Codex Alera 06 - First Lord's Fury (14 page)

The food was . . . “revolting” fell so far of the mark that it seemed an injustice. Invidia had learned to eat the raw
croach
. The creature keeping her alive needed her to ingest it in order to feed itself. She had been startled to learn that it could taste even worse. The vord had no grasp of cooking. The very notion was alien to them. As a result, they couldn’t really be expected to do it very well—but that evening they had perpetrated nothing short of an atrocity.

She choked the food down as best she could. The elder Queen ate steadily. The younger queen was finished within two minutes and sat there staring at them, her expression unreadable.

The younger queen then turned to her mother. “Why?”

“We partake of a meal together.”

“Why?”

“Because it might make us stronger.”

The younger queen absorbed that in silence for a moment. Then she asked, “How?”

“By building bonds between us.”

“Bonds.” The younger queen blinked slowly, once. “What need is there for restraints?”

“Not physical bonds,” her mother said. “Symbolic mental attachments. Familiar feelings.”

The young queen absorbed that for half a dozen heartbeats. Then she said, “These things do not improve strength.”

“There is more to strength than physical power.”

The young queen tilted her head. She stared at her mother, then, unnervingly, at Invidia. The Aleran woman could feel the sudden heavy, invasive pressure of the young queen’s awareness impinging upon her thoughts. “What is this creature?”

“A means to an end.”

“It is alien.”

“Necessary.”

The young queen’s voice hardened. “It is alien.”

“Necessary,” repeated the elder Queen.

Again, the young queen fell silent. Then, her expression never changing, she said, “You are defective.”

The enormous table seemed to explode. Splinters, some of them six inches long and wickedly sharp, flew outward like arrows. Invidia flinched instinctively, and barely managed to get her chitin-armored forearm between her and a flying spear of wood that might have plunged through her eye.

Sound pressed so hard against Invidia’s eardrums that one of them burst, a wailing thunderstorm of high-pitched, shrieking howls. She cried out at the pain and reeled out of her chair and back from the table, borrowing swiftness from her wind furies as she went, embracing the weirdly altered sense of time that seemed to stretch instants into seconds, seconds into moments. It was the only way for her to see what was happening.

The vord queens were locked in a fight to the death.

Even with the windcrafting to aid her, Invidia could barely follow the movements of the two vord. Black claws flashed. Kicks flew. Dodges turned into twenty-foot bounds that ended at the nearest wall of the dome, whereupon the two queens continued their struggle while crouched on the wall, bounding and scuttling up the dome like a pair of dueling spiders.

Invidia’s eyes flicked to the ruined table. It lay in pieces. A ragged furrow was torn through one corner, where the younger queen had surged forward, plunging
through
the massive hardwood table as if it had been no more a hindrance than a mound of soft snow. Invidia could scarcely imagine the tremendous power and focus that would be required for such a thing to happen—from a creature who had been born, it would seem, less than an hour before.

But swift and terrible as the young queen might have been, the match was not an even one. Where claws struck the elder Queen, sparks flew from her seemingly soft flesh, turning the attack aside. But where the younger queen was hit, flesh parted, and green-brown blood flew in fine arcs. The vord queens fought a spinning, climbing, leaping duel at a speed too swift to be seen clearly, much less interfered with, and Invidia found herself tracking the motion simply to know when she might need to leap out of the way.

Then the elder Queen made a mistake. She slipped on a slickened spill of the younger queen’s blood, and her balance faltered for a fraction of a second. There was not time enough for the young queen to close in for a more deadly blow—but it was more than time enough for her to dart behind the elder Queen and seize the fabric of the dark cloak. With a twisting motion, she wrapped the cloak around the elder Queen’s throat and leaned back, pulling with both frail-seeming arms, tightening the twisted fabric like a garrote against her mother’s neck.

The elder Queen bent into a sinuous bow, straining against the strangling cloth, her expression quite calm as her dark eyes fell with a palpable weight upon Invidia.

