. I'm not willing to waste what time remains to me on the matter."
"Sire. This is murder."
"No, Sir Ehren. This is a footnote. There is no time for arrests, investigations, and trials." Gaius reached out to a weapons stand that was set up beside the door and buckled on his sword belt. "I'm afraid the Vord have arrived."
Gaius stood on the broad balcony, looking down as the Vord came for Alera Imperia. At his murmured word, the edges of the balcony had become one enormous windcrafting, focusing the view into a greatly magnified image whenever one stood at the rail and looked down. All Ehren needed to do was stand at the railing and stare at a particular portion of the lower city, and his view of it would suddenly rush forward, showing him the outer walls, more than a mile away, in crystalline clarity.
It was a little disconcerting, and gave him an odd, spinning sense of vertigo. This must be how the Princeps felt aboard a ship. Ehren reminded himself to be somewhat less cavalier about Tavi's discomfort in the future.
If there was a future.
"Ah, I thought so," Gaius said. "Look."
Ehren came to the First Lord's side and stared in the direction he indicated-south, over the plains surrounding the capital. The Vord had crested the most distant ridge that could be seen from the Citadel in a solid black line, like a living shadow that rolled steadily forward. Most of the ground troops were the four-legged creatures that they had seen before, but for every dozen or so of them, there walked a single creature shaped something like an enormous ape. The behemoths had bandy legs and enormous apelike arms, and they rolled forward using their forelimbs as well as their feet for locomotion. They were huge, better than twelve feet tall, and covered in plates of Vord armor that looked inches thick.
"Siege units," Gaius murmured. "They'll use them for breaching gates and walls, and probably to spearhead assaults."
Ehren stared at the behemoths and shivered. "Look behind them."
Gaius fell silent for a moment as he studied what Ehren had noticed.
Behind the first wave of Vord came an enormous line of Alerans.
They weren't alive, of course. Thanks to the windcrafting, Ehren could see that much. Their skin was mottled with postmortem bruising, and in some cases their bodies bore disfigurements or injuries that would have rendered any human immobile. The taken holders-and the vast majority of them were obviously holders, dressed in common clothing-walked without any expression whatever on their faces, their eyes focused on nothing.
"Where are the vordknights?" Ehren murmured.
"Staying out of sight, massing for an attack, most likely," Gaius said. "They can't have much fight left in them."
"They've been harassing us all the way here," Ehren said.
"Exactly," Gaius said. "It takes an enormous amount of power for them to keep themselves aloft. They must eat like gargants to be able to sustain the muscle they'd need for that sort of activity-and even with the patches of croach that they planted in secret, ahead of their advance, we've yet to discover one more than an acre in size." The First Lord shook his head. "Badly supplied infantry can fight on to some degree. But I think the vordknights are more like cavalry. Short cavalry of supplies, and they become ineffective far more rapidly. She'll save them for a critical stroke."
"The queen, you mean?" asked Ehren.
Gaius nodded. "She is the key to the entire battle." He fell silent again as they watched the Vord swarm over the plains toward the capital.
"So many of them," Ehren breathed.
For an instant, the First Lord's eyes glittered with a wild, fey light. "Aren't there, though." He nodded and turned to one of the Legion trumpeters at hand. "Signal the first attack."
The courier nodded and raised his trumpet. Its call sounded clear over the quiet city, and in its wake the Legions roared.
Thousands of Citizens stood among their ranks, called forth to fight for their land, to demonstrate the obligation that went with the privileges of their title. Among the Citizenry, earthcrafting was by far the most common talent, and now those Citizens unleashed their furies upon the Vord.
Just ahead of the Vord ranks, the ground erupted, swelling into hillocks and blisters of stone that burst to disgorge furies of the earth. Gargants, wolves, serpents, great dogs, and nameless things-both beautiful and hideous-came bounding and slithering and charging out of the very soil of the land, to fall upon the first wave of the alien horde.
The battle that ensued had a ghastly sort of beauty to it. The Aleran furies, like statuary come to frenzied life, slammed into the Vord. Furies of the earth, though not swift, were viciously strong and difficult to actually harm-and the Vord were packed in close to one another as they came for Alera Imperia. Ehren watched as a bear made of black-and-grey marble slammed its paws down with methodical precision, crushing a Vord at every blow. A gargant of flint and clay thundered into the Vord ranks without being noticeably slowed, leaving destruction in its wake. A great sandstone serpent wound swiftly around one Vord after another, crushing the howling creatures in its coils and slithering on. The earth furies broke Vord quadrupeds like toys, and shrugged off blow after blow in response.