The vord Queen’s eyes flashed with silent anger. “Octavian must have some plan for the Shieldwall. It is the only significant structure north of Antillus. I will dispatch airborne warrior forms to patrol the Wall and locate him.”

“The second reason I am here,” Invidia continued, “is because while you have been chatting with the woman who cannot directly harm you, your attention has wavered from the battle. The High Lord and Lady of Placida and my former husband have been freed from the press of the fight to redirect the feral furies we loosed upon them. They have nothing like overt control, but they have driven most of the ferals out of Riva and away from the fleeing civilians. Our own troops are now suffering at least as heavily from their attentions as are the Legions.”

The vord Queen’s eyes widened, and she whirled to stare at Isana.

“I was also hoping,” Isana said mildly, folding her hands in front of her, “to distract your attention from the fight. I thought it might weaken the coordination of your creatures if you weren’t constantly overseeing them.”

The vord Queen’s eyes blazed for a moment, flickering with odd motes of brilliant green light. Then she whirled and strode back into the area from which she had stared at the battle before. “Get back out there. Take my singulares. Find and destroy any High Lord or Lady you can isolate. I will see to it that their attention is directed elsewhere.”

Invidia lifted her chin. “It might be better to accept our losses and plan for the next—”

The Queen whirled, her face suffused with rage, and shrieked in a voice like tearing metal, “FIND THEM!”

The sheer volume of the scream slammed against Isana like a fist, and she staggered back against the wall. She sagged there for a moment, her ears ringing, and felt a trickle of heat upon her upper lip; her nose had begun bleeding.

In the stunned seconds of silence after, she found herself blinking dully, staring at the unmoving Araris, his scarred face slack, his eyes opened and focused—

Isana froze.

Araris met her eyes for an instant, gazing through a murky half inch of croach. Then his eyes flicked down, and back up to hers. Isana glanced down.

She had not before noted that Araris stood with one hand behind his back—where he was, she abruptly realized, clasping the solid steel handle of the dagger secreted beneath his wide belt. Steel, which might be shielding his mind against numbness, against pain, against the disorientation of any toxins within the alien substance, just as it had utterly hidden his emotional presence from Isana’s own senses—and presumably from those of the vord Queen and Invidia Aquitaine.

Araris Valerian, arguably the greatest swordsman of his generation, was not yet out of the fight.

He met her eyes for a breath, winked at her once, then closed them again.