“Good day!” boomed the Marat in cheerful, heavily accented Aleran. A sweep of his club smashed a leaping mantis warrior from the air before it could touch him, then he hauled himself lightly back up onto the gargant’s back. He shouted something and tapped the gargant with the handle of his cudgel, and the beast bellowed again, batting another vord away from the wagons with its clawed paws.

Ehren stared, stunned.

The huge black gargant and his rider had not come alone.

There were at least a thousand of the great creatures within sight, and more coming down the causeway from the Calderon Valley, each bearing one or more Marat riders. They smashed through the vord that had penetrated the Aleran lines like a stone hurtling through a spider’s web. The noise was indescribable, as was the heavy, musky odor of gargant on the air. The beasts went by like a thunderstorm, like a tide of muscle and bone, leaving smashed and broken vord scattered over the earth.

There was a howl of wind, and Countess Calderon streaked by no more than twenty feet from the ground, rushing along the trail of destruction left by the lead gargant and his iron-thewed rider. The hem of her cloak snapped and cracked like a dozen whips in the speed of her passage. She vanished as rapidly as she had appeared.

Ehren found himself standing over the wounded teamster, makeshift club in hand, panting for breath, his ears ringing. The world suddenly seemed to be a very quiet place.

“What...” The teamster coughed. “What just happened?”

Ehren stared dazedly back down the road to the west, toward the main body of the troops, where the angry bugling of the gargants drowned out all other sound. Several pockets of humanity remained along his line of sight, where desperate refugees had banded together to pit their inadequate furies against the foe, and where legionares had formed a shield around groups of civilians and withstood the onslaught. There were many dead and wounded on the ground.

But there wasn’t a living vord warrior in sight.

“Doroga,” Ehren breathed. “That was Clan-Head Doroga. Must have been.” He turned to the teamster and began to more thoroughly see to the man’s leg. “I think we just got reinforcements.”

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 27

Travel with the vord Queen was, Isana felt, an extremely unsettling experience—not so much because of the alien nature of the environment as because of all the small, familiar things that appeared, here and there.