The Aleran woman met her eyes for a pair of endless seconds before she nodded once, rose, lifted her hand, and with an effort of will and furycraft caused the air within the nose, mouth, and lungs of the young queen to congeal into a nearly liquid mass.

The response was immediate. The younger queen twisted and writhed in sudden agony, still holding on desperately to the twisted cloak.

The elder Queen severed it with a slash of her claws, slipped free, turned, and with half a dozen smoothly savage movements tore the younger queen open from throat to belly, removing organs along the way. It was calmly done, the work of an old hand in a slaughterhouse more than the intense uncertainty of a battle.

The young queen’s body fell limp to the floor. The elder Queen took no chances. She dismembered it with neat, workmanlike motions. Then she turned, as if nothing at all had happened, and walked back to the table. Her chair remained in its place though the table had been ruined.

The Queen sat down in her chair and stared forward, at nothing.

Invidia walked slowly over to her side, righted her own fallen chair, and sat down in it. Neither of them spoke for a time.

“Are you hurt?” Invidia asked, finally.

The Queen opened her mouth, then did something Invidia had never seen before.

She hesitated.

“My daughter,” the Queen said, her voice a near whisper. “The twenty-seventh since returning to Alera’s shores.”

Invidia frowned. “Twenty-seventh . . . ?”

“Part of our . . . nature . . .” The vord shivered. “Within each queen is an imperative to remain separate. Pure. Untainted by our contact with other beings. And to remove any queen that shows signs of corruption. Beginning several years ago, my junior queens have universally attempted to remove me.” Her face was touched by a faint frown. “I do not understand. She did no physical harm to me. Yet . . .”

“She hurt you.”

The Queen nodded, very slowly. “I had to remove their capacity to produce more queens lest they gather numbers to remove me. Which has hurt us all. Weakened us. By all rights, this world should have been vord five years ago.” Her eyes narrowed, and she turned her faceted gaze upon Invidia. “You acted to protect me.”

“You hardly needed it,” Invidia said.

“You did not know that.”

“True.”

The vord Queen tilted her head, studying Invidia intently. She braced herself for the unpleasant intrusion of the Queen’s mind—but it did not come.

“Then why?” the Queen asked.

“The younger queen clearly would not have permitted me to live.”

“You might have struck at both of us.”

Invidia frowned. True enough. The two queens had been so intent upon one another, they would hardly have been able to react to a sudden attack from Invidia. She could have called up fire and obliterated them both.

But she hadn’t.

“You could have fled,” the Queen said.

Invidia smiled faintly. She gestured to the creature latched upon her chest. “Not far enough.”

“No,” the vord said. “You have no other place to go.”

“I do not,” Invidia agreed.

“When something is held in common,” the Queen asked, “is it considered a bond?”

Invidia considered her answer for a moment—and not for the benefit of the Queen. “It is often the beginning of one.”

The vord looked at her fingers. Their dark-nailed tips were stained with the younger queen’s blood. “Do you have children of your own?”

“No.”

The Queen nodded. “It is . . . unpleasant to see them harmed. Any of them. I am pleased that you are not distracted by such a thing at this time.” She looked up and squared her shoulders, straightening her spine—mirroring Invidia herself. “What is the proper Aleran etiquette when an assassination interrupts dinner?”

Invidia found a small smile on her mouth. “Perhaps we should repair the furniture.”

The vord tilted her head again. “I do not have that knowledge.”

“When my mother died, my father apprenticed me to all the finest master artisans of the city for a year at a time. I think mainly to be rid of me.” She rose and considered the broken table, the scattered splinters. “Come. This is a more demanding discipline than flying or calling fire. I will show you.”

 

They had just sat back down at the repaired table when the whistling, trilling alarm shrieks of wax spiders filled the air.

The Queen came to her feet at once, her eyes opening very wide. She stood perfectly still for a moment, then hissed, “Intruders. Widespread. Come.”

