Cursor's Fury (Codex Alera #3)(252)

Tavi drew his blade, snapped to attention, and saluted the ranks of crow-signed young men in front of him.

"First Aleran, Battlecrow Cohort!" Tavi bellowed. "First Aleran, Knights Pisces! Are you with me?"

They answered him with a roaring crash of voices and drawn steel. Max, Ehren, Kitai, and the Knights Terra fell into position around him as Tavi turned and led his Battlecrows and Knights Pisces onto the Elinarch.

The Elinarch was a marvel of Aleran engineering. It arched over the waters of the Tiber for a distance of more than half a mile, a span of solid granite drawn from the bones of the world. Infused with furies of its own, the bridge was very nearly a living creature, healing damage inflicted upon it, shifting its structure to compensate for the heat of summer, the cold depths of winter. The same crafting that allowed the roads to support and strengthen Aleran travelers also surged in unbroken power throughout the length of the bridge. It could alter its surface to shed excess water and ice, and smooth grooves collected rainwater in small channels at either side of the bridge during rainstorms.

During this storm, though, those channels ran with blood.

Tavi led his men at a quick march up the bridge. Twenty feet after they started, Tavi saw the trickles of blood in the channels. At first, he thought that the reddish overcast was simply shining on water, runoff rain. But the rain had stopped hours before, and the gloomy day drained color from the world, rather than tinting it. He didn't really, truly realize it was blood until he smelled it-sharp, metallic, unsettling.

They were not large streams-only as deep, perhaps, as the cupped palm of an adult man, only as wide as his spread fingers. Or rather, they would not have been large streams of rainwater. But Tavi knew that the blood running down the slope of the bridge had carried the lives of many, many men out onto the unforgiving, uncaring stone of the bridge.

Tavi turned his eyes away from it, forcing them to focus ahead, on the uphill march that still remained before him. He heard someone retch in the ranks behind him, as the legionares realized what they were seeing.

"Eyes forward!" Tavi called back to the legionares. "We have a job, gentlemen! Stay focused!"

They reached the final defensive wall, which was now manned by perhaps half a cohort of legionares-all of them wounded but capable of bearing arms. They saluted Tavi as he and his volunteers approached.

"Go get those bastards, boys!" bellowed one grizzled centurion.

"Send 'em to the crows, Captain!" called a wounded fish with a bloodied bandage around his head.

"Give it to 'em!"

"Take em down!"

"First Aleran!"

"Kick their furry-"

"Assault formation!" Tavi called.

On the move, the cohort's formation changed, shifting into a column two legionares wide. Their pace slowed somewhat as the column squeezed through the opening in the northernmost defensive wall, and Tavi kept them in the slender formation as they double-timed to the next defensive wall. The din of battle grew louder.

The bulk of the Legion was there, at the next wall. Tavi could see Valiar Marcus's short, stocky form on the wall, bellowing orders. Legionares stood at the wall, then in two long lines at either side of the bridge, where the rough steps up to the improvised battlements awaited them. As defending legionares on the wall were cut down, the next men in line took their places. Tavi shuddered, imagining a nightmare wait in a line to pain and death with little to do but watch the blood of your brothers in arms flow past you in the gutter.

A larger force was positioned to block the opening in the center of the wall. The legionares nearest the opening fought with shield and short blade, but those behind them plied spears, reaching over and around the shieldmen to wound and distract the constant stream of Canim raiders trying to batter their way in by main strength. Canim bodies lay in piles that had become makeshift barricades. Alerans lay unmoving among them, their fellows unable to drag them free in the furious press of melee.