She saw the vord Queen move - a blur of motion that she did not register in time to allow her to so much as flinch before the blow fell across her face. Isana fell back to the floor, fire burning her forehead, and wet, hot blood flowed down over her face, into one eye, half-blinding her. She did not cry out - at first because she was simply too startled to respond to the sheer speed of the assault, then because she forced herself to remain silent, to show no sign of pain or weakness before the alien being before her. She ground her teeth as fire spread over her forehead and face, and she made no sound.
"I will ask the questions," the vord Queen said. "Not you. As long as you answer them, your mate will remain whole. If you refuse, he will suffer. It is that simple."
She turned away from Isana, and a radiant green glow filled the chamber. Isana hunched her body uselessly against the agony as she lifted her hand to her forehead. A single cut perhaps four inches long ran along her brow, in an almost precisely straight line. The cut was open nearly all the way to her skull and bled freely.
Isana drew several deep breaths, focusing her effort through the pain, and called upon Rill. The work was harder, much harder than it would have been with even a modest basin of water, but she was able to watercraft the wound closed. A few moments later, she was able to reduce the pain somewhat, and between that and the cessation of bleeding, she felt dizzy, mildly euphoric, her thoughts clogged into muddled clumps. She must have looked a horror, half her face a sheet of red. Her dress was ruined. There was no reason not to use the sleeve to try to wipe some of the blood away, though her skin was tender, and she thought she probably succeeded in nothing but smearing it around a little more.
Isana swallowed. Her throat burned with thirst. She had to focus, to find a way to survive, for Araris to survive. But what could she do, here, with this creature facing her?
She looked up to find the cavern transformed.
Green light swirled and danced through the croach covering the cavern's ceiling. Bright pinpoints of light, many of them, stood in slowly swaying ranks. Other lights darted and flowed. Others pulsed at varying rates of speed. Waves of color, subtle variations of shades, washed across the ceiling, while the vord Queen stared up at it, utterly motionless, her alien eyes reflecting pinpoints of green like black jewels.
Isana felt slightly nauseated by the seething, organic motion of the luminous display, but was struck by the impression that there was something about it, a kind of link between the luminosity and the vord Queen that she could not fathom.
Perhaps, she thought, her eyes simply were not complex enough to see what the vord Queen saw.
"The attack progresses well," the vord Queen said, her tone distracted. "Gaius Attis, if that is what he is to be called now, is a conventional commander. An able one, but he shows me nothing more than I have seen already."
"He's killing your forces, then," Isana said quietly.
The vord Queen smiled. "Yes. He has increased the efficiency of the Legions remarkably. The soldiers who escaped me last year are blooded now. He spends their lives well." The vord Queen watched for a moment more before asking, calmly, "Would you give your life for him?"
Isana's stomach twisted as she thought of Aquitaine wearing the First Lord's crown. She remembered the friends of the entirety of her adult life she had buried because of his machinations.
"If necessary," she said.
The vord Queen looked at her, and said, "Why?"
"Our people need him," Isana said.
The vord Queen's head tilted slowly to one side. Then she said, "You would not do it for his sake."
"I..." Isana shook her head. "I don't think so. No."
"But you would do it for them. For those who need him."
"Yes."
"But you would be dead. How would that serve the attainment of your goals?"
"There are things more important than my goals," Isana said.
"Such as the survival of your people."
"Yes."
"And that of your son."
Isana swallowed. She said, "Yes."
The vord Queen considered that for a time. Then she returned her eyes to the ceiling, and said, "You answered me clearly and promptly. As a reward, you may go to your male. Assure yourself of his health. See that I have not yet taken his life. If you attempt to escape or attack me, I will prevent you. And tear off his lips as punishment. Do you understand?"
Isana ground her teeth, staring at the Queen. Then she rose and walked to Araris. "I understand."
The Queen's glittering eyes flicked to her once more, then turned back to the ceiling. "Excellent," she said. "I am glad that we have begun learning to speak to each other. Grandmother."
Chapter 16
Amara watched the battle with the vord unfold from the air.
She had seen battles before, but mostly those joined between Alera's Legions and her more traditional foes - the forces of rebel Lords and High Lords, smaller-scale conflicts with armed outlaws, and of course, the Second Battle of the Calderon Valley, fought between multiple factions of the Marat and the hideously outnumbered defenders of Garrison, at the valley's easternmost end.
This battle bore little resemblance to those.
The vord approached, not like an army in the array of battle but like an oncoming wave, a tide of gleaming green-black darkness beneath the light of a weak moon. It was like watching the shadow of a storm cloud roll forward over the landscape - the vord moved with the same steady, implacable speed, with the same sense of impersonal, devouring hunger. It was an easy matter to track their progress: There was little light upon the lands of Riva, but where the vord walked, they consumed it all.
By contrast, the Legions were clothed in light. All up and down the Aleran lines, the standards of the individual centuries and cohorts blazed with furycrafted fire, each in the signature colors of their Legions and home cities. In the center of the lines, the Crown Legion was a blaze of scarlet-and-azure light, flanked by First and Second Aquitaine in a shroud of crimson fire. The right flank was centered upon the veteran forces of High Lord Antillus, burning with cold blue-and-white light, the left around the similarly veteran Legions of High Lord Phrygius, its standards sheathed in glacial green-and-white fire.
Other Legions, some from cities that no longer remained standing, all of them far less experienced than the northern veterans, had been interspaced between those three points and spread across the rich fields surrounding the plain south of Riva in a wall of solid steel and light.