Cursor's Fury (Codex Alera #3)(254)

The little Cursor flicked the standard pole out, the Legion's blackened eagle-crow now, Tavi supposed in some detached corner of his mind-standard lashing out and snapping like a whip into the Cane's nose. The blow did nothing more than startle the Cane for the space of a second. Tavi could have struck in that second, but he didn't. Instinct warned him not to, and Tavi recognized and trusted the intuition.

Kitai's armored figure descended from the wall behind them, swords in either hand sweeping down, opening horrible wounds on the Cane. The Marat girl had bounded up the stairs while they labored through the tunnel, and she had hurled herself from the battlements a beat after they emerged. Kitai rolled forward, under the blind, furious swipes of the Cane's sickle-sword, came to her feet behind the raider, and cut it down in a short, vicious flurry of slashing blades.

Kitai flicked blood from her swords and circled to continue forward on Tavi's right, while Ehren took his left. They pressed ahead, furious sound and violence all around them, and behind them the Battlecrows began to emerge from the passage through the wall, led by acting centurion Schultz, the shaft of the spear behind Max and Crassus's deadly point.

The Canim had not been prepared to defend themselves against an attack, Tavi realized. The enemy must have known that the Aleran's ability to fight was faltering, must have known that time and wounds were taking their toll. The Canim, Tavi somehow knew, had spent the last hour or more in eager anticipation of the final, deadly fall of the Aleran defenders, and when the defenders had abandoned the opening in the wall, the Canim had known that the time for the final, killing rush had come at last. They had pressed forward, hungry for the killing blow that would destroy their enemies.

Instead, they found themselves faced with the deadliest swordsman in the Legion and the superhuman power of the Knights Terra, followed by the blackened, bloody banner of the captain who had defied Sari and his ritualists, shamed him before the host, and lived to tell the tale despite the terrible powers the ritualists had sent after him.

Battles are fought in muddy fields, in burning towns, in treacherous forests, in unforgiving mountains, and on the blood-spattered stones of contested bridges, Tavi realized. But battles are won within the minds and hearts of the soldiers fighting them. No force was defeated in battle until it believed that it was defeated. No force could be victorious unless it believed it could be victorious.

The First Aleran believed.

The Canim raiders weren't sure.

At that time, on that bridge, before the terrible swords of the sons of Antil-lus, before the crushing power of the Knights Terra, before the blackened banner of the First Aleran and the reckless, frenzied charge of the Battlecrows, those two facts were what mattered.

It was as simple as that.

The resistance of the Canim forces on the bridge did not simply waver-it abruptly vanished, as panic descended on them. Max and Crassus pressed the assault, and Tavi led the Battlecrows after them. On the walls behind them, trumpets rang. Valiar Marcus had seen the Canim break, and the rest of the weary Legion began rushing forward to lend their strength and momentum to the advance.

The advance had to cover most of five hundred yards, all uphill to the defenses at the bridge's apex-which had not, after all, been designed to defend against an assault from the Aleran side of the bridge. Without battlements, the only real protection they offered the Canim was the simple impediment of movement caused by the walls themselves and the relatively small opening in them.

That opening, however, also slowed the Canim now attempting to flee. The legionares were slower on foot than their opponents, but caught up to them as the choke point in the wall stranded them on the northern side.