Amara bit her lip - and tossed the stone toward him.
He caught it and rolled his shoulder, wincing. Then he went to stand beneath one of the holes and look up at it. It was ten feet or more to the ceiling. "Hmmm."
Aria pushed herself unsteadily to her feet. She walked over to Araris, bent over, and made a stirrup of her interlaced fingers. Araris hesitated for a moment, then put his booted foot upon her hands. "One," she counted. "Two. Three."
Aria straightened with fury-assisted strength and tossed Araris upward as if he'd been a small sack of meal. He went through the hole with his arms held straight up above him, then slammed his elbows down on either side of the hole when he reached the other side. Amara saw his legs kick several times as he hauled himself out, and heard a fresh round of wailing vord cries.
And beyond those, faint but clear - trumpets. Aleran Legion trumpets, sounding the attack, over and over and over again. Firecraftings crackled and boomed in the near distance, and Amara sucked in her breath, sitting up in the pool. "Do you hear that?"
"The Legions," Aria breathed. "But the whole horde lies between here and Garrison. How?"
"Tavi," Isana said, her voice suddenly fierce. "My son."
They fell quiet, and everyone listened to the distant sound of trumpets and firecrafting. Each sounded both near and far away by turns. Minutes crawled by in which nothing changed.
Then the exhausted Lady Aria, still slumped beneath the holes in the ceiling, drew in a sharp breath, and staggered back, crying, "Vord!"
And, as quickly as that, half a dozen mantis warriors came flooding into the hive.
Chapter 52
Fidelias sat upon his horse, keeping pace with the weary infantry of the Legions, and watched the most desperately aggressive military action he'd ever witnessed begin to play out.
The enshrouding mist complicated matters. The knot of Canim ritualists who kept pace with the command group muttered and snarled to themselves constantly. Every so often, one of the Canim would slice at himself with a knife and fling droplets of blood into the air. The drops vanished as they flew, presumably to maintain the misty shroud that would hide their precise location from the enemy.
Of course, it also meant that Fidelias couldn't see his own bloody troops once they were a few hundred yards away. They'd had to work out several chains of couriers to relay signals between the units that had traveled out of sight of the command group. Even now, signals were coming in: Attack under way, light enemy resistance. Apparently, the vord Queen had left a few alert guardians among her sleeping brood - probably posing as sleepers. At least, that was how Fidelias would have done it.
The front ranks of Legion infantry had reached the old steadholt, and the most experienced cohort of the Free Aleran, together with the First Aleran's Battlecrows, reached the gates and a broken-down section of the wall, respectively.
"Now," Fidelias said to the trumpeter behind him.
The man raised his horn and sounded the charge. Other horns throughout both Legions took up the same call, and the sudden roar from nearly four hundred throats joined the voices of the trumpets as the two assault cohorts rushed the old steadholt, while the rest of the Legions moved up to support them. As they did, windstreams roared behind him, and Gaius Octavian and the First Aleran's Knights Aeris took to the air.
A second later, there was an earsplitting cry, metallic, alien, and furiously hostile. It froze Fidelias's throat and locked his limbs into place for an instant. His horse shuddered and danced nervously, nearly knocking him from the saddle. All around him, he could see the same expression of dread and confusion marking the faces of the officers and the men. Even the Canim's mutterings had slowed to a trickle of soft sounds that fell from between their teeth.
"Sound the charge," he rasped. It was hard to force himself to make that much noise, so intent were his instincts to avoid attracting the attention of whatever had made that sound. He looked over his shoulder at the dumbstruck trumpeter, whose face was as white as everyone else's. Fidelias had played the role of Valiar Marcus for far too long to be stricken silent. He drew upon Marcus's strength, stiffened his spine, drew in a deep breath, and bellowed, "LEGIONARE! SOUND THE CHARGE!"
The soldier stiffened as if Fidelias had slapped him and jerked his trumpet to his lips. He puffed out a weak breath of sound, and Fidelias turned to him and broke his centurion's baton over the man's helmet. Shocked by the blow, the man dragged in a deep breath and blasted out the trumpet call, loudly enough to hurt Fidelias's ears.
Other trumpets took it up, and the momentary pause in the advance was over. Forty thousand infantry and cavalry resumed their motion, as a windstream larger and more powerful than any Fidelias had ever seen erupted from behind the old steadholt's walls and rushed out over the fields of sleeping vord, bearing a pale figure in a dark cloak, already vanishing into a windcrafted veil.
The Queen shrieked again, farther away, and Fidelias ordered the trumpeter to continue sounding the attack. Reports started flashing in from the courier lines: Battlecrows heavily engaged. Horse cavalry light resistance. Taurg cavalry inflicting heavy casualties with no resistance. And the last had come with the signal he'd been dreading. Canim infantry heavily engaged by mobile enemy. And, only a moment after that, Enemy aerial forces in Legion strength, inbound.
That tore it. Against a sleeping enemy, they'd had a chance. But if the enemy was waking, and if, as Fidelias dreaded, the Queen had summoned reinforcements, they could be in for it. He was willing to die, if it was necessary to save Alera - but as far as his experience had taught him, a living, fighting solider was almost always more valuable to his Realm than a dead one.
The Aleran infantry had been tasked to take the steadholt. He would simply have to expedite matters. They couldn't have fitted a fraction of the forces there into the steadholt, but at least it would provide a solid object against which the other forces in the field could put their backs - if it could be taken quickly enough.
Fidelias signaled for the Prime Cohort to move, sending them in after the first two, along with a pair of Knights Terra and Ferrous attached to the unit, with orders to support the Battlecrows and secure the steadholt with all due speed. Then he turned to the Canim.
"Master Marok," he said. "There are significant enemy forces inbound. We need to secure the steadholt immediately. Are you willing to help?"
Marok flicked his ears in the affirmative and began loping calmly toward the steadholt. Fidelias and the command group followed him. Fidelias unlimbered the Canim balest from its holder upon his saddle, more a gesture of habit than of any real intent. He was unused to ordering things done at this level rather than doing them himself.