Invidia followed the Queen outside into the moonlit night, onto the gently luminous
croach
that spread around the enormous hive. The Queen started downslope, pacing swiftly and calmly, as the trilling alarm continued to spread.

Invidia heard angry, high-pitched buzzing sounds unlike anything she had encountered. The creature on her chest reacted to them uneasily, shifting its many limbs and sending anguish pouring through her body in a fire that threatened to rob her of breath. She fought to continue walking in the Queen’s shadow without stumbling, and finally had to put her hand to her knife and draw upon a pain-numbing metalcrafting to let her continue.

They came to a broad pool of water that had gathered at the center of a shallow valley. It was no more than a foot deep and perhaps twenty across. The shallow waters teemed with the larval forms of the takers.

Standing upon the waters in the center of the pool was a man.

He was tall, half a head over six feet at least, and was dressed in gleaming, immaculate
legionare’s
armor. His hair was dark, cropped short in a soldier’s cut, as was his beard, and his eyes were intensely green. There were fine scars visible on his face, and upon him they looked as much like a military decoration as the scarlet cloak secured to his armor with the blue-and-scarlet eagle insignia of the House of Gaius.

Invidia found herself drawing in a sharp breath.

“Who?” the Queen demanded.

“It . . . it looks like . . .” Septimus. Except for the eyes, the man at the center of the pool was almost identical to her onetime fiancé. But it could not be him. “Octavian,” she said finally, all but snarling the word. “This must be Gaius Octavian.”

The vord Queen’s claws made a quiet, sickly-stretchy sound as they elongated.

The watery image was in full color, an indicator of excellent control of furycraft. So. The cub had grown into a wolf after all.

The strange buzzing sounds continued, and Invidia could see something striking the watery image, small splashes of water leaping up as if a boy had been throwing stones. Invidia called upon her windcrafting to slow the motion of the objects, to focus more closely upon them. Upon closer inspection, they appeared to be hornets. They were not hornets, of course, but seemed to be of the same general wickedly swift and quietly threatening appearance. Their bodies were longer, and sported two sets of wings, and they flew faster than any hornet and in perfectly straight lines. As she watched, one of the hornet-things struck at the water image, its abdomen bending forward to expose a gleaming, serrated spear of vord chitin as long as Invidia’s index finger. It hit the water image with an explosion of force and came tumbling out the other side to fall stunned into the water.

Invidia shivered. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of the things swarming out from innocuous lumps in the
croach
.

“Enough,” the Queen said, raising a hand, and the series of impacts came to an abrupt halt. The buzzing hums ceased, as did the trilling shrieks of the wax spiders, and silence fell. The surface of the pool rippled as thousands of larval takers came up to tear at the bodies of the stunned hornets.

The Queen stared at the image in silence. Minutes passed.

“He copies us,” the Queen hissed.

“He understands why we chose to appear this way,” Invidia replied. She looked down the shallow valley, focusing upon her windcrafting to magnify her sight of the next larval pool. An image of Octavian stood there as well. “He means to address all of Alera, as we did.”

“He is that strong?” the Queen demanded.

“So it would seem.”

“You told me his gifts were stunted.”

“It would appear that I was mistaken,” Invidia replied.

The Queen snarled and stared at the image.

A moment later, it finally spoke. Octavian’s voice was a resonant, mellow baritone, his expression calm, his posture confident and steady. “Greetings, Alerans, freemen and Citizens alike. I am Octavian, son of Septimus, son of Gaius Sextus, the First Lord of Alera. I am returned from my journey to Canea and have come to defend my home and my people.”

The vord Queen let out a rippling hiss, an utterly inhuman sound.

“The vord have come, and have dealt us a grievous wound,” Octavian continued. “We mourn for those who have already perished, for the cities that have been overrun, for the homes and lives that have been destroyed. By now, you know that the enemy has overrun Alera Imperia. You know that all of the great cities still standing face imminent attack if they are not besieged already. You know that the vord have cut off tens of thousands of Alerans from retreat to safety. You know that the
croach
is growing to devour all that we know and all that we are.”