Cursor's Fury (Codex Alera #3)(233)

She almost wished she hadn't done it.

The gleaming figures of Knights Aeris were rising from Kalare. Rook had warned them of the twenty or so who had remained in the city's garrison. Amara looked at the four mercenary Knights Aeris struggling to keep the overloaded coach in the air. They did not have the speed to evade a pursuit, and the terrain below them offered them few opportunities to play hide-and-seek with Kalarus's forces. Without being able to rise to the higher winds, they could not use the clouds as cover, the other favored tactic for evading airborne pursuit, and the only one their slower group might have successfully employed.

Which meant, Amara thought, that they would have to fight.

It was not a ridiculous prospect for them to fend off a score of enemy Knights or so-not with Amara and no less than two High Ladies of Alera there.

But as Amara watched, more Knights Aeris rose from the city. Twenty more. Forty. Sixty. And still more.

With a sinking heart, Amara realized that when Kalarus returned to his citadel, he must have come by air-and that he must have brought his personal escorts, the most capable and experienced of his Knights Aeris.

Against twenty Knights, they would have had a chance. But against five times that number-and, she felt certain, Kalarus himself...

Impossible.

Her throat went dry as she signaled the coach's bearers that they were being pursued.

Amara thought furiously, struggling to find alternative courses of action. She forced herself to look at the situation in dispassionate, emotionless terms. No foe was invincible, no situation utterly insoluble. There had to be something they could do to at least improve their chances, and that meant that she needed to make some kind of assessment of their foe's capabilities and resources.

And at once, she saw that things might not be entirely hopeless.

True, there were scores of Knights Aeris on the way, but only twenty had been in Kalare on their regular post. The rest had returned to Kalare with their master-and that meant that they'd already been traveling, probably since before first light, which meant that they might not have the endurance for a protracted chase-particularly if they were forced to pursue through the energy-sapping lower winds.

And then another thought came to her. There had been no slowly approaching roar of such a large group of fliers coming in at low altitude. They'd clearly heard Lady Aquitaines Knights approaching minutes before they'd reached the tower. They should have heard a group with twenty times as many windcrafters coming for three or four times as long as that, before they'd actually entered the citadel. Which meant...

In fact, now that she thought about it, it could hardly have been anything else. Kalarus had most certainly not spent the previous ten or eleven days flying along the nape of the earth as Amara's party had. His presence would have been absolutely necessary with one or more of his Legions-he could not simply throw away days and days in travel. While he might be sadistic, ruthless, and inhumanly ambitious, he was not stupid.

Which meant that Kalarus and his Knights had come through the upper air in a far-more-conventional approach, after either half a day or a day and a half of travel. The former would give him time to fly from Ceres back to Kalare-the latter would be about right for him to be returning from the forces put in place to stymie Lord Parcia's Legions.

And if Kalarus could carry groups through the upper air when the rest of the Realm was grounded by the Canim's unnatural cloud cover, it would give him an enormous advantage in the campaign.

It also meant, she realized with a cold ripple of nausea, that it likely meant that if he had overcome the Canim's interdiction of the upper air when even Gaius could not, it was because Kalarus was meant to be able to do so. It meant coordination with the most bitter foe of the whole Realm.